Borth and Ynys Hir:

Another activity that I did at the end of 2016 was to take a group of Photography Learners (a private group I teach in the village of Gorsgoch not far from where I live) on a day trip to visit Borth Zoo and the RSPB’s Nature Reserve at Ynys Hir in the north of Ceredigion. I set this group up to meet a need in my teaching, namely that often when I have finished formal Higher education and Further education courses, I still have requests from students asking if it would be possible to continue to learn. With the support of the village hall I was able to offer those learners interested such an opportunity at a relatively low cost. The learning itself is very relaxed, sometimes I  do a workshop, sometimes we talk about the work and occasionally we go on a field trip as was the case here.

Even though this was at the end of November we had a perfect day; the zoo was fun and the animals entertaining to photograph, Ynys Hir was really beautiful and we got some great photos. I have to admit though that when I am teaching I don’t often get much opportunity to take photographs, and I am more interested in my students having the greater success, however I am attaching a few images that I shot whilst working.

2nd Year Undergraduate Painting Class:

I am using this period at the beginning of the New Year to look back at the end of the last, and to put some of the activities that I did last term into the content of my new blog. One such activity could be the opportunity I took to go along to Dr June Forster’s undergraduate, second year painting class. Being able to sit in on undergraduate classes has been one of the really nice things about being an Masters student and also one way in which the School of Art is very supportive (I cannot imagine that this happens at every institution – I do not recall it occurring when I was an undergraduate). Provided that you are open and willing to learn and I try not impact on the class too much; then I find that everyone is very welcoming, supportive and that you can really get involved with the activities.

I cannot attend every session but I managed to sit in on three of June’s painting classes, two practicals and one theory on materials and one of Prof. John Harvey’s lecturers on ‘board preparation’. I particularly enjoyed the practical sessions and I only wish that I could have attended more of them. Below are some of my efforts.

First are two near identical paintings of the same subject matter on different coloured grounds, one is painted over a warm colour, the other over a cold colour. There are some good points about the paint application, but not too many and I definitely got caught in the trap of narrow thinking. I was obsessed at the time with making both paintings identical, which of course they did not have to be and I also did not use the coloured ground to its best advantage; I could have use this to create two very different takes on the same subject. As it was, because these paintings were bright and on boards I think I only need another two the same to make some good dinner table place mats – not good!

If there was one thing I learnt from these classes, one thing that stuck in my head, it was when June said to remember that ‘each painting that we do is actually about our next painting’ – what are we learning right now and how are we going to make it better next time?

In my case, after painting the fruit still life, I learnt to relax my painting. My next painting, the following week, was a still life of some sticks in an iron fire bucket. I remembered how the previous week I had over focused and tried to replicate the still life and both paintings meticulously and so I stood back further, used a pallet knife and tried to remain relaxed. I think this painting is much more successful.

A bucket with sticks.
Acrylic On Board.
30x43cm

Traditional Artists:

As well as all of these photographers and naturalists, I am influenced by a number of artists. Some of the ‘greats’ have to be mentioned, at the head of the list has to be Leonardo da Vinci, who could almost be in the list above as he was as much a scientist as he was an artist. I like all of his work from drawings of the body, to town plans, inventions, frescos and paintings; where I find myself growing fonder of the Mona Lisa by the day. As well as Da Vinci, the work of Rembrandt van Rijn, J.M.W. Turner and John Everett Millais. They were all very different artists but I still find their work inspirational, if just for the skill level involved. I know that this is no substitute for going to see the actual paintings (and part of me does not like promoting a multinational company) but I have to admit to finding Google’s new ‘Google Arts & Culture’ really great at locating some of your favourite paintings and seeing them in detail and within the museum that they are housed in; this is very useful if you live in West Wales.
To the list above I would also add the Impressionist movement, which I have looked at time and again since being a boy, particularly Claude Monet and of course Vincent van Gogh (although he is almost certainly at the other end of the movement from Monet perhaps almost outside of the movement – he would probably think so).

Contemporary Artists:

Finally, we get to contemporary art. The list is not that long, although please do not think that this is because I do not like contemporary art (I do, a lot) but rather I have not made up my mind about most contemporary artists. The list here was longer but I find myself taking names off. I think that part of the issue these days is that over an artist’s lifetime we can expect their art to change to a greater degree than was perhaps true 100 years ago and certainly a century before that, and so it is perhaps natural that we will like some of their work but not all?

Just making the list is Jean Tinguely and his sculptures of movement and destruction; and at the opposite end of the sculpture scale is the calm and reflective land art of Richard Long. However, much of my preferred contemporary art breaks away from traditional media and becomes conceptual art. I very much like the staged photographs of Jeff Wall, and the amazing video installation that was ‘Hole in Space’ by Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz. More recently (as part of my visual culture module) I was introduced to the world of new media art through artist Maurice Benayoun on whom I had to do a presentation. I still have many questions I want to ask Benayoun about his work but I cannot deny his influence on me over the last year. As part of my exploration of new media art came across the art of Golan Levin whose work I found interesting, intelligent and fun. And last but not least Katie Paterson whose work is closest thing I have to someone who is directly inspiring me within the art world. Predictably perhaps her work is a mixture of art and science, I have been surprised by the variety and quality of her projects; to date have always found her work interesting, exciting, as well as setting a standard for me to work towards.

Where to put my influences?

I have seen many other artists put their influences or more specifically the people who influenced them directly onto their ‘about page’. I have though, after some consideration, decided to put this information in the form of a blog entry. This is because; I regard it as slightly transient information. True there seem to be some people who always influence you, but if I think back the people influencing me, say 10 years ago, are not the same as the people who influence me today, nor are they likely to be the same in 10 years time. Putting this in a blog allows me to easily update it and if necessary I can create a later influences entry.

The other reason for not putting this on the about page of the website is that I think there is a tendency for readers to see some well known artists names at the bottom of the page and then to pigeonhole that artists work into a particular category of art, to say ‘ah this person is influenced by such an artist so they must be x’.

Finally, putting information about artists on the about page does somewhat limit you in what you can write, more than half a dozen would look strange, and I wanted to say that bit more about a much wider range of people so here seemed to be the right place to do it.

Broadly speaking I am heavily influenced by inventers, pioneers and explorers more than I am by artists, although artists can be some or all of these things too. Many of those who I like have multiple disciplines and they often sit on the edge of art and science. It is also true that I seem mostly to be influenced by people who are dead and at least a hundred years old; I find history fascinating and perhaps that is the reason why this occurs, although I think that time is very good at sorting out those people who are excellent at what they do from those who are perhaps good publicists in their own time.

The Naturalists:

I am going to start my list though with people who are not artists at all but rather some of the great naturalist’s of the 19th century: Charles Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace and Alexander von Humboldt. Darwin perhaps does not need any introduction, although Wallace and Humboldt might, but what these individuals have in common, what I find inspiring about them is the way that they could see the world differently from the other people of their time, they were fascinated by the natural world around them and the way in which they could draw upon many disciplines to make their groundbreaking theories. Darwin for example could be said to be a theologian, philosopher, zoologist, botanist, geologist, meteorologist, explorer and writer and without all of these different disciplines he would have never had written about natural selection. This was positively artistic of them, in a Renaissance kind of a way, although they were probably too constrained by Victorian values to realise this.

To this list I would like to add some one from the 20th century: Jacques-Yves Cousteau, whose multidisciplinary skills and enthusiasm for the natural world I always find exciting.

These naturalists and explorers were often accompanied by painters and later photographers, some of which were very special in their own way: Sydney Parkinson was a young botanical illustrator who was employed by Joseph Banks to travel on Captain James Cook’s first voyage of the Pacific and who completed some amazing paintings and drawings in the bottom of a boat in conditions which eventually killed him. Photographer Frank Hurley who participated in Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Endurance Expedition and who perhaps went to greater lengths to take, store, develop and return his photographs than any photographer before or since?

Photographic Pioneers:

There is whole raft of photographic pioneers who I find inspirational:

Hércules Florence, one of the lesser known inventors of photography, who seemed to invent his process without outside influence in the depths of Brazil.

John Herschel a scientist and artist and inventor of the Cyanotype method of photography; whose techniques were employed by Anna Atkins to photograph botanical subjects and who was herself female photographic pioneer when virtually no other women were using photography.

Edward S. Curtis who took on the task of recording the story of the Native Americans through photography (and other methods).

Peter Henry Emerson for taking such beautiful photographs of rural life and challenging the photographic institutions of the day.

Wilson Alwyn ‘Snowflake’ Bentley for just being the best snowflake photographer ever.

James Nasmyth and James Carpenter were and engineer and astronomer but they worked together to produce an amazing body of work ‘The Moon, Considered as a Planet, a World, and a Satellite’ (1874); for whose photographic illustrations they made plaster models of the moon’s surface before photographing them . I discovered this after I started my landscape generator project but it is possible to see how it might now act as an influence for this work.

Roman Vishniac seemed to teach himself photography as a child in 19th century rural Russia, before going on to be a pioneer of macro photography and an important photographer of the Jewish people and history.

Finally here, Percy Smith was not a photographer (although he has a strong influence in photography) but rather a pioneering natural history film maker. One of the first people to film microscopic life and time lapsed sequences of plants.

All of the photographs above are copyright free.

An artist’s website:

I have decided to be honest and tell you of the trouble I had in making up my mind to create this website; it has been (and continues to be) a real mental wrestling match. Actually, this decision has been taken away from me, in that we have had to create an artists website for our MA in Fine Art at Aberystwyth University. However, I am glad my hand has been forced because there is a large part of me that wants to tell people what it is I do (and ultimately I think that this is good for me) and because I think that this ‘struggle’ with creating a website actually lies at the heart of my work.

To make this clearer, I will expand my thoughts slightly on one of my projects. My Landscape Generator or ‘Belvederoscopic Generator’ project which was born out of the idea / notion that so much of our world has already been photographed; an idea that I started to think about a couple of years ago when undertaking my teacher training. At the time I was considering the evolution of technology, the exponential growth of technology and the trillions of photographs that are taken every year on earth (in relation to teaching photography). I had for a while realised that taking a unique photograph was becoming an increasingly large problem.

Teaching at Aberystwyth & the trouble with photography:

I remember finishing teaching on a beautiful day at Aberystwyth’s Old College; we had been talking that day about how award winning photographs such as those by photographer Phil Jones which won him the Urban Wildlife category of the 2012 British Wildlife Photography Awards and which had been taken very close to where we were standing, of the starlings that roost beneath the pier on Aberystwyth’s sea front. As if to fulfil a prophecy the starlings that evening were in fine form, at sunset they gathered in a perfectly clear sky to perform their ‘murmuration’, their dance above the town. The people of Aberystwyth are to some extent used to this sight as it occurs every year from autumn through into winter, but this proved to be such a spectacular sunset, such a clear sky and such a large and impressive murmuration that I saw many people stop what they were doing and head towards the sea front camera in hand (this included me).

On arriving at the scene, I was confronted with the normal quandaries of a photographer, do I have the right lens on (I had a massive 300mm f/2.8 Tamron on my camera, but this really meant that I was lacking in wide angle shots)? Am I standing in a good spot? Can I get a better angle? What are my camera settings? For a time I was captivated by the spectacle before me, but after about 20 minutes or so I had taken most of the shots of the starlings that I was going to manage with a 300mm lens. I began to wish that I had brought another lens or had a different, lighter camera (again this kind of wishing is common in photographers). I started looking about and realised that there was another spectacle behind me, in some ways just as impressive but one that I was ill equipped to capture: this was the growing ranks of people with cameras stopping to photograph the scene. There were certainly hundreds of people maybe more. I knew a lot of people had cameras these days and mobile phones have certainly added to this, but the amount of people with DSLR’s, Range finders, Bridge cameras, and there were people with quality lenses, tripods, cable releases and every kind of accessory under the sun; in short every kind of camera possible seemed to represented that day on Aberystwyth sea front.

Starling Murmuration Crosses The Sun at Aberystwyth

That image of people photographing starlings at Aberystwyth will be etched in my mind forever, as it was the moment that I felt personally, that something shifted in photography. That photography had moved from being a unique, specialist activity to being something much more ubiquitous, open to everyone and part of everyday life. Indeed Mary Warner Marien in her book ‘Photography: A Cultural History’ tells us that:

‘The stream of images is so intense that contemporary observers have honed skills that allow them to assess and reject swiftly much in the daily rush of images. Where a person in the 1840s might dwell lengthily on a single, carefully stored daguerreotype, someone these days might hurriedly review and delete numerous images from an e-mail, in expectation of many more equally valuable ones to follow soon.’1. (Marien, XIV Intro).

I considered the starling photographs taken on the beach that day in-light of Marien’s observation. How many people took similar photographs? How many of these photographs were shared on the internet? And how many are languishing on someone’s computer half forgotten about and in danger (should the computer break) of being lost forever? How many people really look at their photography these days? Do I look at my photography enough, in a truly critical light, or am I caught up in a kind of photographic arms race: trying to purchase the next, latest, best piece of photographic equipment and take the sharpest, best composed, most vibrant photographs (although they perhaps don’t have any soul)?

Unique Photographs:

At the start of MA in Fine Art I was considering these points, I was considering them when I read an article on blogging platform ‘Photography-life’ entitled ‘Searching for Unique Photographs’ by photographer Spencer Cox. https://photographylife.com/searching-for-unique-photographs/  In this article Cox makes some interesting points, he explores the idea of whether photographs can be unique, whether people are becoming bored by seeing the same image again and again, and what can be done about this, saying:

‘A lot of us have a desire to take unique photos; we want to do something that has never been done before. There is nothing wrong with thinking like this. But, if you are after unique photos (and I tend to include myself in this category), are you chasing something that is impossible?’2. (Cox, photographylife 14th Oct 2016)

He focuses mainly on landscape photography and talks us through a number of examples of getting ‘different images’, about getting ‘something new’ into the scene; and there is nothing wrong with his advice on this, but it was a comment at the end of the article that started me thinking and which eventually led to my current body of work:

‘Aside from the instances mentioned above [in the original article] there are still a few places in the world where you can capture things that have never been seen before. Maybe you are a macro photographer searching for a rarely-seen species of beetle. Or, you could be a landscape photographer hiking to the inner reaches of the Canadian Rockies. If you capture a subject that few people have seen before, your photo will certainly be unique.’ 3. (Cox, photographylife 14th Oct 2016).

This got me thinking and I latched on to a few words in the first sentence ‘few places in the world’; what if the photographs were not taken in this world? And here I got my idea of making model landscapes of other worlds (out there in the Universe) and photographing the models to give me by own unique photographs.

However, you might be asking what this has to do with why I was reluctant to create my own website? Well, I believe photography does not stop at simply taking a photograph but rather it continues on to how that photograph is seen by others. How do we share our photography? I truly believe that we should share our work and I am guilty as the next person in having continued a trend of no longer printing my photographs but rather leaving them on my computer. Perhaps does not matter if you an ardent user of social media, if all of your photographs end up on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram but then are we just falling into the trap that Marien mentions above of creating so much photography that we are constantly ignoring images and deleting them, that much of time is just spent cataloguing the information that is contained within images. Is this even photography? Have we forgotten how to look at photographs?

If you consider a website as being another method of sharing this photographic and artistic information, then you may see why I have been so (over) cautious in creating my own website. How long before I am sharing all my images in an endless stream of data? It may be starting right now! I will however try and be sympathetic to this problem. You see, part of me wishes to go back to the 1840’s, and create work that is singular, unique, and one of a kind, that you could sit and stare at for awhile and realise that there is no other image like it; to be amazed, to be shocked, but in a good way, in the same way as when you develop a darkroom image for the first time. It is probably arrogant to believe that this could be achieved in the modern world, were images can be copied at the drop of a hat; but this does not stop me wrestling with this problem in my artwork. As my tutor for the website, Chris Iliff said after discussing my landscape generator project, ‘it is as though you want to be a magician, to not share your ideas, so that we wonder how you are creating your work’. I have to admit that this is true and indeed I am influenced, by magicians, performers, magic lantern shows and the early cinema of the late 19th and early 20th century’s.

I hope then that in my art work you will see someone who is very much involved with modern digital technology but who treats it with caution (the kind of respect that you might treat a venomous snake with) whilst remaining greatly influenced by historical ideas.

Sources:
1: Marien, Mary Warner, Photography: A Cultural History, 3rd Edition, pub 2010 Laurence King Publishing Ltd.
2 & 3: Cox, Spencer, Photography Life, 14th October 2016, https://photographylife.com/searching-for-unique-photographs/

See More of Spencer Cox’s photography at:http://www.spencercoxphoto.com/