RON HENGGELER

April 5, 2024
The jars, their headdresses, and miscellaneous vignettes around the house 

"In your own bosom you bear your heaven and earth, 
And all you behold, though it appears without, 
It is within, in your imagination, 
Of which this world of mortality is but a shadow." 

William Blake

A camera alone does not make a picture. To make a picture you need a camera, a photographer and above all a subject. It is the subject that determines the interest of the photograph.

Man Ray

When you realize how perfect everything is you will tilt your head back and laugh at the sky.

Buddha

"Wherever you are is the entry point."

Kabir

"To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour."

William Blake

"The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act." 

Marcel Duchamp

"This world is but a canvas to our imagination."

Henry David Thoreau

"Imagination is the highest kite one can fly."

Lauren Bacall

"I succeeded in simply attending at the birth of all my works."

Max Ernst

"I take photographs with love, so I try to make them art objects. But I make them for myself first and foremost - that is important."

Jacques Henri-Lartigue

"Dada is not modern at all, it is rather a return to a quasi-Buddhist religion of indifference. Dada puts an artificial sweetness onto things, a snow of butterflies coming out of a conjurer's skull. Dada is stillness and does not understand the passions."

Tristan Tzara

"I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled poets to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean. "

Socrates

"The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts."

Marcus Aurelius

"I still get wildly enthusiastic about little things... I play with leaves. I skip down the street and run against the wind."

Leo Buscaglia

"April ... hath put a spirit of youth in everything."

William Shakespeare

"One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you'd be stricken blind."

Dorothea Lange

"The artist is a spectator, indifferent or impassioned, at the birth of his work, and observes the phases of its development."

Max Ernst

"The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance."

Aristotle

"Life is without meaning. You bring the meaning to it. The meaning of life is whatever you ascribe it to be. Being alive is the meaning."

Joseph Campbell

"It’s amazing how lovely common things become, if one only knows how to look at them."

Louisa May Alcott

"To the one who knows how to look and feel, every moment of this free wandering life is an enchantment."

Alexandra David Neel

"Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors where there were only walls."

Joseph Campbell

"Every normal human being (and not merely the 'artist') has an inexhaustible store of buried images in his subconscious, it is merely a matter of courage or liberating procedures ... of voyages into the unconscious, to bring pure and unadulterated found objects to light." 

Max Ernst

"Finding Nirvana is like locating silence."

Jack Kerouac

"If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away."

Henry David Thoreau

"Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence."

Henry David Thoreau

"Life is pure adventure, and the sooner we realize that, the quicker we will be able to treat life as art."

Maya Angelou

"A certain amount of contempt for the material employed to express an idea is indispensable to the purest realization of this idea." 

Man Ray

"With photography, you zero in; you put a lot of energy into short moments, and then you go on to the next thing."

Robert Mapplethorpe

"Everything has two aspects; the current aspect, which we see nearly always and which ordinary men see, and the ghostly and metaphysical aspect, which only rare individuals may see in moments of clairvoyance and metaphysical abstraction." 

Giorgio de Chirico

"Collage is the noble conquest of the irrational, the coupling of two realities, irreconcilable in appearance, upon a plane which apparently does not suit them."

Max Ernst

"My works were designed to amuse, annoy, bewilder, mystify and inspire reflection."

Man Ray

"Creativity is that marvelous capacity to grasp mutually distinct realities and draw a spark from their juxtaposition."

Max Ernst

"The soul should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience."

Emily Dickinson

"Collage is a supersensitive and scrupulously accurate instrument, similar to a seismograph, which is able to record the exact amount of the possibility of human happiness at any period. "

Max Ernst

"Color is the fruit of life." 

Guillaume Apollinaire

"It's the viewer that makes the work."

Marcel Duchamp

"To become truly immortal, a work of art must escape all human limits: logic and common sense will only interfere. But once these barriers are broken, it will enter the realms of childhood visions and dreams." 

Giorgio de Chirico

"I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way - things I had no words for." 

Georgia O'Keeffe

"I never knew what I was doing until I was done." 

Man Ray

Hold fast to dreams,

For if dreams die

Life is a broken-winged bird,

That cannot fly.

Langston Hughes

"Memories are hunting horns whose sound dies on the wind." 

Guillaume Apollinaire

"You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough."

Mae West

"Beauty is an experience, nothing else. It is not a fixed pattern or an arrangement of features. It is something felt, a glow or a communicated sense of fineness."

D.H. Lawrence

"The imagination is not a state: it is the human existence itself." 

William Blake

"When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive - to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love."

Marcus Aurelius

"The artist performs only one part of the creative process. The onlooker completes it, and it is the onlooker who has the last word."

Marcel Duchamp

"Beauty is simply reality seen with the eyes of love."

Rabindranath Tagore

"Photography is not documentary, but intuition, a poetic experience." 

Henri Cartier-Bresson

"Your sacred space is where you can find yourself over and over again."

Joseph Campbell

"One must picture everything in the world as an enigma, and live in the world as if in a vast museum of strangeness." 

Giorgio de Chirico

"This whole universe, with all its vastness, grandeur and beauty, is nothing but sheer imagination. In spite of so many discoveries, researches and scientific knowledge, the creation remains a great unsolved riddle."

Meher Baba

"This world is but a canvas to our imagination."

Henry David Thoreau