pete mcgovern

I bounced out of bed early(ish) today and was already home from my icy-ditch shoot by one, slightly slowed by an interaction of sorts with a young lad of about 3 maybe, (' Hello. My name is Ronnie ') who was out walking with his mum when they had the audacity to encroach on my shoot to cross to another field. My guess was he may not have a dad-shaped object in his life as he was keen to stop and hang out with someone vaguely resembling what one might look like. ' What's your name ?' he eventually continued. I could just about muster an answer to that but any meagre attempt at conversation on my part only went as far as suggesting he needs a hat as it's so cold, (minus 6 wind-chill). He pondered that for a moment, ruffling his hair and smiling while totally failing to explain the oversight. Perhaps he has a similar ineptness at lengthy man-conversation although admittedly has had less time to get up to speed than me. He then wanted to be helpful and started to l...

Reading ' Ninth Street Women ' by Mary Gabriel and I've reached the point where things are happening, both for Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock. While living out in the sticks at Springs, Krasner worked on two mosaic table tops which incidentally led to a breakthrough in her approach to painting, which had been going nowhere for years. ' Noon ', which she knew at the time to be a good painting, was seen by visitor Clem Greenberg whose immediate response was, ' That's hot. It's cookin' . Lee admitted, 'It took very little feedback to sustain me,' and she would ride high for years on that offhand remark.

Before the ice forms.

Whether it's the influence of Andrei Tarkovsky's films or Jem Southam's river photographs I've been repeatedly pointing a lens at water while walking through soggy landscapes lately. Today I went specifically to a ditch in the corner of a sodden field that I photographed yesterday, swapping out to a different camera. I've been attracted to low-key picture-making, with the jpegs exposed so the dark tones fall naturally down into zones I to III, where they belong. Dialling down the EV that much always feels a bad mistake and the reviewed images verged on almost unviewable on the LCD display, but still seemed sort of accurate, verifying directly against the ditch, that I was occasionally about to slide into. Composing while hands were cold, feet wet, nose runny, with something in my eye, my trousers about to fall down as my belt had worked loose, and my slightly too-small woolly hat about to drop off, and always glancing up, hoping the blotchy cloud pattern that reflec...

An hour in to a presentation by English landscape photographer Jem Southam and he mentions in passing a colleague at Exeter College of Art, Mike Garton, a painter. He painted in a little area of woodlands called Stoke Wood, just outside Exeter, for 26 years, 365 days of the year. He'd get up on Christmas Day, 'Here are your presents, kids', get on his bike and go and paint. A completely obsessive character. And all his paintings look the same. Bloody good painter. If he was painting and there was a twig in the way, he didn't snap it, he got a piece of string and gradually pulled it out of the way and when he finished the painting he let it back. There were all these odd bits of string all over the place, his presence is in the wood.