Make the time to stand and stare
It was dusk, and as I walked along the edge of the copse looked up into the top of the trees. The branches and twigs were etched out in a pitch black, a stark relief against an ice-blue sky that was tinted with rose petal pinks and moody violet. It was enough to halt my journey to take in this simple, common - but beautiful - composition. My first thought was to take a picture of it - then, secondly, to use the resulting image for the basis of a painting. But I carried no camera. So I stood stock still and took it all in. And while I did so, had a little think... Why is it that, for some of us at least, when confronted with an arresting scene/plant/bird/insect our first thought is to reach out for the camera. Is it part of an ancestral need to own or shackle nature? To lock it down so that it cannot escape and becomes our possession? The written word is another tool that can be used to obtain the same result - do we feel the need to annotate, describe and commit the subject to...