Where is the Love?

 

I like this picture, but what do you think?

It breaks one of my golden rules – it has people in it – plus the heart isn’t easy to see, though once you’ve seen it it’s clear enough. I like it because it builds a bigger landscape and it makes a nice change from the usual heart + location shot that I generally run with for this project. I’ve always liked the kind of hard-cut panoramas you get when you just piece them together roughly, and this has that effect.

It’s from Portland, Church Ope Cove to be precise, same as the last picture. You’ll find a map link in that post. Where smugglers once came ashore with brandy and tobacco there is now this scattering of eccentric beach huts and, on a summer’s day like this was, the sight of burning English bodies scorching themselves in the sun.

Putting this together I was reminded that I once photographed some hearts on a fence and went away and came up with another idea but found that the fence had been painted black by the time I returned. I’d wanted to re-photograph the hearts (there were at least a dozen) and then blow them up to life-size before piecing them back together on the wall. It was thinking about Hockney’s photographic collages that prompted the idea. Next time I see a whole bunch of hearts in one place I must remember what I was too late to do then… but the join on this picture makes me think of just a piece of a bigger image.

 

love | landscape

Barely There At All

 

I picked up the pictures that were left from my show at the White Stones Gallery on Portland at the weekend – there wasn’t a lot left. I’d had a fantastically successful show and it was great to know that people had really appreciated the work I’d put up. Over the six weeks or so that the show was up for I visited Portland several times, mostly to drop off more work. It’s an interesting place Portland – it is quite distinctly different to anywhere else along the Dorset Coast and has an air of wildness about it. I always feel that the villages on Portland have the feel of frontier towns, which is odd because they are on the edge, at the frontier of the sea I suppose, but a frontier that has long since passed.

I have a question: I’d like to know what weight of stone has been removed from Portland since they began recording what was taken from each quarry. I want to know how much lighter Portland is now to what it was in, say, 1800. Seen from a distance I think Portland looks as though it could lift up from the sea like a balloon if they take much more stone away…

This shot was taken at Church Ope Cove. The sun-bleached quarry-waste pebbles gleam beneath a wooded cliff and the ruins of a church, next to which are a handful of macabre tombstones faced with skulls and crossbones. The kids loved it. The heart on this stone is almost completely bleached away, but look closely and you’ll see it, feint in pink – it was in a pebble-built den with a stern warning against the ‘tresparsing’ of parents – maybe the long-dead pirates would be back for me if I’d stepped foot inside…

love | landscape