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Intro
Another eclectic season: René Magritte style surrealist images were again my main theme but my practice embraced other genres including:
- product photography
- wedding photography both in Jamaica and in the UK
- street
- travel
- a spot of astro-photography, but sadly without my Star Tracker.
Some travel:
- Jamaica – Sarah & Mark’s wedding
- Tallinn in Estonia
- Clavell Tower in Dorset
Top Images
Image created for Karl Taylor Education
- Positioning in the frame, bang-on. Used the overlay function in Capture One to align the elements in the shot (live view) with the art director’s sketch
- General lighting good
- Gradient lighting on background, OK but could have been more extreme
- Highlight on the blade should have been higher, aligned with logo
- Sawdust needed to be more visible.
MG shot at the Stoke Poges Fete where the Photographic Club was exhibiting.
Lots of work required to remove the other cars, people, etc., in the background
Idea copied from a painting seen at the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition.
My version though uses a picture of the moon taken in my back garden, a shot of the Milky Way made in Northumberland, both on a gradient of dark blue at the bottom to almost entirely black at the top to give a subtle impression of atmosphere.
“My Double Secret III”
Latest in a series of reinterpretations of René Magritte’s “Double Secret”
Very popular with my colleagues at the Amersham Photographic Society’s weekly coffee meetings.
The clouds were shot on an iPhone out of an aeroplane window.
The man is a Magritte-style self-portrait shot in my kitchen.
“Another Magritte Mirror Image”
Latest in a series of attempts to recreate René Magritte’s “Not to be Reproduced” image of the man looking at his own back in a mirror.
“Two Bodies Embracing”
My reinterpretation of Man Ray’s “Lovers” where he suggested that the lips looked like two entwined bodies.
“Tallinn Rim Light II”
Vic Attfield suggested cropping a third from the top of the original, i.e., chopping the subjects’ heads off. This draws attention to the shadows and makes the image generally more enigmatic.
“The Jurassic Coast at 3am”
“View from the Tower”
The view over the Jurassic Coast, clearly showing the shadow of Clavell Tower.
LongTerm Projects
I now have 3 candidate projects for an RPS A panel:
- Landscape – “Trees of Stoke Common”
- Visual Arts – “Reinterpreting the Work of René Magritte”
- Travel – “Clavell Tower”
Progress Against Goals
New artists discovered:
- Louise Bourgeois – painter and sculptor – massive bronze spiders and the Tate Modern
- Frida Kahlo – figurative painter, a surrealist bar the fact that she “paints [her own] reality, rather than dreams”
- Yoyoi Kusama – installation artist – known for her polka dots
- Robert Crumb – radical cartoonist
- Wolfgang Tillmans – German contemporary musician, painter and photographer
Working across multiple genres as demonstrated by the potential A panels above.