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Probably half of the Denizens here are amateur photographers ;- ) but that doesn't mean we can't enjoy a few Nature images, snapped by a local Soccer Mom. In this little piece on art appreciation, Jonathan Jones claims that when an artist is trying to convey an emotion (any emotion!) powerfully, he can't do better than a landscape.
Also when a piece of natural "art" takes my wife Cindy with a sense of fear and wonder, she usually snaps a photo. Which emotion is best associated with with, is beyond me to say. For example, mirror lakes often create in me a sense of time suspension, as though we are observing Earth from a third point of view:
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I also have to admit that I smile wryly when listening to [materialistic] scientists trying to explain color. In the brain it's math. Usually their explanations go something along the lines of, "Well, the brain sees Xa27d4g and it goes, 'I'll just call that yellow'." You and I know better than that:
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There is a sense of coherency in these colors.
For me, sunsets evoke the emotion of satisfaction, especially satisfaction in labor. If days are chapters separated by sleep's turn of the page, we each get about 25,000 of them or so:
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Mt. Rainier is unusual on the planet in terms of the way it rises suddenly above the range around it. Jim Bouton wrote that he'd give up a home run in Sicks' Stadium, look out at Mt. Rainier "and some of that bad feeling would go away." You had heard that if the Earth were the size of a billiard ball, it would be smoother than one?
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Finally here is a Listverse of ten iconic black-and-white baseball photos. The art appreciation in the text is pretty solid - enjoy! They capture the ultimate sadness of the Gehrig photo, the intensity of the Cobb photo, the exultation of the Yogi-Larsen photo. Perhaps the uniqueness of baseball is in its humility; it's a game of failure and not a game of bicep kissing. Here is a Life Magazine cover shot of Mickey Mantle strike out and tossing his helmet in utter resignation:
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Best,
Jeff
Don't have much to add--but if we are 'merely' stardust trying to figure itself out (the cosmic equivalent of naval-gazing, I suppose?) the symmetry, beauty, and contrast of things has to be part of that process.
There's beauty in mathematics, as well, though I don't appreciate that brand of beauty as much as an astrophysicist likely does. Pictures like the above are plenty 'nuff for me.
That is all.
Well, also I love being viscerally reminded of how nasty Ty Cobb was. I know we just decried malignant violence in baseball in the Haniger thread, but man, that's a rich history for the game to have. Kinda like how once it's in the past, WWII is utterly fascinating, instead of purely horrifying.