John Paul Caponigro, visual artist

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

John Paul Caponigro is a prominent visual artist working with digital media. His art has been exhibited internationally and purchased by numerous private and public collections including Princeton University, the Estee Lauder Collection and Smithsonian. Thanks for coming in today.

John Paul Caponigro:

Thanks for inviting me.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

You are a very busy man. You have had a lot of fingers and a lot of different pies.

John Paul Caponigro:

I am busy, yeah.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So I'm interested in how you initially got involved in this. I know that your father is also a photographer, but it doesn't necessarily mean that one person is going to do exactly what one's parent does.

John Paul Caponigro:

No, not at all. In fact, when one's parent is so accomplished and actually both parents were artists and accomplished, my mother is a painter and graphic designer, one thinks carefully about stepping into somebody else's shadow.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So

John Paul Caponigro:

it was a longer road than many people anticipate. Many people don't realize that I was drawing and painting and actually pursuing that all through college. And it wasn't until I had a few big questions to answer about photography that it really became a personal passion. And there were two questions that I really wanted to answer. One was how do you take a device that makes this literal recording and come away with an abstract image? How does that change the experience? And two, how is it possible that two people with the same tool standing side by side shooting the same subject, can come away with such different photographs? So in many ways the photograph is both a window and a mirror. And that that's been fascinating, still fascinates me today.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

You have a background in graphic design, I believe.

John Paul Caponigro:

Well, I learned something about graphic design through my mother and helping her in the studio over summers. But I wouldn't call myself a graphic designer, even though we do produce many things in the studio. I do that out of respect to all the graphic designers who have that large training and her much greater expertise. But I really do appreciate that she sensitized me not only to design, but also to offset printing. Most of what I learned about offset printing was something I learned through my mother while she was overseeing the production of many books, including La Porter's Inman landscape book, which is where I saw the first digital retouching machine was back in the 70s. And she called these things million dollar coloring books. And I wanted one, but I had no idea how I was going to get a hold of a million dollars. Fast forward to 1990. Kodak sets up their digital training center in Camden, Maine, center for Creative Imaging. And I got to be an artist in residence. And there was Photoshop and a Macintosh photo for a few thousand dollars and it was a dream come true.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

I remember looking at your website and reading about this kind of conversation that you had to have with yourself to decide that you needed to stop doing other things in order to really focus in on what you really were supposed to be doing.

John Paul Caponigro:

Sure, I think we all do. I mean, in the era of information overload and in this extraordinary world of possibilities, you have to give yourself some focus. And I think the degree to which you focus and focus on the things that are really enduring passions for you, that'll have legs that you can stick with it long enough and feel strongly enough to bring all of your passion and innovation too. I think that's the degree to which you're going to live a successful life.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

But what is it that caused this to stick for you? Because I think a lot of people have that question. You can have a lot of different interests in a lot of different things and not know which one is the one that you're supposed to really go with.

John Paul Caponigro:

Maybe it's a cure for choice paralysis. You know, when you learn to be creative and I studied creativity, I can't tell you how many times I laugh when my colleagues or aspiring students say they want to be more creative. But they don't necessarily think they have to study it. You are it. But then you see the intelligence community or people in marketing or all kinds of other people studying creativity. I thought, you know, you should study it as well. So there are a lot of skills out there that will help you generate a lot of information, a lot of ideas, a lot of material, and then you're left with choice paralysis all over again. You realize out of all of these thousands of ideas, you only have a certain amount of time. And it used to be extraordinarily frustrating to me. I would think, you know, why would God give us all of this infinite possibility but so little time to actually do a small fraction of it? Over time, I felt that I came to understand that the things that you decide to commit yourself to, the most precious thing you have, your time, your life, your breath, that level of commitment that you bring to what you do speaks volumes, adds in a kind of a depth and a certain quality to it, and it also becomes a compass for you. So I think if you can find your true north, it helps an enormous amount of.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

How did you find your true north? What was that? Was there a turning point? Was there some place where you were in your life where you realized, okay, this is where I've got to go, right?

John Paul Caponigro:

And I think a lot of times we're looking for that one eureka moment where it all comes together. But my experience has been that there are smaller eureka moments, these turning points on a much more winding path that all build up one on top of another. And if one maps out that whole territory, you start to see not only a richer world, but you get a sense of a portrait of yourself. So it's almost like dominoes. One thing builds on another. There might have been a particular image that came through that was a surprise, and it had a certain quality. Yes, this is what I was looking for. I didn't know exactly what I was looking for, but I found a piece in this puzzle. And I think then there's a danger of stopping there and saying, okay, I found it. It's different. I could stick with this a lifetime. And in one way, you do want to stick with those eternal themes for a lifetime. You want to find those, but at the same time, within that, you want to innovate.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

When you say that you study creativity, what does that mean? What do you. How does one study creativity?

John Paul Caponigro:

There's some great books out there. Like, Michael Machalko educates the intelligence community and goes out and does lectures for corporations. His books like Cracking creativity or Thinker Toys, they're fabulous. A number of people in the marketing industry have also written great books about generating ideas, learning little acronyms. Like, I think was Tony Bazan, who came up with Scamper, Substitute, Combine, Adapt, Modify, Put to other uses Expand and Reverse. It's a great little tool to Think about how many ways could you generate new ideas and new perspectives. A lot of people have a lot of different definitions of what creativity is. It's far more than just being. It's a set of tools, it's a set of operations, it's a state of mind. And then as one of my students said years ago in one of my workshops, oh, I get it. Creativity. You mean to actually make something where you test all of those ideas and then in coming in contact with the world, with the way other people react to it, with the actual materials, new information comes to light, you have to recalibrate. So there's this wonderful evolution of perception.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

In addition to being a photographer, you're very active in educating other photographers, which not everybody chooses to do. Some artists are very much about just doing their art.

John Paul Caponigro:

Sure.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

But from what I can tell, you have a passion for helping others further their own art.

John Paul Caponigro:

Yeah, I do. I do. You do a lot of soul searching. You wonder what your contribution might be. And I realized that one of my contributions and one of the clearest ways that I can see my contribution right here, right now, is to empower other people. When you see them find their voice, something that's authentic, something that's theirs, and you see them light up, there really is, there's, there's this illuminated state of being. You know, somebody struck a spark and they fan the flames. That's tremendously gratifying. And you can, you can leave a week long workshop, sometimes a portfolio, review once in a while, or lecture, and you realize you've touched people. Okay, now I know I've made a difference. And when you leave a legacy of a body of work, you never know what Indiana Jones vault it might be locked in, or how people are going to reconsider it, or whether it's going to be lost in a tsunami, you have no idea. But when you see that you've touched another person and you see them go on to do things for themselves and start to change their world, and you know you've made a difference. So I'm looking for both. But I realize there's an opportunity and a responsibility and I feel privileged to be able to make a difference in other people's lives.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So speaking about legacy, what would you consider your legacy to be? Is it about helping others find their own path? Is it about doing something specific with your work? Or is it a combination of these things?

John Paul Caponigro:

It's a combination. I would hope that my legacy as a photographer would be to encourage people to think more openly and broadly about photography, to Understand what it was, what it is and what it can be. I would hope that as an educator, I can help people live more creative lives and then empower them to make their own authentic contributions. And as an artist, I would hope that I inspire people to think of themselves as a small miracle within a much greater miracle, not separate from, but connected with something much larger. I think the mindset that comes with that has been life changing for me.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

What I like about your photography is that it really is fine art photography. It's not simply landscape, which is also beautiful, but you are creating something new from something that already exists. But you're kind of bringing things out of your own self and putting it out there. Even though it's a photograph,

John Paul Caponigro:

it's both a window and a mirror. You know, there are many kinds of photographs, many kinds of art. I'm as interested in the landscapes within, the way the land shapes us and how we take it in and what we do with it inside. And then as a result, our psyches change and we see and interact with the land. The kinds of perception that we approach the world with change our experience. So it's that old Piaget, what you see changes what you know. What you know changes what you see. There's this kind of feedback loop. So my work is as much about land as it is about the subject. It's about as much about mind as it is about the subject of land. I don't think you can separate the two. And I think it's very important to become more aware of ourselves and our mind, our mindset and the ways of being with land or the ways of being land. Not just documenting that vanishing thing out there, which in that larger perspective we kind of need to get a clue on the environmental movement. I appreciate that when the biologist Lovelock, who proposed the Gaia theory that the Earth is one self regulating organism, we are only a small part of that, was asked to speak on behalf of a lot of environmental organizations to save the Earth. He was saying, wait a minute, you got to reframe this. You're not talking about saving it, you're talking about saving the habitability of Earth for us, our future, our environment. Because the Earth will persist, it has for hundreds of millions of years without us, and in all likelihood it will after us. But in our own self interest, we might want to think about how we relate to and change the Earth that supports us, that we are a part of.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

In many of the pieces that you do, you address a very spiritual element of being. This piece is called Exhalation 4. And this piece is called Illumination 25. So these are big and broad topics and themes. Are you constantly trying to find ways of manifesting these themes in your work over time?

John Paul Caponigro:

Yeah, and they're coming out of the process of asking a lot of questions. And I constantly come to these things. Obviously, I'm a guy who likes to think, and I like talking to people who like to think, some better sense of. Of how this all works and what it's up to. I've been accused of having a low threshold of interest. I'm tremendously curious. I was really flattered that in high school I was given the physics award for being the Wonder man, because I think in addition to being fascinated by all these facts, that sense of wonder is what really transforms consciousness, being, and leads to the new discoveries. I think we are spiritual beings, and I think that spirit encompasses mind, body and emotion, the whole integral thing. And so if I'm looking at a system of self being attached to a system of a much larger entity, nature, it would be natural that some of these come to light. It's also, the titles are a product of the way that I work. I'm looking at more universal themes and trying to extend a sympathy and an empathy and a sense of connection for things that might seem very distant, but which we are very connected to. Like Antarctica changes our weather. And at the same time, I'm trying to propose an alternative to a Western material mindset where we're just little particles separate, bumping into each other. It doesn't fit my experience. I think we're deeply interconnected. If you. You look at the larger web of things, aside from the fact that sometimes the photographs are made with two or three exposures from different places and different times. So what are you going to call them? The standard Antarctica 2012 doesn't quite fit. Right. More importantly, I'm interested in those processes. So all of those series titles are about process. They're not a title that describes a thing and a place, but they describe more a process which would suggest a way of being or a way of entering into that system.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

You've traveled all over the world, and I think that I read that you had a bipolar year where you spent time on Antarctica and also time on the other end of the world.

John Paul Caponigro:

I can't remember. Greenland.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Greenland. Okay.

John Paul Caponigro:

Yeah.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

How do you make decisions about where you would like to go next? Is it places you haven't been yet, or is it places that you feel drawn to?

John Paul Caponigro:

I mean, it's an important question. It's one I ask myself all the time. I think you've just hit on one of those enduring questions, those guiding questions, you know, the questions you can hold for a lifetime and that have many answers and the change over time. So that is a guiding question and I think it's a very interesting question for all of us. Do we spread ourselves thin and see it all or do we decide to focus in on a few things and go deep? And I think you have to do a little bit of both, kind of experience new things, but then also find some of the things that you want to return to. It's one of the reasons why I've returned to Antarctica eight times and there'll be at least two more. I think we're probably scheduled to do that every year for the foreseeable future because it's just, it's gotten into my soul. It's such a magical, mysterious place that I feel like every time I go I discover something new and I'm always rewarded. So there are places you want to connect to and have a long term relationship with, and then there are other places you want to survey and say, how long of a relationship do I want to have with these places? I do a lot of research on Google, do some Google image searches, run Google Earth. I sometimes use Google Earth to plan a route through a dune field. There's a lot of great ways these days to get information and there's certainly no lack of photographs to be able to see these places now. I mean, the. The world has been fairly well mapped. We're living in an era where more photographs are taken by cell phones in a single year than all years previous in the history of photography. That happens every year. More than 3 trillion photographs made every year. Never mind that a disproportionate number of them are selfies. I'd encourage other kinds of self portraits. I think every photograph, in a way that mirror is a self portrait. But there's more than just pointing the camera at yourself. Sometimes you want to point it at your emotions or your thoughts, your connections, your relationships.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

When I look at your photographs, there's something often otherworldly about them, often not firmly planted on this planet. They could be. Some of them could be what I imagine Mars might feel like. Is that intentional?

John Paul Caponigro:

It is intentional. I go to these wild places, 1500 foot high Namibian dune fields, Antarctica, which many people think of as ice but is actually called the Crystal Desert. There are these strange otherworldly places right here on terra firma where we're asked to reconsider what we think of what we think Earth is and what we're a part of. That's the mindset that I would hope that my images would inspire that moment, that sense of suspension, of how do I know what I know? And in that openness, that sense of inquisitiveness that a child has possibly discover and experience more because we allow ourselves that openness. So it's that moment of pause, that gap, that suspension, where so much can happen.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

It is interesting that you would use the word suspension because that's another feeling that I had in looking at many of your photographs. When was that? There's a groundedness to them. There's an Earth element to them, but then there's also an airiness to them. There's the sense of something not being firmly placed and that. I think that's a different feeling for many of us. Many of us feel very firmly grounded in this time and place. Sure.

John Paul Caponigro:

We're taught to think of ourselves that way.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So how do you walk around as a physical being in this time and place and also be creatively in a different space?

John Paul Caponigro:

I think we can all look more broadly at this thing called being. You know, we relate to when we identify with our physical body and the feet that are on the ground, and that's good, gets us across the street. There's some wonderful sensations. You know, coffee is fantastic. Chocolate's fantastic. Fantastic, Right. And at the same time, there are all these thoughts and emotions. And I've meditated most of my life. And so the benefits of watching yourself, watching, watching yourself being in lots of different ways, have opened up possibilities, insights, opportunities. So I realize I'm carrying this whole psychic space with me with this collective of psyche and body. And then I also challenged myself to think more broadly about self and environment. So, you know, there's an airy quality. There's also an airy quality to the breath. If you watch your breath for years, you realize you're part breath. But then you also read the latest science, like Lyle Watson's beautiful book Heaven's Breath. You realize that the very air that you breathe is alive, that there are thousands of microorganisms and there's this conscious exchange. We've exchanged breath just in the short time we've been this close together, that the water we drink also is alive. Thousands of microorganisms. Craig Venter did that DNA sampling down the east coast and saw that there were these interconnected biomes. And we're a part of that. We're bags of ocean, really. We're far more water than we are physical. And according to physics, we're far more space than we are particle. The Earth itself is full of life. And even the parts that we don't consider living are really a matrix because it sustains that life. So we think of our living, our being as being embedded in this web of life. We're part of that. Moving through that space creates ripples and that space creates ripples within us. We realize this is marvelous exchange. So I hope that my art gives other people a taste of being connected to that, what I'm calling a miracle. I mean, it's just so staggeringly beautiful, interesting, complex, infinite. I think for all that we've learned in the last couple hundred years in science, we have to remember how much we don't learn. The great scientists let us know that every time they answer a question, they come up with 10 more. We have to remind ourselves that as much as we understand so much about the universe, orbits of planets and big bangs, that we still can't account for 90% of the mass in the universe. There's a long way to go and it's that more open minded quality that I find exciting.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Tell me about your own evolution as a photographer and an artist. Tell me what this has looked like over the trajectory of your career.

John Paul Caponigro:

How far back do you want to go?

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

As far back as you'd like.

John Paul Caponigro:

I almost got us kicked out of our apartment in Dublin at the age of two because I took up mural making. My parents paper trained me and put blocks of paper everywhere and said a kit on the paper. Got that straight. We all had our place on the, on the icebox or refrigerator. Dad always used to embarrass me with this one story. It wasn't really an embarrassment, it was more of a celebration, he said. I knew the kid would be okay when he came back with two drawings, tossed the first one on the table and said, look what the teacher made me do. Red house, blue sky, green grass. And look what I did. Purple sky, orange grass, black house. I knew he'd be okay. So there was that celebration of independent spirit and also a recognition that we all each had our own individual creativity. I learned to talk a good painting at Yale. I wish I'd learned to make a better painting. Sometimes you just have to put a lot of time in there. I decided not to study photography there because I had a great teacher and my father and I thought I won't be able to spend that much more time with the old man. Little did I know that he'd move in my Backyard in Maine and we'd be spending decades together, which has been really quite rich. And a lot of people overlook the training my mother gave me. She was also a very fine painter, graduated top for a school from RISD in painting, but then later became a graphic designer and became far more than a graphic designer when she oversaw the production of books. And so she really understood the printmaking. So in watching her and even helping her in her graphic design studio, I learned a great deal there. So my parents trained me and I also got some academic education. And then, as I say, I'm just endlessly inquisitive. So I'm constantly looking at other people's work. I'm constantly studying in lots of different fields, whether it's science or creativity or art. And then you find your way. Finding your way has really kind of been the real challenge. There's no well mapped system. And it's something that I'm actually trying to make some inroads in with some of the publications that I do with the workshops that I create. I think there are ways to discover your voice more quickly and to make some substantial and generative statements about the creative process, as open as it is and as much space as you need to make for individuals and all of their subjective, idiosyncratic differences that make a richer stew. The it doesn't mean that there aren't certain turning points in certain ways and certain moments that you can look for in certain ways of responding, certain ways of asking questions that can get out a lot of rich information very quickly. These are not the things they taught me at Yale. I learned to write a good paper, at least for Yale.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

It's good to have lots of different talents, good to have lots of different ways of being educated.

John Paul Caponigro:

Well, it was a certain way of looking and thinking, so I was fascinated to see that orientation. And then ultimately I felt like I wasn't learning to make the painting that I wanted to make and that if I graduated with that degree, I would for me feel like a fraud. So I went west to Santa Cruz and handed in my first Yale paper there. And they went back and said the same thing. I said, you need to go see a writing tutorial. So I went back to my old way of writing and it was just fine. It was fascinating to see the very different mindsets that different communities had. They had a different language, a different way of orienting, different way of seeing, different way of being. And exposure to all of that was very helpful because then you can take the best from each and chart your own path.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, I'm very glad that we have had the chance to talk. As I had mentioned to you, when I met your father, I could tell he was just a fascinating individual. And then I knew that both of you were very fine artists in, in your own right. So it, it's kind of a as my father is a doctor and I became a doctor, but then I've continued to evolve in a different way from my father. It's interesting to kind of hear the same thing from you that you your father's a photographer, your mother is an artist, you are a photographer and artist. But you've also, again, continued to evolve in a different way. So you kind of continue to maintain your own DNA, but it's kind of a launching pad for you.

John Paul Caponigro:

It is, right? I mean, you understand your parents are part of that nurture. They provide a rich foundation from you. And at the same time you want to individuate, you want to find your own path and you bring something new to it because you have a very different experience and a different soul.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

One last question. What is it about Cushing that continues to nurture you here in Maine?

John Paul Caponigro:

Maine has always been this calm, stable, quiet, safe place to come off the road, to retreat to. It's beautiful. I'm surrounded by nature, and I think the Maine coast is really one of the more beautiful places in the country as well as the community is very welcoming. They really do, all walks of life have a deep appreciation for art and for nature. So I find that kind of restorative, generative. And they're also respectful enough about private space and about doing it your way. Don't tell me how to do things, I won't tell you how to do things. That kind of mentality, which is pretty wonderful. They can get a lot of work done. So I found it to be a very supportive, quiet, grounded community that's really rich and wonderful. If you're looking for it, it's got a lot to offer, and if you just want to hide out in the woods and get stuff done, you can.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

I've been speaking with John Paul Caponigro, who is a prominent visual artist working with digital media. His art has been exhibited internationally and purchased by numerous public and private collections, including Princeton University, the Estee Lauder Collection and the Smithsonian. I look forward to hearing more about what you're going to be doing in the future, and I really appreciate your coming in today.

John Paul Caponigro:

Thank you for inviting me.