Posts Tagged: Artists

Striving to have μεράκι

IMG_3067sgsm

Tulips in a vase, both beautiful and banal.
I wondered how to photograph them
A perspective from below to try to express the feeling of rising, growing even after they have been cut
The life that remains for a long time in bulb plants.
It did not look good, too much "contre-jour"
Keep them partly behind the curtain? Some element unseen always being more interesting.
Then the problem was the background, seing the house behind our house a sad very regular outline.
So take the picture from above?
The window became a problem, it really is not a pretty window and choosing a landscape format, it became more visible.
Then I thought to use the rather unsightly black rubber around those windows as if it was the black line that one was able to frame one's photograph with in the days of printing photos in the lab.
A favourite feature in Henri Cartier-Bresson's work, maybe to show the photos were never cropped.
Then the question: all around or not? The answer "not quite".

Striving to have μεράκι...

μεράκι (meraki): the word entered the Greek language from Turkish, but its meaning has evolved in Greek into a very complex concept of good taste, hard work and positive attitude towards hard labour.

Someone has meraki when that person is good at their job, when they do it dutifully and with great attention to detail no matter how hard it might be, without complaining, but rather enjoying and taking pride in it.

It can also be used in the sense of yearning.
from:
Lost in Translation.

Picasso at the Wren library

IMG_2358sgsm

Chesterton Community College Drama

IMG_2305sgsm

Chesterton Youth Theatre

The Bully Plays by Nell Dunn

Chesterton Youth Theatre
Direction Suzy Marston

IMG_1377sgB2

IMG_1387sgB2

IMG_1409sgB2

IMG_1451sgB2

Brixton

IMG_1350sgsm

Elspeth Owen’s Open Studio December 15 in Grantchester

IMG_1317sgsm

I Worried – Mary Oliver

IMG_5290I worried Mary OliverSGSM

The Key

P1110210Keysg

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Letters to a young poet (1934) Letter 4, 16 July 1903

Exhibition 2015 – Reflections

I approached the theme of the exhibition in three different ways:
A reflection on passing from Life to Death as both my parents died this summer
A question : Was the naming of the planets a reflection of man’s observation of himself, or does each man/woman reflect all the planets?
Looking for reflections of light and objects, I also found a reflection of a dream I had had ten years previously.

.

Reflection on passing from Life to Death

Both my parents died this summer. My mother, unconscious in the last days of her life, seemed to draw from her own source but she also seemed anxious. To my eye, her hands shaped a question mark.
My father, also unconscious, held the hand we gave him with surprising force. There was a strong sense of communication, of receiving and passing on.

.
.

IMG_9337_rtp  SG WEB

Vigil as dusk is reflecting on the table

Reflecting the Planets?

Is there a set of qualities that can be described very powerfully with the name of one planet?
Could I make ten self-portraits, one to reflect each of the planets?

Click on the cover to see a preview (the photos are a little distorted)

.

Too desirable Madam? or HRO IN(2015)

More than ten years ago, I had a dream in which my family was robbing a bank, looking for a treasure in underground passages; it felt half-heroic, half-dishonest. A man stood up and died. Then a young woman and I had to hide in a flat and as we were trying to enter unnoticed a small crowd was looking at a yellow sports car. As I was describing this dream in the following days, I was asked what that yellow sports car could represent. More than one idea came to mind. After this dream whenever I saw a yellow sports car I was reminded of the dream and thought of a more showy, more visible part of me, and why not?
In May 2015, I had to collect my passport from South Kensington and saw this car in a showroom window. As I was trying to photograph it without my reflection the woman on the photograph said goodbye to the man and turned; she must have seen me and this was her reaction.
It is only when I was working on printing it that my friend Peter commented on the number plate. The name of the showroom is
H.R. Owen but of course it could be heroin or heroine.

.

materia poetica

IMG_4196kenneth whitesgsm

The "known" materials of my life