Seek and ye shall find? - John Mitchell Photography

If only it was that easy.

Seek and ye shall find. I think they left off the most important part; Seek and ye shall find, but only if you work your ass off while you are seeking.

I went for a drive along Hwy 60 again today. Along the way, I made another stop at the Algonquin Art Centre. I had been there the other day looking for inspiration. Hoping to see paintings by the group of seven and Tom Thomson. As I’m sure you know, Thomson wasn’t a member of the group of seven.

I wanted to have another look. There was one particular painting by Thomson which had caught my eye. This was a painting of a canoe along a shoreline.

I have always looked for a clean angle of view of my subjects and tried not to have any distracting twigs or brush in the foreground blocking the main point of interest. In this image, Thomson left the undergrowth in the painting, in front of the canoe. As I said I had stopped by the other day and you can see the impact this image had on me in the photos I took at Oxtongue Rapids just yesterday.

I went back out cruising Hwy 60 looking for interesting landscapes but kept thinking of this Thomson painting. Eventually, I ended up back at the Art Centre where I purchased a small 8×10 matted print of this painting. Many of Thomson’s paintings were only 8×10 because larger boards and canvas were too awkward to carry into the bush.

*Tom Thomson’s painting – “Drowned Land” – 1912*

I had seeked and now it was time to work my ass off. The rest of the day I spent practicing, taking a number of photographs of a variety of subjects from as many different angles as I could think of. The question became “do you like what you’re seeing and why?” This was quite a change from just asking what’s my main subject and what is blocking my view of it.