William Oldacre Photography

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Why Do Dey

Light Signatures series, day, colour photograph, art, abstract, abstract expressionism, creative, city street, urban, downtown, cityscape, speed, blur, movement, motion, green, muted, streaks, patterns

Green Streaks Roadside, 2012 – Light Signatures :: (Click to see more)

When I was a little kid the most important question to me was Why? “Why do dey” is what I used to ask says my grandmother – I think I was 3 years old. Still, WHY has stuck with me my entire life. WHY is the central precept of my life and continues to inform just about everything I do, particularly creatively.

I remember as a kid sitting in the back seat while we drove somewhere through the Ontario countryside on a sunny morning – probably to go camping. I was watching the telephone wires at the side of the road undulating in smooth rhythm between the poles. The trees in the far distance seeming to never change while the farm fields up close were a blur.

Right beside this memory is another – this one a school trip to Toronto. I grew up in Guelph about an hour’s drive from Toronto. We were on a school bus of and I was sitting by the window so I could see the gravel shoulder along the edge of the highway. I was staring down in a daze watching as the lines from innumerable tire tracks snaked, twined and writhed in the soft gravel as we drove.

I’ve had similar experiences riding in trains watching tracks beside the train twisting and twining as they separate and combine. Sometimes this happens with tire tracks in fresh snow

These experiences and my strongly inquisitive nature have brought me here, now – photographing movement and emotion in my urban home. It seems those snaking moving lines in the gravel, the rhythmic telephone wires, motion blurred fields and twining tracks imprinted on my young impressionable mind in such a poignant way that I am still pursuing them today. And of course WHY over arches all of this.

Why is this important to me?
Why am I doing this?
Why am I here?
Why?