Going vintage to see differently

Variations on a white theme....2

Warm silver in close

Never shoot flowers, is a cardinal rule of the web, I'm told

Roses and th'other

i imagine persimmons....4

i imagine persimmon...3

i imagine the persimmon other....2

Bam. Suddenly neo-baroque went white out!

I don't know what happened.  One minute I was thinking Caravaggio and then, it was snow white.

In fact, the petunias insisted on white.  It was white or nothing.

Next the monochromes came.  It was out of control.

Time for skullduggery

It's not really time for skullduggery.  I just wanted to use that word in the headline.

I have trotted out good old "Death" for a few shots.  He doesn't always look good in a photo (who does?).  He does, however, put the genuine "morte" in nature morte, nest-ce pas ?

Occasionally, he will shine.  The trick is to make him look natural and not contrived.  And he has a natural smirk, sort of.

New Darwinian summer frieze

I'm evolving this idea.  These days it's all evolution.  Evolve.  Evolve.  Evolve.  I expect to see Darwin come out of my bathroom any day now.......sans beard and hair.....looking for a cameras to get in on the action.

Don't monkey with me, Darwin!

Objects have to be arranged

I was feeling a bit frustrated with the water and reflection shots.  So I set up the old "cezannesque" still life again.  By that I mean the multi-layer tilted surfaces with the textured cover.  Cezanne didn't invent the idea but he made extensive use of it in his many still life paintings.

I find the various elements involved like painting a picture in many ways.  The objects have to be arranged exactly and the colour and form must be harmonized.  It's odd but a few millimetres to the left or right completely alters, and often ruins the picture. Go figure

The danger is that one can start to repeat the same theme, so the added challenge is enough change to move forward.

I change up the fruit and flowers as often as I can to modify the composition and colour.

He crept quietly around back

I noticed I could occasionally find an interesting angle if I moved 'round to the back of the still life and shot it from a high angle into the light.  With transparent subjects like flowers and round objects like mangoes, it often works.

As touched as possible, as personal as possible

Ive been trying some new ideas for composition; trying to simplify where I can.  Sometimes one gets out on a limb of the unknown, which is where I feel I am now.

Over the long weekend, guests brought some wine, one bottle of which was a beautiful black  with a red seal.  I painted up two bottles to look like it.  I could have used the actual bottle,  but I wanted the Morandi paint job to add human effort to the still life: I wanted these to be as touched and modified as possible to keep them as personal as possible.

Pears mangoes encore.....

The mangoes have proved to be excellent companions with all my old faithful nature morte participants: pears, oranges, the painted neo-morandi ceramics.  This is much to my delight.

Oddly, I find that after a lifetime of seeing in black and white, these days I'm seeing almost entirely in colour.  I think it started when I had a surprisingly strong emotional experience in front of the Rembrandt paintings in Amsterdam earlier this year.

I don't know what it means or if it makes a difference.  But I used to prefer black and white photography for my photos and now it is colour.  It surprises me greatly but I have to just go with it, I think.

Here is another in the ongoing colour series.

Wall flowers on a shelf

The bottles, coffee, tea pots sit on the shelf without the backdrops, mangoes and other props.

For me it's an interesting view: we try to read this and place it in the context of what we know, what came before.

We are tempted to say: "Oh, this is what they really look like."

But is it?