It is over four months since my last post. I really didn't mean such a long gap between posts, sorry. Many things have happened in those four months; a holiday, then two lots of major internal work on the house. I also had the first of two full knee replacements. I'm having the second one done at the end of October. Expect a break after the NEXT post. I shall make the effort to put one up before the operation. I think it will be a selection of my favorite macro photography photos taken this year. The operation takes a long time to recover from and takes a tremendous amount of mental and physical stamina out of you but it has been worth it. It proved to be a life changing, life enhancing event for me. Following the operation, I seem to have fallen into a hiatus, it has taken me some time to pull out of.
So, on with this new post. Sometime ago, I thought I'd have a go at a self portrait. I created several, some I was more pleased with than others. A lot of artists do this, some have been accurate drawings or paintings, some abstract, or even tongue-in-cheek ones. I decided to start this post with one mine. My dear friend Roger, (hello Roger) does not like the white areas in this one. I explained that they're supposed to represent places where the paper has been torn out.
Self Portrait #3.
Here are two more "portraits" but not of me!
The Queen of Dreams.
Rock Troll.
Spiders Web.
St John's Wort.
I took the image below with a powerful telephoto lens, It's reflections of people passing a large window. They looked as if they were dancing. Sometimes you just happen to be there at the right time, in the right frame of mind and the magic of inspiration happens.
Street Dancers.
The following is of part of a modern building. It works well as an abstract image.
Building Detail.
The next shot was just begging to be taken. I wonder how many hundreds of people have passed it, or walked over it and didn't notice it.
Greek Horse.
I was on my way to somewhere, I forget where, when I spotted this scaffolding. It has a very sculptural feel to it.
Construction #2.
Now for the abstract images. I won't comment on these unless I feel that one, or more need it.
Evening Sky.
Mozambique.
Fallen Angel.
The next one is a computer modified photo-montage. It's title, "The Mill is Your Chapel", is a rather bitter, sarcastic condemnation of the British Mill owners in the past. I seem to think I talked about this before. Basically, I'm having a dig at the great textile mill owners in England in the 18th and 19th Century. A great many of them were members of the Methodist chapel. Without going into the complexities of it all, here is the thrust of my title and the piece of art.In the 1800s conditions were very harsh for mill workers. They generally worked in terrible conditions, with little or no safety, for long hours and very low wages. Also, children from five or six years old were set to work in mills for anything from 12 to 16 hours a day, the were often very badly treated, part starved and paid very little. Often children would be found in the road having falling asleep whilst walking from the mill to their homes. On the other side of the coin, a lot of Methodist preachers at the time were giving sermons to the workers from the pulpit about putting up with their situation as, "The Lord would reward them in heaven." The mill owners and ministers at this time, were, of course living very rich lives with plenty of good food and drink and an easy, comfortable life. I'm sorry this was a long explanation, but I could not see a way of talking about why I called the next image what I did.
The image represents the chaos in the mills. You might need to study it before you seem the actual building in the work.
The Mill is Your Chapel.
On to lighter subjects after that.
The polyptych below was inspired by Andy Warhol's screen prints. I did screen printing for a while, I really enjoyed it. It can be time consuming, demanding and fiddly, but when you get it right, the results are worth the effort. The subject is an extreme close-up of a halftone photo of a strawberry, from a magazine cover.
Strawberry.
I Told You Before!
Volume in Context.
Solar Flare Telemetry,
The Shadow Lands,
I'm disappointed that it's taken so long to get this post out. I hope all my readers have enjoyed it and perhaps even liked, some of the work.
Be careful and be good to each other.
Gordon.
