Today’s word is…resonance

The first real job I had was as a Radio Technician at the Post Office (later Telecom). In my training I learned a lot about resonance in a technical sense mainly to do with LC tuned circuits. What fascinated me though was the resonant properties of quartz crystals as in the old crystal radio sets (if you’ve never made one, I’d recommend trying it). If you’ve seen resonance physically in action, in a crystal oscillating for example, I think it makes so much more sense of the phrase “that resonates for me” when speaking of art or writing etc.

So when an artwork or grouping of words resonates, it is a physical response for me. Like the sensation when you stand very close to a concert speaker system. This week (and this year) has been one of resonances. I am constantly finding writing and art that truly resonates. And extending this further, people that I resonate with, brought fully home when chatting to an old friend from radio days this week. Ah yes the old resonance is still there too.

So what art resonates for me? Well read this blog long enough and it becomes pretty clear. But as an example, photography often goes straight to my heart. This photo for many, many reasons.

Trinity- Peter Peryer

To end another quote sent to me from Lis (thanks again) from Drusilla Modjeska’s ‘Stravinsky’s Lunch’. In it Modjeska quotes the artist, Grace Cossington Smith. 

‘ “A continual try”, she [Cossington Smith] said. It’s true of painting, it’s true of writing and it’s true of life. The process of staying with that continual try can produce long low loops and sudden illuminations, which we see in retrospect as springing open and banging closed. But in the tug and pull of time it is another day lived, another piece of board on the easel, another squeeze from the tube.’
 

Tags: Peryer, resonance