From a walk in winter

This photographic fragment is of an image I 'caught' thirty two years ago during a walk through our Langford neighbourhood on a cold, overcast winter afternoon. My husband had bought me a Pentax single-lens reflex camera for Christmas, and on this walkabout I was learning the settings. One neighbour's fence had a mass of fluffy clematis seedheads spilling through the weathered fence slats - this is a section I cropped out of the photo which I printed myself in our home dark-room.

I have always had difficulty in making photographs, especially with focus, due to my extreme shortsightedness and thick-lensed glasses. Yet, there was something compelling about this poorly focussed fragment that approximated my mood and feelings about this situation I had come upon and which caused me to linger, consider and soak in the particular nature of the masses of soft seedheads supported by a scaffolding of fencing.

Twenty-five years later, I was poking about in my box of photos, wondering about the compulsion to 'take' certain images and to store them for future refrence. This photo prompted me to translate a small segment of this fragment into the painted diptych below.

This diptych, oil on canvas, each panel 11 by 14 inches, was one of the first paintings I had attempted to make using oil paints. It is not particularly skillful handling of paintbrushes, but did satisfy my urge to play about with mixing together a limited number of colours and to explore some things that could be done with the paint and brushes. It is the activity of mixing colour, creating light and dark pattern, experimenting with blending some marks and leaving others as direct strokes which convinced me to persist with painting.

I found myself looking at how other painters handled the material and noted some of the decisions they had made in achieving particular character in their works. I think it is possible to spend a lifetime using limited materials and exploring their potential as image-making tools. That is what excites me about painting and drawing - the seemingly inexhaustible possibilities.

I realize that it has been declared by some contemporary art practitioners that 'painting is dead'. But, is it really? I think not. As long as people have eyes to see with and tools at hand with which to make marks, the desire to create images, even with the humblest of tools, is an innate and persisting human trait. What do you think?