Art & Creativity Quote by John Dyer

There is a quiet restlessness in Dyer admitting that photography remains useful while declaring it insufficient. He’s not rejecting the camera so much as demoting it: photographs become “personal studies,” a private sketchbook of evidence rather than the finished argument. The telling phrase is “for my own use.” It frames the lens as a tool of gathering, not a voice. What he wants is expression, not capture.

The subtext is a familiar artist’s anxiety about mediation. Photography can be brutally good at description and still feel emotionally tone-deaf to the maker’s intent. A photograph records; it doesn’t automatically interpret. Dyer’s line “I do not feel that I can fully express my views through the medium” suggests frustration with the camera’s built-in rhetoric: its tendency to claim objectivity, to flatten time into a single instant, to privilege surface over process. If your “views” include atmosphere, memory, political stance, even moral emphasis, the photograph can feel like it is speaking in someone else’s accent.

Moving “towards painting” reads less like nostalgia and more like a bid for agency. Paint lets you edit reality without apology: amplify what matters, blur what doesn’t, invent light, bend perspective, stage metaphor. In context, it also hints at a cultural hierarchy that long treated painting as the more serious, authored medium and photography as mechanical reproduction. Dyer is staking a claim: the work isn’t just what was seen, but what was meant.