I will work in the present, honing skills into craft, accepting where I am while envisioning where I would like to surface. Progress, of course, a destination; it is the action of, or sense of, doing that which will allow me to create a modicum of personal satisfaction.

I am guided by both curiosity and resiliency. Art, my art, may currently be only a reference point on this creative path. Don’t we all have varied mediums and methods that have ushered us through our artistic lives? Even amateurish attempts of our youth — crayon renderings or finger paintings, irregularly shaped pottery vessels, pastel smudges — have contributed to our most immediate desire to create.

As artists, the style never mattered as much as the will to fashion something with our hands from our imagination. Today, this modus operandi holds true no matter how sophisticated our attempt. The results now, perhaps polished or near perfect, remain maddening in an unfulfilled promise. Should it not be better? Don’t we want to do more? Could our efforts not be deeper, more meaningful?

The inevitable and everbearing drive for excellence.

It is so.

The words of my first photography teacher still hang in my head: ‘You are only as good as your last shot’. Humiliating as it is; humbling, yet ever inspiring.

Inspiration: it is what keeps us going, learning, and trying. Striving. For should our art become patently perfect, we know we may well lose that continued urge to create.

© 2026 j.g. lewis