“To see the light we must first acknowledge that we are in the dark.”

Dominic Rouse was born in England in 1959. His career began in photojournalism in 1977 and has progressed through various stages into the world of fine art.

The style of his imagery may appear to be rooted in the past but it relies heavily on a fusion of state-of-the-art digital technologies & traditional photographic processes to produce seamless transitions between the world of contemporary digital art and the timeless qualities of large format black and white photography. His work has received a number of international prizes and been published globally. He lives far from the madding crowd in a small wooden house on a remote Thai mountain with his wife Wilaiwan and their daughter Angeline.

Life can be likened to a movie shown only once to a captive audience of one – a darkened cell in which the level of illumination is a decision for the solitary occupant. The perfect prison is the one in which the inmates have been convinced that they are free. The visionary is charged with the duty of exposing our many grievous faults and failures, with dredging up to the light our dark and dangerous dreams for the purpose of improvement. To see the light we must first acknowledge that we are in the dark.

Work which displays most accurately the deepest recesses of the human soul will, by default, display some rather unpleasant aspects of it. It is not the duty of Art to be acceptable to polite society and wherever he goes, the artist will find himself a stranger because he is the only legitimate citizen of the world which he inhabits. His lone, dissenting voice is society’s surest line of defence against its greatest enemy which is, of course, itself.

Unless the truth be sinful, it should not be possible to find fault with a man who views the world through a camera though it is equally impossible in any given age to create work which is agreeable to everyone. Art often challenges existing assumptions rather than simply accommodating them: it is beyond good and evil, which are not the antitheses, but degrees of each other. I suspect that evil does not exist, at least not in the form in which it is presented to us, though there can be little closer to it than the hypocrisies of men and women who claim goodness for themselves. Morality is the acceptable face of hypocrisy, a disease peculiar to humans. At its worst life is not tragic but unmeaning.

I do not seek approval, as a sense of worth should be independent of the approbation of others. What I hope for is an acceptance of that unique quality – the province of every soul – the discovery of which reveals the facet of creation reserved exclusively for us. Works of art are fragments of the Universal Mind given form. They are not made by the wise but by those in search of wisdom. To search at all is wisdom enough. Knowledge of ourselves is the most that we can know. And saying so to some means nothing, for others it leaves nothing to be said. [Official Website]