Belief!

I'm not talking about the belief the world is flat or round, in God or Allah or that Barack Obama will save the world.


When I'm dead and gone the world will still be flat. we will still be fighting wars over God or Allah and Barack Obama will have saved the bankers and not the world.


I'm talking about belief in ourselves, I still consider myself a process operator working in a chemical factory, others call me an artist, I still struggle with the term. I take photographs, I post edit them, I stumble around the digital darkroom but at what point did I become an artist?

Do we get an epiphany? Do we suddenly wake up with the word artist on our passport?

I think not, there has to be more.

But what?

Its that time when you open your eyes, not for the first time at birth, but the time you really open your eyes and see the world as it truly is.

At sunrise you see the colours as none other has, the deep reds that break over the horizon and casts a light over the land that has a tangible feel to it. The cracks in the pavement that follow a pattern along the street that you can see traversing the land. The dew as it sits upon the grass on a cold autumnal morning. The smell of rain on warm concrete during the summer. Standing on high as the only person in the world and looking down on the land and seeing the curvature of the horizon. Feeling the pain of the vagrant as stumbles from one bin to the other looking for nothing more that a bite to eat.

We have to open our eyes, we have to see the agony and the ecstasy there is, its only when our eyes are open do we then feel, sometimes it can be overwhelming, sometimes it can be uplifting, sometimes it can show us despair but we need to see, its a passion, and from that passion art is born, only then can we be artists.

Open your eyes.