Call me a curmudgeon but I just can’t wrap my tongue around the word ‘Blog’ and say yum. It’s……..too guttural. Like something you’d prefer not to have coughed up, or better yet, like that dingy, dark amber side dish spooned from a 1978 grade school cafeteria.
‘Blogggggg’,
And, so it begins.
Welcome to my ‘News and oh so Random Thoughts’ blog with an emphasis on Random.
Today, day 1, we start by announcing the new and improved website www.Hurstarts.com, Version 3
Version 1 was released in 2005 and two years later we had the smokin’ hot Version 2. I hope to have both archived online for those curious to see the progression of what I simply consider to be my life’s work.
Photography.
I suppose the natural question espoused by Shawn Escoffery and others is ‘Why HurstArts?, Why not Hurstfoto or something along those lines?’
The not so short answer is that I began as a self taught painter. (A gift given to me by ic16@cornell.edu on a Nor’easter Christmas many years ago.) The frustration and thus the education of painting laid the foundation as I see it to this day. For me, creating a painting is really about the ebb and flow of the creative process where the artisan, through intense training and due diligence, can expose a raw and deeply spiritual talent. This creative process, if successful, can transform the artisan and his works into something akin to an artist and his arts.
And thus, HurstArts comes into being. It is (hopefully) a non linear autobiography–a true collection of my ideology, my due diligence, my aspirations, and my reason for being. With any luck, it is also a display of inspired material carved from inspired ideas.
And while painting is my foundation and poetry is my abstraction they both serve to inform, inspire, and reconstitute my mind’s eye as a photographer.
Photography, above all, is the gift of captured sight. It is a gift given to me by my father, and thus, all of his fathers; my mother, and thus, each of her Mothers. It is my most beloved and assured voice.
It is My pulpit and my speakerboxx.
My iridescent lighthouse through uncharted territory.
My proof and My Love and My colorful, desaturated, and dynamic Queen.
C. Stephen R. Hurst
