The view from here

The view from my bathroom window at 7am this morning.

I've seen professional photographers shoot hundreds of pictures but they are all basically the same. They are hoping that in one fraction of a second something will make that face look as if there were a longer moment...

If you take a hundred, surely one will be good. It could be anybody doing it...There are few good photographs, and those good ones that do exist are almost accidental.

Photography has failed...How many truly memorable pictures are there? Considering the milllions of photographs taken, there are few memorable images in this medium, which should tell us something.Photography can't lead us to a new way of seeing.

It may have other possibilities but only painting can extend the way of seeing.

Quotes for the irascible David Hockney,

I have always drilled into my sixth form photographers the more photographs you take the better the chance of capturing that fleeting moment.

I appreciate the gist of what Hockney is saying, I can get far more emotional punch from a William Scott or a Breon O Casey, than I ever can from a photograph. But, and there is always a but. I do think that photography can feed into the way we see things, it can open up vistas previously passed by, above all the age of digital photography opened up the world in a way that paintings never could.

The biggest mistake we make is to compare the two, to assume that one is better than the other, that one can replace the other.

For me painting and photography perform two separate functions, they can feed into each other or complement each other but at the end each creates a unique viewpoint.