Philip Blair

Statement

My work concentrates on the beauty of the outdoors as seen through personal prisms of abstract shapes and balanced geometry, looking to assemble life’s confusion, bewilderment and loneliness into harmonic visuals that transmit peace and a sense of presence.  I am interested in the creation of sense from nonsense, order from chaos, contentment and satisfaction from disappointment and frustration.  

I use a camera to make better sense of the world around me.  In this way I see the camera as a practical, even essential, tool for living.  Though the genre I have worked with has been primarily landscape, my projects at a deeper level are streams-of-consciousness, travels of the mind, and meditations upon personal things important, and unimportant, both.

My most recent work from late 2016 to current are studies in loneliness & sadness, with a particular interest in remedying these.  I always knew loneliness was not the same thing as hopelessness, yet there is often an uncomfortable semblance that it is.  Being physically alone in wide-open space can cause a haunting agitation and even panic.  Practiced solitude has the capability of bringing this into perspective:  by enduring the discomfort, scenes of great peace and subtle beauty reveal themselves in these unlikely places.  Calmness follows.  The resulting visuals and images illustrate these journeys to the outer reaches and become unexpected messages of hope, counteragents to some of today's illusions of disconsolation and despair.