After waiting nearly two months I finally got the bad news:
“Dear Michael Autumn
Summer Exhibition 2007
11 June – 19 August
Thank you for entering this year’s Summer Exhibition. With nearly 12,000 entries the competition was extremely strong. On this occasion, I am sorry to inform you that your works were not hung in the exhibition; two of them however were shortlisted, which is a fine achievement.
…
[ collection details]
…
I very much hope that you will submit work in future years.
Yours sincerely
Sir Nicholas Grimshaw CBE
President”
I can consider myself extremely unlucky to have had two of my three works shortlisted, put into one or two gallery rooms to be assessed for hanging with other works in those rooms – and for them both not to be selected! This could have been because there was not enough space or they didn’t make up the hanging aims of the gallery hanger – in terms of symmetry, size, balance, or some other aesthetics.
My work is high risk in terms of the RA Summer Exhibition: it is big – with limited wall space smaller works have a better chance; digital – for a conservative institution this is not universally understood and appreciated; and they look photographic – for a conservative institution this is not universally understood and appreciated.
It is high time the RA elected digital artists and photographers to better represent the diversity of art being produced today. Currently the Academy’s rules are that there must always be at least 14 sculptors, 12 architects, and 8 printmakers; the balance being made up of 46 painters. Things have moved on since 1769…
It is a bit misleading to call it an “open” exhibition when the 80 Royal Academicians making up its membership can each submit up to six works as of right. With room for approximately 1000 works, up to 480 places – nearly half – are clearly not open. Moreover, the Academician’s work can be, and often is, very large, and sometimes huge – like Hockney’s “Bigger Trees Near Water“: it takes up a whole huge wall (about a third of a room allowing for doorways)! Last year, 2006, the Summer Exhibition included two memorial galleries (from a total of thirteen) dedicated to the late Members Sir Eduardo Paolozzi and Patrick Caulfield…
With these “special privileges” I estimate the Royal Academicians take between 30-70% of the available hanging space. I am not criticising the RA as such: it is their club and they can have whatever rules they like. I just question the use of the term “open exhibition” – because clearly is it not entirely that.
I would like there to be a really open annual art exhibition held in London, somewhere prestigious, where the selections were made by a large cross-section of artists (from all fields) – who couldn’t select their own work.
I am not disheartened. I will try again next year because I like the spectacle, and I just accept that there is a large element of luck and a huge element of subjectivity. This is after all representative of art in general…
I have been extremely busy recently – working away from home for weeks on end and naturally very busy when I come home to my family. On Saturday (17th March) I realised that I didn’t have an application form. I quickly fired up the internet and to my horror discovered that I could no longer order one on-line! Bugger! However, according to the RA web site I could order one over the phone Monday to Friday between 10 am and 5 pm. Knowing that Friday 23rd was the last day for application form submissions, I anxiously tried calling the RA at 10 am this morning (19th) – only to hear from a machine saying that it was no longer possible to get application forms over the phone and that you had to come into the RA and collect the forms in person. “Oh dear” I said to myself – NOT! I said something altogether stronger and completely unrepeatable!
What on earth is wrong with their technology? One of the huge benefits of the internet is that you can let people self-serve and save a lot of time and money – and give a better customer experience. Why on earth would they stop allowing people to order on-line and force them to use a labour-intensive, cumbersome, technology – like a phone and a human at the other end? It was so annoying. There was no way to speak to a human. The call just hung up after the message.
Quickly considering my options, I thought: “I’m a Friend, I’ll ring up the Friends department and surely they will be able to help me?” They couldn’t or wouldn’t. I pleaded with them. It was somehow impossible for someone in the Friends’ department to walk over to the information section, put a form in the post and sent it to me! Despite pleading with them that I have been a Friend for over twenty years, and the alternative is that I come in from over a hundred miles away just to pick up a form – they said they couldn’t help me. This is the problem with charities and other non-commercial institutions – they don’t do customer service, and they can’t bend a rule here and there and user their initiative. Bloody infuriating!
I pondered the possibility of getting a biker to pick up the form and either post it Special Delivery or bring it up to the Fens. I thought better of it. Too much to go wrong. I resigned myself to make a fleeting journey into London and pick the darn thing up myself…
It didn’t help the fact that the Open Day I decided to go on was the last one of the two-month season – prior to formal applications being required to be submitted (all departments have different Open Day dates because they are sharing the same space and resources). Prior to the Open Day on January 11th, I didn’t even know I wanted to study at the RCA, or whether I would have any chance of being accepted – not having any formal art qualifications. So on deciding that I most definitely did want to study there and that I did have an albeit slim chance of being accepted – this left me three weeks, a), to get my application in by the 22nd of January; b), to get my portfolio together from scratch – and write it up – by the 31st of January; and c), to get paid work to finance the course (if I am lucky enough to be accepted).
I’m guessing, but I suspect most art graduates – the majority of people applying for the MA courses at the RCA? – would already have a portfolio and all the supporting documentation. Of course little old me didn’t even have prints ready (unframed) – and so I had to print them all out (a two-day exercise in itself because they are so large). I decided to submit eight pieces: 6 large-scale digital art works (they are all on this blog), a digital print from a very poor 26-year-old photograph of an oil painting I did when I was nineteen (the only example of a painting I have!); and a black-and-white pen-and-ink drawing I did about twenty-four years ago – to show what, if any, drawing ability I have…
I started some temporary IT consulting contract work last Monday (22nd January – some two hundred miles from where I live) – which left me evenings and the last two weekends to do all my writing up and preparations. So that I can continue with my art and related work while away from home, I ordered an Apple MacBook Pro, Cintiq pressure-sensitive computer screen, and two 500 GB external drives – which thankfully all arrived punctually by last weekend (20th January).
I spent some time making the documentation look professional, with a consistent style and presentation, and included several small detail images to support and illustrate the text. I completed the final print-outs of the documentation this morning, packaged everything up in a huge make-shift portfolio case (portfolio cases aren’t made large enough for my work, so I had to make one from the packaging of some large aluminum honeycomb sheets I purchased last year. It measured approximately 2m x 1.5m x 6cm, or 66″ x 50″ x 2″. I had to cut it down a bit so I could fit it in my wide car, but obviously it had to be wide enough to avoid the folding of any of my larger pieces.). It was with much relief that I personally delivered it to the RCA portfolio room just before midday today (I was taking no chances with postal services).
I probably couldn’t have done a much better portfolio or write-ups. I’ve given it my best shot. Announcements are made by the 2nd March as to whether you have succeeded in getting through to the next interview stage. It’s out of my hands and now it’s an anxious waiting game…
There seems to be at bit of a buzz going around at the moment about gigapixel photography. This is digital photography where the detail or resolution is so high that the number of pixels used to make up the image is in execss of a billion – one thousand megapixels. If such numbers don’t mean anything to you then it might help to say that such images occupy in excess of four CDs, or you might fit one of them on a standard DVD. The average digital camera is currently about five megapixels – so in excess of two hundred of such images would go to make a single gigapixel image.
Printed out they look stunning, and they require special zooming technology for you to be able to see them on the web.
I have being doing gigapixel art and photography since 2003, indeed some of my pictures run into several gigapixels in size. There is a big difference between gigapixel art and gigapixel photography though. Whereas you can get a camera to take a gigapixel image at the press of a button – or you can get stitching software to fit dozens or hundreds of smaller images together to form one larger composite
(e.g. work in progress of photograph of shops)
(Click on image to zoom in…)
– this bears no resemblance to the effort involved in gigapixel art. The work involved in creating, editing, and compositing dozens of photographs, all the freehand work on such large files, and the colour proofing – typically runs in to several hundred hours for me – using the most powerful computer equipment. And that is before doing anything creative with it…
E.G. zoom in to the centre to see the flying doves?
(Click on image to zoom in…)
I hope this puts to bed the myth that digital art is quick and easy – or certainly gigapixel art definitely isn’t!
Just for the record, gigapixel photography is nothing new really. In terms of film photography, large format cameras, like my 10″ x 8″ (this is the actual size of the usable part of the transparency or negative) Sinar P2, took/take the equivalent of gigapixel photographs all the time. Indeed I have a scanner that can scan up to 18″ x 13″ at 10000 dpi (dots per inch). A 10″ x 8″ transparency or negative scanned at this resolution equates to 100,000 x 80,000 pixels = 8,000,000,000 pixels of information. This is 8 thousand million pixels or 8 gigapixels… (For those of you who think in terms of bits and bytes, this is twenty-four (24) gigabytes at 8 bits per colour, or forty-eight (48) gigabytes at 16 bits per colour).
As an artist I am thrilled and daunted at the same time about the prospect of being in control of well in excess of a thousand megapixels. However, the creative freedom this level of control gives is very liberating…
You can see zoomable examples of my work either from links on this blog or on my web site, or at various exhibitions.
I like to go to really famous, impressive, places to try and capture them, or create an impression of them, in an artistic and hopefully unique way. I don’t always succeed! I went to New York at the end of September 2002 on such an artistic trip. I love the hustle and bustle of Times Square and was staying only a block away from it – as I had done on a previous trip five years earlier. The image I came up with took many days of contemplation and for a long while I was pessimistic that I would fail in my quest…
The two main roads, 7th Avenue and Broadway, run roughly from north to south. There is only a short time window, around about noon, when the sun shines straight down both streets – rather than leaving one side in hard shadow. Time… Time… Moreover, the angle of the sun shining on the buildings is better in the Autumn and Spring – where it is neither too high nor too low at noon. Time… Time…
I was running out of time – nearing the end of my trip but with no inspiration about how to capture this place…
On my penultimate day at noon in Manhattan the light was terrific. The yellow cabs, the rivulets of multi-coloured people, the sheer rock faces of the buildings, the brilliantly lit signs… What is the shot? What is Times Square? I pondered and pondered. Time was running out… The light won’t last…
Hoards of random purposeful people, impatient busy cars, domineering buses, enticing alluring shops, mesmerizing ingenious signs, agitated horns, blinding glare, confusing reflections, killing fumes, incessant humming engines, occasional screeching breaks. I was being bombarded with Times Square but no ideas how to capture it. Then, all of a sudden, and quite by accident – I looked up – directly above me, and I saw this amazing sight: a beautiful tranquil azure blue sky, with brilliantly bright titanium white cloud slowly drifting northwards. I found a bare patch of pavement and lay down on the ground looking skywards. All of a sudden everything was perfectly serenely quiet, and I was transformed into a new timeless silent dimension.
What a transformation! Horizontally it was a torrid river of humanity: noise, zillions of people from everywhere – going everywhere, attention-grabbing economic gimmicks, control, dirt, pollution, unbelievable complexity. Here, in Times Square, it was as if three dimensions were squashed into two: everything happens on street level! Of course! The fourth dimension, time, is upwards… One minute I was in those rapids and the next I had broken free from the surface water tension – like a caddis fly emerging as an underwater grub and transformed into a free-flying insect…
The sun was nearly at the perfect angle – it had just a few minutes to go to catch both sides of the parallel buildings equally. This was central to the shot. I waited for the perfect moment, during which time a typically un-shy American asked “…Hey, what-ja doing?” (This was one of many exchanges I had with passers-by that day.) I told him and he looked up – at an angle he probably wasn’t used to. His expression was at first strained and squinting, and then an oh-I-see smile…
For me the picture works for a number of reasons – some of which I can take credit for and some is just good old-fashioned luck – and, believe me, the best shots need some luck. I love the azure blue of the sky and the cold Arctic white of the cloud – and what a deliciously bright glacial white it is! But I love that area in the middle where the blue intermingles softly with the white. This just seems to epitomize the cosmopolitan nature of what’s happening at street level – different races coming together…
I have rendered the buildings in a perfect square – which says something to me about time – how regular it is. All the vertical parallel lines of the buildings in their infinite perspective converge perfectly in the middle of the picture. The whole scene could be a clock face without hands. Time, like the hustle and bustle of the square, has momentarily paused.
Just think, if you will, how this landscape will have changed over time. Not so long ago the same shot could have had the same sky with trees receding in perspective in place of the buildings…
The time theme crops up in a number of unexpected ways. The clock on the building is very apt and very, very, lucky! The street lamp is off, because it is not time for it to be on. The position of the sun is very time critical – illuminating both sides of the street rather than casting one side into shadow. This is similar to the precise orientation of ancient megaliths like Stonehenge or the many amazing constructions in the Peruvian landscape and buildings – to cast light on to some sacred spot on just a few days at first or last light at the summer or winter solstices.
The shot is an antithesis of what Times Square is all about. I didn’t (and generally don’t) want to capture what most people do. Times Square is one of the busiest places in the world, and one of the most photographed. I wanted to do something completely different… This is possibly the least you could portray about Times Square and it still be recognizable… Less is sometimes more… Minimalism is sometime maximalism…
(Catalogue _C8L2984_24-01-06: 36″ x 53 1/2″, edition of 100)
Pregnancy is the most magical and mysterious process that can happen to a woman, her partner, and existing children. As a father-to-be I felt so unnecessary but constantly strived to be involved.
I felt impudent, irrelevant, distant, curious, useless, confused, ignorant. I might as well have been on the moon looking back at the earth – watching as a bystander…
I was outside of this on-going, and soon-to-climax, marvel.
Pregnant Reflections – Male contribution
My role in all this magic was the use of my appendage for a few minutes several month previous – all but a faint memory now…
If that is how I felt with no changes happening to me physically or mentally, I can’t begin to imaging what effect it had on my dear wife who was undergoing all those changes… What was going on in her mind? What was going on in her body? What did she feel and see when she looked in the mirror?
How would I feel if I experienced such transformations in myself? What is it like to have a new small human being growing inside you: feeding off you, moving around and kicking you?
Pregnant Reflections – baby growing inside mother
Answers to these questions are meaningless because I cannot possibly relate to them in any way. Answers are foreign and can never be translated. There is no male vocabulary to translate into. It is as meaningless as asking a caterpillar what it is like to turn into a butterfly.
Pregnant Reflections – Sister
And what of our little princess – who was the centre of our universe? What did she make of it all? What was her comprehension and anticipation of it? She was too young to give any coherent articulation. Did she even really understand what was happening and what was going to happen? She was – and at the time of writing this, still is – more or less a completely emotional being. I sensed in her a growing anxiety but never quite understanding…
Will it be healthy? Will it be a boy or a girl? What will it look like? How will the delivery be?
On an artistic note, the transformation of my wife was very inspiring. Women are delightfully curvy anyway, but they enter another curved dimension when with child! It is as if they are three dimensional normally, then they become five dimensional for a few months. Concave, convex, soft, taught, primal. I think the thing I enjoyed most about her being pregnant was the expression of contentment, peace, fulfilment, contemplation, wonderment on her face…
Cambridge, England Jan. 2006
Pregnant Reflections in artist’s dining room (click on image to see artists’ home studio, workshop, and gallery).
(Catalogue #100_5644-5730: 44” x 66” – edition of 100)
The human eye is an amazing gift, tool, and experience. The power of the brain behind it takes seeing to mesmerizing capabilities. Take focusing for example. That part of the image in the centre of our field of vision is in sharp focus (excepting for long- and short- sightedness), and the rest of the image gets progressively out of focus – the further away from the centre we go. But we are usually not aware of this. Anything we scan our eyes over becomes instantly sharp. The fact is we are constantly re-focusing as we scan a scene. If we are looking at one part of a scene it is in sharp focus. We may not even be aware that the rest is out of focus, because no sooner have we moved our eyes to something else, then that new part becomes immediately in focus.
Focus has a few noteworthy properties. The closer we try to focus, the shallower the depth of focus is. If you hold your hand in front of your face and focus on it, even things just in front of it (try placing a finger of your other hand in front of your hand without looking directly at it), and things immediately behind it will be out of focus – i.e. blurred. This is a “shallow” depth of focus – or depth of field as it is more commonly known in photography. The further away the subject is the greater is the focus depth – the region from the nearest to the furthest part in focus. The focus range is invariably perpendicular to our eye view.
The camera acts like a static eye in that it can capture one static scene and its inherent depth of field. It is unlike the eye in one important respect: we focus on a narrow zone where our two eyes converge, and outside this area – left, right, up or down – but at the same distance from our eyes – things become progressively more out of focus the further away from the centre of our gaze they are. The camera on the other hand focuses on planes. Think of double glazing: the zone between the two pieces of glass is in focus, everything in front and behind are out of focus. As always with focus, there are no sharp boundaries between in and out of focus – just very sharp to progressively less sharp. However, there is a general area where most people would agree is an acceptable level of sharpness – enough to say it’s in focus.
Depth of field can be controlled by the diameter of the iris or aperture: the smaller the aperture the greater is the depth of field. But the aperture can only affect depth of field to a small degree. What also applies to the camera is the phenomenon that the closer the subject is, the shallower the depth of field. There are special cameras/lenses that offer a tilting mechanism that allow you to literally tilt the plane of focus, but these are only effective with flat surfaces – like a road or a lake. Anything in the foreground sticking up or down – rising above or below the narrow horizontal plane of focus – like my tulips – would appear out of focus.
Why am I rambling on about depth of field? When you are confronted with a real life scene you can survey it at your leisure, and it is something we all seem to enjoy. We seem to love being able to see a long way, and climbing/driving to the top of a hill or mountain to see a great view is a common goal we nearly all like to do. Taking a static image of such a scene – from our toes to the horizon – is virtually impossible, especially if there is fast movement in the scene as well.
What has all this got to do with art? If art is about enhancing the viewer’s experience of life, getting the viewer to think about their surroundings, and their perceptions and pre-conceptions of it, then “Depth Of Tulip Field” is very much art.
I use photography a great deal because I’m so moved by reality, and a lot of what I want to convey about my perceptions, pre-conceptions, and ideas about reality I feel are best expressed by being as realistic as possible. I’m completely in awe of vision – it is the most amazing gift. When I see a beautiful scene I’m frustrated as an artist that I cannot transport you there to see it also. So much art is about non-reality, disfiguring reality, or making attempts at copying reality – with varying degrees of success. But reality cannot be faithfully copied – it has near and far properties, and we can interact with it in almost an infinite number of ways – moving to different parts of it, zooming in to any level of detail. And reality’s main quality is, I feel, the freedom we have to look at it in any way we choose.
At a scene we can scan and focus on anything we please, and that is the real delight I want to capture. Conventional photography pre-focuses for you on a static focal plane. The photographer has to decide what he/she wants you to focus on – that is what he/she wants to focus on themselves, and they capture that in stone as it were. You are not free to focus on what you want. That is not necessarily a criticism – indeed it may well be the intention. But in this case my intention is that you should be free to look at any part of the picture in great detail – as I had the pleasure of doing.
The conventional artist – oil painter for example – is severely limited by the materials she uses, and by time. Whilst she doesn’t have the same limitations of depth of field, close up daubs of paint look like daubs of paint. And what would the point of meticulously copy reality anyway in this day and age of photography? The best you’ll ever achieve is a photograph. If Vermeer or Ingres (two of the best detailed artist I know of) were around today, would they reject photography and paint? Was it the process of painting they enjoyed or were they trying to capture something they considered beautiful, captivating, worthy of putting on a pedestal…?
In Depth Of Tulip Field I have gone to enormous lengths to share the freedom of focus I enjoyed on a fateful trip in Norfolk, England. It was early morning, the date was spring 2004, I was driving along and suddenly this amazing field of tulips appeared. The field was huge and the rows ran perpendicular to the road. A striking feature was the bands of brilliant colours. The sun was not out fully (it was burning up the morning mist), and it was at the wrong angle anyway (aesthetically) – so I decided to come back later in the afternoon (the forecast was for sun).
When I returned I went to the far end of the field with the sun shining at me – I love the sun shinning through plants – it really brings out their colour. I spent quite a while admiring the scene and wondering how best to shoot it – how to do it justice. I had all the main types of cameras, numerous lenses, and other equipment with me – so I had very few technical limitations on what I could do. The field was wonderfully long. I didn’t want to crop it. I didn’t want to focus on one part of it. I wanted it all. Eventually I came up with an idea and proceeded to execute it…
There are a lot of different types of birds, insects, and other animals in this picture, but that is only to draw your attention to the fact that there were none! This field – due to modern chemically assisted intensive farming methods – was a veritable desert of life! Everything was either dead (killed by “pesticides” – implying they are pests – probably a propaganda ploy by the agrichemical companies) or the wildlife stays away – perhaps because there is no natural food there and/or because it is such an alien landscape to them and they have no natural cover. I did actually see the hare and the deer running through the field – sadly they were fleeing from a near by gun shot blast – I don’t think it was their natural choice to be there. But it gave me an idea…
Most landscape paintings don’t depict this level of detail, and many animals in the wild are very elusive – indeed a lot of the time their survival depends on them not being seen. So often they are there but you just don’t see them. But for me this is what is fascinating about Nature: it is everywhere. The more you look, the more you see. And the closer you look the more detail you see. You can start with looking at a whole landscape (even my depiction of the tulip field is a small section of the whole), and you can zoom in on a field, then a flower in the field, then an insect on a flower in the field, and see the amazing detail of it. Zooming in still further, you can see the hairs on its body, its compound eye, the structure of its wings. Zooming in on the eye reveals its conical hexagonal lens structure. You can go on to see the structure of the cones, the cells that make it, the internal structure of the cells, the structure of its proteins, the atoms that make up the molecules, the structure of the atom – its subatomic particles. And who knows where this journey ends in ever smaller worlds…?
I have kept the detail in the picture to what you could see with the naked eye, but I hope I’ve got my point across about the detail in Nature.
Sometimes we come across a scene so beautiful that we stop what we’re doing. We stop and stare, remain silent, and enter into a trance-like state. It’s fascinating that our mind should respond so strongly to what are after all just images. It is also fascinating that the vast majority of us will respond in a similar way to the same scenes… I, as a contemporary artist, feel just the same (possibly more?) about such scenes – but I want to respond to them in a very personal and unique way, and to sometimes use them as a vehicle to express certain ideas I’m interested in.
Really this is many photographs (circa 80) combined into one, with a great deal of digital editing – including much freehand work. But it is essentially what I saw. I have spent more time on this “photograph” than I have ever spent on a real painting or drawing. (No, I haven’t attempted to break any world records – some artists will have spent longer on their paintings.) My goal was to try to break the limits of photography, to highlight our wonderful, amazing, delighting, gift of vision; to produce something beautiful – or something I consider beautiful. The result is not perfect, but I’m happy it goes a long way to depicting what I saw and the ideas I wanted to convey. It gives me immense pleasure to be able to share that experience.
Nature is not always what it seems, and in Nature reproduction is a vital force…
16/05/2004
Exhibited at Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2006
This YouTube video is using a new video-from-photo technique I developed.
(Catalogue #030525-01-05: 46” x 46”, diamond – edition of 101)
This is another of my studies in visual perception. Unlike most photographs – which are a snapshot in time – I created this image as an idealized scene that shows the best of what did happen over a short of time while I was in this beautiful space. The flying fulmars (sea-gulls in the picture) – who came up close to check me out, the pied wagtail (black and white bird) foraging for flies among the bedded plants, the sunbathing red admiral (red-wing-tipped butterfly), the flying gatekeeper (brown butterfly), and all the insect and arthropod activity – all this happened in front of me over a period of about half an hour. Conventional photography could capture such a scene in one shot using an ideal camera (which doesn’t exist!), a very fast shutter speed, and a very, very, great deal of luck. I had to resort to less miraculous and time-consuming creative techniques to create this image…
This is also part of my “Diamond Series”. I wanted to make the white tulips the centre of the picture – almost as if the castle was being held up by them. The natural way our perception follows the lines across the corners of a diamond to locate the centre helps draw you to the tulips. We “know” that the castle isn’t being held up by the tulips, and that the castle is much bigger than them. But this is based on what we know rather than what we can see…
I like the geometry of half sky, half land. I like the textural difference between the top and the bottom half. Standard photography can’t discriminate texture at its finest, pixel, level of detail. I have worked a great deal on the image to achieve this effect.
We can’t produce anything more beautiful than nature – despite our huge numbers, all our technology, and time. We merely re-arrange it for a while. How can this be? We are led to believe that Nature is merely a quirk of chances – trillions of chances. Out of nothing came all this… The lovely castle in the picture doesn’t compare to a single tulip – for beauty and complexity. In gardens we merely rearrange Nature…
Nature is a complex set of forces, among many other amazing things: there are many systems and programs running, sometimes they collide and the programs survive or die. But we never make anything new – we merely convert something that is already there into something else – for a short while. Anything that we re-arrange in Nature is only temporary. All we can do is put a tiny piece of Nature out of equilibrium. The soil, climate, aspect, cover, surroundings, herbivorous predators – all affect what will grow and survive in the longer term. We can fight this, but only temporarily. We are temporary…
Not that I hold the Royal Academy of Art in any special regard in terms of art selection for exhibition (on the contrary…), however, for some people, exhibiting there matters… So I just mention that this artwork was selected for the Summer Exhibition of 2006, however, due to its size and diamond shape – i.e. the amount of wall space it takes up – it was not exhibited that year. (Back then physical actual artworks were submitted for consideration.)
Having an interest in art, it was natural that I would eventually pay a visit to the Louvre in Paris. My first visit to Paris was in November 1998. What struck me most about the Louvre was not its wonderful art collection, but the buildings themselves. I was particularly interested in the glass pyramid (square-based right regular tetrahedron), cutting up through the ground in the Cour Napoleon and its juxtaposition with the magnificent Louis XIII/IV courtyard architecture. It seemed like an ice fissure or glass crystal had been forced up through the ground by some colossal subterranean tectonic force. The weather was appalling but I knew I had to come back and shoot it “properly”…
I returned to Paris on a photo shoot in October 2003. I specifically wanted to do something with the pyramid. As is so often the case, my challenge was how to do a very well know place justice and yet be different or original? I love maths and geometry and so the tetrahedron had extra appeal to me…
I had already experimented with diamonds (squares turned on their sizes – through 45% – so they are “resting” on a corner) on some earlier compositions that year. The appeal being that conventional rectangular shaped pictures are passé, don’t lend themselves naturally to any specific horizontal or vertical alignment, and the centre is not clearly defined. This is not a “problem” for many images but there are a few times when this is a distinct disadvantage, and simply not aesthetically “right” – for me at least.
A diamond on the other hand has clear horizontal and vertical lines that the eye naturally follows (the lines through opposite corners), and the intersection of these imaginary lines is the centre. Our eyes seem trained or are sensitive to vertical and horizontal lines. This may have some biological/physiological significance. For example, our sense of balance is closely tied in with the horizon – to the extent that we can feel sick if the horizon keeps moving around – as it does on a boat in a choppy sea. Any liquid in a container – from the ocean to a cup of water – will level out. Most things fall in straight lines and most plants grow in straight lines. The vast majority of our buildings are built perfectly straight or vertical – I suspect because we would feel uncomfortable working in them otherwise. We are very familiar with vertical and horizontal lines and can tell if they are only slightly out of “true”. We can’t do this with slopes because there is no absolute or “normal” slope. If we see a hill at 40% it is a hill at 40% – so what? It doesn’t particularly register or matter. The fact that we have specific words for two angles – 0 and 90 (horizontal and vertical) – is testimony to their importance to us – we don’t have names for any other angles…
This year (2003) marked the birth of my Diamond Series, where I felt the geometric properties of a perfect square on its side – my diamond – was aesthetically the most natural, flattering, and interesting for certain compositions. It was/is important for me to take the shots in this diamond formation – it’s not a case of cutting up prints afterwards! I have to feel the diamond and go to the extra effort of composing the shot as a diamond (using my square format camera and tilting it – not easy believe you me – especially when the image is back-to-front!).
So I had this idea in mind before going back to the Louvre and its pyramid. The pyramid itself is actually half a diamond – the top half. It didn’t take me long to decide that the best composition I could think of was to use the diamond shape to accentuate the pyramid – whose top angle is very close to 90. Perfect symmetry was an absolute must for such a geometrical composition. The pyramid from a certain angle looks like half a diamond – an isosceles triangle. I wanted to make its base the central line of the diamond.
Why did I shoot this in black and white? Because the shot is about shape and texture – colour would be a distraction. I wanted to contrast the old and the new buildings and their materials: rough stone with intricate carvings, alongside metal and glass – smooth, simple, prefabricated. The original pyramids were made of stone with intricate carvings, friezes, and paintings. The modern has gone the other way – showing it has no real value. If it is destroyed it can quickly be rebuilt. It says something about the wealth and power of the past rulers compared with today’s…
The whole idea of the modern geometrical form in this historical setting, with the light as it was, and the majority of people walking towards the pyramid – conjured up a scene of an alien spacecraft and people mesmerically be drawn towards it – to be taken away to another planet… I decided not to deliberately accentuate this theme…
That part of the image in the centre of our field of vision is in sharp focus (excepting for long- and short- sightedness), and the rest of the image gets progressively out of focus – the further away from the centre we go. But we are usually not aware of this. Anything we scan our eyes over becomes instantly sharp. The fact is we are constantly re-focusing as we scan a scene. If we are looking at one part of a scene it is in sharp focus. We may not even be aware that the rest is out of focus, because no sooner have we moved our eyes to something else, then that new part becomes immediately in focus.
The photographer has to decide what he/she wants you to focus on – that is what he/she wants to focus on themselves, and they capture that in stone as it were. You are not free to focus on what you want. That is not necessarily a criticism – indeed it may well be the intention. But in this case my intention is that you should be free to look at any part of the picture in great detail – as I had the pleasure of doing.
Was it the process of painting they enjoyed or were they trying to capture something they considered beautiful, captivating, worthy of putting on a pedestal…?
I did actually see the hare and the deer running through the field – sadly they were fleeing from a near by gun shot blast – I don’t think it was their natural choice to be there. But it gave me an idea…
