Vapour
Playing with wetness and ambiguity
Hello, and welcome.
Yesterday I woke to an unexpected calm before our next named storm (Babet) though elsewhere storms already rage with their attendant and seemingly unending suffering. I wrote in February 2022 about the darkness that I felt and again I cling to creativity as a place of ease in which, while not forgetting, I can sometimes lose myself for a while.
I decided to go for a walk after breakfast, expecting to spend much of the next few days inside. As I do the trees at times talk of the wind’s arrival.
By evening it’s still strangely quiet. Perhaps the rolling belly-folds of earth are sheltering us a little from the unusual wind direction (SE). The thought prompts me to imagine what this valley looked like under glacial outwash; I have a mental picture akin to the fluvial braids often photographed in Iceland.
Today is fulfilling its promise of extreme wetness. We are just north of the area given a red weather warning for exceptionally heavy and disruptive rain, but decidedly in the amber. The day is filled by sound as much as sight: falling rain, dripping water and wind-torn leaves.
Last week in “A Corrected View” I wrote about how my personal vision has found its way into my photographic images and some of you were kind enough to share with me what you notice in your own art and photography.
I had originally intended to share a new gallery of images at the end of my writing, but decided that it would make my missive overlong. You’ll now find this below.
I did manage to revisit the blaeberry last Thursday but found it too was weathered.
At the weekend my gel plate came out again and I began printing more wetness and vapour. It seems to fit today - there are no hills, just hanging moisture.
Monday and Tuesday saw a now seemingly rare two quiet and sunny days after an early frost (isn’t this supposed to be Autumn?) and prompted a burst of activity in the garden.
There are things that I might otherwise drop in here but it seems prudent to send this on its way to you while the electricity remains on. It’s not unusual to have problems here and the tracker already shows power outages nearby. I have my fingers crossed!
Vapour
Slowly but surely my images have shifted, resembling more closely my natural, myopic, vision. For a while I held on to the branches whose offset from my liquid picture plane was such that I could render them sharp while everything else relaxed. My undoing if it was such was to look into a small pool of water that had gathered at the foot of a Scots Pine and find - simply- colour.
As I began to make these newly soft images, I felt that they were just my own little indulgence. Then they became a way of bringing nature’s palette into the studio. As I considered a liquid’s impermanence and metamorphic capability, I began to think of them differently and realised that I was photographing Vapour as much as water, and this gaseous form is present in a new collection of images which you can view here:
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Michela, again you deliver incredibly thought-provoking thoughts and ideas, with sublime images to add life in wonderfully colourful images that are alive with gorgeous, rich velvet tones and hues. You convey imagery that comes from under the skin, from the heart. This I find wonderfully refreshing. No doubt others will experience a similar reaction.
Thankyou for such inspiring words and images.
Regards
David.