"I think all art is about control - the encounter between control and the uncontrollable"

Art thrives in the tension between intention and accident, discipline and spontaneity. Control is the artist’s plan: technique, composition, structure, and the deliberate choices that define boundaries. The uncontrollable is everything that resists mastery: the tremor of a hand, the surprise of a subject, the weather, the time-bound nature of perception, and the unruly surge of emotion. What we find compelling in art often emerges at the precise moment these two forces collide.

Photography makes this encounter vivid. Avedon’s studio is a theater of control, lights, backdrop, lens, timing, yet his subjects bring their own inscrutable interior lives. A blink, a breath, a fleeting doubt in the eyes: the camera records what cannot be commanded. The photographer decides where to stand and when to press the shutter, but the life inside the frame refuses to be entirely choreographed. The resulting image carries both the author’s architecture and the subject’s irreducible mystery.

The dynamic extends across disciplines. In painting, controlled brushwork meets the viscosity of pigment and the chance of a drip or a gesture that exceeds intention. In jazz, rigorous harmony and rhythm invite improvisation that cannot be replicated. In poetry, meter and line breaks impose order while language surprises the writer with unanticipated associations. Film editors sculpt performance and time, but serendipitous moments on set often become the heart of a scene. Even in digital art, where tools promise precision, glitches and emergent patterns can catalyze new forms.

Control without risk yields sterility; chaos without form dissolves into noise. The artist’s craft lies in creating conditions where unpredictability can speak, choosing constraints that sharpen chance into meaning. This is not domination but attunement, a willingness to be altered by what enters the work. The encounter continues after creation as well: viewers complete the piece with interpretations the artist cannot foresee. Mastery, then, is less the conquest of uncertainty than the orchestration of a living meeting between form and the uncontrollable pulse of reality.