"Light in the Trees" by Sean Kernan

Even now, with this long work nearly done, I can’t remember exactly when I began photographing trees, or why. I know that it had little enough to do with the trees themselves.

Whatever it is that calls one away to begin something like this is both so powerful and so chimerical that the only real way to get to the bottom of it is to do whatever it tells you. The best articulation of this process I know of, pungent and provocative, comes from the poet Charles Wright, who said, “I write to find out what it is that I have to say.” When I read this, I first understood what I’d been doing all along.

It generally surprises people to find out that most artists working on something—a poem or novel, painting or photograph—don’t really plan the thing out and then execute it. Certainly it surprised me. I had always done everything by just jumping in, but I always felt it was somehow wrong (a notion supported by most of my teachers from first grade on). But even for those who do think and plan and make notes there is still that time they can only hope for—it can take a moment or months—when the thing at the core of art blooms and something that has been moving beneath the surface of their mind breaks out and floats there just outside it. They see it clearly for the first time, and it’s better than anything they had dreamed. It is the moment that any artist is always hoping for. And one gets to it by doing—writing, painting, clicking —not by planning. The experience is not necessarily comfortable, but the wonderful thing is that if one pays careful attention afterward, the view through one’s self is wider, deeper.

Of course, when standing in the presence of any great work, particularly an ambitious one like the Taj Mahal, the Sistine Chapel, Cy Twombly’s mural in the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, the big Richard Serras, one sees all of that labor and thought and tempered skill, all of that paint, stone, steel. And all of these things carry a work, but its heart begins to beat when its maker suddenly realizes that something is emerging that shatters the plan and exceeds it. And the best response is to continue without pausing.

Ironically, the phenomenon mixes epiphany with that moment in a Roadrunner cartoon when Coyote runs off the edge of a cliff and out onto the air without falling. The trick if you’re Coyote is to deliberately not look at the fact that you’re running on air. The trick if you’re an artist is to keep that startled energy going without stopping to think How am I doing this?

Because when creativity really begins to happen it can just as easily feel as though things are going badly wrong. Yet that is just the time to really persist. I had a tai chi teacher who called this “investing in loss.” He had been telling me to balance on one leg, sink lower and lower, and relax my muscles completely while doing it, but I just kept falling over. He was obviously wrong, because obviously squatting lower means using more muscle power. So I went to him and complained about his teaching. But he pointed out that while my falls were evidence that I had stopped relying on muscular effort, I had yet to put my trust in chi. I would have to let go even more, keep falling if need be, to get to the point of giving up what I knew in order to get to what I didn’t know. I would have to invest in loss, he said, and if I did, chi would support me. I persisted, and it worked. And I didn’t even believe in chi.

When one finally gets to this point of trusting, invoking and using the inexplicable, there follows moment of heightened feeling of aliveness and connection to everything around one. It’s kind of like a drug—and you want more. (In fact, recent imaging work on the functioning of the brain suggests that this kind of extension and completion might be the occasion for a little squirt of dopamine to the brain . . . which might explain why artists keep working in spite of the slim rewards the world gives them.)

I got some early hints of how this kind of self-extension worked from my youthful tries at writing in school. I sat there and made up stories about things that I couldn’t possibly have known anything about. No one knew I didn’t know about them. I was lying and getting A’s for it. This was great!

It manifested more fully when I left college and began my working life at a theater, where I acted, built sets, lit shows, and stage-managed them. I was in pure, true love, full of passion and adrenaline and the self-importance of the overworked. I had no time to think, and that probably was the part that appealed to me most. I simply surrendered completely to the doing. I promised myself I’d do the thinking later.

Then, one night before a photo call, I watched the theater's photographer lay out his gear. The cameras fascinated me—black machines so capable and precise. I followed my fascination without thinking, and I had a camera inside of a week.

On my days off I began to take pictures. I loved going off on my own, needing nothing in the way of actors, script, or audience. I could drift around and look, wait to see what happened as the light changed, wait for something to shift and reveal what was right there before my eyes all along. And I didn’t care if the pictures came out in any particular way. I just wanted to see what I’d missed, to learn.

On one of those days I took my first picture that was even a little interesting. I had been wandering through an old abandoned house and happened on to an upstairs room with a tattered curtain billowing over a glowing window. The room wasn’t really that unusual. But the picture I took was. It was lonelier than the house had been, spookier. The photo had a meaning that the window itself did not. There was something in the image that I had completely failed to see when I took it. The room had looked at first like a group of physical objects, but really it was an arrangement of elements that made certain harmony, a sense of light, a resonance. It was alive, and I saw. Something alchemical had happened, and I knew that the alchemy was in me.

That did it. I was a coyote on air. Shortly afterward I left theater and began to photograph seriously.

Taking that photograph of the window was like stepping into a boat for no reason other than it was there, and then noticing that the boat was moving. And instead of yelling Help or jumping out, I said to myself, Where is this going? I am still finding out.

I have never learned to make the alchemy happen at will, but eventually I learned to prime it with certain behaviors—going to unfamiliar places, running around madly, wearing myself out, taking lots and lots of pictures. In time I knew that it wasn’t what I was seeing that precipitated the alchemy but the looking itself. The alchemy was in my awareness, my attention.

I’ve never come up with a better way to do creative work, and that’s pretty much how I approached this book. It was as though I was walking through forests and across mountainsides and into jungles looking for an invisible matrix that I knew must be there somewhere, one that could be seen only through a tiny ring floating in the air. If I could find it and put my eye to it at just the right moment, something in me would shift. Like Borges’ Aleph, it would offer a view into a kind of singularity in which the order of the world, or at least some part of it, became clear. The rings were rare, but they were out there, and it was my awareness that revealed them.

The experience was not particularly serene. Most often it was kinetic, a little frantic, exhausting…and always compelling.

I knew I had found one of these rings whenever I saw that the shifting and fragmentary twigs, trunks, rocks, and clods of earth among which I was moving seemed to be composing themselves into something that was still, clear in its interconnected parts, and informed by a feeling that something was about to happen. In other words, a picture. In that moment in time and space my mind was able to find order—or perhaps make it. In a world that often seemed senseless, making these pictures let me navigate through chaos to meaning, much the same way as finding that window had. And if it worked to make a picture, it might lead me to a larger understanding in the process. And who wouldn’t love to have a larger understanding.

Now, any physicist will tell you that the atomic particles that make up our world are separated by proportionately huge measures of space, as are other planets and galaxies. The artist will grab that thought and leap to the idea that the space we inhabit extends to the intergalactic, and thus may contain billions of worlds that we might grasp by just thinking, by awareness. The physicist may try to call the artist back and say Prove it, but it is like trying to catch a disobedient dog who has slipped its leash. Besides, artists don’t prove.

But the artist is onto something that is true in its way. It is the truth that art gives us, and it arises from awareness, from consciousness. And consciousness changes us.

That’s the secret. Art changes our minds. Not our thoughts, our minds. It’s all the reason one needs to be an artist or to look at art.

I’d always suspected that something like this might be so, so when I found some with real authority who thought so had I was thrilled. The man was Antonio Damasio, head of neurology at the University of Iowa and a pioneer in brain imaging, who’d written a book called The Feeling of What Happens (Harvest Books). In it he describes some of the science behind the phenomenon of consciousness. He talks about the effect that seeing an object has on the brain, as measured by brain imaging. He observed that the neural pathways of the brain reorganize themselves when exposed to a visual stimulus, and that the revised organization remains in place even when the stimulus is removed. This produces a feeling, a narrative that becomes what Damasio described as “the movie in the brain.” The outcome, then, is that the seer is changed by the act of seeing.

Damasio is saying that we notice what we have not seen before, and its newness changes us, extends our consciousness. As a result we are different, expanded.

Damasio is not talking about art per se. But I am. I think artists work quite directly with this phenomenon. It is in this state of aliveness that new work is born. There is a story that as Mondrian was painting over some old canvases he had lying around, a friend reproached him for covering up perfectly good pictures. “I’m not trying to make pictures,” he said. “I’m trying to find things out.”

In my non-scientific way I think this view of the function of art suggests that existence is a bunch of possibilities, and that part of what shapes and gives it meaning is our gaze, our awareness. In other words, the world we see is, more than we ever dreamed, of our making!

Was I thinking about all this while taking the pictures in this book? Believe me I wasn’t. If making them was an exhilarating and sometimes overwrought experience, it is also true that there was the quiet pleasure of walking through the woods too. My world’s surface is almost entirely man made. The ground I walk on is parking lots, lawns, elevator floors, roads and sidewalks. To walk directly on earth is an exception. So whenever I wasn’t beating the bushes trying to startle another picture into the open, it was pleasant indeed walking through the redwood forests of California or the pines in the north of Greece or the foggy hardwoods of New England. Looking up through a bamboo forest at what seemed like explosions of light above literally made me gasp with surprise.

And when I walked out of the woods I was more alert to those interesting interstices where humanity had done its work, as different as Capability Brown’s great landscape garden at Stowe in England and the clear-cuts on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington.

There was Hatfield Forest near London, preserved as a royal hunting forest since medieval times. I visited the San Joaquin valley, where commercial agriculture has been taken farther than anywhere on earth, lining up every living profitable plant and leaving only a few of the great tousled Valley Oaks that were native there. And I was seduced again and again by the straight rows of poplars grown in Italy for pulp.

And the olive groves! As a teenager one summer in Spain I fell in love with olive trees. The sage-colored drifts of their leaves against the khaki hills, the dance of trunks in their groves moved me to try some faux-Lorca poetry. (Unbelievable stuff. “The midnight tongue of the Bull of the River…” Whew!)

So last year in Greece I kept slipping away into the olive groves, like a gypsy in a poem, to look quietly among those oldest of working trees for their harmonies.

So clearly when I said that this project had little to do with trees I was being disingenuous. I loved doing the walking and the work among them, and I feel a little lost now that I don’t have on my bureau a plane ticket to some place where I’ve heard the forests are full of magic.

Still, in the end this work was not about trees but about seeing and changing. From the first photographs I did in the woods I had the sense that there was something waiting deeper in, and I went looking. That’s how art—making it and seeing it—works on me. Art changes my mind.