About the Site

Descriptive Eye is an exploration of process. Descriptive Eye is not news, propaganda, or advertising.  Descriptive Eye shares aesthetic works, presents objective descriptions of their creation and creative intention, and initiates web discussions to further understand meaning within works. As such, Descriptive Eye can include photography, writing, music, sculpture, food, and other human creations, not as a class or course in the creation of any one of these but as an overlapping mosaic of arts and human creations in an attempt to preserve and encourage the creative impulse.

The idea behind Descriptive Eye rests in the concept that an artist is not born but is awakened through an individual’s focus on a set of materials, his or her desire to find and express meaning in a surrounding world, and that sparking impulse to make somthing new or different, often out of raw materials---how may guns have been made out stick, how many tea parties have been given to imaginary friends. At a time when education rests too often on results measured through testing and recollection, Descriptive Eye pushes for understanding sought through creation. Descriptive Eye treasures subjective processing as people attempt to make sense of their world, to find “truth” in their lives.  At the same time Descriptive Eye respects that our understanding of that processing can be more clearly perceived through honest and objective portrayal of its workings and the elements behind it.

For example, given a contemporary poem, the poet himself, in addition to the creative product of the poem, can express understanding of its creation and often a surgical dissection of elements within the work.  The poet, possibly, knows meaning and often various levels of meaning within a work.  However, concurrently, other viewers may perceive and be able to explain value in the work’s creation that escapes the artist largely because the creator is so close to the creation.

About the Editor

Before a head-on collision in 1993, Kirk Hathaway was already a produced playwright, published authors, avid photographer, and active college instructor of English.  Following a life-changing accident which resulted in “mild but significant brain injury”  and concerned with changes in his verbal skills and memory, Kirk Hathaway shifted his work slightly so that along with the products of the creative impulse, he began recording the process of that creation.  Also, in his teaching, he required a portfolio that portrayed the development of each prose work a student created.  This “mapping” of process, and the methods by which it was openly shared in class, lead Hathaway to design this site and its two blogs to celebrate the learning process for artists creating works to be shared with others. 

Editor and Contributor to many of these pages, Kirk Hathaway has spent more than two decades teaching writing to college students at community colleges and universities across the United States.  An author himself, his plays have been produced on the west coats and elsewhere. He has had stories, poems, and photographs published and sold, but for much of the last decade Hathaway has withheld creative work from the public while pursuing teaching process as his objective.

Currently, Kirk Hathaway is designing and managing a set of web pages for clients, editing books, and developing an online magazine to celebrate the waterways of North Carolina.  To pay for these creative habits, he spends considerable time under water inspecting and preserving sailboats and yachts.