William Oldacre Photography

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Cabin Retreat

Light Signatures series, day, colour photograph, art, abstract, abstract expressionism, creative, city street, urban, downtown, cityscape, speed, blur, movement, motion, blue, yellow, green, muted, swooshes, waves, layers, pattern

Koi Pond, 2014 – Light Signatures :: (click to see more)

For quite a while now I’ve wanted to build a quiet hidden cabin retreat off somewhere in the woods or by some water. When I was a kid around 8 or 9 my parents found a piece of land on an Indian reserve on Georgian Bay and built a beautiful A-frame cottage off the grid. My brother and sister and I all helped build in any way we could and over the years it was a quiet, progressively hidden retreat as all the trees and foliage encroached upon it.

Sadly there came a point at which through a long painful process the cabin retreat was pried from our hands. Since then as my son has grown I’ve come to appreciate the important roll my family’s cabin retreat played in my life and I want to – aside from my own selfish reasons – provide the same experience for my son.

I’ve been exploring an image blog of cabins of all kinds from around the world called cabinporn.com that has an amazing array of retreats in all circumstances. The irony for me is my intense desire to have a quiet cabin retreat external to the city – opposite to the city – despite my creative interest in the city – disconnected, simple, woodland, water, quiet and slow. All that the city is not. It’s something I thirst for and have been unable to compensate for while living in the city. There are many excellent and beautiful retreats within Toronto for example and I love them all, but none are the same as a quiet retreat in the woods.