William Oldacre Photography

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Considerations

Light Signatures series, day, colour photograph, art, abstract, abstract expressionism, creative, city street, urban, downtown, cityscape, speed, blur, movement, motion, turquoise, pink, orange, muted, swoops, circles, pattern

Deconstructed Pink Orange, 2012 – Light Signatures :: (click to see more)

I can’t help feeling odd lately. I find myself with a small amount of time on my hands – enough to get down to creative work but I feel the work isn’t worth doing. I’ve been in production mode in my print business working to deadlines and tasks for a long time now and I’m suddenly at loose ends. I like to have a goal – a purpose. But just finishing images – any image, I feel has no apparent purpose except self satisfaction and oddly I don’t find it satisfying… not right now.

I’m staring at the light of my monitor reflecting off the scaly wrinkly skin on the back of my left hand and realizing with new shock that I’m getting old…er – and that my time is very likely limited. There’s no time for fooling around – or rather less time than there was previously. So why am I feeling unmotivated?

All of this is calling into question deep ideals in my life – concerns centered around purpose and meaning. Is it important or purposeful for me to make images? I don’t have a satisfying answer to that. And what is the meaning of what I’m exploring? I don’t have a solid answer to that either.

With the meaning of my explorations, I do think I stepped away from realism and figurative work because I wanted to incorporate emotion and sensation into my images and I felt a conventional realistic landscape approach wasn’t emotive enough – failed to sufficiently capture the dynamic of urban life – that, plus a still image is usually a single moment in time. I needed to find an alternative that stretched beyond those still image/single moment bounds yet somehow managed to portray movement and activity. I’m still exploring these concerns.

I later also considered a slightly different approach for Coloured City and instead distilled the view to essential shapes and colours rather than movement. But overall, I was still concerned with the dynamism, the emotion and the activity of urban life.

I don’t know, I guess I’ll just have to trust in my prime directive and keep slogging away in the hopes that I rebound out of this funk.