One of the things I’ve enjoyed most about having an exhibition (L’Esprit Insolite) has been watching people’s reactions to my pictures and getting feedback. I touched on this before, when the show had run its first week. Now it’s over and it’s time to take stock. It’s certainly been quite an educational experience.
Sometimes boredom is a useful thing. It makes you start looking around, searching for some stimulation.
At the vernissage of my exhibition with sculptor Sue Riley, L’Esprit Insolite, I was momentarily left speechless by an unexpected request.
Putting on an exhibition can be a daunting undertaking. You can feel exposed in more ways than one. And with L’Esprit Insolite, my joint show with sculptor Sue Riley, there’s no getting away from people’s reactions to the work.
L’Esprit Insolite, at the Casino de Bagnoles de l’Orne, is the first exhibition I’ve done in decades, and the first where I’ve had to mount the pictures myself since my graduate show. The secret to making it all go smoothly? Make sure you have the help of some strong women.
This is a continuation of yesterday’s post because this image was shot on the same foggy morning. Having shot a number of photographs of a very bare and simply landscape, I turned my attention to the trees lining one of the several rivers that feed into this estuary. One of my reasons for this is that this is a scene not entirely devoid of mankind’s presence. If you squint very hard you’ll see some boats moored at the river’s opening. […]
Sometimes you look out of the window, see the weather and think, ‘there has to be a picture waiting for me’. That’s what happened here.
We stopped here just to give the dog a run. We’d been out exploring the Finistère coast all day and, with the light fading, had decided to head back to the gîte. But our old dog Zola needed to stretch his legs. We threw the ball for him a few hundred times (so it seemed), and just as we were all feeling tired and eager to get back in the car, nature decided to put on a show. Now I […]
Of all the images in the exhibition, L’Esprit Insolite, this has the simplest story. And it’s another of those ‘always carry a camera’ moments. It was a beautiful day in September. We drove to the nearby town of St-Fraimbault, mainly to walk the dog around the lake (he does so love to go for a swim), and also to take a look at the damage wrought by recent storms. Our bit of Normandy had taken something of a battering. I […]
Le Bec d’Andaine is strange, as beaches go. It’s at the base of the Cotentin peninsula, on the west coast of the Normandy department of the Manche. It has a fine view of Mont St Michel. And the beach is wide and spacious. Very wide. Maybe too wide. In fact, in the many times we’ve visited the Bec d’Andaine we’ve rarely had a proper glimpse of the sea. This is La Baie du Mont St Michel and it has some […]
They say that familiarity breeds contempt. It can also make you blind to what’s right on your doorstep. This is also a lesson about always making time to grab that photograph. It was early in the morning. I had the car loaded with filmmaking gear and was on my way to start work on the first day of shooting a short film, Cigarette. Making films, even amateur ones like ours, is a complex and exhausting endeavour, so my mind was […]
This is an example of why you should always carry a camera. We were on holiday in Brittany. In the late autumn we like to get to the coast for a week. Most often we head for Finistère, but this time we decided to stay closer to home. Our dog Zola was old and wouldn’t have liked the long haul to the west coast. But that was okay because the Côtes d’Armor is another of our favourite areas of Brittany. […]
A significant proportion of my landscape work is about the traces that mankind leaves in the environment – or, as I call it, the Layered Land. Some of the signs are obvious, others less so.
We didn’t get much in the way of snow this past winter but we did get the hardest frost I’ve ever seen. I first wrote about this back in January, when it happened. The weather had been bitingly cold for a few days. Each night, when I took the dog for his final walk of the day, I’d see a strange glittering effect as the torch beam caught the frost forming on every leaf and blade of grass. I kept […]
Sometimes, when you’re looking for one thing you find another. This was quite a magical day. We were at La Pointe de la Torche, a small headland poking out into the sea at the southern end of the Plage de Tronoan in Finistère, Brittany.