Hi Rob,
For me drawing and painting has been part of my life always... My father had some art school time after the second world war. He introduced me to the basics of drawing and color at the early age of five. He later gave me my first camera, a zeiss rangefinder when I was ten. So the brush and camera have been with me for quite a while. I went on to art school and studied painting and illustration, with my camera fixed to my head. The seeing informs all. I chose painting to make my way, it has the ability to be more personal. The marks, the nuance of touch are paramount for me. The camera in a wonderful companion.
Peter
That makes you a truly fortunate person.
I was unable to do the art school trip becaue of school politics, but I suspect that I'd have ultimately arrived at the same conclusion: drawing and painting were always going to be second-best abilites for me, though to this day, I do think (when I'm honest enough with myself) that the hand-arts would have felt more worthy.
Perhaps that's part of the reason that I feel wet darkroom ability to be a more visceral, a more genuine form of expression than is sitting in front of a monitor tweaking and tweaking and... it's all so mechanical and without any prior experience of doing it the hand way, perhaps one never develops a sense of enough being enough.
Some painters obviously use photography as record or reference, but photography can be a lot more than that, as your own posted shots over the years have shown. I also think (without proof) that people devoid of painting/drawing skills are more obsessed with pixel peeping. If so, then I think it's because they don't quite get the idea of
expression being the numero uno target, not technical perfection, whatever that is. But hey, it shifts cameras off shelves as much as it stops others from wasting their money on upgrades that don't matter!
Rob
