It is very true. My muses have been many and various; painters like Monet and Van Gogh, Tom Thomson and The Group of Seven, Emily Carr, Burne-Jones, JW Waterhouse, JMW Turner, and the American painters, Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Moran, and Maxfield Parrish. And more recently it has been the Abstract Expressionists such as Jackson Pollack, Willem de Kooning, and Vassily Kandinsky that have greatly stirred my artistic soul. But my very first sources of photographic inspiration came from the Masters of the black & white film medium, especially Ansel Adams and his awe-inspiring portraits of Yosemite and the many other National Parks and natural wonders of the American wilderness. And more recently, has been the influence and inspiration of the Pictorialist photographers of the late 19th and early 20th century. The images created by the artists Robert Demachy, Andre Hachette, Paul de Singly, Frantisek Drtikol, Edward J. Steichen, and Hugo Henneberg, et al, have resonated deeply with my creative aesthetic and with my belief in all that photography can achieve as an art form.

Having addressed some of the many sources of my artistic inspiration, I must now speak to my own creative process, beginning with the 'original' photograph and how it came to be. It is the all-important starting point for any of my completed works. As a 'digital' photograph, it has to possess many, though not all, of the traditional qualities that an image produced on film would need to possess to be considered a great image: especially strong composition, strong subject ‘value’, good exposure, and sufficient color information. Without these fundamental elements no amount of creative manipulation will produce a photograph of any worth. This was an important lesson for me to learn because I am a photographer first and foremost. (I am actually an artist, first and foremost, whose primary medium at this point in my life is photography.) So, I am a photographer who uses a digital camera, where, by its very nature, each image the digital camera records, possesses a wealth of ‘potential’ that can be tapped into and ‘cultivated’ with the aid of various photography software programs. This potential for ‘inspired cultivation’, goes far beyond anything that could be achieved with a film exposure in a traditional darkroom. Although I must say at the same time, that the work of the Pictorialist photographers from the late 19th and early 20th century, with the many different processes of reproduction they employed, eg.; photogravure, gum bichromate, gum platinum, bromoil, oil, and carbon printing, etc., produced some of the most remarkable, beautiful, and evocative photographs I have ever seen. They are a regular source of admiration and inspiration.

Digital photography is still a relatively new type of photography. It was at first reviled by many traditional film photographers as not ‘authentic’ photography. That argument alone forced a deeper consideration of just what a photograph was. Certainly it was never ‘the thing itself’ that had been photographed, no matter what type of camera had been used. It was always only a facsimile of the original. So the arguments against digital image creation (with the relentless advances in the technology) ultimately proved to be more about ‘change’ in the (sacred) traditions of photography, and image processing, than about whether the image produced in the end could be authentic or good, which now is rarely considered to be in doubt.

A highly specialized set of tools has been created for use by the photographer who uses digital equipment, in the plethora of photography software now available. Typically, there is a relatively steep learning curve to deal with before the highest-quality image results can be achieved with this software. But this is not necessarily as onerous or discouraging as it might sound. Actually, it is a happy fact! For artists often say, no matter what their medium, ‘it is all about the tools’. While photography is my main medium of artistic expression, I also sculpt in stone. I have a treasure box full of the most wonderful carving tools available, including  English-crafted woodcarving scoops and gouges, assorted knives, scrapers, and bits of this and that, all of which are used as necessary to produce the finished work. Similarly, but even more so, the latest versions of any of the photography software products available represent perhaps the most advanced ‘toolbox’ in existence for the photographer/artist/designer. There is very little that can’t be done with them and it is essentially only one’s degree of ingenuity and imagination that limit this potential.

So the question becomes, what to do with the photograph that started the creative ball rolling, and was the first step in the creation of the finished work of art? Well, the first thing to do would be to take a couple of steps backwards to the ‘real beginning’ of the work of art; to the ‘point of inspiration’. That point or moment in time, as likely as not, occurred without a camera in my hand. I lived in the country for 15 of the last 18 years, on large pieces of farmland and forest. Typically there were no signs of human life when I looked out of any window. But what there was or could be, for example, was a very interesting and beautiful dawn breaking. The sun slowly rising, therefore the light slowly increasing and revealing what the retreating night had left behind; the work of a thousand spiders draped between tall grasses, wildflowers, and dead trees in the derelict hay fields and lowlands of my old farm; the streams of mist that were determinedly draped across long stretches of swamp and bog, field and forest, their delicate beauty begging to be ‘captured’, daring me to only

look and not make the effort to get my camera and tripod, to perhaps just slip back into my warm bed and pick up on my pleasant dream from a few minutes earlier. I couldn’t do it!  It was too remarkable and beautiful to just let slip by. I didn’t always have to capture these moments with my camera, and sometimes simply, like anyone might, just watched and marveled at Nature’s breathtaking beauty, but typically, I ran for my camera! I’d throw on an old coat and boots, and run outside to shoot the scene before it was too late. So that would have been the ‘start’ of the creation of one of my works; the looking out the window, and seeing the scene and basically being stunned by the beauty, and in awe of what is created by nature at every turn! The photographs are taken, the scene changes and the moment of inspiration and opportunity passes. But the images have been captured and await viewing, and more. And if the image happened to be inspired in an urban setting, the process is the same. When inspiration hits, you must respond.

So now begins the next phase of the process. The painter will set up his easel and paints in the open air and begin to sketch and paint what is before him, perhaps finishing the painting later in his studio, recalling images, colors, and composition, and perhaps referring to rough sketches or studies. So it is also with the (digital) photographer. I took the photograph standing at the edge of a forgotten field, in the middle of nowhere, one lonely and misty dawn, and that image of a fragment of a moment of reality, that actual scene before me that I witnessed, lives on in the original photograph. But it is not enough to just release the shutter and record what is in front of my camera in a basic way. What I attempt to add to the basic image is the living, breathing, spirit of that special moment and view, as I recall it, sitting in front of my computer screen. That same spirit inspired the works of the Impressionist painters. In their first collective exhibition in April of 1874, Monet included a painting entitled “Impression, Sunrise”. What painters like Monet aspired to produce in their work was the evocation of the feelings and sensations, the ‘impression’ that the scene originally produced in them, and it was a very individual and personal interpretation of the moment that they had witnessed. So it was also with the Pictorialists. They wanted to break away from the traditional notion of what photography was, ie.'straight photography', to produce images that were more subjective, poetic, and more to do with beauty and their own particular sense of aesthetic truth. And so, the ‘success’ of any given image that I produce, the ‘success’ of it as art, is the degree to which this adding and transforming done to the original image re-creates and enhances the force and natural drama of the moment when it was shot. And it goes almost without saying; no human, no art. This is the human component, of course, where if I hadn’t looked out the window upon the scene that was there for only me to witness, or for only me to decide that it had artistic potential, or put myself where there was an artistically exploitable moment, it would have passed without any human consciousness. Art is all about this compulsive human component, this ‘meaning’, this profound and mysterious effect that we take from Nature, or from any other source of inspiration, and must give back, in the form of a work of art.

And the work of art thus created fulfills the artist’s compulsion, and with any luck the appreciator and collector of art will want to share in this fulfillment and possess the work or a copy of it. In any case, we want to re-visit the meaningful moment, (as the creator of it, or the viewer,) the moment of intensity that moved us so, that shocked us and made us feel something powerful, and that is there before us reproduced in a book, hanging on a gallery wall as a rich and glorious chromogenic print, or that same print hanging on a wall in our living room. This shock, or power in recognition of extreme truth and beauty, be it an extraordinary dawn, or storm scene, or the astonishing beauty in a woman’s face, or in the fascination of some human construct and its integration into the 'natural' landscape, this is what I strive to have exist in my art. I want a strong visceral reaction to be unavoidable, (goose-bumps would not be inappropriate!), giving the viewer no choice but to surrender and be struck by the totality, truth, force and, ultimately, beauty of the image. It remains only for a person looking at one of my images, to be either moved or not, to recognize what was always inside them that but for this image might have remained latent and un-felt, but which now has been unlocked, released into their consciousness, into the spiritual stream of their being, to alter and change forever, how they ‘see’ and how they feel about life and the world around them. And, I will add, that when an image of mine does not specifically relate to the 'natural' world, but concerns a landscape of a more urban, ie., man-made nature, or is essentially figurative, the hoped-for reaction to it from any viewer can be the same. We are all urban dwellers, or know well the human constructs of the city. They are as prevalent in our minds as are trees in a forest. But they are not trees or a forest, though they may mimic them in form, texture, and number. They can be interesting to look at, even beautiful, but sometimes, especially so after they have been abstracted from their original situation, by, let us say, an artist with a camera and a computer. The 'thing' is now no longer the 'thing', but an abstraction of it. Fine. Now the artist will hopefully make these 'things' even more interesting, Now we can stand back and take the measure of what is before us that we know so well, that is being represented novelly, and possibly interestingly, and/or, even beautifully. So, it is the same process of abstraction from the original 'reality' to a new representation of reality, whether the setting was country or urban, the subject figurative or otherwise.

Denis R. Buchan, Winnipeg, Feb. 2010