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.)
Cambridge, England 12/09/2004