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Showing posts from October, 2016

Cody's Lab: Mining Platinum From the Side of the Road, 2016

The Smiths: Ask

Local war landscape

 

Paul Nash: Landscape of the Vernal Equinox, 1943

I was never excited by the paintings of Paul Nash but found this evening's BBC 4 programme by Andrew Graham-Dixon was engaging and many of the works were suddenly impressive.  I'm intrigued now by Nash's preoccupation with very specific local landscapes which engaged him for years, how he found significance in the moon and equinoxes - and I can relate to his becoming a war artist.

Very Close Proximity, and yellow leaves

After somehow getting away without any hassle from officialdom last Autumn I didn't think I'd go back to site C again, particularly after getting no interest in the pictures from various open submissions. But, it was that time of year again, when those leaves would be changing colour so amazingly. How could I not go? On the cycle trip out I was pondering excuses to turn back, particularly because the hedgerows en route were mostly still green and I wanted another batch of images with flaming yellow and burning gold leaves (that, to me at least, referenced explosive shell-bursts). The ones taken on the first day of November last year (after a violent storm had stipped most of the branches) were more effective I thought due to those hot colours. The weather has been mild recently so presumably that's why the hedgerows are holding back longer this year. Site C involves taking pictures in very close proximity to what's actually there at site C, and not including that

Site C, Pollock, and the convention of having the sky at the top of the picture

It's hard not to think of Jackson Pollock (or Picasso's Guernica ) when making wide pictures. Using high res sweep-mode panoramics today I was considering the welter of lines in Pollock's paintings, and later reflected on Picasso's response to the bombing raid in 1937.

Life at Forest Fields/Hyson Green, Nottingham, 1980s

Thanks, Stephen .

site A, passing by

new build houses through trees, Oct '16

Being October 17th today I was passing through the part of town where I used to live, and stopped by at Site A, at the bottom of the road there. One of the paths that run along the golf course and that overlooks the houses has become overgrown, It was an historic path that local people have always used for generations, maybe someone obstructed it till it became impassable to provide some greater privacy. There is now just the parallel path which runs on other side of a long copse of trees. A few years ago one of the variations I was really excited by was to photograph the new build homes through these trees, so I took some more today. At the time I was worrying how to sort my own place to live. Today I saw a mattress and some belongings in there which made me wonder if someone was sleeping rough, (not photographed).

blue fence

a line of clouds on the horizon

This summer sometimes I've noticed trails of clouds on the horizon far away. They have made my list of best things in life (such as birdsong), though being a specific subset on one that was already neart the top of the list anyway, the sky.  It is the farawayness I like, and they are like a herd of elephants crossing savannah. One day I was under a vast salt crust of storm cloud and in the distance lit up by the sun was a gap of blue sky and a ripped line of immense clouds burned by sunshine. I didn't get a picture of that, and this is from another day. These distant trails of clouds made me resolve to live forever.

spectrum

seafront

the north sea

at the hub, sleaford