SONIA MELNIKOVA ART PHOTOGRAPHY

I look for grace, poetry and mystique in the most common of things. In that respect I feel strong affinity with the Japanese philosophy and aesthetics of wabi sabi, with its focus on the transient nature of things, acceptance of their impermanence, and reverence for the beauty in old things with all imperfections that occur with age; marks of time, wear and loving use, such as scratches, patina, or rust. Sometimes your eye and mind come to rest on a beauty so common it exists unnoticed in plain view. The wear pattern of a broom, the way a leather chair has been molded by the human body, the multi-hued stains of lichen on a terra cotta pot—the understated beauty in simple and familiar old things. But there is also something in the decay of old things that evokes sadness and nostalgia for the vanished past.