I turned 30 earlier this week and for whatever reason my mind keeps circling around the question of why we go where we go.
Sometimes we go for a person, sometimes for work, and sometimes we go for an event. Sometimes we go down to Alabama to photograph a concert, like I did yesterday afternoon.
Sometimes we go for a wedding, and sometimes we go for a feeling, and sometimes we go for a ribeye steak and a glass of Gamay. Sometimes we go to “watch a movie” with a girl we met last week when we were 21 and she was 19 and standing on the front porch of the ADPi house wearing a dress her mother wore on that same porch decades ago.
Sometimes we go for a bighorn sheep with a bow on our back and 5 day’s rations in pursuit of the animal, hiking hills & cliffs that we’d never see otherwise and will never see again. The world is huge. And sometimes we pull off to the side of an Idaho backroad and park the car and walk across a field and down by a stream to cast a little nymph at a patch of slow water where brook trout flash in and out and we see their color.
Sometimes we go to a Led Zeppelin show, and it has nothing to do with the music at all. We wear earplugs and feel the sound move through us. We’re not there for the music. We’re there for the energy of a place.
The most common example is probably New York. We are drawn to the energy of Manhattan. It’s almost thick in the mornings at all times of year as the city wakes and caffeinates itself. The feeling is tangible there, and it fuels you from the inside out.
I was drawn to New York in November 2021 for reasons I did not know but they were real and they pulled me there and that trip changed my world completely. It was seeing paintings by Fritz Scholder and Etel Adnan and Jasper Johns, all in the span of a single Tuesday, that did it1. A spark was lit. That spark was curiosity. I felt a tremendous curiosity about the things I was looking at, and about the people who made them. I was 26 then but this was all new. It was one of the best days of my life.
That day stands as a kind of a demarcation line in my personal story—the day I realized the power of art and became fascinated by it and by the people who make it. I guess it was the day I found my passion. And that passion has only grown since. It was always there, but on that day it became clear. I became more myself. And it all happened because of the energy of a place.
My friend GL once called Scholder the "gateway drug" into Western art, and he was exactly that for me. Etel Adnan’s simple style and usage of color captured me like few things ever have. The Jasper Johns exhibit was a lifetime retrospective—each room represented a decade of his career, each so distinct it felt like it could have come from an entirely different artist.