071: Where Art, Thou!

Where Art, Thou!, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Hide & Seek

Living in an open-plan apartment, even one as small as forty square metres, has its advantages - no messing around with lighting, doors, moving into cold rooms - and whatever music you are playing can be heard everywhere. It's perfect for us, and for everything that we do.

One of the uses is as a studio, where everything is a prop. it is quite common in films to follow the trail of discarded clothes on the way to the bed, but I wanted to show it all in one image, as well as try to give a bird's eye view of our apartment as opposed to all those horizontal shots we have at eye-level. One of my aims for the weekend was to create a kind of three dimensional image from a number of shots, which I have kind of done because none of these are vertical shots but done at about 20-30 degrees from the vertical, to give a subtle 'dish' view.

069: Rocker

Rocker, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Attention Whores

Anyone can be a star in their own bathroom, but I wanted to experiment with the concept. Forget the air guitar, let's make us a guitar and then some noise! Everything was just lying around at home, just waiting, and some of it has appeared before in other guises. If you want, you can have a front row seat, I'll be signing autographs at the end of the show.

When you buy things, like clothes or ornaments, try an avoid things that have a single use, it either ends up gathering dust in your wardrobe or on that shelf. Shelves are the ultimate death for objects - once there they lose any function other than as three-dimensional wallpaper. Finding your art means getting involved in your life, and that means getting better acquainted with all those objects that you surround yourself with. Remember, if you buy something because you think it makes you look cooler in others eyes, give it to them because it is not you.

066: Red Hat

Red Hat, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

If I catch you wearing this...

It's amazing what I can find to fit in my wife's wardrobe ;)

Clothed and closed are very similar-sounding words, and the clothes you can wear depend a lot on how much society closes its minds. Different cultures have different mores, and even these vary with time. What I do not understand is the problem that people have with clothes - why can I not be free to wear whatever clothes I like without threatening the very structure of society itself. Society, in reality, is very flexible when push comes to shove, and I want to do some shoving.

The other element of this picture is that wearing the same clothes is a symbol of the single unit that out marriage represents. There is no leader, no his and hers, we do what we can, the best we can. Interestingly enough, society seeks to lever this unity apart by insisting that roles and clothes be assigned to suit them, and not our own preferences and abilities.

This was an interesting shot, as we had to position ourselves in a 3D space to produce a dynamic in an essentially 2D medium, some of the pose elements would appear artificial from another viewpoint. See the major power triangle with Ania's elbow, my hat and my lower foot. Luckily, as long as I can keep the major positioning in mind, my subconscious takes care of the details. Ania, though, has her own influence on the image, completely outside of my control.

064: Partisan Rules

Partisan Rules, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

eye:hand

Rules are important for people who obey them, but they are even more important for those people who can make use of them for their own purposes. For the latter group, what the 'rules' say is not black and white, are not the surface appearance the obeyers believe. Rules have a purpose, but this purpose is rarely more than loosely defined.

Life by rules are like the images above - we choose the one that best fits our purposes; none of them are the reality.

I can't draw very well, and this image represents some stages of producing the 'hand' drawing from a photo, using the mouse to paint on the lines. I deliberately chose an image that was free of eyes, lips and noses, and then experimented with where to put the hard lines and the soft shading. Ultimately, though, it had to represent me, the explorer, the adventurer, and the techniques I chose were merely one of many possible routes there.

060: Low Life, High Thrills

Low Life, High Thrills, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Playing Cards

This is my trinity.

The Dealer: Confidently playing the cards, relaxed, and sure of where he is going.

The Doubter: Weary, seen it all before, just knows that failure is just around the corner, taking the cards as they come.

The Darkness Within: The mysterious stranger that most people keep well hidden as it is often not very pleasant, but my Darkness Within is an acknowledged friend my other two turn to for help, the one that keeps faith and in touch with God. The cards? They are all the same.

As I rarely play cards, I was not sure where to go with this one, I found it hard therefore to find my art as my life seemed to have so little contact with them. However, when my Darkness Within spoke, I listened and set up this triple shot, and then later understood the relevance.

057: Hip Cat Walk

Hip Cat Walk, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

sixties psychedelic visions...

It is surprising what one can do with an old dressing gown and sweatshirt, they can be almost anything one wants them to be - with the help of a few things from my wife's wardrobe. Twiggy walks the cat walk again! I was a bit short of time for post-processing of this image, especially as i had to figure out a number of methodologies to achieve the desired effect.

Today's question is: if you are a painter then you are allowed to paint what you like, in any way you like, effectively, without any real attention being paid to the actual props. For a photographer the situation is different, as despite actually achieving acceptance an art, the image is still treated as being real life. Whatever you photograph is held up more strongly to some concept of public morals, and used as 'evidence of truth'. This amounts to a censorship of art, a restriction on the work of photographers.

049: Dunce, the Knight's Away!

Dunce, the Knight's Away!, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Copycats

Today I took a shot for a group that I didn't really want to do as I had already planned a different shot and then the choice was changed. Other than the disappointment in not doing the shot I had planned for Flikr Group Roulette, this one led me to a crisis of confidence - but then it also taught or reminded me of some things. Basically, I had to do a copycat image, and that meant I ended up doing a comparison between my image and the one that I had copied.

And technically, there was no comparison. Argh!

*breaks out the vodka, drinks himself into a stupor*

Once posted, it quickly generated some comments. It had made some people happy!

*screws cap back on vodka bottle*

Hold on, isn't part of my art the giving of simple pleasure?

*Puts vodka bottle back in the cupboard and washes glass up*

In ye olde days, several careers ago, when I was an apprentice mechanic, responsibility for my on the job training was given to at what the time seemed an ancient geezer. Fred, of the white hair and the impossible responsibility, had the knack for training up new comers to the trade, and probably welcomed the largely uncritical extra pair of muscles when man-handling Morris Ital gearboxes back into place while lying on our backs under those blessedly unreliable cars (we became a specialist team one summer with those gearboxes, doing around twenty of them).

It was a large garage with about fifteen mechanics and body shop people, plenty of technical skill to be in awe of. And yet with Fred I never felt that my lack of skill was a problem, nor do I remember him doing much in the way of direct teaching. In fact, I learned my skill by observation, and it was not just technical skills, for not everything one did was by procedure or repeating experience. Technology changed, and there were always new and unexpected problems that no one had seen before. What I learnt was to feel the cars as systems, almost like a person, to visualise what was happening.

I had, although I was not to realise it until many years later, was to stumble upon art in a car workshop. And my art was not the same as Fred's, we often arrived at the same or different conclusions, by dissimilar thought processes.

One day I was watching Fred as he tested the set of bronze rings from one of the gearboxes for cracks. He was relying on his experience, trying to physically pull these rings apart to see which of them had cracked through, the cracks being too fine to be visible. I then picked them up and carefully tapped them on the vice, and those which were fine went 'tiiinnng', while those with cracks went 'dnk'. Although lacking the technical knowledge, I had discovered a better and easier method of testing.

Other than being proud of myself, I did not think much about it, but several career changes later I began to realise how important it is to lay technical skill aside sometimes and rely on one's art. Without any particular linguistics training, I continue to surprise my wife, who is a doctor of linguistics and who has been teaching language and teachers of language at university level for over 25 years, with insights into her core skills. The secret is not to be overawed by knowledge and technical skills in others, but to look and try to understand what you are seeing.

The photograph I was copying was technically good, the art there for anyone to see - a sexy, feminine image. Mine was flat, rough around the edges and masculine, but isn't that one of the things I have been working with all summer? The contrast between the masculine and the feminine, often mine?

Then the original idea I had had came back to me, it wasn't a competition in technique, I was contrasting, my lack of technical skills was not a problem. I was not supposed to be working on fine skills, it was the contrast itself mixed in with humour that had driven me. Almost point for point I had contrasted the two images, leaving only the basic alignment of them the same.

It has been another piece of the jigsaw that is me, another step in bringing my life into focus, to understand my core processes better. And in line with the see-saw concept I outlined previously, my image had driven me to write all this.

046: Peer: Glass

Peer: Glass, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Asymmetric

Our bathroom door is such a useful thing, it has appeared in so many of my images in many guises and disguises. This is the most mysterious so far. The hardest bit was sitting on the floor while I experimented with the positioning of me and the camera, but in the end I chose the second I took.

Notice the kind of waterfall effect of the light above my head? That was due to my Sony and its habit of corrupting some picture. The other, perfect shots I discarded in favour of this one. What is inspiration? Everything you deliberately choose to do or also what happens when you choose a deliberate path. I know that some of the shots will have the defect, yet I choose to keep on using that camera, nothing more than taking advantage of your camera's or your photo processing program's functions, except you can neve be sure when it will happen.

It is like using a special prop, the art is in how you use it, not in the fact that you have got it. Here I applied my art to the effect, draining the image of colour, tinting it and then putting two images in one, at different width compressions. I have no guide as to how to do it, no training, nothing more than experimenting with paints and deciding how best to use them to create an effect that I may not have consciously conceived off prior to the editing process. But the ideas were conceived.

043: Smile

Smile, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Happy Sunday

Imagine you are at the side of a pool looking out along a diving board, are your pictures 'out there' on the board, while your diary writing is the real you safely on the land? Is there any risk that your art will just slip out too far, or that you and your writing might fall into the water? What if you walk too far out along that board to reach your art and then cannot find your way back? I mention this only because I notice that many people write about one thing, often the mundane real life stuff or technical description of the photographic process, and then their photographic images show something else. Can we tie our words and the expression of our images closer together, or is it necessary for some reason to keep them apart? Are our happy pictures a reaction to something else in our lives, or a striving for something we are not sure about?

Our words are one expression of ourselves, and our images are another, but neither are actually us, although together they give other people a better picture of us than either alone. Instead of imagining our lives and art as a diving board, perhaps it would be better to consider a see-saw instead, with our words at one end and our images at the other, with us as the fulcrum, that point of balance. Perhaps we use our pictures to express what our words cannot, together they better forming or describing our art, or to balance less positive elsewhere in our lives? If this is the case, if we change what we write about, does it also change what we photograph and display for others to see? If true, perhaps if we change what we write in our diaries, we will also change what photographs we choose to take or show - and vice versa? It might be easier to show in images what we lack the confidence to do so with words, or the other way around, and by experimenting with the form we have more confidence in might help us to do more with the other?

By creating this image of me pretending to smile, it helped me write that I was feeling sad that my wife had to stay on for another ten days in New York while I returned home. Would I have written that if first I had not taken the picture and then played around with it until it fitted my mood?

042: Badass Traveller

Badass Traveller, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

I'm a Flikr Badass.

Fresh back from New York. Don't you think that travelling can be so tiring, but I wonder why no one would talk to me on the plane? After a week out of the loop with the Fuggers, this was my return shot, incorporating my very recent travelling experience.

I came back to Poland with a number of books I had bought about the meaning of art, and finding these was harder than I had imagined because most books are either descriptions of technique or of artists' work. Reading them I can see the authors battling with exactly the same problems I have been, I do not always agree with their conclusions but I have found some very useful insights.

Art is your concept of the world. The only way to improve your art is to improve your understanding of people and the environments in which we live. It is not particularly relevant whether you choose to study poetry or physics, either will give you equal insight into the world and your art, as would market gardening or whatever else. You do not even have to study one thing, any and everything will do as insight is the key, not bodies of knowledge. Your personal art and the levels of art of the highest achievers in society have nothing in common, unless you wish to compete for awards - it matters not one whit what other people produce, you only have to produce your own art. Art does mean your best work under whatever conditions you live under, but not 'anything will do' as art requires patience, effort and, yes, some pain. Art lies along the limits of your abilities, and unless you push the boundaries of your understanding with each new piece the art fades into mere reproduction. Pushing boundaries causes pain, and events causing pain push your boundaries of understanding further out in some direction. If something is causing you pain, then that is not a bad place to look for your art. Remember, though, that there are many kinds of pain, but they all hurt! :)

041: The paparazzi are coming!

Paparazzi, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Paparazzi

Central Park is a great place to visit, especially if you do not mind the over the top 'romantic rustic' look, with the too many 'fallen logs' scattered everywhere around the Ramble. I liked the architecture of this gazebo, reminiscent of a Monet I remember, which made it excuse enough for a backdrop, what other excuse does one need?

On editing I decided to play around with the colours, simplyfy the palette a little. This brought out the pink in the hand, as a kind of warning colour against the cooler blues and greens - as well as the mysterious black silhouette that was me, blending in with the roof.

Ideas rarely come to fruition in one blinding flash, you often have plenty of thinking time somewhere between the stages of conceiving the idea, possibly seeking the right location or props, taking the photo and then finally processing it. The earlier you can get your thinking in, then generally the better, especially in a work environment. But one must not be switched off to later ideas, unless the delay they create is unacceptable.