My friends got married recently. I observed their wedding and the care with which they looked after every detail. I learned from them that details matter – they are at the heart of beauty and symmetry, they give character and depth and allow for a fine composition.
How important are details for you? Are you attentive to them?
Wales: The Brecon Beacons National Park. Admiring horses.
Perhaps, it’s because a lot of our energy is spent on trying to organise it and make it work for us. Preoccupations – they often make us lose judgement and the ability to observe and appreciate what’s around us. We do our shopping so fast and so absentmindedly that we miss our child pointing to the eggs and we don’t hear them saying “egg” for the first time. We drink our teas so quickly that we fail to notice that our sister has just been using that gorgeous rainbow-patterned tea pot and mastered the brewing-and-pouring ritual that our grandmother used to practise.
Photographs often remind us that our daily lives are filled with moments of significance, of awe and wonder. Without our control. Without our intervention. These moments just happen. I firmly believe that it is enough just to stand back a bit to delight in them and become a beauty spotter. At least for a day.
Try to become one. Just for today. See how nice it feels.
I look at the handcrafted daffodils, rosettes and butterflies on the Welsh Royal Crystal glassware and marvel at how skilled someone must be to do such pieces. Their patterns are so rich, the engravings impeccable. I lift one of the tumblers towards the light and I turn it in my hand. Small colourful flashes of light hurry through my arm. I’m in Rhayader in Wales, at the Welsh Royal Crystal’s Visitor Centre. I look around the glass display and I can’t stop wondering, how do they do this?
‘We use diamond wheels of different sizes’, Alan O’Neil, the master craftsman and the co-runner of Welsh Royal Crystal, explains to me. Alan is open and affable and when he shows me how the glass is cut, I am overawed with his dexterity. He gives the glass surface a completely new trim. The ornamentation is just magnificent, so much so you quickly realise that you are dealing with an artist as well as a craftsman. Alan says that it was his cousin, a glass decorator, that inspired him. ‘If it wasn’t for my cousin’, Alan reminisces, ‘I would probably end up working in the mines, in South Wales, just like my father’. Alan says that he wasn’t attracted to the pitch-black route; his journey was meant to be crystal clear.
Postcards Without Stamps 