Visual Explorations

Philosophy is often presented as the fundamental interpretative tool, but art can also serve this role. Visual Explorations is the online art showcase of the Global Spiral. Every monthly issue will present a “visual exploration” through painting, sculpture, photography, and images from the sciences, expanding our understanding of foundational questions.

Artist's Statement

My imaging philosophy is very simple. I strive to record the subtle, interconnected web of energy that makes up what we call the world.

For me, beauty, which permeates everything around us, appears in its most sublime state when form, color, pattern and texture are all in harmony.

In the same way as all "objects" in this world are fundamentally impermanent, and essentially arbitrary, partitions of an otherwise continuous, unfragmented whole, photography is (again, for me) an almost mystical process whereby the "veils of fragmentation" are momentarily lifted and the underlying essence of the universe is revealed. To "see" the whole, one must first learn see "parts" as real illusions.

Photographs are nothing other than abstract brushstrokes applied to nature. If one applies these brushsrokes intuitively, so that they capture a part of nature's deep rhythms, they permit our minds to glimpse, however briefly, the even deeper truth that lies forever hidden beyond our physical senses.

The better an image is at weaving together, in holographic fashion, the seemingly disparate "things" that make up the world, and thereby at creating a unified, emergent whole that transcends any single element of which it is composed, the happier I am as a photographer. The ultimate photographic expression, of course, would be to capture everything in nothing, but the resulting image might appear to some as too uninteresting to display ;-)

www.ilachinski.com