Patterns in Art

Sami Serola

I decided to make a comeback here at Shoot & Tell blog for numerous reasons. First of all, I need to start keeping some sort of a journal on my photography. That is what I discovered after accidentally finding Ted Forbes's Youtube channel and his photography assignments:

 The idea is to record the creative thinking and flow in some way, in order to reflect one's own work. However, I think I like to utilize modern digital format for it. Although, I much like handwritten journals and diaries, they does not allow such useful features as ability to search afterwards, with words in text and keywords. Moreover, digital text is superior because it makes it easy to copy (for example copying pieces of my own text from here to elsewhere), edit, and share.

I was first going to start yet another private blog, but then I realized there is really no good reason for that. Here "we" already have one perfectly good publishing platform and area to use. If this becomes noticed and "used" also by others, it is only a good thing. Having a shared journal still is something I have tried to achieve for a long time. And this is because of the reasons I said above, to make things to become searched, found and shared more easily. But if this attempt of mine stays unnoticed, it doesn't matter either. I still have a place where at least I have an easy to use digital journal.

And to get things started, I grasp on ideas that has been going around my mind today, after reading two challenge assignments where I am personally involved to. First one is Saturday Self-Challenge at Ipernity and Flickr, where this weeks challenge is to shoot patterns. And the other one is The Sunday Challenge (at Ipernity), where this week's topic is no more and less but Art, and yes, definitely with capital A! So, the idea is to start my journal with these two concepts, and how they are related.

My very first approach was focused only on patterns, and especially patterns that appears in nature. On Sunday morning I went out to local cemetery to shoot barks of trees. I indeed got some rather interesting shots. But when reflecting what I got during that day, and after reading the photo assignment for The Sunday Challenge, I really started to wonder what we take as art, and what art is about. Definitely not the first time for me or anyone to think this, but the very crystallized idea I came out this morning was that art is like balancing between repetition and being unique.

 What somewhat every artist likes to be is unique. In other words, we all want to come up with something truly original, something that is never seen before. But there lies also a great risk of being way too alien to audience, to critics (including ourselves) and to the whole society. Our whole education actually aims to this. We try to learn how to copy patterns (phrases, images, techniques) that makes our input for the society similar enough to become recognized as a pattern within the larger cultural fabric. And yet we also need to get that piece of pattern look unique enough, to make it look like something new becomes discovered, and avoid for example risk of just copying others too much.

And when reflecting my Sunday catch, I noticed one shot, where I first noticed the "eyes" that I saw on side of old spruce trees, trees where the lowest branches were cut some time ago. As a living creature we are learned (partly by repetition and copy, partly maybe because of DNA) to recognize such patterns as faces and eyes. In computer science this is called as pattern recognition, where the attempt is make computers to do the same for us: recognize common patterns for example in the image. For modern people this can be useful for example in photography, to automatize the camera focusing based on face patterns. For the primitive animal inside of us the face recognition is important to help us recognize the both, the potentially dangerous creatures, and those that belongs to our own kind and especially the close ones (those that belong in to our pack/family).

Altogether this is somewhat also the reason why we especially get drawn to images where we recognize anything that looks familiar. It is very much based on this concept of pattern recognition. We become exited when we see a human figure in the picture. And this is probably because it tricker multiple things in our mind. We start trying to find out whether the figure is something (someone) we know, belongs to our pack, or is danger to us, or looks attractive. Then it also may provide us such values as possibility to identify with some of our own experiences in that image, and to reflect our own feelings and believes.

Then the opposite is probably a very non-figurative art where we find absolutely nothing familiar, except maybe some colors, or in a long run, similar works of abstract art. And there we approach the risk of becoming too original and alien. The majority of audience then just "don't get it".

Photography then is a very much as an art form of ultimate copying and attempt to still do that in some original way. Which then leads me back to this weeks challenges. How to illustrate patterns and kind of repetition creatively?

But I will return to this topic later on during this week because the idea of a journal is not to say everything at once, but to record one idea at the time, like making a quilt (a pattern) out of small pieces.