– Ann O'Hanlon, from According to Ann…
Creative Philosophy
Ann authored several publications during her career. The first, According to Ann, was compiled and published by Suzi Martin and Elinor Severinghaus. The second was published posthumously by Arctos Press in 2001 and is called seeing/perception: looking at the world through an artist’s eye. The book was edited by Suzi Martin and Cornelia Wattley, and designed by Jeremy Thornton. It contains many photographs by both Ann and Dick, and a poem by Ann’s nephew, Wendell Berry, the well-known writer.
From the foreword:
"I wish to make this bit of musing a foreword to this manuscript.
For over forty years I have been learning about the creative spark in people and in myself, first through the job of teaching (for the first half-a-dozen years or so), then through the privilege of teaching (for the next half-a-dozen years or so), and then the suspicion dawned on me that I should not be teaching at all, but should be listening, and asking, and exposing, and perhaps nudging (occasionally), and above all, perceiving objectively (forgetting my own subjective preferences) the works of people and the world of nature.
…It dawned on me that the major obstruction to comprehension on the part of (students)…was the fact that they did not know how to see, how to look. It was as simple as that. So I invented an elective non-credit course called Orientation to Visual Experience, and that was the formal beginning of the rest that has been unfolding to the present…Gradually it became very obvious that the ability to perceive—totally—required more than just reading or looking or talking or meditation. It required DOING." – Ann O'Hanlon
Ann O'Hanlon photo by Diana Peters