Last week I wrote about impermanence — the idea that nothing within a photograph is truly still.
Looking at this image, I find myself returning to that thought, but from a different direction.
I see the beach as a canvas.
The water moves across it continuously, never making the same mark twice. The ice appears solid and permanent by comparison, yet we know it is anything but. It fractures, moves, melts and eventually disappears.
I think creativity can be like that.
Sometimes it arrives like the water — instinctive, energetic and difficult to control. Ideas collide with one another, change direction and occasionally disappear before we can do anything with them.
At other times creativity is more like the ice. An idea takes shape. It becomes something we can hold onto, examine and work with. But even then, it isn't fixed. Given time, it too will change.
And underneath all of it is the canvas.
Perhaps our role as artists isn't always to control what appears upon it. Sometimes it is simply to recognise when all these temporary elements have come together — light, movement, form, chance and our own presence — and make something from them before they separate again.
Maybe that's why I continue to photograph.
Not to make the temporary permanent, but to acknowledge that, for a moment, it existed.
And perhaps the more interesting question is this:
When you create, how much of what appears on your canvas is something you deliberately put there — and how much did you simply recognise when it arrived?
M.