FLOWER My name is Marjorie Lord and I am a Photo Artist living in Flaxton on the Blackall Range of South East Queensland. My oldest son described me the other day as the most social introvert he knows which I thought was rather funny. Prior to discovering my passion for digital imagery and portrait photography, I have worked in our family cattle station business in Mount Isa, Queensland and raised four sons with my husband. Throughout my entire life I have always been involved with some form of art but life, businesses, 32 years of motherhood meant that creating art had to often be put aside much of the time. I have a strong inner built need to create things and as a result a visual arts project has never been far away from me. Now all our children have grown into well balanced adults and leading their own lives, I am embracing being able to be artistically creative every day. I think I can be really brazen and say “It’s all about me now”. I grew up in the very small regional town of Julia Creek, Queensland, my father and mother as a secondary job were the local town wedding, school functions, and Debutante photographers. However during my childhood I had no personal association or experience with photography other than to watch my parents. I remember as a little kid watching all the beautiful Debutante girls gliding into our home wearing their white and long wedding like ball gowns with satin gloves that seemed to wind their way up and around the Debutante’s arms just like a tree snake slithering quietly up into a tree. This was a most fairy tale princess moment for a dreamy little girl as she peered from behind the curtains watching them enter one by one. Artistically though was another story, I have always been creative and practiced some form of art since early childhood ranging from puppetry, drawing, painting, linoleum printing, silver jewellery, making Blah Blah dolls, crafting and anything else that artistically came my way. As an adult I studied Fine Art externally through Open Universities Australia, self-taught myself Photoshop and other software. Once our remote region of Mount Isa surpassed the old unreliable dial up internet and we entered into the world of luxury, aka, ADSL broadband, well a whole new world of learning had now reached my fingertips. No words can express to you how unreliable, painful, frustrating and slow the old dial up was. With my new fast reliable internet in place, I have literally watched hundreds of hours of YouTube tutorials along with enrolling into many online courses such as The Arcanum for photography and the Photo Artistry courses of Sebastian Michaels. The Photo Artistry lessons and Awake have been a wonderful learning journey of creativity and the meeting of likeminded artists has been an extraordinary experience. I picked up a DSLR camera for the first time around the middle of 2013 with an intent to do some real photography work. Why I decided to learn I really don’t know, I think it was just one of those moments where I thought I would like to learn how to photograph using manual settings so I did. Thinking about it now I had started doing a lot of Photoshop digital work, so I guess photography was more than likely the next progression to creating my own imagery for the story telling process that I like to do in my artworks. The camera has become my paint brush or my medium of choice. I don’t really see myself as a photographer but I do as a photo artist. I just happen to use a camera as the first part of the creative process in creating pictorial narratives. Marjorie Lord
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