Monochrome

I prefer to talk about colour rather than show pictures which can be distracting and here is an example which shows why I prefer it that way.

Here is a picture from our travels in New Zealand. The Maori say that these places are alive. A waterfall like this is a person in its own right and often protected as such. I've always thought that this picture had promise. I was sure I could show why such places are believed to be real beings, so I tried again to make it work. Part of my process is to kill the saturation to check that the lightness and contrast are still balanced without the distraction of the colours in the image. I'm profoundly distracted by colour. In this picture the resulting monochrome showed me the error of my ways. I'd been trying to bring out the epic greens in this image, but it's all green. The picture is so obviously green that the green can be pulled out. The green is the field for the real subject. What's left is the real subject of this picture: the explosive, feral, muscular, living water that makes New Zealand what it is.

 

Blood

I find myself haunted by the night-colours of the poppies at Blood Stained Lands and Seas of Red. We visited the Tower a few weeks ago and had planned to visit the poppies in the morning - which we did - but we first walked past them as we left the tube the night before. Their colour absorbs the artificial light of the city at night, so that their deep daylight scarlet becomes the sooty crimson of pooled blood. Like all good art, the effect is deep and transformative. As you leave, you cannot shake the thing which has taken root in your subconscious. I can close my eyes, and instead of seeing a colour, I can smell blood.

Mixed Media

I find that my life has cracks, like an old monument, fractures from tectonic shifts in life, work and relationships. I'm blessed that none of those cracks have become breaks, so far. Instead they become features; part of the architecture. What comes after may not have come at all, if not for the breaks and shifts. What comes after also heals and integrates. Some things just weave through those cracks until they bind them together into something special.

Once upon a time I stood in the dark and listened to my own breathing, which at the time whistled like a gale in a winter graveyard. A little while later I blogged about our pup.

Then there was a picture which captured a moment...

The memories evoked by that image became another post about ink spilled on white sand.

Those events in a sun-simmered week in an otherwise dire summer became a pivot in our lives. These were the days when the puppy became a dog. He reached his final weight on these beaches, as though annealed by the steel and sapphire water. His willfull self-absorbed lunacy started to give way. A deeper bond was forged between us. 

So when it came to deciding on a special present for a special birthday, it seemed fitting to take that pivot in our lives and build something around it. I contacted Idreammosaic and commissioned a mosaic for a table using that image and among others, these.

 

After a great deal of thought and discussion, mosaic designer Cathy Cant synthesised my original idea into something special in its own right.

A mosaic is not a photograph. It has depth and lustre. It has mass. This one has metallic elements, lustrous stone and stained glass. The surface is both solid and flowing. At Cathy's suggestion, the grout is anthracite which defines the tiles and ignites the colours by a curious absence which black or white would not have. Again at Cathy's suggestion, the bedding for the mosaic is the whitest mortar that I could find. It sits behind the tiles and brings them alive in the sun with reflected, refracted light.  The whole is edged in tiny black obsidian tumblestones - apache's tears.

When my partner saw it, her reaction was to find someone that she would trust to inherit it. That reaction is good enough for me.

Here it is

  And there in the detail, is that image again.

 

 The image on the left is grouted, the pup above is as Cathy delivered the mosaic, ready for installation.

 The table legs are wrought iron and were made by Kevin Thrower of The Cottage Forge. I assembled the table myself, with an inch thick concrete table top holding it all together. I firmly believe that it will last a thousand years. 

 

@Graffiti

Babylon again, this time to celebrate a special birthday. Our tired but cheerful hotel is made of concrete, which has been the theme of this year, and our room is in a twisted apex of the ziggurat looking out over St Katherine's Dock, Canary Wharf and the City. The all-surrounding lights of the city were as loud as rock music.

I decided to experiment with a little light-painting. Most of the results went in the bin, but this one looked like graffiti to me and I loved the accidental at signs leaping out like a river of emails. Next time I'll go for hash-tags.

Unearthed, a Trove of Precious Jewels On the Rocky Shores of Galloway

We took a holiday along the neglected and lonely coast of south-western Scotland. At night the only man made light that I could see was the lighthouse at the Mull of Galloway, twelve miles away. As we were exploring the garden of the cottage, the neighbour had leaned on the stone wall, looked at the sky and said that we would not often be blessed with days like this at the end of September. He was gloriously wrong and we had days of cold, dry sun. One particular evening had been full of umber sunlight and now the night was clear and still. As my eyes grew used to the darkness, treasure unfurled in the skies. First, the familiar constellations, then the unfamiliar  line of the Milky Way right across the sky, from horizon to horizon like an old friend whose arrival brings regret for the lost years between meetings. As the minutes passed, more stars appeared, thousands, millions, all coloured like a basket of jewels until the billions of stars rested over me like a cathedral with a roof of stained glass. When the puzzled hound nuzzled my knee to tell me that he had finished his patrol of this strange new place, I still looked up. I could barely stand it. I looked at the dog and he too was looking up at the stars, his head cocked on one side. Whether he was puzzled by these strange lights, or was looking in vain to see what I could see, I couldn't say, so we slipped inside for a glass of malt by the fire which is, as they say, entirely another story.