And so it begins

Purbeck Art Week begins today. Lots of hard work to get ready. Imagine if I ever did a major national show! Hope people like my show...

This picture is from Swanage, recently. I like this one, I like the sunlight on the tarmac and the tiny blue flower. Vick doesn't. Ho hum. One of my favourite things is reflected sunlight on tarmac, and this, though direct light and dappled, is close to that.

It was taken here.

Art Week, Hurtling Towards Me

Every year I tell myself that I'll be ready early for Dorset / Purbeck Art Week and every year I find myself in a crazy rush the week before. This is the week before and I'm now in a crazy rush, sitting here putting way too many £££s worth of ink on lovely lovely paper that costs more than I like to think about and I know that if I want I could be sat here doing this til midnight... and you never really know if it's worth it until the Art Week is over. Even then sometimes you wonder why you put yourself through it!

However. I know why I do it. If I didn't I'd have less incentive to get my work together and to a point nearing finished. This is a never-ending project and I'm hopeless without a deadline, so the imposition of a deadline makes me get things done. And every year since I started this thing I find myself meeting strange and interesting people who express a fascination with what I'm doing. Hence the 'strange'! But that makes it more than worthwhile. It makes it wonderful, and it makes me keep going.

This is a heart found at Studland, a few miles from here. Being a local picture it stands a chance of selling during Purbeck Art Week! I don't do these pictures necessarilly to sell of course - I'd have given up a long time ago if that was the case. I do them because that's what I do, and each picture tells a little story about the place it was in or the person who put it there. Then when they're put together in a book, they tell a story about Love and about People In Love and about the world we live in, with all its love and hate and anger and warmth and how we cope with that as a species. So I really hope to sell some books, as there's an awful lot to learn in there!

This heart at Studland is here.

The Density of Cities

I spent the Bank Holiday weekend on a Transition Training course - learning how to help create a town that is ready for the world after the Age of Cheap Oil. Thinking globally and acting locally, how will we avoid the worst of climate change, and what will we do when we can't afford the energy we use day-to-day today because the price of oil is inevatably going to rise and everything we do relies upon it? The course assumed an acceptance amongst participants that change was necessary and was designed to enable us to spread the word, expand our local groups and to understand a lot more about the psychology of change, and of the psychology of resistance to change, as resistance is surely what we will meet a lot along the way.

I should also add that the course was amazing. This was an incredibly inspiring weekend - to meet people from all over Dorset who are working towards sustainable communities at all levels fills me with hope. I would urge anyone with an interest in a positive, sustainable future to make contact with their local Transition group and to add their skills and dreams to the mix.

The Transition Network website might help if you want to know more about what I'm on about.

I didn't mention my New York trip last year... I felt too guilty about the carbon footprint of the trip. I did think, however, about the differences in community resilience between a village, a town, and a big city. Villages are reliant on the car for survival and nowadays lack the necessary facilities for everyday living, though they do have land, required if we are to grow food for our own communities. Towns can often be reliant on a larger neighbour (Swanage lacks facilities because our County Council assumes that we will travel to Wareham or to Poole to reach them), but they have more potential to regain resilience, to grow food on surrounding land and so to be sustainable environmentally and as a community. Big cities can do this too - many cities are a collection of towns and villages that have merged together to become a larger entity, but they may lack the green space they'd need if they were to be self supporting.

The Transition Handbook has an interesting quote about New York. New Yorkers have some of the smallest carbon footprints in the USA because of the way they live within a dense city, so in a sense they are getting something right. In a recent pwer outage, however, the structures the city dwellers were dependent on began to crumble, however - without energy based on fossil fuels the modern city cannot function. New york does have a Transition movement though - it'll be great to see how they get along. Maybe next time I go, which I hope will be soon, I'll travel there by boat and pay the Transition people a visit ... wouldn't that be nice!

This picture, taken from the Brooklyn Bridge, shows the density of the city and the lack of anything natural. It's an exageration of course, the whole city doesn't look like this, but it paints a picture of an artificial space that we need to work back from towards sustainability.

Happy St George's Day!

I took this this afternoon in Bridport, and it seemed so terribly, terribly English that I thought I'd offer it as a St George's gift to you all! Only the English could come up with a pet shop window display as oddly sweet as this is, and Bridport is a wonderfully English market town itself - the heart was here, just opposite the pet shop on the wall outside the gents'.

I was over there after visiting the very English seaside town of Lyme Regis to drop some work in at the Blue Lias gallery - actually I took the work over to show the chap there and he liked it so took some straight away, which was great. It's a really lovely gallery right in the centre of town, so if you ever need an excuse to visit Lyme, it's a good reason to go!

I'm heading downstairs now for a pint of English Ale, and I may even treat myself to the traditional English bag of crisps in front of the telly. We show St Patrick how to celebrate!

Bridges of Love

I went to London with Vicki and the kids last week and as ever came home with a few hearts. I also returned with a load of duff stuff where the focus was too soft as I'd rushed the pictures at dusk - the price of trying to shoot quickly so the boys wouldn't get bored...

This was on Tower Bridge, where there were several. Bridges are always good for hearts - I've found them on Brooklyn Bridge, several bridges in Paris, the Ponte Vecchio in Florence, all over the place in Venice, and on a few over the Thames. I remember way back seeing some on the Sydney Harbour Bridge years back, but I haven't been there since starting this set of pictures - I wish! There must be some symbolism relating bridges to romance - perhaps the joining of two bodies (of land) or the bridging of divides... perhaps I'll google it later. The odd thing with hearts on bridges is that often the bridge is a famous one, and to photograph it in an original way (or in a way that I want to see it, at least) is really hard. I tend to end up looking at the river, or at details of the bridge's construction. This one I quite like.

Speaking of the river, I saw the Roni Horn show at Tate Modern while I was there. Not my mug of coffee at all. I knew I didn't like the germanic deadness of the portrait work, but thought I'd like her work on the Thames. Having seen it in real life, I didn't like that either - without wishing to be rude, all her annotated work (the drawings and photographs) come across as humourless and smacks of the kind of art described as pretentious (I'm sure she takes it very seriously and that no pretense is involved) - like very well executed art student work, the 'artfulness' of which you hope the student will grow out of... harsh? I spent £7 on the ticket which gives me the right to an honest review!

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster's TH.2058, down in the Turbine Hall, was fantastic, however. The biggest installation space in the world, surely, and HT.2058 makes great use of it, immersing the visitor in a post-disaster London. I love sci-fi and this was like being a part of it. Not for everyone, but wonderfully disturbing.

Tower Bridge is here.

I want to go on holiday!

I was just sitting here looking at the greying view and thinking "I need a holiday". I probably don't NEED a holiday, but I really would like one... probably a reaction to my friend and fellow photographer Thierry Roy jetting off to New York today. And the fact I had a lovely weekend in the sunshine and now it's raining and I'm sat at my desk. And holidays are always good!

So I dug through some love landscape pics I hadn't yet completed and there were a bundle from Barcelona last summer. This one was taken early one morning at the Biblioteca Joan Miró de Barcelona, built in 1990 but already a mess of vandalism and frequented mainly by alcoholics and drug users from the looks and smells around it (I've written about this before in an earlier post).

There was a human poo near this heart. At least it didn't look or smell like anything any dog I've ever met would do. Sorry if you were enjoying the picture until then...

A beautiful building in need of a little TLC, I'd say. Funnily enough, it's on an island - I'm sure it could be gated off at night to keep it safe for the future and for the people who actually use the library facilities inside. I was amazed to find it was still a working library considering the outside looked like a stage set from Children of Men.

Anyway, it's a great building from the air too, as seen on Google maps.

What chance Peace & Progress through the G20?

I feel strangely excited about the fact that Obama is in England, as if there's a chance I might bump into him. In Swanage. It takes me back to the strange excitement I felt about being in New York just before his election, as if Something Huge were about to happen...

This was taken alongside the Hudson on November 1st last year, just 3 days before that historic vote, and I put it here now because at the time it amused me that the Obama / Biden sticker was on a bin and I remember thinking 'I hope he's not going to be rubbish...'. I'm thinking that today too, though I'm not sure exactly how I expect a politician (which is what he is, although so many of us would like him to be more) not to be rubbish. They all end up disappointing us in one way or another, at least they do once they get a taste of power.

I've decided that the P + P on the tree stands for Peace & Progress, though I imagine it's more likely to be Peter & Patricia or something. And Progress, I should stress, is not the unsustainable capitalist Progress of the past, with its emphasis on technology, industry & constant financial growth. I long for Post Peak-Oil Progress, sustainable localism with a global understanding... not much, then!

Here's a map - do check these because you get to 'walk with me' in Manhattan! Actually, here the Street View runs out just beyond where the heart and bin were, but if you look towards the river, it was just to the left of the columns...