The first of the two photographs below is a mishmash of blackwood leaves, eucalyptus leaves and a single banksia tree with its barely discernible grey trunk holding up candles of yellow.
Hardly recognizable, yet the total, somewhat fuzzy composition works. It gives a sense of the whole.
The second photograph shows a detailed look at hakea needles just a few feet away from the above photo and taken a day later after the most soft, fine mist came through to deposit innumerable tiny droplets.
They represent how one perceives the world: either focusing on detail or looking at the subject matter in a broader context. They represent how our left and right brain hemispheres work.
Each is exquisite in its own right. Each has a story to tell.
They suggest the possibility that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
The competent artist and the emerging scientist of today understand that: “no one object exists independently of others, but reflects a part of whatever else it co-exists with, and in turn is itself similarly reflected there.”
The photo below is an attempt to show this.
Not that it is totally successful.
But it does demonstrate how an artist works: focusing on detail, yet always trying to embody through their art a universal truth; patient with his/her imperfections, looking again anew, and again, and again; engaging with nature constantly.
“… truth is arrived at through engagement with the world, not through greater abstraction from it; the general is encountered through, rather than in spite of, the particular; and the infinite through, rather than in spite of, the finite.
[The] artist does not merely reflect what is there anyway, albeit in a novel way, but actually brings into being a truth about the world that was not there before, perhaps the best example of the universal being manifest through the particular.”
Ian McGilchrist, The Master and his Emissary
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