pete mcgovern

ooh ahh, ooh ahh, ooh ahh

Gill Gathercole website I'm not into having more stuff but if this hadn't sold already...

You'd think I could hold a camera reasonably straight after taking maybe half a million pictures but no, still no.  This is a church near me. I pass it on the way to and from work. St Peter's, 11th Century. I like it. The worn stone, the colour. It's not an affluent area. It's set on a bank, several feet above the surrounding road and buildings and has a line of tall trees and some railings in front.  I think of John Betjeman* as I sometimes hear a modest, sweet sounding bell on the hours and wonder if it's from here. It's the nicest church bell I've heard, a tumbling, friendly call and does more for me than the grandest crashing of chimes at cathedrals ever did. It has a sense of quiet and prettiness here, and a sense of people. In the Elbow song, Starlings , Guy Garvey sings the wonderful line of wistfully dreaming of ' marriage in an orange grove '. If I was in that same situation I think this little church would do for me. *From SU

I was deleting stuff on an old eMac and came across some band shoots from back when I'd be at gigs all the time. This is LOS who I saw a couple of times here in Lincoln and once in South London. They were a full-on bluesy grunge band and probably the coolest people I ever got to hang around with, and they were also incredibly nice. I never normally said much to bands but offered them a floor and they accepted, and they didn't even trash the place. I took this picture next morning while hanging out before they set off back south. I still sometimes wear the t-shirt they left me.

I downloaded this picture recently,  'Three Eggs' , after seeing Aenne Biermann's portrait, ' Helga ', and subsequently becoming interested in her life and work. Having some white eggs to hand today I thought to emulate what Biermann was doing when she put three white eggs on black and white sheets of paper in 1932.  Admittedly it would have taken a lot more to match what her's looks like while kneeling in my bay window waiting for occasional sunshine but it was interesting. Her elongated, clean, soft shadows are especially lovely. I assume she made this in a studio with a tungsten light source positioned low to the left side of her work table. And I now know how particularly awkward eggs can be to get them to sit exactly where you want them. Biermann wrote: 'I realized ever more clearly that the lighting was of critical importance for the clarity of the work. … The effect of light ... a play of shadows seldom noticed, surprising contrasts of black and