For those who don’t know, Hermeticism is a philosophical system that has greatly influenced Western esoteric thought. For the last few weeks I have been totally absorbed, to the exclusion of all else, in Western Kabbalistic and esoteric thought as it relates to the arts as part of a Masters degree I am working on, so the topic is forefront in my mind at present.

One of the core concepts of the Western esoteric tradition, including Hermeticism, is that of the four classical elements: earth, air, fire and water. These four classical elements are tied to aspects of our being, so earth is the physical, air is the mental, fire is the inspirational and water is the emotional. In many systems of esoteric thought there is a fifth element, spirit. So at the personal level we consist of five ‘dimensions’ of ourselves: the physical, intellectual (conscious), inspirational (subconscious), emotional and spiritual aspects that as a whole make up who we are.

When I consider the artwork that has really touched me profoundly over the years I realise that such work has impacted me at all five levels or dimensions of my being. Take, for example, the large, dark paintings from Rothko’s mature work, the viewing of which I consider one of the most profound experiences of my life. These works impacted me on all five levels:

• physically, by their size and dominant ‘presence’ in the space;
• mentally, by stimulating thought of colour resonances, use of space and proportion, etc;
• inspirationally, in that they appear in my dreams and have inspired some of my own, meagre in comparison, art explorations;
• emotionally, as they evoked deep and profound emotional reactions;
• spiritually, in that even now, many years later, when I bring them to mind there is a shift in consciousness and a profound connection with the ‘other’ that is impossible to put in writing.

I have had similar reactions with other works of art: Pollack’s action paintings, especially Blue Poles, some of Bill Viola’s video works and such.

In thinking about all this I realised that, informally, I rate art and photography on this five point scale: the most profound work hits all five levels, other work may only hit one, two, three or four of them.

Contemporary art has stressed the intellectual, the conceptual and, indeed, there has been an active pull away from emotional and spiritual art. However, as the research I’ve been doing has shown, whilst the pull away from the emotional and spiritual in art has certainly been there at the institutional level and among most art critics, curators and art historians, it has certainly not been there for the actual creators themselves. A careful examination of the literature shows large numbers of artists who are connecting with their work at all levels and certainly aspire to state something profound in their work on all five levels. It is just that, for the sake of their careers, many artists are reticent to speak of such things until such time as they are well enough established that the institutions will want to show their work no matter what they say.

This idea of multi-dimensionality also explains why much of contemporary art is shallow. Certainly when I examine new work being shown I find it appealing at some levels, perhaps physically from its presence or use of materials, or intellectually from the conceptual aspects. But if that is as far as it goes it only rises to a one or two on my five-point scale. This is a particular problem for digital art and photography, which can often even miss out on the physicality aspect.

As an artist, I strive to bring all five aspects into play in my own work. I’ve not succeeded yet, to my satisfaction. In my writing I try for the same, as yet, unachieved target. And that is the thing that pushes me to keep trying, to keep going deeper into my own self and tap all levels when making my art.

It may benefit you in the production of your own work to just try looking at things from this way too and seeing how you feel about it.

My two recent posts have been:

MagCloud and Publishing for Photographers

covering my experience using MagCloud to produce the DIMi print edition

and

Why Apple’s iPhone Can Be a Fun, Useful Camera for Photography Pros

covering my ideas on why we should embrace the iPhone even when we have far more sophisticated gear.

Both articles are worth a read and I’d encourage you to read the other articles on the HP Professional Photography blog. All the other contributors are great writers and photographers and the articles are informative.

Photographers and digital artists come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, for sure. Some like the chemical darkroom, some like the alternative processes, some adore the perfect lab print and others love a perfect digital print they have done themselves. Others love to experiment with digital printing on all sorts of surfaces, doing transfers and such and others treat their print as only a starting point for a long development journey.

A recent conversation with a friend also showed that there is another type of image maker, the type who enjoys the making of the image, whether it is the capture with a camera or the rendering on the computer, but who do not really like the steps involved in presenting our work physically. I had thought it might just be me, but obviously not. And this got me thinking.

My wife is a painter and the great thing for her is that the process of making her art also makes the artefact that gets exhibited and sold. Now I know that is not quite true of all painters: watercolourists need to matt and frame their paintings, as do printmakers. But acrylic and oil painters can, if they want to, just exhibit and sell the painted, stretched canvas.

In discussing this with my friend Tony we both came to the conclusion that, in so many ways, the old Polaroid film that gave use both a nice print and a negative for later work, was perfect for us. Well of course it wasn’t perfect, with the negative and positive having different ISO settings. But the idea of a shooting process that automatically produces the resulting artefact to exhibit is not a bad one.

Sadly, it isn’t there with photography these days. We can shoot with digital or film, but either way this is only the start of a long process. And no matter what you do it is a lengthy process from there to a finished, exhibitable image.

Now the printer manufacturers claim it is a one stop job to print, but we all know that is not true. Aside from the processing to get your image ready to print, there is also the stuff to do just to get a good print, from calibrating your monitor to adjusting profiles and more.

It strikes me that my feeling about it cannot be that rare. We see masses of people uploading huge numbers of images to places like Flickr and Facebook (F is for Foto, after all). But those numbers are not also appearing in people producing hangable images. So something is stopping them, either the cost, time, expertise or just the interest in going to all that hassle.

So what is to be done? Well, for many people the solution is not to print, but to simply upload to some site.  For others it will involve only occasional printing. And of course many photographers and digital artists actually enjoy all that mucking around with printers, matt cutters, glass cutters and framing. It would be nice of the printer manufacturers and others found ways to make the whole process from printing to a hangable image much simpler.

Of course, it is also a waiting game. Eventually large electronic flat panel displays will be cheap enough to allow, those who want it, to avoid the whole issue of printing and then framing and go straight to the electronic display. I know I am one who can’t wait.