New Years Resolution - stop worrying about resolution

It's mid-December, so naturally my mind is turning toward New Years Resolutions. Along with the perennial 'lose weight' and 'exercise more' and 'eat right', I think my biggie is going to be this: stop worrying about resolution.

Here's why - not too long ago, I visited Tracy Helgeson's web site, and I looked at her paintings, and the experience seems to have completely redrawn my opinions about resolution. Go, now, and look at her paintings, then come back here.

Done that? No, really. You need to go look, or nothing in the rest of this post will make sense. Take five minutes. When you get to 'November Road', keep going. Take at least 30 seconds to look at "Snowy Fields 2005". Look at enough of the paintings to get past that 'right, I understand what Paul is on about, now I'm back to reading' reaction, and when you start to think "Hey, these paintings are giving off huge waves of 'sense of place'", come on back. Honest, there's a point to all this.

Here's the thing that strikes me so deeply when I look at Tracy's work. In terms of spatial resolution - not so much. I haven't seen the work in person, so of course I'm out on a limb, but a quote from this article about Tracy makes me think I'm not wrong in thinking she's mostly concentrating on form as a way to communicate the landscape experience:

“I often take great artistic license with what actually exists ... , ” Helgeson said. "However, the line of the hill and the intersecting hill, or trees, remain constant as I am endlessly fascinated with its form and how the sky and trees interact with it.” Helgeson wants to show her audiences that there is more than one way to see the land surrounding us.

“I appreciate realistic landscapes, where you can see every leaf on every tree,” she said. “But I hope people can understand that you can see a hill and not see every tree on it.”

So the bottom line for me is this: Tracy Helgeson is successfully getting across something very concrete about (insert sounds of fumbling for the right word) the placeness of where she's living. And she's doing it with very little reference to detail. She's painting the forest, not the individual trees. As a photographer who worried obsessively about resolution and detail and sharpness, that's an eye-opener for me.

I understand that there are artists whose work is about detail. Christopher Burkett, for instance, does huge breathtaking prints of scenes in nature. Last time I saw one of Burkett's prints, I was stunned. It's just detail, all the way down. You can't get so close to the print that getting closer doesn't reveal more detail. And if you read an interview with Burkett, it rapidly becomes clear that this depiction of infinite depth of detail is, in fact, a religious issue for Burkett. I don't mean that in the sense that Burkett just feels very strongly about detail in prints, I mean that in the sense that what we are seeing is Burkett's religious convictions about how God made the world, embedded in his art. That's good, and that's right, and as a photographer I have some sense of the herculean effort to make Burkett's photos.

But I keep coming back to Helgeson's work, and looking at those paintings, over and over and over. There's a lesson there, about a different sort of landscape experience. There's a tremendous sense of not just being there, but of actually living there. There's a sense of apprehending not just the tiny fractal detail, but the broader structure and process of the landscape.

If I could, over the next year, manage to get a hint of that into my photographs, I'd be mighty pleased.