“There is a pleasure in the pathless woods.
There is a rapture on the lonely shore.
There is society, where none intrudes.
By the deep sea, and music in its roar.
I love not man the less, but nature more..”
Lord Byron
Draw What You See
My high school art teacher always had a sign up in her room that said “Draw What You See”. I never forgot that. Whenever I have the opportunity to stop and sketch my environment, I try to do so. In this fast-paced world that we’re in, its hard to get a moment to sketch, but sometimes its just good to sit down, even for twenty minutes, and record the world around you with a pen and sketchbook. You might flip back through that one day and think, “That was a great day!”.
Just Take The Picture
There’s so many photographs I regret not taking. For a multitude of reasons I haven’t taken some that I wish I would have. Fear of annoying a potential subject, being in a hurry, or thinking I will have another opportunity for that shot are some of the biggest hurdles in photography. After shooting around for a couple of years, I am learning that its just better to suck it up and go for it. Sometimes it is just nice to enjoy a moment without the camera, but i’ve usually never regretted going for shots that I thought would be great in a tricky situation.
Tell The Story
The Toolkit
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Photograph
Photography is special to me because it feels like being a preservationist. A photo captures a moment that will likely never be replicated again. That moment is frozen in time as long as that photograph exists. As much as I love to sketch and paint, and no matter how good of a painter I will ever be, I will never be able to recreate a beautiful photograph.
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Sketch & Paint
As a landscape architect, we are taught in school to sketch places to understand them or for our own design ideas. For some designers like myself, there is an artistic quality applied to this practice that makes our experience with a place of study or design idea more memorable. As an artist I have taken what i’ve learned as a landscape architect and turned it into art.
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Write
In recent years, writing has become an additional outlet of creativity. While I can share photos and paintings from adventures and be done with it, writing about those experiences has allowed me to add an extra layer of detail that my art cannot describe. As i’ve learned recently, words can sometimes paint the best picture.