Life Imitates Art

Marysville Falls can be found just minutes from downtown Kimberley, a small ski town nestled in the East Kootenays of BC, accessible via a narrow walking trail from the bridge in Marysville.

The Falls commence where Mark Creek, from its shallow valley, cascades into the canyon that flows downstream to the St. Mary River. Amazingly, the rocks that these waters constantly slowly erode are some of the oldest to be found in BC at 1.4 billion years old!

On a recent visit to Marysville, when the ice was just beginning to melt after a longer than usual winter, my goal was to create some images that had a surreal painterly feel.

Hopefully, you'll enjoy the result.

Awestruck at Lake O'Hara

In September of 2016 I had the opportunity, along with fellow avid photographer, Ken Grady, to experience two extraordinary days hiking some of the trails surrounding Lake O'Hara in Yoho National Park, British Columbia. 

After catching the quaint, rattly, old shuttle each morning for the eleven kilometre off-road journey from pick up point to "Le Relais" - the day shelter - it was only a matter of minutes before we were off on our way along the trail heading round the lake which lead to several other divergent paths.

The rewards were soon to be reaped as truly magnificent vistas revealed themselves at every turn. Originally designed by Lawrence Grassi, who was a park warden at Lake O'Hara in the 1950s and had, among other attributes, stonemason and mining skills, the trail is a marvel in itself.

During those two wondrous days I found myself, at varying times, inching my way past towering rock formations, wading through sparkling streams and steadying my gait as I clambered over massive moss-covered slabs, always shooting frames from every possible angle.  

Not before this experience did I ever imagine how significant it was to become.

I was hypnotically immersed in Nature.

Impressions

The interaction of light, colour and shape, be it within the framing of distant landscapes or at the macro level of intimate staged environments, is a theme that seems to echo within my own collection of photographic expressions.

I actually get very excited when looking through the viewfinder to discover a visual pattern that promises to reveal much more than the actual subject material at hand! And often it can be just only one particular ray of sunlight or just the smallest, sparkling glimmer of water reflection, which can change the mundane into an almost spiritual experience.   

A few summers back, I was paddling on an almost still lake just after sunrise and the glow of the tips of the reeds enhanced by the rising warmth of the day seemed to perfectly frame the loon ahead, grooming itself and floating along in solitude. The moment was memorable.

Marcel Proust - Inspiration Personified

I decided to publish my evolving portfolio of images after much encouragement from friends far and wide. In making that choice quite a few challenges began to surface and, being somewhat of an overthinker, the need to understand my personal motivation was one of the first.  

Photography, for me, is the interaction of an individual with external subject matter that can be visually recorded. It is an emotionally charged encounter and enormously satisfying.

Choosing which images to share on the internet was always going to be a difficult task for me, but when I recalled a quote I once had read - The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new lands but seeing with new eyes - I felt that perhaps I should let my artwork speak for itself.

It was French novelist, critic and essayist, Marcel Proust, who first penned the original of this paraphrased quote, in Remembrance of Things Past (later retitled In Search of Lost Time), published in 1923:

The only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of Eternal Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds, that each of them is...

I hope the images that I share here will give some of you a new way of viewing each universe you encounter from the smallest, simplest subject matter to the lofty mountainous landscapes of the Rockies and beyond.