Go Round The Mulberry Tree

I've just put the window in at the Mulberry Tree Gallery in Swanage - a mix of love landscape pics and Purbeck Alphabet pictures. Lots of LOVE and hearts, of course!

One of the pictures included is the one above - Venice. The heart was on the water-bus, on the metal barrier that stops you being shunted overboard by enourmous enthusiasts from the US of A, hell bent on videoing everything they could have seen between ice-creams and pizza. The view was a happy coincidence as I lent from the side of the boat - the orange of the canopy in the summer sunlight echoing the paintwork I was leaning over, and the green of the others repeated in the surface of the canal. It just (in my humble opinion) summed up Venice perfectly.

I'm about to log off here and start putting some of the thousands of photographs together that will make up a couple of hundred more love landscape images - some of Venice last year, and Florence, Paris, Pisa, London...

My Wessex Muse

Thanks again to Gemma at Liz Lean PR, Muse magazine have run a double-page spread on this project. There's so much publicity out there at the moment it's amazing, but I reckon on Feb 15th I'll have to go cold turkey, as no-one will want to know again until DAW in May...

The pumpkin pic above was taken at the wonderful Square & Compass in Worth - one of the world's finest drinking establishments! We were there after a wedding at St Aldhem's chappel in 2006, and being October the remains of the previous week's pumpkin festival were still lying around. Everything from apple-sized squashes to these enormous specimins. I spotted the heart, but then had to wait for the kids to stop climbing on them before I could get the acompanying shot. I gave a print to the happy couple to celebrate the day.

Radio Sta-a-a-a-a-r!

Thanks to Tara Dominick I got to talk about my love landscape project on Hope FM yesterday morning. I didn't post about it in advance, just in case somebody read this and then listened! My mum and dad heard the show though, and said I came across very well, with no ums and ahs - if it had been awful, they probably would have said the same thing!

It was really fun to see how a radio show is put together - everything from not knocking your mic with your hand (sorry!) to watching them fade in the national news and the advertising. I'd love to do it again, now I've done it once, though how often people would want me to talk about photographs on the radio, I don't know! The most difficult thing was not saying 'Jesus Christ!' or 'Oh my God!' as it's a Christian radion station - not that I normally say that often, but it wanted to come out!

The picture above is one I mentioned in the show - taken in Padova. Rather pretentiously, I talked about how I put things into the pictures that I think help tell a story, and here it could be about the Padovan romance with their bicycles, and our romantic ideas about Italy as a country. Or it's a picture of two bicycle seats next to a picture of a heart. You decide!

Been Printing

I've been busy printing stuff for the valentines shows at the Mulberry Tree Gallery and Coastal Creatives - always takes me longer than I think!

The picture above is one of the ones I've printed, and it looks cracking done large. It was in a car park in Bournemouth which was actually the ground floor of a demolished building, I think. Great place. The security guards are only there in the day and the gut on the day i visited was happy to let me in to take pictures. He explained that the kids come in at night, when it's closed and un-guarded - he didn't see a problem with it, as otherwise the walls would be concrete and peeling paint, and as he said, there were no cars in at night that could be damaged. Some of the work in there was amazing (like the 'landscape' side of this. If I owned the place i'd open it as a gallery for Dorset Art week, though I've a feeling that the site is being built on now. So the 'graffers' (I use the term ill-adviedly and not often) will move elsewhere, probably more public, where they'll be termed a nuisance, and another exciting space will be lost.

I wish i'd gone in at night too, to photograph the artists at work, but I never had the nerve...

On the BBC

Scarilly, I'm featured on BBC Dorset's homepage today... something of a surprise! I say scary because of the picture of me on there... another heart would have looked nicer!

This is the link if you'd like to see it: http://www.bbc.co.uk/dorset/content/articles/2008/01/09/heart_photos_feature.shtml- a slight mis-quote, as I don't think I'd ever use the words 'keen eye', but never mind!

The picture above is the full version of the heart they've shown - taken in Paris way back in 2005, the sun setting behind the Tour Eiffel... so romantic, and a nice reflection of the Plane Tree bark in the clouds behind the silhouette, don't you think? It always amazes me how things like that present themselves. I always photograph the 'landscape' part of the picture within a few minutes and within site of the heart - that's probably Rule #1, and there's always something there that can be read as symbolism, visual allegory or simply as vsiually pleasing - beautiful is the word I liketo use, even when the content may seem ugly.

Ah, the BBC, eh! Fame at last!

Hoorah for PR!

Rather excitingly, I've been lucky enough to be selected as one of the artists to promote Dorset Art Weeks as part of a Valentines Day PR exercise. Gemma Ward from Liz Lean PR has written a fantastic press release all about me, which makes me sound far more competant and aware of what I'm doing with this series than I feel, but which is really flattering and is giving me the kick up the bum I need to pull out all the stops for the week approaching Valentines Day and towards DAW in May.

Anyway, the pic today is another Popular Favorite, photographed in Upton Country Park some time ago. The beech woods there are stunning, and I can assure you that the colours in this image are entirely true to life - nature's canvas, and all that. The beauty of carving into trees such as beech is that the carving grows and changes with time. This carving may be fairly recent, but others, older, have become soft-edged, more subtle over time. It must be time soon to revisit these woods, and see what the passing of a couple more years have done to the hearts shown here - others will have become impossible to read as true heart shapes now, and hopefully, there'll be new hearts, new loves, to find too.

Ha! ppy New Year!

i want to celebrate the new year by uploading one of my favourites. it's not the most striking heart, i suppose, but i like the texture of the gate on which it's painted. the real joy for me is the photograph in the photograph on the left.

when i was at college i stopped taking photographs (gelatine in the process vs vegan principles being the cause) and started to work with found photos, mostly from house clearances, retitling the image to make it into my own artwork. so imagine my joy when i'm out working with animal-friendly digital cameras and i find a photo... opposite a heart! i love the laddish conent of the snap, and the fact that it's been stolen or lost and then left nicely on top of a telephone exchange box. the heart is quite laddish too, i think - certainly not a feminine look to it.

my first photography project on my foundation course at Shelley Park was about telephone exchange boxes. three projects, coming together nicely. good to have some faces in the picture too - i don't often have faces in my pictures - if you were to look through all the love landscape images you won't find people in any of them, as far as I can recall, even in the bigger landscapes. It's one of my many rules... i'll come back to my rules in another post.