Learning about photo-artist Lee Miller

 Open Culture Newsletter posted about Lee Miller, photographer, the other day.

In late-twenties Manhattan, a nineteen-year-old woman named Elizabeth “Lee” Miller stepped off the curb and into the path of a car. She was pulled back to safety by none other than the magnate Condé Nast, founder of the eponymous publishing company. Not long thereafter, Miller, who’d been studying at the Art Students League of New York, appeared on the cover of Vogue. It’s tempting to call this the first major episode of a charmed life, though that descriptor fits uneasily with the arc of her seventy years, during the last few decades of which she could never quite recover from having witnessed first-hand the liberation of the concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau — sights she shared with the American public as a war photographer.

Miller took pictures of not just the concentration camps, but also events like the London Blitz and the liberation of Paris. At the end of the war, she posed for an even more famous picture, bathing in Hitler’s tub on the very same day that the Führer later shot himself in his bunker.

So I watched the 23 minute YouTube (above) about her life. I hadn't heard of her extraordinary talents before, so found it most interesting!

The Wikipedia article is more detailed about her life... HERE.

Happy Canada Day (late)

 

Thankfully all my Canadian friends have good senses of humor!

On being creative

So the impulse to create seems so fleeting, a wisp of wind that blows into my brain/beingness, and sometimes gives me the urge to move into the different place physically where I can make things...and sometimes it just escapes me completely, and I return to book, computer, or TV entertainment.

Mary Oliver, the poet, presented the idea of three personalities in each of us, the inner child, the normal working adult, and the creative dreamer. She said this:

Say you have bought a ticket on an airplane and you intend to fly from New York to San Francisco. What do you ask of the pilot when you climb aboard and take your seat next to the little window, which you cannot open but through which you see the dizzying heights to which you are lifted from the secure and friendly earth?

Most assuredly you want the pilot to be his regular and ordinary self. You want him to approach and undertake his work with no more than a calm pleasure. You want nothing fancy, nothing new. You ask him to do, routinely, what he knows how to do — fly an airplane. You hope he will not daydream. You hope he will not drift into some interesting meander of thought. You want this flight to be ordinary, not extraordinary. So, too, with the surgeon, and the ambulance driver, and the captain of the ship. Let all of them work, as ordinarily they do, in confident familiarity with whatever the work requires, and no more. Their ordinariness is the surety of the world. Their ordinariness makes the world go round.

In creative work — creative work of all kinds — those who are the world’s working artists are not trying to help the world go around, but forward. Which is something altogether different from the ordinary. Such work does not refute the ordinary. It is, simply, something else. Its labor requires a different outlook — a different set of priorities.

Source:

Mary Oliver from “Of Power and Time,” found in the altogether enchanting Upstream: Selected Essays

 

I wonder if I await a different kind of impulse to just sit down and make something. I feel that coming to the computer and sharing with blog friends, and sometimes Facebook friends, I have a sense that this is community. After COVID I know how valuable this is...and in-person contacts are really growing and expanding in my life. 

So I do have a scheduled time to go to the studio, and I plan to do such and such things there. These are steps in techniques, not quite as much creative as focused on good craftsmanship. 

Are my dragons just expressions of humor and less a creative force? I'm not really sure. I do my own Freudian examination of my impulses and find that my dragons represent the powers I want to see to combat climate change. So they may have a whimsical side, but they are definitely a powerful force in the face of impending doom. And calling upon natural forces, as well as magical ones, seems like a good idea these days.

The woman who bought Dragon Number 4 at the Tailgate Market last week said she'd watched Game of Thrones, and some other magical story. I'm a bit out of it for the latest stories. So my dragons only reflect what I've seen/learned somewhere a long time ago...with of course my own personal twists.