You could ask yourself the following questions

My HNC has begun again, second year.

For one of the briefs I have asked myself the following questions and, kindly, given myself some answers too.

Who are you?
Elgan Lewis Bruce, 30, married, father of one son, homeowner, full-time employee of a publishing company where I lay-out business-to-business magazine pages all day, frustrated gardener, keen photographer, avid reader, short by modern standards, fond of melancholy, largely anti-social except on special occasions when I am virulently anti-social, hypocritical environmentalist, cyclist, enthusiastic cook, over-enthusiastic eater, possessor of somewhat more body fat than I'd like but newborn son is preventing the remedy, son, brother, grandson, descendant of Robert the Bruce of Scotland, Bob Dylan addict trying to find other sources of musical enjoyment, politically left-leaning, fond of Gordon Brown because I am largely contrary, voter (only missed one since 18), reluctant driver, friend to spiders, fond of birds (feathered), Bill Oddie and Kate Humble, annoyed by rampant spread of humanity over past hundred years or so to the extent that the balance has shifted to the machine (I'm with RS Thomas on this) and would like somebody to do something about it with the minimum of fuss so that we can all get on with our lives quietly, disinterested in computer games except the free card game on the PC, shit chess player to my frustration, a bit of a romantic at heart, like buying the wife flowers, suffer from a bit of a bad back and sore thumbs from various rugby related injuries in my youth, keen sleeper, vivid dreamer, procrastinator of professional standard.

What is your work about?
It is as confused as I am, and seeks some clarity.

What area of photography are you interested in?
The area which is least concerned with profit.

Why do you want to practice photography?
I want to create my own version of my reality – see below.

Where do you see yourself in the future?
I don't have that facility.

What was the first image you saw that got you interested in photography?
Probably something taken by my father. He is very keen on photography and was always taking photos of us as youngsters.

Who was it by and how did it influence you?
One of the photos my dad took shows me looking through a window at my elder sister who is outside in the snow, looking at me from the other side of the window. It's ingrained in my memory, even though I can't remember the actual event. In some ways, all I want to do is take a photograph like that which, even though it isn't a great exposure, is part of my mythology, the story I have created about myself. We all have stories about ourselves which make us the people we are. This photograph is vital in my understanding of how I grew up. I want to create little myths with my photographs.

Which other art forms are you interested in (film, sculpture, painting, poetry, literature, theatre etc)?
I'm interested in all art forms. I don't necessarily like all art forms, but they are all intriguing in their own way. I've been to a number of operas: they should be the zenith of artistic endeavour in music, theatre, dance, but somehow they always fall a little short, even when they are brilliant. I enjoy the theatre, but the actors always try a little too hard. The art form I admire most is poetry, more so than photography, though I feel that photography and poetry are very closely linked artistically. Both tend to have a small frame to work within; both are more technically demanding than generally thought; both offer subjective viewpoints on the world which can be, at their best, deeply moving. Both hide as much as they show, and benefit from closer study. Both seem somehow luxurious, but at the same time vital. Dylan Thomas wrote: “The photograph is married to the eye / grafts on its bride one-sided skins of truth.” The difference is that poetry's truth shows both sides.

some beardy pics for John

Look John, some pics of my beard... for my photography course you see. Didn't I look good?

grdn

http://arts.guardian.co.uk/features/story/0,,1390742,00.html

stephen gill stuff, stuff stephen gill

fao: katie

http://www.litegraffiti.com/page/2/

book covers...

On the guardian website, a gallery of Casion Royale book covers.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/gallery/2008/may/07/1?picture=333967653

Baudelaire quotes to help me with this presentation...

To be away from home and yet to feel at home anywhere; to see the world, to be at the very centre of the world, and yet to be unseen of the world, such are some of the minor pleasures of those independent, intense and impartial spirits, who do not lend themselves easily to linguistic definitions.

The crowd is his domain

He is looking for that indefinable something we may be allowed to call 'modernity'

Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the-eternal and the immovable.

The draperies of Rubens or Veronese will not teach you how to paint any fabric produced by our mills

Woe betide the man who goes to antiquity for the study of anything other than ideal art, logic and general method!

He (our modern artist) began by looking at life, and only later did he contrive to learn how to express life

What's a blog?

This is a blog: http://mcfunfun.blogspot.com/

No, this is a blog: http://hickoree.blogspot.com

This is a blog, but it shouldn't be anything: http://inkonmyear.blogspot.com/

Last one: http://criztu.blogspot.com/2008/04/tallest-vs-smallest-men.html

?

These are a couple of early attempts at creating an Impressionist inspired art piece. As you can see, they aren't very good. I looked at the signs of Impressionism, the style, rather than the meaning behind the style. For the top image, I used a few photoshop tricks to try and achieve a soft focus and saturated colours. It worked in the sense that the focus is soft and the colours are saturated, but it's not pleasant to look at. The second image uses the motion of the water to create the broken brush style of the Impressionist. It looks quite pretty, but that's not what I was after.
So after these attempts, I spoke with Kevin, my course tutor, and decided to look further into the reason behind the rise of the Impressionists. Why did that style develop then and not at any other period in time? Are these ideas/inventions/ways of seeing still relevant today? If so, how and why?
The results of my research can be found here: http://unitfour-elgan.blogspot.com/

photoquotes

This link: http://www.photoquotes.com/ takes you to a site managed by Hákon Ágústsson and features lots of info about lots of photographers.

Projects_remaining> studio practice

I've to recreate four images, two still life, two portraits, in the studio...
One: big fish eat little fish (after Brueghel, Pieter the Elder)
Two: This is not a fish (C'est ne pas un poisson) (after Magritte, Rene)
Three: Gulliver arrives at Lilliput and is bound and harrassed by the little people... (after Swift, Jonathan)
Four: Odysseus' encounter with the Cyclops where he and his men blind the Cyclops with the heated end of a stake (after the Greek myth)

Rubbish project

I've decided to photograph some of the rubbish which turns up in our backyard here in Reddish on a regular basis. Here is what I found on the 12th of April 2008.

Links, links, links

http://www.nothingness.org/SI/

http://www.geog.leeds.ac.uk/people/a.evans/psychogeog.html

http://www.geocomputation.org/2003/Papers/Waters_Paper.pdf

More wikipedia research...

What would we do without wikipedia?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchester_Area_Psychogeographic

A Manchester based group of psychogeographers who disbanded in the late 90s. Can't find much more out about them at the moment, but this post is a note to myself to do so.

Situationists_psychogeography_

"Down with a world in which the guarantee that we will not die of starvation has been purchased with the guarantee that we will die of boredom." - Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution Of Everyday Life

Kevin Linnane's comments on my Impressionist-inspired-art-piece blog (see link to the right) included the observation that some of what I was saying was similar to what the Situationists of the 1960s were saying. I have always thought of myself as a poorly disguised political and artistic agitator.

He also mentioned the Dérive: In philosophy, a Dérive is a French concept meaning an aimless walk, probably through city streets, that follows the whim of the moment. It is sometimes translated as a drift. (From wikipedia.)
The Dérive was a radical offshoot of the flaneur - the dandyish stroller of mid to late 19th century Paris. The Dérive was inspired by psychogeography: "a slightly stuffy term that's been applied to a whole toy box full of playful, inventive strategies for exploring cities. Psychogeography includes just about anything that takes pedestrians off their predictable paths and jolts them into a new awareness of the urban landscape." (Again, from wikipedia.)
Such as: http://timdevin.com/providence.html

cassatt//feminism and the impressionists

This image is by Mary Cassatt who, along with Berthe Morisot, was the leading female Impressionist. Which means what?
If we've established that Impressionism was an artistic interpretation of modernity, then didn't the sexes experience modernity differently?
There's enough evidence to say that they did without any doubt. The subtleties of the differing experiences can be exemplified by the image above and the image below.

Cassatt's image places women in a safe, regimented space, having a gentle cup of tea. Manet's bar-girl is in a chaotic public space, under the gaze of many men, each inebriated no doubt and looking for their own little adventure. She's bored, impassive and resigned. Cassatt's women are impassive but pensive, frustrated perhaps? But less tense, less on show.
Which is a more accurate depiction of a woman's lot in the second half of the nineteenth century in Paris?

Another road song...

The link on the right which says Jeroen's blog/website takes you to the website of my friend Jeroen Wilhelmus.
I haven't seen Jeroen in a while: he lives in Holland and my father has just moved from Holland back to the UK. On one trip to the Netherlands, my father took me to Scheveningen on the coast, on a wet day, a windy day, where I took this photograph:

I spotted this same pier-end in Andrew Brooks' (see link right) work, Sealand, when he came to talk to my HNC class last year. He creates hyper-real images in photoshop, built out of hundreds of individual images and a lot of patience.
I think I have this right, please correct me, Jeroen, if I'm wrong... Jeroen is the son of the daughter of the man under who my grandfather studied music in Amsterdam after completing his degree in Edinburgh and before the Second World War. There is more to it than those words imply, of course.

form, content: content form

Trying to think about how the Impressionists would react to the world today. What kind of art would Monet want to make if he were alive now? Would he want to paint his landscapes in the open air? Would he remove himself from politics and conflict? If he still painted as he did then, would his art end up directly on biscuit tins, diaries and in clip frames in cheap hotels? Or would it spend time in a gallery, get discussed on the Late Review?
My wife and I have conflicting views on music. She is a classically trained singer and appreciates the skill and craft that goes into creating a good vocal performance. Thus she can applaud the contestants on the X Factor because they show a vocal ability. She also detests Bob Dylan because he sounds like he's beating a bag full of cats and dogs instead of singing. I can't argue that his voice is beautiful like Pavarotti's. But I can argue that what he sings and the emotion with which he sings it makes his song more moving, more like art or poetry than Gareth Gates.
Content over form. Form over content.
So, going back to our Impressionist friends, art is about content over form, isn't it? It doesn't matter what form the art takes (it could be a painting, a sculpture or a disused unrinal) if it has something to say, some observation to make on the world, the human condition, sex, death, MacDonalds... If it has some contribution to make to how we understand the world and ourselves and if it isn't something that // Falling into the old trap of trying to define art here I fear. I keep forgetting I live in the post-modern age...

... looked around themselves, not behind ...

The Impressionists as a reaction to the modern world, their modern world. Degas, Monet, Cezanne - three artists with distinct techniques, passions and intentions. Yet they all come under the Impressionist umbrella. It isn't their technique, how they painted which unites them - Monet and Cezanne favoured working outdoors, Degas worked his canvases in the studio. It is what they painted, or what they didn't paint which unites them. It isn't this sort of stuff:

Ingres, Roger freeing Angelica, 1819.

What's that all about?
It's brilliant in it's own way, but what does it tell us of the world that Ingres was living in? Not that there is any imperative for an individual painting to describe the modern condition, but the collective, dominant outlook of painters leading up until the Impressionists took hold was based on the art, the culture, the stories of antiquity, the Bible and the medieval period.
(Forget that the Greeks didn't regard painting as an art at all. Forget that the Bible wasn't exactly keen on images of God.)
The Impressionists looked around themselves and not behind.

That don't impress me much

Monet's Impression, Sunrise (1872). It was this painting which landed the group of painters who exhibited at Nadar's former studio in 1874 the monicker Impressionists. The critic Louis Leroy wrote: Impression I was certain of it. I was just telling myself that, since I was impressed, there had to be some impression in it — and what freedom, what ease of workmanship! A preliminary drawing for a wallpaper pattern is more finished than this seascape.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Leroy

Forward rolling...

The contact strip for the medium format images I took of me doing a forward roll for the self-portrait project.

One of the photographs I took on the large format cameras at college. I'm a bit annoyed that I cut off the tip of the arrow, but it's tricky looking in the back of those cameras, in the dark, thinking you're going to be run over as you're standing at the tip of the arrow which is directing traffic into the college car park...

After a brief sojourn to look after Jo, my wife, whose appendix became infected and had to be removed - bearing in mind that she's four months pregnant so the operation was a little more precarious than normal - I can return to this blog...

My intention here is to use this blog as a resource and virtual workbook to hold some of the research and ideas I've had whilst surfing the digital world for things to do with the projects I'm currently completing at college www.tameside.ac.uk

I am researching the Impressionist - that lively band of Parisian artists who turned the art world upside down in the middle of the 19th century. Has any art movement been as influential as the Impressionists? Probably not. They were a disparate group without a singular objective and certainly with no manifesto as later art movements had, but it was their reaction to the modern world and their desire to place their work in the public domain as the equal of the art of the Salon that led to Impressionism becoming so widely known even to this day.

Controversy, everybody loves a good controversy. Art ever since seems to have wanted a bit of controversy to get itself noticed... from Surrealism to Damien Hirst, from Bauhaus to the Chapman brothers.

Photography HNC

This blog is my digital workbook for the photography HNC I am studying. A lot of the ideas and research I am conducting for this course comes from digital sources so it makes sense to have an easily accessible place to share, show and store these ideas.