Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
Ralph Walso Emerson
As I remarked in my introduction, there is, I believe, a creative impulse, a spirit, in every person that seeks expression. Mine has surfaced in many ways – embroidery and knitting as a child, painting as a teenager and writing and photography as an adult. Not to mention an all-consuming five years of creating jewelry.
Photography has been the most intense and as I acquired traditional photographic skills that allowed me to document the world around me (https://janetwebster.myportfolio.com/) and the world of my travels (www.silvernomad.ca), I began to investigate different means of expression with a camera. I found a more impressionistic and expressionistic approach where traditional standards of description and representation – sharpness in particular – didn’t apply.
This later arriving aesthetic uses a variety of non-standard techniques to produce images that are so unique that even the photographer cannot replicate them. I don’t think there is a formal name for this approach – Freeman Paterson called this Photographic Impressionism and Doug Chinnery and Valda Bailey coined the term Expressionism – but it reveals itself through techniques used – Intentional Camera Movement (ICM) and Multiple Exposure (ME) in particular and quite frequently in the application of digital collage to original photographs. The focus is in creating a sense of what the photographer saw and, frequently, of what was felt. These techniques encourage the creation of images ‘with a different eye’ that satisfy my creative impulse.
This is a fair move away from the mainstream representational photography and it is proving to be a steep learning curve. The end is no where in sight so it seems I will be busy for quite a while. As I stumble towards creating images that satisfy my creative impulse, I occasionally attempt to document my thoughts – writing to discover what I am thinking and doing. Perhaps you’d like to pop back occasionally to see where I am in this creative endeavour and whether I have succeeded in discovering what it is I am up to.