I Will Not Draw As I Am Told

I didn't get to see as many galleries in Barcelona as I might have done, but did see the fantastic Joan Miro permanent collection as well as a fascinating show by Olafur Eliasson. Strange, off-puttingly minimalist website he has there, but worth seeing his work.

We also stumbled across a fantastic wall of graffiti behind the covered market in the centre of the city - it covered a hundred yard stretch of derelict wall left where a building had been demolished. This lavishly illustrated wall kept me and the kids entertained for some time. Unfortunately a high metal fence kept us from the artworks, and with the lens I use I couldn't get in to shoot the heart as close as I would ordinarilly.

Happily, I don't think this matters too much, and gives me a more subtle view, a different take on the project I've been working on for so long. At this scale you may find it hard to see the heart (click on the image to enlarge it and it should help) but it is there in the very centre of the right-hand image. It actually puts the heart into its own context, and it could tell its own story without a need for the left-hand image. Again at this scale it's hard to read it, but a stencilled text repeated on the left side of the image says 'I Will Not Draw As I Am Told' and spaeaks volumes when seen in the context of a wall of graffiti.

I couldn't resist the pirate-style Jesus, either. Perhaps he wasn't hanging with the fishermen of Galilee at all!

A quick PS - I googled 'I will not draw as I am told' and see that it's a popliar phrase amongst the graffitiati - here's a fantastic example. Click on the image to enlarge it - the script the artist has used will make your eyes pop!

I Love Barcelona

I've just got back from a long weekend in Barcelona. Carbon guilty. And we flew with Ryanair, which makes me doubly guilty, as not only does Michael O'Leary treat the environmental issues associated with flying with contempt, he treats his customers and staff in a similar fashion. I hope never to fly with them again - it's worth the extra expense of travelling to a different airport and flying with a mid-cost airline just to have nothing to do with his miserable low-rent business.

But apart from that:

Dozens of hearts! Tons of graffiti! Hell for vegetarians!

Barcelona is a fantastic city, and one I hope to go back to soon - there is way too much to see! I photographed hearts outside Joan Miro's gallery, around the huge ghost-town of the Olympic buildings, on the subway, in the lift to our apartment, on several streets and in several parks, and even inside Gaudi's Sagrada Familia! Graffiti in a church! Crazy!

It is the first city I've been to where I was actually shocked by the amount of graffiti - they7 really do have a problem. The type of graffiti I photograph tends to be small and innocuous, though I do enjoy the artistically stunning 'illustrations' that can be found here and there. What I can't abide is tagging - fair enough, you can write your name, but why write it on the shutter of every shop in a street? If you want to prove you have a bigger cock than the other guy, get it out and show him - nobody else is interested! One of the largest tags on the motorway out of the city was in the shape of a coathanger. Maybe coathangers are cool in Spain - I don't know.


The people everywhere were fantastic - we'd read all sorts of warnings to be wary of taxi drivers, pickpockets, bag snatchers, muggers, but we found people went out of their way to be helpful. I want to learn the language now, too - possibly to help out with plans for a trip to Cuba... Food was a problem - we took a list of vegetarian restaurants in Barcelona, but they weren't often in the same place as we were, and even self catering is hard as food isn't labelled very well. Had we been there for longer we would have found it easier I think, but the Spanish have a lot of catching up to do when it comes to catering for people who care about what's on their plate. I think that's why people have opened specifically vegetarian places to go - to compensate for the lack of understanding of 'sin carne' elsewhere!

Enough about my holiday... I plan my trips now around places where I think a heart or twelve might be found. I fly to New York in a month... I alone will be responsible for an extra degree of global warming. My children will have every right to curse me. I'm going to look at carbon offsetting the whole lot (I know it's knocked, but it's better than doing nothing) though surely being vegan counts for most of it!

The picture above was taken in Joan Miro's park, which was suprisingly run down and rough, but due to be refurbished. I found the face first, and the light on it was delightful, then I looked for a heart. I was determined to find one as I was so pleased with the 'landscape'. This stunning little carving was on a bench right beside the stone ball, as it turned out. It was only later (and too late) that I realised that the camera was still set to 1600 ISO after photographing the Magic Fountains the night before, so these images are very noisy, close up. If it were grain, I'd be happy, but noise adds some ugly colourful speckles. I need to do a test print to see how it looks at full size... and then I'll pretend it was deliberate. Don't tell anyone!

The Big Bang, Love and The Snail

I was genuinely worried about the switching on of the Large Hadron Collider at 8.30 this morning. At about 8.15 I gathered my children to my knee, held them close, and reminded them how much I loved them, just in case they'd forgotten since the dozen times I tell them dusing the course of any average day.

At 8.30 precisely, I listened to the switching on on the Today programme, and then realised that the particle streams wouldn't be colliding today anyway - we have some time left before the Earth is consumed by an ever expanding black hole created when they actually do acheive collisions between prtons in the weeks to come. Hopefully the scientists can be trusted, and their assurances that no harm will come of their creation will be true. The problem is, scientists have often been proved untrustworthy, and I have a feeling that harm will come. Not in the shape of a Black Hole, but I find it hard to believe that Governments, even European ones, would put the billions into the experiment that they have without an ulterior motive. I think that whatever is found in that infernal machine below the Alps will at some point in the future be turned into weopory, just as the wonders of the atom swiftly turned into the horrors of Hiroshima. A Higgs Boson Blaster, or something. And even if that was not the case, there is still the almost criminal waste of available scientific funds which should surely be diverted to the prevention of climate change or the saving of human lives in the poorest societies.

I'm not anti-science. I love technology, much of which is a waste of genius. Why invent and create the Nintendo Wii, when we haven't yet mastered the solar panel? We seem ever able to divert our minds to the trivial. I would like an affordable 20 megapixel camera soon, though. So I am not anti-science. I love a good discovery. I detest the anti-intellectual stupidity of the likes of Sarah Palin, who can come to a position of potentially global power while still believing things that 99% of European children have grown out of by the time they turn ten. But I do think that there is more to learn in the real, physical, visible world that will help us to be a better global society, things that science should concentrate on before delving into areas that will tell us interesting things, but will really help no-one.

So. After the world didn't end, I wandered down the alley behind the chip shops and photographed some hearts, as well as the decay of this truly grotty part of Swanage. As an accompanying image I tried to photograph a snail, too. My hand was shaking (a result of too much wine last night) and the darned thing was too quick for me. The pictures are shaky and blurred. But while I was watching the snail I was also thinking about the collision of things, in the physical world. Two human beings meet and their hearts collide, and nobody can say what the outcome will be. The most important outcome will remain forever hidden, in the spirit and soul of the beings themselves, a place that scientists can never, ever look, and some may not even believe in.

Why a speeding snail should have brought that to mind, I really couldn't say.

The Oddness of Swanage

Spent a hugely entertaining evening at a perfomance of 'The Strange Sea Sighed' by Peter Cooper, Tara Dominick & Matt Wilkinson last night. The whole thing was about the wonder & oddness of Swanage, what draws us to it, keeps us here, and the surrealism that surrounds us. It was a fantastic performance, moving, humourous and inspiring.

A Thomas Hardy passage (from The Hand of Ethelberta I think) referred to the sea going folk who live their lives on the water and only have a vague concept of the areas inland. It made me think about my own preferences. I love the shore. I'm uneasy on the sea and wary of water, but when I go inland I yearn for the coast. I'm entertained by the city, but claustrophobic, and I fail entirely to see the point of the countryside as a dwelling place, other than to prevent overcrowding on the shoreline.

I like to be by the edge, and to look out from the water's edge in the safe assuredness that in front of me is a wilderness, and that as hard as we might try to bugger it up, we cannot control it. From Peveril Point (in the picture above) on a good stormy day like today, you get a real sense of the power of nature, the ferocity of the tides and currents and fuming foam that crashes and leaps on the jagged rocks stretching from the shore and you can feel the very fragility and impermanence of your tiny self, while at the same time feeling at one with something huge and forever.

The photograph above was taken on a day in early summer when the wind was singing siren songs of lost souls as it whistled through the crumbling concrete structure that hangs teetering from the cliff edge. Catching the song from some feet away, unsure of where it was coming from, the feeling was supernatural, eerie, prompting a shudder as it spoke to something deep in the human psyche that harks back to times of fireless nights in dark caves with savage beasts in the forests beyond. Beying 21st century man, I recorded the sound on an mp3 recorder, and perhaps I'll stick it up here if I can figure out how. Then I turned and walked away, pushed hard by the wind toward town and a soya latte, one sugar, in a friendly cafe.

A Whole Lotta Love

Close to the fantastic campsite we stayed at in the Forest of Dean (notice how positive I'm being? It's because I'm going out for a vegan pizza tonight - at least that's what I'll be ordering; we'll see how they cope!) was a roadsign. The road sign was covered in hearts. Unfortunately it was also getting dark and what light there would have been was also hidden beyond a canopy of trees below a heavy sky.

I don't recall what the village was called, though it had a green with a red phonebox, which was nice, and clearly a lot of happy young loved-up kids who spent their evenings professing their adoration for each other on this dirty old sign. Either that or it was a noticeboard for local doggers, but I prefer to think of it as the former...

I'm far from convinced that this photograph (the heart) is in focus, but for me it works nonetheless. A good photo (and I'm not suggesting that this is one of my better shots, but I like it) can work regardless of technical perfection, I think. I see a lot of technically marvelous but deadly dull shots around, and I'd rather have a picture that says what it was meant to say despite being technically inferior than a picture that didn't speak to me. This one I can look at and it clearly says 'sit'... but I hope it helps to tell the story of this romantic / dirty place.

That's my excuse, anyway.

Here's That Coffee I Promised You

Looking back over the last few posts I noticed how negative they were, so thought a shot of caffiene might help.

Hand rails are a good place to find hearts, so obviously a good place to leave them too. They present a challenge, photographically, as they can appear too flat, or the background beyond can be distracting. Sometimes the light reflects too much if the surface is glossy, and I have to decide between a straight-on shot or whether to shoot at an angle - generally I shoot straight-on with the hearts, but I vary it from time to time. This one's nice as the accompanying picture has a similarly narrow depth of field, so you get a lovely mottled effect as a foil to the focussed areas.

I do love finding hearts without names attached too. They're left by people who have a need to express non-specific love to all around them. The world needs more people like that.

What's to Love in Weymouth?

Without wishing to be rude, it's a bit grim in Weymouth. It wasn't helped by the wet weather, but the gravelly beach, the run down side streets, the Standard British High Street, the traffic, the Pleasure Pier (where I couldn't find a single pleasure to be had, unless you count Schadenfreude), and the way the train tips you out into what appears to be a mini red light district.

I couldn't help thinking that in just four years time a place that at the moment has all the charm of a faded turd will have to be polished into something that won't be overwhelmigly shameful to see. The Olympics (of which I'm not a big fan) is not that far away, and Weymouth will be hosting the sailing events. It's just my opinion, but whatever people may say, sailing is not a poor person's sport, while Weymouth is very much a poor person's holiday resort. I know the supposed point of hosting the Olympics is regeneration, but there just isn't the time or money to fix Weymouth as well as London... I wonder what an international crowd of yachting enthusiasts will make of it...

Anyhoo, enough negativity. On the positive side, the kids loved it, there are some lovely examples of old seaside architecture, I found a good book in a charity shop and an OK pub to sit and read it in, and I know that the old Weymouth, over the river is a lot nicer than the centre, where I was. But then, I was looking for graffiti, so it's the tatty tourist bit I was after. This was taken down towards the Sealife centre, where I was dropping ladies and the children, and I'm really pleased with it. This is a great heart, and as I was taking it my cynical side was thinking 'should be a seller', and the landscape side sums Weymouth up too I think. Faded, tatty, but optimistic.