“All art can have the power of poetic revelation about the material world – it can reveal the ensoulment of the universe.” – Hugh Conway Morris

“Whether it is a wheat field by Van Gogh, a grass field by Wyeth, a picnic table by Caulfield or an unmade bed by Emin, artists take from what they see or experience and transform it into a reflection of their own world to share with and to entrance an audience”

It is all about seeing beauty in the world around you. Easy in the woods because our visual conditioning since the Victorians instituted the use of pretty pictures in advertising has conditioned us to see the natural world as all beautiful (it ain’t, think of a cow pat) . Thus we look at an image of woodland and go ‘aah’ as a reflex, unless you are one of the drones in the Hive

Looks a little like a Victorian lithograph, actually a photograph taken last week 

Photography these days has ballooned into a creative tool, images from which are often only loosely based in any reality that can be perceived due to the number of filters that can be used to alter the image.  Thus below giving a visual kinship to a hand coloured Victorian steel plate engraving

“To the woods. let us go there my lovely” went the folk song...

Photography can also be used to reveal hidden secrets as is so steadily and beautifully shown in the delightful  photo essays of Andy Marshall  of English churches. I use photography as a starting point, supplemented by work in a series of note/sketch books and then through many explorations on paper  – small paintings that lead to larger canvases

This may be the starting point but the image below shows how it can be  zoomed in and focussed on further

A world of texture and rust created by time and exposure

Using the quality of the camera can allow me to replicate looking closely as I did before taking the photograph, zooming in to show the fascinating patterns and texture below the superficial appearance and opening a new world of beauty to explore.

I have worked hard over the last two years developing my vision . It may seem like an obsession with the coast, but it is more than that. It is about decay and erosion. Essentially, as with the ‘Four Seasons’ series or my work looking at waves and sunsets it is about the passing of time. In many ways the key work is also my daily routine of taking a weather photograph every day, day after day, all in the same hourly period first thing in the morning.  A BBC person dismissed these as “photographs of your garden” but with over 2,000 images taken from almost the same spot (different cameras, similar times, but slight changing concepts) they show the changing seasons expressed through one place – growth and decay, light and shade. Capturing time.

This is an image made by merging  from one day on Winter, Spring, Summer and Autumn into a composite photo of the year 2020. A bit like an acid trip, it shows how the imagination can be more powerful that any drug – and as addictive

This is an expression of January – fours days made into one expressive image.     

This is this October 2021