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!

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.

first post - here is the love:

with each post i want to introduce a new love landscape image and tell you a bit about it, or at least what i think about it. i'll start with some of the pictures people seem to like the best, and i'll add new ones as i produce them. at the moment i have around 2,000 individual photos to pair up, from all over the place over the last year. i hope this blog will make me get on with them!

this first image is called untitled 33 - it was taken in an alley next to the odeon in bournemouth, and with any print should come a scratch and sniff panel of urine, sick and bins. the red heart is one of the most pouplar i've done, and people like the pairing (this one's over my fireplace downstairs), though they often miss the darkness of the full graffiti piece.

i don't do the graffiti, by the way, i just record it. usually the landscape on the right is more landscapey, but it is there to describe the location/situation, so might be an interior or an urban scene, or anything that puts the heart in context.

i've only spoken to a few graffiti artists about what i do, and i know some will be put out at having their art recorded and made into a piece of interior art. one guy asked me what gave me the right to photograph someone else's art and 'frame' it as my own. well, firstly, their art is often vandalism of a public space, so ownership is questionable, though i'd respect the right of any artist to ask me to withdraw a piece. secondly, as a photographer, anything i photograph becomes my image as a result of the way i compose the picture and by the very fact that i chose to compose the picture. if this were hung on my wall and another photographer were to photograph my wall and publish it, apart from the issue of it being a private space that they've photographed, i believe that the artwork is the their own... if anyone ever reads this, comments are welcome!