Some time ago I bought a pack of kids crayons and have been carrying them around with me in my arts bag for a while. This afternoon I thought I’d just have a go with them and the results were interesting.
It is fascinating what you can produce with so called “Children’s’ toys.
A few days ago I decided to put a sketch pad next to my computer. In the past I had passed the time whilst waiting something to happen whilst working on the computer by doodling on any old scrap of paper I had to hand. However, I’ve now decided to formalise this process – hence the sketch pad. These two sketches of the character Tyrion Lannister are just examples of the sketches I make.
Two more panoramas from this morning’s shoot – these really made my iMac sweet and start to behave like it is a bit under powered – both are over 300 MB in size in their original format – clearly they are not that size here.
It was a really beautiful morning and what better way to enjoy this autumn sun than to go out and make photographs. Of course at the moment I’m pursuing my Deep Time project and so that was what I did.
I decided to visit a local nature reserve over a local outcrop at Billa Barra – a fascinating name in itself but that is another story. Billa Barra is also another outcrop of Pre Cambrian rocks that form the chain of ancient hills over which Charnwood Forest lies. However, this part of Leicestershire has an other claim to fame as one of the possible sites of the famous Arthurian Battle of Badon Hill. The main Charnwood Hill is called Bardon Hill and land below it is known as Battle Flats – see how it starts to fit together. What is less well known is that across the Battle Flats runs two ancient roads – one Roman and the other a prehistoric salt road – serendipity strikes again.
Anyway the light was so lovely this morning that I just had create a panorama of this. Now my Canon G1x doesn’t have a panorama function – thank goodness – so I had to use the much better Photoshop CS6 version and I have to say it made a wonderful job of combining 6 images to create a panorama of nearly 320 MB in size. (This is pale reproduction).
Yum Yum.
Just messing around today with ideas in my sketch book and came up with this:
Every now and then I sometimes wonder if there is something strange going on just outside of my conscious mind. Perhaps it is serendipity, perhaps fate or perhaps a random interaction of cosmic particles passing through my body making neurons in my brain connect in strangely attractive ways.
The Deep Time project is a case in point. This project started much earlier than I recall and must have been simmering in my subconscious whilst I was working on other projects – not least of which was my historical research which slowly took me to the prehistoric world of central Britain. At the same time I started to get interested in the Green Man, an ancient creature/entity that probably dates from way before Christianity. On the surface none of these are directly connected, although the Green Man and Prehistory are in a way.
However, yesterday I was just thinking about the Deep Time project and its relationship with stone circles and I started to sketch out some thoughts and low and behold a version of the Green Man appeared in the sketch along with Bronze Age barrows and old churches. Since then I’ve been thinking about the Green Man even more and its possible relationship to Deep Time. Suddenly all the strands started to pull together in a wholly unsuspected way. Very strange.
I knew I had some images from Avebury buried deep in my archive – some of the earliest digital images I captured back in 2003. Suddenly they have new relevance given my interest in Deep Time.
A while ago I went to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park to see a major exhibition of work by David Nash. What I didn’t know at the time was that I had already made some photographs of Nash’s work for the National Forest – called Noon Columns as they are orientated towards the sun at True Noon. This has started me thinking about the measurement of time and how the sun was probably the first method by which humans measured time. Indeed this is still the cornerstone of time measurement as large amounts of time is delineated in multiples of years and a year is an arbitrary measure of time set by the length of time our planet takes to orbit the sun. Whilst this is convenient for human understanding of time it really doesn’t have any relationship to time in the way that gravity does.
This then started me to think about the oldest tools for measuring the passage of the sun, stone circles and henges, and could these be warped into the Deep Time project as they usually combine stone, not exclusively as there are many henges that use wood but they now only remain as stains in the grounds – the wood rooting away many years ago, and their use for measurement of the heavens – the biggest well of deep time. Suddenly whole new avenues of exploration have started to appear.
| These three sketches go back to the start of my transition from photographer to artist – autumn 2010 and would seem to indicate that this project is somehow interwoven with this move. So perhaps it is deeper than I thought it was.
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So how do you make a photographic image of a concept? This is the question I haven’t come anywhere near to answering with my Deep Time project. At the moment I’ve been capturing images of the rocks themselves but does this really convey Deep Time? I just don’t know but I think the only way to find out is to continue and see what comes up.
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