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Restarting Public Work

September 30, 2022
ExhibitionUpdate

This blog post marks a transition point in my work. Not because I am exactly restarting work (I continued working, even increased my work rate / productivity during and after the Covid lockdown) but rather because my PhD is naturally heading into its final public phase. I am about to complete 3 /4 years working on the PhD, which followed on from an MA and before this teacher training. Prior to this, moving to Wales, meeting my wife, and a dozen years working in the photographic industry. In short, this moment in time marks a point where I can turn my attention squarely to making artwork hopefully moving my arts and teaching careers forward.

The focus of this new push will be the completion of the PhD project (which I will include on this website), and this will culminate at a final solo show at Aberystwyth School of Art in Oct / Nov 2023. The completion of this project will be a very public act – I need to go and work publicly in Liverpool with my photography, meet with various people at locations across Wales, and undertake research at Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru / The National Library of Wales. I am hoping that on the back of this I can exhibit this project at other locations in Wales and on the English / Welsh borders.

There have been several offshoot projects of both the PhD and MA that over the next couple of years I hope to fully realise, and I am also looking to make public my photographic archive which I have built up without exhibiting over the last 25 years.

As a result of the above between autumn 2022 and the summer of 2024 I am looking to increase my public profile. In the next few months anyone who views this website should see content moving around. There will be a new ‘art projects’ page – with all my recent / and archived work listed, a list of my exhibitions, and more regular blog posts. There should also be new links to my social media and academic pages.

Do check back over this period and please excuse any links that do not work or content that does not look complete, such issues are likely to be temporary. I am hoping that most of the large updates should be complete by Christmas 2022.

As a start I am going to post here a couple of images for a recent (August 2022) local exhibition that I was involved with. The group exhibition ‘Art at Waunifor’ has run over the 14 years at The Waunifor Centre in south Ceredigion. This was the second time that I have been involved and I was glad to be invited back. The work I exhibited here was of local natural history / wildlife and general historical photography. For more information on the show, artists and Waunifor see: Artists – Art at Waunifor  

Simons Waunifor Display Left
The Mill near Llanfair Clydogau
Simons Photographs
Simons Waunifor Display Right
Simons Waunifor DIsplay Left Closer

Images of Lockdown

October 15, 2020
Photography

For almost everyone lockdown has been at best difficult, at worst tragic, but one thing that is also true is that no two people seem to have had the same experience. Our lockdown has been extremely challenging but perhaps not in the way that many people have found it.

Just prior to the Covid pandemic we found ourselves reluctantly beginning the worst kind of house move: The one where you must / are forced to go, the house is sold and people are moving in, but you have nowhere to live. We came very close to finding ourselves truly homeless. Luckily, we had a good Samaritan in the form of kind farmer called Kay, who not only found us a temporary spot in a cottage that she has on her farm, but also allowed us to store an amazing amount of excess stuff in her agricultural outbuildings and supported us with many a kind word and gesture.

Almost the moment that we moved in Covid began to travel around the world, and by the time we had originally intended to be leaving Kay’s we were in full lockdown. We have been luckier than many in that we have been trapped in a beautiful, rural prison, with green space and fresh air – and my heart goes out to those people who have been trapped in flats in city centres.

That said we have experienced some very odd things: Staying in cottage that was not kitted out for permanent residence, lacking many amenities (very little internet, nowhere to dry clothes, a faulty heating system, and limited cooking space), and located in a remote valley where half the properties were holidays lets. Has meant that we have been on many walks in an otherwise empty valley (at one point I worked out the population of the whole valley was 12). We have felt an extreme lack of human contact, seen how the tourist industry collapsed and the worried that it caused, and took on the challenge of working from home without a communications network.

The photographs here highlight some of the challenges faced. There are images of the empty, increasingly overgrown playground, abandoned cottages, and working from home. There are two photographs of the bleak beach at Ynyslas near Borth in north Ceredigion where I found out that my face-to-face teaching was going to have stop and where my wildlife photography student group met for the last time on the 13th of March 2020, just ten days before the lockdown was announced – the weather seemed to fit the mood.  One image that might need explaining and sticks in my memory is the photograph of the laptop on an empty wooden bedframe. The mattress had been moved into the lounge where we were sleeping because six months into living in the cottage a rat had kindly died in the loft (in an unreachable position) just above the bed. The smell was unbelievable. Once a day I had to venture into the room and work in this position on the floor because this was the only point in the whole house that I could receive a decent 4G signal necessary for the Zoom meetings that I had to attend. The smell did eventually disappear but not before it left me with a conditioned neurological response where now all online conferences smell faintly of dead rat.

Home schooling – Trying to Concentrate at animal feeding time.
Ynyslas – the last day working outside.
The abandoned playground at the holiday cottages.
Club house games room, a new working space.
The drying tree.
Kids bedroom
Empty holiday cottage.
Empty holiday fridge.
No room in the bedroom. A room without wardrobes.
Pips and chips
The last student on the last day returns to the group.
A selection of images showing lockdown 2020.
My rat stink weblink.

Making the effort to take a photograph.

August 28, 2019
Photographic Theory

In the daily rush of life, it can be easy to start to push one’s art to the back of the que. Photography is everywhere and the smartphone makes it much easier to do, most people are now carrying a camera with them all the time. However, is recording everything constantly, worth doing, can it be called photography or art?

The watching of public events has started to make me think about this more. Whether a small local event or a national moment people often start by reaching for their phone. And now the moment is lived through the screen on the device and the images and video that is captured. This is particularly strange when considering national events because there is almost certainly high-quality professional footage and photographs of the entire proceedings readily available. Why don’t people just stop, concentrate on and enjoy the moment, their memories of the day would almost certainly be enriched if they did. As it is they run the risk of the main memory being that they could not get their device to focus at a critical moment, or that the flash did not fire, or … a similar problem. It is almost as if they always need their own version of the day recorded.

Of course, as a photographer, I do understand this desire – the challenge of the exceptional image that you created because you were there. I also though understand that creating a constant stream of images, can make for meaningless content, or at least the volume of the stream risks watering down any single image found within in it. You risk being overwhelmed by your own content: Unable to see the wood for the trees, unable to see the exceptional image because every image was good. Unable to process the volume of images required – and so the files become temporal and are at risk of being lost or accidently deleted.

Another risk is that you start to suffer from photographic apathy. I think that this is something that I have come close to in the past. It can take a couple of different forms: a). You start to take photographs for the sake of taking photographs, because other people are taking photographs, because you feel you must – or the like. That there is a lack of effort in the work and its execution is formulaic. b). You can’t be bothered to take a photograph: because it is too much effort, or someone else is already taking it (especially true is a crowd at a public event), or worse still you convince yourself that ‘they’ will be taking a better photograph.

Recently I found myself travelling home, sitting looking out of the car’s window, I watched the sun as it made its way towards the horizon. Suddenly, I sat-up for I realised that in the next 20 minutes we would be passing alongside Cors Caron. This is a raised bog and National Nature Reserve in Ceredigion in West Wales and an area of exceptional natural beauty. We looked set to reach the bog just as the sun will be going down and the light that day was already amazing. At that moment I had to make the decision to stop the journey, to rouse my already tired family, and to delay further our much-needed dinner. I would have very little time. I would also have to decide in advance what part of the bog to head to and consider which areas I could reach within the minutes available to me. In other words, I had to decide to be bothered, to care, to try – and take a photograph of a single moment (one of the things I like about the setting sun is that at least at this latitude it is momentary). In the past I have let such moments go but that day I decided to try.

Here is the photograph I took. It is not perfect, but then what does it mean for a photograph to be perfect? The greatest thing that can be said against it is that it is picturesque – a sin in many art circles. But for me this scene is a moment in time, a memory, a calm second after the rush out of the carpark and running down the track. A scramble through the vegetation at the edge of this small lake. Balancing by the water’s edge, one foot touching the water. And then a deep meditative breath as I calmed myself, steadying the camera to help the shutter speed, checking the composition and settings. The still glass like quality of the water, the dancing silhouettes of the foliage, the gentle dissolving of the salmon pinks into indigo hues as without a sound the sun disappears.

The Lake at Cors Caron - Last Moments of the Day - August 2019
The Lake at Cors Caron – Last Moments of the Day – August 2019

Abortive Anthotype

September 20, 2018
Photographic Experimentation
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The Anthotype is an early photographic process that uses botanical pigments extracted from plants as the basis for a light sensitive photographic emulsion. As with almost all early photographic processes of the mid-19th century ‘the Anthotype’ is the result of the overlocking work of several individuals.

However, unlike other photographic processes, the anthotype is not a singular thing: Different plants, different combinations of plants, and even the process of breaking down the plant can yield different results. Primary amongst the inventors of the anthotype was Mrs Mary Somerville who did a great deal of the research on different plant combinations in the 1840’s. She in turn built her research on the work of Henri August Vogel (who first noted that plant pigments were sensitive to light) and Theodor Freiherr von Grotthuss (who realised that light rays were causing chemical changes in the pigments). Sir John Herschel extended and added to Mary Somerville’s work, and later Robert Hunt and Michel Eugene Chèvreaul further expanded and improved the research. In short, all these people ‘invented’ the anthotype. For a more complete history of the anthotype, detail explanation of the process, practical tips do read Malin Fabbri’s publications particularly ‘Anthotypes: Explore the darkroom in your garden and make photographs using plants’ pub: Create Space Independent Publishing Platform, 2011.

My first experimentation with the anthotype, in the summer of 2018, was slightly abortive. Having come across the process in Christopher James’s book: ‘The Book of Alternative Photographic Processes’ (2nd Ed.) and without much detailed reading I decided to just invent my own concoction of plant extracts: 50g’s of strawberries, blueberries, and carrots, 3 yellow poppy heads, 15 red campion heads, 2 pickled beetroot and 1 level teaspoon of turmeric. This was the plant extract equivalent of throwing everything at it. Embarrassingly there was zero science in this (other than to say some of these some of these plants according to others had yielded good results individually, and plants that contained red pigments were meant to work well).

I can now see from doing just a little more research that that the individual prints or botanical combinations that work are specific and are usually born of much experimentation. Therefore, it would have been luck if I had managed to produce a reasonable image, and sure enough the experiment was at least a 90% failure:

Anthotypes take a long time to process (one of the attributes that made sure that this photographic technique was marginalised during the 20th century). The only method of creating a standard photographic positive image is to place a positive transparency on the light sensitive material. In this sense you are not taking a photograph, the anthotype is a photographic printing method, where you already have a positive photographic image through another process. The other way of using the anthotype is by creating a photogram – by placing objects directly on top of a sensitised piece of paper painted with the photo emulsion. In this case pressed plants are often the chosen object / subject. In either method the arrangement is left for days, weeks, or even months in the sun (depending on how strong your sunlight is) until the exposed botanical pigment fades. Over time the sun alters the chemicals in the exposed areas of the paper, whilst those areas that are covered are protected by the image or object and after exposure you should have your photograph. This photograph cannot be fixed, and whilst anthotypes have been known to last decades if stored correctly out of sunlight, they will eventually fade and disappear.

I tried the standard process of making a positive transparency print, putting it with the photo paper in a clamped glass frame and leaving it in the sun for several weeks. However, after a lengthy period I found that whilst there was an image it was extremely faint. My hypothesised reasons for this were that: a). I did not coat my paper with enough of the extract (the colour should be strong). b). My mixture was far too complex, and elements may have been cancelling one another out. c). The acid in the pickled beetroot may have caused problems with the emulsion.

This said, the process was not a complete failure. A slight image was left – not worth recording but hinting at something more. A much stronger mark was left on my consciousness. The beauty of this process and its ultimate goal of making a photographic image out of entirely natural and potentially sustainable ingredients is surely a target worth pursuing. I have promised myself that I will in the long run return to, continue, and expand my anthotype experiments.

This image shows a view of the castle motte at Trinity Saint David in Lampeter. The image is a digital positive transparency on top of an anthotype organic emulsion.
Digital Positive Transparency on top of an Anthotype organic emulsion – University of Wales, Trinity Saint David, Lampeter – Castle Motte through a window.

Quick Landscapes

March 10, 2018
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This entry follows on directly from my last entry at the end of 2017 where I had made a number of works plein air. Working outside can be tricky, you have to cope with the elements, the wind and the rain, your work often gets blow over, you drop things, stuff gets stuck to the painting’s surface (I have heard tell that Van Gogh in particular would have things such as sand and even a grasshopper stuck to his work). One of these problems I recently partly solved, was what to do with the left over paint on the pallet. If you are outside in a field, on a beach then left over paint is a real pain and whatever you are going to do it is going to make a mess or dry up or both. My solution was simply to create another painting from the left over paint. A first attempt at this was carried out on Aberystwyth beach at the end of 2017:

Leftover paint landscape number 1.

Leftover paint landscape number 1.

The crude painting here was far from amazing but I enjoyed the process, immediately a few things came to light: By this point in the painting process, i.e. after I have already been painting for a while on another work, the paint that is left is often of odd colours and dirty. Whether acrylic or oil the medium (water or oil or turps) is often also dirty and by the same logic you often have unclean brushes. The work needs to be done quickly because I am actually trying to pack away and I am often cold or wet or simply required else where. However, I have found that out of these quite limiting factors has come work that I am increasingly pleased with. One of my problems in painting is that I get too tight and precious over the work, to do a work that by its nature has to be the opposite of this has been really educational.

The works that followed on from this painting mostly related to my landscape generator project and so they are paintings of other alien landscapes found out in solar system. I further developed the method of working to actually utilise a single brush and dirty water, often mixing directly on the paintings surface and just applying more paint when I wanted one colour or another to dominate. This required an impasto painting technique of pushing the paint around the surface and often blocking different colours in a method similar to printing rather than painting (this was in an attempt to avoid colours over mixing and just becoming a muddy mess. To start with the paintings have actually been quite small about 6×4 inches (as that was what I had in wood off cuts), but I do envisage this becoming a future painting method that I could use to complete larger works.

I have really enjoyed the freedom that working this way has allowed and I particularly like the fact that now I no longer end up with one painting but two and sometimes even three paintings at the end of the day, which of course is very productive and helps me on my way to the prolific artistic level that I always have aspired to.

 

Kimberly Crater Mars

Kimberly Crater Mars

Dunes Mars

Dunes Mars

A Dune on Mars

A Dune on Mars

Titan Plains

Titan Plains

Titan Mountains

Titan Mountains

The Rocks On Titan

The Rocks On Titan

Painting Plein Air in the Autumn

December 3, 2017
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Since the end of the summer I found that I have increasingly been practicing painting and drawing out doors, ‘plein air’. Even though I work a lot as a photographer and for my latest MA conceptual work this has meant working in studios creating model landscapes to photograph, I have found that in some ways it is even more important to take my inspiration from the real world and real landscapes and to such ends I found that looking and painting / drawing landscapes is of immense importance. Below are some of my efforts from the last few months, I will start with a couple of photographs below of my working set up:

Painting at Aberystwyth

Painting at Aberystwyth

Painting at Drefach.

Painting at Drefach.

Clouds Above The Teifi

Clouds Above The Teifi

The Hill Above Sooty

The Hill Above Sooty

The Ridge

The Ridge

Dryslwyn Ruins

Dryslwyn Ruins

The View From Heathers Oak

The View From Heathers Oak

Longwood Walk

Longwood Walk

Llanllwni Mountain Top

Llanllwni Mountain Top

Brecon Cathedral

Brecon Cathedral

The Sea By Aberystwyth

The Sea By Aberystwyth

 

A new inspiration and the ‘Picton Renoir’.

October 28, 2017
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Sometimes new artistic inspiration takes the form of a happy accident, which it did recently after watching an episode of the BBC’s Fake or Fortune programme. Fake or Fortune is a programme that I have started watching more frequently since starting my art MA. For those who don’t watch this programme the basic premise is that gallery owner Philip Mould and presenter Fiona Bruce each episode set off on another artistic ‘who done it’ or rather ‘who painted, drew or sculpted this?’ quest. There is often a reasonable amount of doubt over the work in question hence all the detective work; and then at the end of the programme there is a big reveal: did the suspected artist create the work or did someone else or is a fake or do we still do not know?

Now, I should point out here that whilst this programme is interesting, and I like anything to do with art, the programme format does play up a bit to the cameras and the hype: i.e. I think that the programme makers like a bit of controversy – in one episode I watched the authority’s / experts in Paris who were looking at the work decided it was a fake and not only withheld it but destroyed the artwork! Whilst everyone was shocked, and this must have been particularly upsetting for the painting’s owners I suspect that such incidents may help boost the programmes ratings? This and the fact that some of the content is dumbed down for a large viewing audience mean that it is not my favourite art programme.

However, on a recent episode (it may have been a rerun) they show cased a supposed Renoir painting in Picton Castle in Pembrokeshire. I won’t go into the full story here but I’ll rather link in here the castles website where there is an account of what happened: https://www.pictoncastle.co.uk/fake-or-fortune-the-picton-renoir-features-on-tv-sunday-12-july-at-8-00pm

Basically, there is a good chance that this painting is by Renoir, however the art world ‘experts’ cannot agree and so this definition cannot be official; unfortunately for Picton this does dramatically devalue the work.

Now, all of this is slightly ‘by the by’; when watching the programme, I had missed the very start so did not actually realise where ‘Picton’ was and had certainly not thought about going to see the painting.

However, chance would have it that a friend was visiting us at the time and we were considering places to visit / take them. We had not tried visiting anything in this area of Pembrokeshire previously and so when web searching and Picton came up the family simply considered this to be an interesting castle to visit. It was only when looking again what was there that I put 2 and 2 together and realised that I would be visiting the painting that I had just been learning about.

This proved to be a fun thing to do, it is always good to see art in the flesh particularly pieces that you might have seen on online, on TV, or in a book; there is something about a real artwork that cannot be conveyed through other media; and I enjoyed spotting the painting and having my own close look at the work. However, this was not what I gained most from the experience. Rather, I found myself considering what other ‘master pieces’ might be hidden in such great houses as Picton and indeed who was to say what is a master piece and what is not. Fake or Fortune had brought to the attention of the world this small painting and whether or not it was by Renoir it’s status had undoubtedly been elevated; a few years before it had just been another small painting on the wall of a great house gathering dust and probably quite ignored. What is to say that there are not many such cases across the British Isles or indeed the world? And even those pieces of work which we know were not done by anyone of consequence; what is to say that a single piece cannot be a great piece of art in its own right?

In short, my brush with Renoir’s painting has highlighted to me the importance of looking twice at paintings, drawings, photographs and indeed any art as I move through my life. It is easy to walk around museums, national trust properties and the like and to not really take in what you are being shown. Starting that day, I have slowed down when visiting such places and have taken the time to really look at the work on display.

Painting in Picton Castle

Picton Castle Renoir

Below are some of the other paintings on display in Picton Castle.

Inspired by all of the art work on display, I did my own En plein air sketch of the front of Picton Castle, sitting on the damp leaves at the edge of their main driveway:-

Picton sketch

Sketch of the front of Picton castle.

Sporadic Blogs

June 15, 2017
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I am retrospectively inserting this blog entry back into a period where I had not written very much on the blog front.

I’ll be honest and say at this point that I feel conflicted about blogs: on one hand the conscientious me feels as though I should write regularly at least every month (and indeed in terms of the internet and web searches this is the best thing to do – as I am sure you all know). However, this is not me, one thing that I feel very uncertain about in computing is the way it seems to turn us all into social media addicts – we seem to feel the need to constantly update our profile and post and share our feelings and be ‘liked’ by one another; I, it seems to do not feel this need (hence only having visited Facebook about three times this year). So, and I can say this looking back (as I am writing this in Oct 2018), my blogging will be sporadic (just so you know); there will be months where I write three times in a month and other periods where I will write nothing for six months. To some degree this is because I will put content else where on my website for the period when there was a gap, or I will have just been too busy to write. Though, and this is the really conflicted part, I am fascinated by digital technology and its impact and love art and photography, so though I will wonder off and do lots of real stuff in the real world like baking cakes, spending time with my family, gardening and painting, I will be drawn back here from time to time to say something about it all.

A Watercolour Painter.

March 23, 2017
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Sue Lewington

My last entry about going out and painting with water colours reminded me of learning to paint with watercolours when I was a teenager. I had like most kids been painting with cheap water colours and powder-paints since I was small but on a family holiday to the island of St. Martins in the Isles of Scilly when I was about 14 (so that would be 1993 /94), my parents discovered a talented water colour artist on the island who was running her own gallery and decided to pay for me to have a lesson with her. Although, in actuality this then resulted in me spending most of the rest of the holiday painting in watercolours and calling back to the poor lady’s studio on a number of occasions to show her my efforts. I have just found that this artist is still painting, her name is Sue Lewington. She does not have much of a formal web presence, but rather exists online by reputation (there are pages and pages of people commenting on her work and courses). I would like to say thank you to her for teaching me to paint all those years ago (I was much improved on my return from the Scilly’s); although I think I might need to go back for some more lessons now.

Painting & Running?

March 20, 2017
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How do you make painting more efficient?

With the weather the recently improving, I have started to think about working (more specifically painting – I already do most of my photography) outside; I have always fancied being a plein air painter. When I was a teenager I used to do a lot more drawing and painting outside than I do now, particularly watercolours, and I have started to wonder if I should not take this media up again.

My work on landscapes, both the photography and the models has made me think that I should also spend more time drawing and painting landscapes so as to better understand the structure and the shapes of the land. I have been enjoying using pen and ink in my illustrations of moons and craters for my ‘landscape generator’ project and watercolour is a similar media. I do struggle with the lightness of touch required in watercolour painting but this should improve with practice and so in this sense there should be no excuse for not getting out and making a start.

One of the problems I have though with plein air is the amount of time taken up by the activity, not just the actual time painting but the getting to the location and the preparation of your equipment beforehand. Don’t get me wrong I think that it is a perfect activity: painting, walking, fresh air, beautiful scenery what’s there not to like? However, both my family and college are keen to make my art economically viable and I worry that disappearing off for the whole day to paint is a risky economic activity; but then we are told that we should not think like this about art. I guess it might be alright if you can complete several paintings whist out or if you can somehow speed the process up? It was with this in mind that I had a brain-wave, what if I combined my painting with my exercise, that way I’ll be doing two useful activities at once and if I run to or from my painting location then I will speed the activity up.

A couple of days after having this idea I packed a small rucksack with paints, brushes, pens, pencils, ink and paper and set off up the hill above our house with the intension of finding a spot to paint!

Ultimately the experiment was reasonably successful; I briskly walked up the hill, so as not to get too sweaty and out of breath before I began. I found a good spot beside the road and started work. I got a couple of images completed and then ran back. The only issue was that I was still gone for a good two hours, although I only saw one car on the road the whole time I was out and at the end of the day you can’t put a price on that, or on art it would seem!