Sunday, August 29, 2010

Do you see the clouds as I do?


You are there and I am here and wondering: do we see the clouds in the same way?  The shapes and the forms they take,  their fleeting nature?  My friend gave me a book on clouds:  'The Cloudspotter's Guide', knowing that I have great views from my windows.   It's blue cover has gone bluer, the print's reaction to the sun's rays, placed as it is in it's obvious space next to a window.  A local bookseller must have gone to ground - all the books in his window have turned blue, even the yellow plastic designed to protect them has taken on a blueish hue.   It's quite a spectacle. 


Cirrocumulus lacunosus undulatus is something that particularly draws me visually.   Although to be fair most do apart from those damn dark flat grey ones that allow no sunlight through.

While taking photo's of clouds I'm reminded of my friend who dislikes the retinal photograph/image and conversely Alfred Stieglitz and Minor White: their interest in metaphysics and their attempts at making the photograph as metaphor or symbol.  Lynn Silverman too who photographed them and made them large (as if they aren't already).  Unlike Turner's paintings which were shockingly small, I'd always imagined them to be large having until that time only seen representations in books.  I am interested in how images of clouds become more like abstract paintings.   How, once their context is removed, they might imply something else.   The last but one painting I made might have been of clouds except it was vividly, lividly gyrating deep red, the last was blue and rising, it was about the sea where I'd finally landed.    Does the sea reflect the sky or is it more of a collaboration - so each reflects the other in a cosmic distant flirtation?


And then, in amongst all that dreamy retinal gorgeousness, my eyes are brought down to earth by the crazy eejit across the road who doesn't want his dog to look where the dog wants to look. 

Spot the difference...





Saturday, August 28, 2010

Pants and all

It's been an odd day.

It started this morning (no I'm not stating the obvious) while driving past the beach opposite my home.  A crowd had gathered, I knew why but was still a bit surprised.  Paying little more thought to it I grinned to myself and carried on. 

Friday and Saturday's are my favourite days.   It's something to do with people beginning to unwind and relax - it's infectious.  And I trawl through my favourite shops (we call them 'Harrods') to see what someone may have recycled.  Virtually my entire wardrobe this year has come about through recycling - the trouble is, it's addictive and so now I find myself recycling stuff that was already recycled, without  wearing any of it.   My Mum tells me to see it as a donation.

After a full day of successful trawling (is it through living by the sea?) - the car was ditched a lot earlier - I'm heading home and there in the distance is still the crowd.  They are opposite the parish church, is that a clue?  What are they doing there, looking at, searching for?  Have they found a weeping virgin?  Or a new messiah swinging from the bottom of a chinese lantern?  Except, apart from the occasional glance at the church they are mostly looking out to sea - or is it at the beach?  Have they spotted ET? 
 

Why and for what are they keeping vigil? 

Later I take a walk to see my brother, there outside a new crowd, it's becoming odder, these people are wearing garlands of the sort they did in Hawaii Five-0. 


On my way home again people are still there, milling about or sitting and gazing in what looks like awe at the wall of the steps that lead up to the promenade from the beach.  Have I stumbled upon a brand new pilgrimage?




Neil Diamond's fans used to throw their pants at him.   Have I a new fan?  For there, on my balcony, are a pair of men's pants, yuk.  How did they get there?  Seagulls do not wear them.  It can't have been the wind this time.   It can't either have been the builder from upstairs (do builder's wear pants beneath the trousers that sit at least 6 inches below their waist when they bend down?), although he does often fling the last of his loaf from his window at the end of a days work.   He should have grown up with my Mum - she often told us to 'use your loaf' (as in 'loaf of bread' = 'head', Mum being a cockney) - he couldn't fling it if he was trying to use it.  The stupid man doesn't even break it up for the birds - why fling half a loaf intact - even the seagulls aren't that big.


I'm glad I wasn't sitting looking at the crowd when these pants flew, there's some recycling that I just don't do.

Friday, August 27, 2010

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Sunday, August 1, 2010

Glen Jamieson, reviewing...

Reflections on Time Travelling (with Sea Piano Fret)
Lucinda Wells, Trinity Buoy Wharf 

With the bare ground flooring of the Gatehouse at London Docklands' Trinity Buoy Wharf under feet, I sat mesmerized by the image of an unfurling St. Leonards seascape. The sea moving gently under an early evening sky is a familiar scene to many seaside dwellers. But even if it is watched on many occasions from the same viewpoint, the same favourite bench or balcony, a seascape is ever changing, and it can evoke different impressions, recall memories, and encourage reveries. Viewed from this sofa for sale on a peninsula where the Thames joins the River Lea, I watched the sea reclining, the tide and the waves creeping and curling away from land. Unlike any seascape I had seen before, a fear grew in me that this sea gestured to an end of an era, that we had gone as far as we could in time and now we were moving backwards, as land and time was being recovered.

A piano melody emerged from the seascape, faintly muffled as if the piano was being played on the seabed, growing in intensity and in harmony with the unfolding of each wave. The tune is evocative of a certain era in Britain - or of a wartime film (the era is before my time), say Distant Voices, Still Lives (Terence Davies, 1988). I learned that Lucinda Wells' "Mum" ("a Londoner through and through") played this tune, and as was her usual way, would play by ear - "the music was inside her head and her hands found the notes". Surreptitiously recorded by the artist, this reticent song that could not be emulated with the same sentiment by a pianist or a performer speaks remarkably loudly and expressively of histories in Britain, both personal and collective. Conceivably, I had travelled to a time I had never been before, a time loaded with histories and memories that are poignant for many, but to a place that was undeniably Britain.

On the walls were images of uncarpeted floors, with the artist's feet in red shoes at the foot of each photograph - at the foot of doorways, staircases, and garden paths. Here Wells seemed to have traced a path through her family home, where her mother's piano would have resonated between rooms, and from where, like many a British family, they would leave for and return from days out by the sea. The red shoes at each open doorway present an eternal future of possibility and at the same time reveal the marks of history. Indeed, we can learn a lot about ourselves from looking underneath our carpets and wallpapers, scratching beneath the surface. But as Wells takes us through the house, across the surfaces of her personal history, we arrive at the foot of a closed door. We might conceive that these photographs of open doorways document the last time Wells would have walked through them - what was once a gateway to a different room has become a preserved pathway to the end of an era.

As the waves recline away from land, and the piano plays the sea, it's as if the marks of time scarred in these floorboards and traversed by Wells' red shoes for the last time have become reopened wounds - where not only the artist's history but thousands of British memories and fictions are seeping out. When the tides creep in again, perhaps these surfaces will play host to new life, with new carpets and new families, and bear the marks of more comings and goings, with new histories and memories to take their place. At the same time, one cannot help but wonder of the fate of the St. Leonards seaside resort, and whether these connections and memories will be lost at sea in the following generations - only to be glimpsed when the carpets are stripped off the floorboards and the marks of history are re-opened in reveries of time travel or when watching and listening to the sea.

As I sat in the next room of the Gatehouse with a blank projection screen in front and the sound of the sea piano behind me, I contemplated the bare flooring beneath my feet, and pictured this London Dockland building in the time the now distant piano evokes.

Like Lucinda Wells' mother finding the notes on the piano that were in her head, visitors were invited to draw on wallpaper the marks of their time travel reverie as the sea piano resonates from the next room. This was not a simple invitation to write a reflective account of the experience in an installation guest book, but an invitation to mark out and visualize the experience, and respond to one another. Perhaps future wallpaper can be peeled away to reveal this one, and the many fictions and histories of Time Travelling (with Sea Piano Fret) will be discovered - as it is not often that we listen closely to the sea, look under our carpets, or draw on wallpaper to discover our roots.

Glen Jamieson

(Jamieson is a Photographer and Writer based in Norwich, Norfolk. His latest book: Suspicions of a Peninsula Town (YH485 Press, 2010) is available from http://yh485press.org - Contact mail@yh485press.org for more details).

http://glenjamieson.blogspot.com