The Cultural Tourist

The following pieces are a continuation of my exploration of using mixed media and photography whilst concentrating on transitory moments of urban existence. In my head, they are a kind of utterance of modern impression – capturing a moment of time and light with photography and then further expressing the essence of this moment with digital drawing, paint and other mixed media in combination with the photograph.

Katherine Mansfield; a renown New Zealand modernist short story writer famous for her Impressionistic ‘capturing the moment ‘pieces – when I consider my latest work, it is her writing that is in the back of my mind.

“And it seemed to her that kisses, voices, tinkling spoons, laughter, the smell of crushed grass were somehow inside her.” – ― Katherine Mansfield, The Garden Party and Other Stories

Blurred edges, hazy experiences, a wink of a moment caught as best as one can with words or in my case; images.

‘Apple Dapple’ developed from a moment of sitting in the garden in the summer sun, sleepily looking at an overladen apple tree with the light glinting through the leaves into my eyes.

‘The tree and the building’ stemmed from looking at a tree and its distorted reflection in the windows of an unremarkable looking building. It gave me ideas of grids, stained glass windows and cubism.

‘Shadows through the window’ grew out of a photo of a shadow of a tree through a semi-translucent window in an art gallery. The suggestion of what else there could be, the effect of the light and gestural capacity of impressionism is evident.

‘After the rain’ focuses on a patch of wild space with its glistening leaves and layers of weeds and flowers after it has been raining.

The final pieces here sometimes change quite dramatically from the starting point – I do not let the original idea I am try to capture dominate the proceedings. If it feels right to carry on working on a piece with mixed media that might ‘overthrow’ the initial concept, then I will do so. Other times, the final piece is very close to what I originally captured in the photograph. Concept and process hold equal status for me and I tend to instinctively play with these.

The following works are currently at the digital montage stage. As yet I have not decided whether I will let them remain like this or introduce mixed media to the proceedings. These images began from photographs of some of my travels when I was much younger – in these cases, through central Africa and Egypt.

Looking back at these photos, I have mixed feelings about it all, knowing what I know now about poverty, exploitation, globalisation, about intolerance, religious wars and terrorism. It’s not that I was completely unaware when I was younger – it just didn’t seem to dominate the everyday as much for whatever reason, be it the media, or the rose-coloured spectacles of youth. However I don’t regret the backpacking. I was lucky – privileged that I was able to do this in the first instance, and return to find decent work with no real problem in London in my 20’s.

With teenagers of my own now, I wonder whether they will have these same opportunities. It feels like they won’t, that they have a lot more to worry about – or is it something that should be actively encouraged anyway. Travelling no doubt provides experiences, encourages tolerance and stretches the mind that just reading about it, wouldn’t have done. Have we wound ourselves up so tight that we are afraid to do anything?

So back to these old photos – oddly they don’t feel strange to me which I thought they would, given my life now– in fact they still feel familiar. They are like an imprint within myself, intrinsic to my existence and experience. Having scanned these old photos, I have created a digital file onto which I have added digital montages of different patterns. These patterns represent a repeating life force yet on closer inspection they are imperfect, with evidence of ongoing changes.

These 2 works are a kind of continuation of what I was concentrating on last month – those small windows of urban existence – in particular reflections in a puddle and in a small local river respectively. These reflections draw one in, become internalised, and are then transformed imaginatively and poetically. I find it interesting that we can take something that is really quite ordinary and let it reflect some other unconscious dream or paradise – all down to a bit of sunshine, shadow and ripple of water. This to me is reminiscent of ideas surrounding art and the sublime and how we as humans develop feelings of awe and fear when confronted by the magnitude and beauty of nature.

On a more grounded level, I have been trying to experiment with different materials in terms of painting and drawing with these 2 pieces. Normally I would use oil paint combined with my photographic transfers but I was fortunate last year to win a Cass Arts Materials bursary so have had the luxury of being able to purchase different types of materials to play with. To this end, I bought some water colour paints and pencils and also pastel pencils and have combined these with my puddle and river reflection images. Experimentation clearly comes with pros and cons in terms of the outcome, but on the plus side, it has allowed me to draw much more delicately within the work which I am pleased about.

Sometimes, (in fact very often), it is not the large and spectacular that grabs my attention but the small and insignificant. I had been suffering from a particularly nasty virus for over 6 weeks and as a consequence there was not a lot I could face doing art-wise. The thought of working on anything too big and complex combined with the wonderful but often too complicated life we can all lead was just too much for my addled brain and consequently made me withdraw considerably for a bit.

The art that I have been working has been very small, and more expressions of solace and quiet pleasure. Shadows through a window, wildflowers growing in urban areas, reflections in the river, a pot plant as a still life – these are the things that take me away and give me pause for thought.

Using existing photographs of mine, I concentrated on playing digitally with the small and intimate images, then transferred these onto small primed boards and began painting within them – small meditations on the ordinary and magic in their own little way. I have some way to go to complete these – I have only painted within the wildflower images so far, but look forward to doing more soon.