Making an impression.

I like art and that. I would say that I'm quite creative, in a lazy way. I'd love to paint and draw and practice and be good at it, but in reality I have the attention span of an ADHD-riddled three-year-old in a ritalin shortage. I would get two strokes into a painting and be so completely and utterably bored I'd want to kill myself. It's very often the case when I'm writing a blog post, it's a good job I'm so completely infatuated with my own opinions.

The Impressionists are my favourite painters, as it goes. Along with the Fauves, but that doesn't suit my current point so I shall ignore those chaps. The Impressionists never painted a picture that you could go and visit yourself, something you could have bought on a postcard. There was something of their soul within the paintings, the way they captured the light and the movement and an impression of what that scene was like at that moment.

When I take a picture with my camera I hate taking a picture that thousands of others have taken, I have to get something unique, something that no-one else will have. I like the knowing that I have documented a singular moment in time that will never be seen again, whether it’s a person or a cloud or series of fortunate events.

I like to see writing as impressionism – it’s why I don’t post pictures and text on the same thing very often, I don’t necessarily want either to be coloured by the other. Pictures and text should be taken and designed and composed to stir something within the person that receives, something self-made, not prescriptive. I like that when I write an impression of something that you're imagining it in your own head and my thoughts and words mix with your thoughts and words to create something new. It's a connection, some sort of intellectual reproduction.

If you laugh at something I've written or appreciate some point that I've made or an analogy I've drawn, it's not because I've written that, it's because our lives and our experiences and our nurtured natures have come momentarily into alignment and we've shared a little something. Isn't that a nice thought? It's why I don't get on with writing news articles on my course - I just don't want to give a stock account of what's happened somewhere, you could stick a camera on the scene and it speaks for itself. The thing about writing is that I'm there, not anyone else and I get to communicate what has happened through my senses, things I've seen and smelled and touched, filtered through my brain, sent through my fingers and onto the page or the screen.

A camera does all that factually, inertly, dispassionately - but it's what sets us apart, being able to see and feel and translate. It's the ultimate difference between a picture and an impression.