Sam Francis' Aphorisms

This is a selection from a small book by the artist Sam Francis called APHORISMS. The entries tilt more toward short poetry (with line breaks) or perhaps being composed as back-of-an-envelope jottings on art/aesthetics, rather than ‘aphorisms’ as we tend to think of them:

The eye is
the light
of the body

*

Death has
no surface
only depth

*

I paint time
I am ruin rolled
I am rolled

*

Color is born
of the interpenetration
of light and dark

*

Color is a series
of harmonies
everywhere in
the universe
being divine
whole numbers
lasting forever
adrift in time

*

Red contains every color
even red

all colors in this
painting consist of

all other colors

*

The space at
the center
of these paintings
is reserved
for you

*

There are as many images
as eyes to see

*

As you know
energy can have
never begun
and yet is
taken up
again and
again and
lasts forever
and forever
until it is
taken up
again

*

We are always at the center of space
we are always at the center of time
we are always as far
as possible from both
east and west
we are always as far as possible from earlier
and later

—Sam Francis, APHORISMS (The Lapis Press, 1984)

Leverant's Zen in the Art of Photography

Robert Leverant
Zen in the Art of Photography (Images Press, 1969)

Among some books owned by a deceased poet, I encountered this little book. The author Robert Leverant was not known to me. He was a photographer, but I gather from his February 2021 obituary that this little book (numbering 152 entries) was perhaps more notable than his photography. There is something about the project of this book, including the author’s use of the words “groovy” and “grooving” in a couple instances, that places it very much in those wild and wide-eyed years of the late 1960s.

These short writings are not Zen koans. Some are aphorisms proper. Some are short meditations on ‘seeing’ and ‘time’ and the ‘universe’; being there in the moment, experiencing the world visually via the art of photography. At times, Leverant breaks certain sentences into pieces, each bit standing beneath a number, but each not exactly standing-alone as an interesting assertion by itself. For example in this run:

-75-
There is rhythm. There is rhythm of the object.

-76-
There is no object.

-77-
We are object.

-78-
Click.

-79-
Each picture is thus a self-portrait.

Artists often know very well their materials, their means and practices, but they sometimes struggle when it comes to finding an adequate language when asked to articulate certain aspects of their vision or to explain their processes:

-105-
Before we do, we must be able to verbalize how and we have gained a tool which ours forever.

Some artists have turned to aphoristic writing as a partial way of introducing their art and their methods. Here are few more of Leverant’s aphorisms that caught my attention:

-2-
The camera is an extension of ourselves. An appendage to bring us closer to the universe.

-6-
We have allowed the picture and the picturetaker and the picturetaking to become one. Inseparable in a moment of time.

-14-
A camera is only an intermediary between us and a new us. To repeat: we must be as receptive and ready as our equipment.

-22-
Either we see it or we don’t.

-24-
The way lies not in the equipment.

-25-
Is the shortest distance between two points a straight line?

-38-
Our photography is not the art of looking for It. An art of waiting.

-41-
Not us to It. The art of true finding.

-46-
We do not know we have snapped the shutter.

-60-
Our pictures teach us not to cling.

-86-
We know we are light as we know the universe to be light.

-97-
Photography is ourselves. It is our world we are creating.

And two more as obituary…

-116-
For names are tombs. They have no windows. And so no light.

-117-
Our photography will have nothing to do with names.

oncoming traffic of a kind

On the road we pass many things, but we often fail to notice time going by us in the opposite direction.