A quiet Sunday.
Savouring the fading beauty
of this grand old pair of rose ladies.
And wise words jotted down in my notebook.
And some more wise words
from Sally Mann's autobiography Hold Still:
"There is nothing better
than the thrill of holding a great negative,
wet with fixer,
up to the light.
And, here's the important thing:
it doesn't even have to be a great negative.
You get the same thrill with any negative;
with art, as someone once said,
most of what you have to do
is show up.
The hardest part is setting the camera to the tripod,
or making the decision to bring the camera out of the car,
or just raising the camera to your face,
believing, by those actions,
that whatever you find before you,
whatever you find there,
is going to be good.
And, when you get whatever you get,
even if it's a fluky product
of that slipping-glimpser vision that de Kooning celebrated,
you have made something.
Maybe you've made something mediocre
- there's plenty of that in any artist's cabinets
- but something mediocre is better than nothing,
and often the near-misses, as I call them,
are the beckoning hands
that bring you to perfection
just around the blind corner."
Wishing you an inspired Sunday.
x
