NEW STARTS | MEDIUM FOR VISUAL ARTISTS
In the Beginning
Beginnings are, invariably, full of hope.
Each one has the potential to be both life-affirming and life-changing. The first school, the first kiss… You get my drift and are free to add your own. And in my case I should probably add “The first camera”.
Perhaps I’m naive, jumping into Medium with both feet as a paid member and a writer at the same time. I’m here because, as a visual artist, I increasingly recognise the value of reading and writing alongside my photographic and mixed media work. I’m writing more, and beyond my own newsletter and website blog I’d like somewhere to share it. In recent months the words have been running on ahead of the audience, so there’s some catching up to do.
Two weeks in, I’ve found much to enjoy here but it does seem that there can be a tendency towards eyeball snares and attention hooks. So many potential solutions are offered to life’s questions and problems. Well, I’m sorry, but I have no intention of twisting around the way that I write or what I write about to fit with this. If that means I ‘fail’ here then so be it; anything else would feel like artifice. I have no I interest in pretending to be someone that I am not. I know my niche and I am looking for people who are comfortable with that and also curious about among other things nature, art, water and abstraction.
Of course, I very much hope that you will find my writing enjoyable and it may at times be informative, but my words will inevitably reflect what inspires me, how I see the world, what I make, and my attempts to understand this. If this suggests that it will be about me, that isn’t my intention – I am merely the vehicle for my curiosity, and in turn water is my conduit. It has dramatically altered my vision, my practice as an artist, and it keeps on prompting me to reimagine the natural world in new ways.
I plan to share with you the things that I notice and where they lead me. Mostly they are the smallest of details, moments of unexpected beauty, fragments of nature and time. In the past few years, they’ve come to be increasingly important to me as a place of ease, as I shared in my last story.
I’ve always tried on Instagram to include informative text with my images; here I’ll be adding one of my own photographs or an image of my mixed media works to my writing so you’ll have the opportunity to look into my world as well as read about it. For me, the two – art and writing – go together. What is writing if not an art that should be practiced?
If you’ve read this far, thank you. I’m new to Medium and hoping to grow my writing here. I plan to share something about why I write in a future post.
I take inspiration from the smallest of details as I wander through my local wood and peer into moss-lined pools. How my images feel is as important as what they look like and I have begun to loosen the reins on my interpretations; we commonly think of water as liquid but it is equally vapour and at times may, briefly, be solid. I have learned to abstract even more, to dream a landscape, sometimes mixing the sights with the ambient sounds of this quiet place. The threads that bind my work irrespective of medium (no pun intended) are curiosity and fluidity.
If you’d like to see what I make you’ll find examples on my website as well as the option to subscribe to my newsletter.
