They say fear is what blocks art. I am fearful that what I want to capture, cannot be captured. With every passing batch of images, I feel the pull leading further away from the picturesque, towards something other which I worry doesn’t exist and cannot exist, and if it did, isn’t something that could be serialised into a body of work. I am fearful that by forcing the ideas I will create something silly, something that is not art, but childish play.
I am fearful that I have an ever-stronger resonance with the landscape, yet I cannot express myself inside it. With a model, I can express so many things in a way that cannot register without her, but with her, I’m no longer sure I can express the core idea of what I want. I have been playing with the idea of conceptualizing the landscape by altering it, adding to it and doing all those things that landscape photography is not. I want to force my energy into it, but that’s all I have, potential energy, a feeling the potential exists to show something is out there. I guess that’s why we make art, when words cannot describe or maybe ideas the human mind fails to grasp needs art to probe its existence.
Recently I have tried something I have always done with Model shoots, the act of keeping a sketchbook. It has taken a long time to start, getting my head around the idea of seeing the landscape as a stage where ideas interlink. Over the years I have always felt I jump into a sketch to find an idea; Now I force ideas into my imagination first. It’s hard, patient work and needs the act of sitting on the idea, incubating it. I now start the sketch much later. I still cannot draw but I find my ideas are now there on the page.
The scary ending is that I don’t know fully what my direction is. I only know it’s the beginning of a new attempt to grasp something that keeps leading me towards some truth. A few words I read "As above, so below" is the closest to an artists statment I have.
Images from imagination create the foundations of the photography that follows, but I want to keep trying to pull my photography and sketches closer together. To learn how to use charcoal fast and effortlessly I’ve also started making some rapid sketches loosely based on my old images. Who knows, one day the two may fuse. With divine intervention and practice, I may even learn to draw properly.
