William Oldacre Photography

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A New Phase

Light Signatures series, day, colour photograph, art, abstract, abstract expressionism, creative, city street, urban, downtown, cityscape, speed, blur, movement, motion, orange, mauve, streaks, pattern

Orange Overriding Mauve, 2012 – Light Signatures :: (Click to see more)

I’m entering into another phase of my – well dare I say, plan? More a loose collection of ideas, ideals and intents than a coherent plan. All the same I’m entering into a new segment of it. On one hand, I’m excited, or more simply, I’m thinking – oh at long last, on the other hand I’m kind of tired of thinking about it for so long and not so jazzed. The excitement and anticipation come in waves interleaved with apprehension and corresponding fear.

It’s somewhat unknown territory for me but stuff I’ve had a good long time to get to know in a kind of conceptual way in my imagination at least so its not completely unknown. And of course part of why it’s taken so long to get to this phase is my intense discomfort with this stage. A lot of the lead up has been practice, working out concepts and just plain getting myself as familiar with the ideas as possible without actually executing. Kind of like a lot mental dry runs.

My fear and apprehension is completely irrational I know, but the intellectual understanding of my irrationality doesn’t diminish the gravity of my emotion – unfortunately. So I’ve had to find other ways to gradually pry my fingers off the ladder rung I’m on, in preparation for the leap of faith into the great void of the unknown – part of which has been to familiarize myself so the void is not so unknown. Does this mean I don’t have faith in myself? Hmm.

In many ways I find it easier to do things when I don’t know so much – which is how I got started when I seriously committed to following my photography practice as a career. If I had known as much as I do now or known as much about the obstacles and pitfalls, I wouldn’t have had the guts to make the leap. I would have buckled. I’m not sure why the unknown nature of the void has been such a unusual stumbling block for me this time, especially considering unknown is usually easier for me.

Perhaps its to do with high expectation – unreasonable expectation? More likely its because my vulnerable feelings are at stake. I don’t like getting hurt. I don’t know, and I kind of don’t care at this stage – or so I tell myself constantly in the hope of lulling my fears. I’ve kind of beaten the whole thing until its a dead horse so I might as well give up thinking about it so much and just stumble on through.

Clip, clop – here I go.