It's kind of a standard question to ask an artist how they began their work..."What inspired you to become an artist?" or some formulation of the same query. For me it was a number of factors, but one very strong inspiration was a love and connection with the natural world. In my childhood and teenage years, my idea of fun was to skip school, not to smoke pot behind the 7-11 with the other truants, but to steal my mother's SLR camera and macro lens and spend the day in the woods and fields near our house, photographing bugs, trees, and plants. It wasn't until I began my formal training in photography that I realized that the art world had little use for such images, and my nature photography was forgotten, or relegated to images that I would make for fun, but rarely share or exhibit.
Today, the summer solstice, and my first full day at Saltonstall, as I awoke to the early sun and the sound of birds, I decided to regress a bit to my childhood, and just enjoy taking a walk in the woods with my camera, to reawaken that first inspiration I felt to begin photographing. Art? Probably not, but what fun it was to forget about all that and spend time enjoying the play of light on foliage, and play the game of composition with my camera!
I love these nature photographs. The little miracles of nature we so often take for-granted will enrich our lives tremendously if we just slow down long enough to appreciate them.
ReplyDeleteThank you Neil for the reminder.