Artist Statement
Mark Tisdale on the Isle of Skye
I was raised in Montezuma, a small town in Georgia’s mid state, and spent a decade living and working in the Metro Atlanta area. While I cannot remember the first time I held a camera, photography has always been about saving moments for me. Yet, I would never have guessed that it would one day evolve into a creative artistic center for my life.
It was my first exposure to traveling outside of the states that fanned the flames. The feedback I got about those photos from my trips became a catalyst for change in my life. I went on to get a little grounding in the basics of photography in a class room in the evenings. Ultimately though I think all art revolves around practice. I learned how my tools worked (in this case my camera and its lenses along with Photoshop and Adobe Lightroom), but it was constant trial and error that has gotten me where I am now and that remains a lifelong process, to constantly improve at something I love doing!
I suspect Travel Photography will always be part of the equation in my art and photos, but if I wanted to practice, I had to aim my camera at things and places more accessible to me on a daily basis. That necessity taught me with patience and a careful eye that one can make a memorable image from much of this beautiful world of ours. Places that might seem unspectacular on first glance can be as compelling in a piece of art as any image of the great wonders of the world. This is why today when you look through my print gallery, you’ll find photos of the great pyramids, skyscrapers in America’s cities, and rusted tractors, an unlikely combination but part of my love for recording and sharing moments.
While I’m so far most known for my travel scenes, regardless of the subject, what I most often hear remarked upon is my use of color and light. Almost all of my work is naturally lit. I’ve read on more than one occasion that photography is actually best described as painting with light. And I love that description, as there’s nothing so pretty to me as our own sun lighting up the world.