ABOUT
The Bamboo Sage is a blog where discussions of art, travel and the environment overlap and come together. It seeks to discover through interactive postings, audio and video content and photographs, the common relationships of people within the context of those three areas of interest.
What goes on in one part of the world is occurring in another. Most of the concerns people have in the Andes are similar to those living in the Himalayas; Hindus and Catholics, the migrant and the farmer, the Armenian and the American, they all share a common desire to live a good life, filled with family, certain comforts of security and a need to share. Humans may be separated by geography, cultural histories, religious beliefs, political positions, language and race, yet what I hope to share through this blog are the essential concerns and conditions that affect us all.
Travel and careful observation of local customs is certainly one way to achieve this. What drives many globetrotters in their own meandering is being open to whatever experiences come along that project one to the next circumstance. My own life of world travel began at age 11 when my mother took me and my brother and sister away from our familial home of Asheville, North Carolina and we embarked on a period of travel across the Atlantic Ocean and throughout Europe. We eventually settled in Paris where I attended a Catholic boys school.
That wanderlust has not subsided. While much of the world remains for me to walk through, many a ‘songline’ yet to be found, I have had the good fortune to see much of the earth and its inhabitants, both the cultivated human kind and the wild animal kind.
My photographs, a sampling of which I will show through this blog, are the visual statements of my explorations, whether far afield or closer to home. You can see more of my portfolio on my web site: fredsigman.com.
Like my photography, my work as an art historian is about studying and understanding the commonalities that underlie that uniquely human behavior called ‘art.’ What motivates humans to such levels of intense expression and exploration through image and sound? Despite the protests of my graduate school professors, I chose the academic path of being a generalist. It never interested me much to study art within the rarefied world of scholarly specialization; I seek a broader context for the explanations about art, travel and the environment.
Why the Bamboo Sage? It is a title borrowed from the legendary group of seven Taoist literati, whose day jobs were academics or civil servants, all trained in the stifling traditions of Confucianism. Seeking retreat from the world into the mountains, they composed poetry, played music, engaged in philosophical ruminations and drank wine. A sense of humor and iconoclastic attitude were requisite traits to be one of the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove. In whichever small way, I hope to follow in their footsteps, literally and figuratively.
