nature – BLANK CANVAS

Time to Stop

I love waking up and seeing the view from my kitchen. The endless variety that the same picture conveys, changed by seasons and the vagaries of the English weather. Coastal winds transforming the seascape unfolding in front of me. The variances as the sun rises from a slightly different position each day, spraying deep orange and peach light that gradually lightens as the sun rises, turning our home into a constantly varying symphony of colour, replicating musician and artist Brian Eno’s light boxes, never the same, always different. Nature drenching its mood and perspective. Whilst studying for my doctorate I used to cycle most days between the south western English cities of Bristol and Bath, stopping at the same point and snapping a shot on either my phone or camera. A beautiful spot where the city was left behind and bucolic countryside emerged, fields, horses, a church spire rising out of the English village, creating balance in the view. I was entranced by the differences in similarity, the chance to look more deeply when you start to know every element in your picture. Sometimes the horse was there but other days not, or in a different location creating an alternative balance. Standing still and contemplating. Repetition providing the opportunity to stay in the moment, the place, the view. Not a set of holiday snaps which blindly take you around the pool, beach, lunch, church, beach, afternoon drinks, sunset, dinner, party. A beautiful view is to be savoured, unfurled through the ages, the chance to measure your life alongside the beauty of humans and nature. An opportunity to be static and contemplate change, to work out what it is all about. To stop rushing around, stand on one leg and breathe, the tree of yogic life. Zen gardens. Life is everything around us. Let’s be more observant, take time out, put the phones away and actually live, fighting the demands and distractions of the modern world. Recognise what is going on around us, the different dynamic of certain moments or days.

Why does the start of the week feel different to the end? Parts of the year have certain scents, views, feelings, which time stamp our development. Facebook reminding us about what was happening on the same day one, two, seven years or even eleven years ago. It all seems so recent. Present, in the now. Time has sped past, our lives juggernauting along at breakneck speed, unable to slow it down as caught in a merry-go-round, gliding up and down on a horse, repeated views blurring past from the bottom of the hill. Our lives have reportedly changed over the 58 years I have been present, but it all seems the same to me. The UK. The long hot summer of 1976, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, exciting pop music with punk screaming into view, strikes, extreme weather, long periods of drought followed by flooding, a warming globe, familiar places and faces. Not a static life spent in one location, from birth, school, work to marriage, children and death but a multifaceted one travelling the planet, moving from place to place, adventures that make life exciting and dynamic. London, Paris, Glasgow, Bristol with a swathe of smaller locales in between. Days which were dynamic, a cure for the humdrum, a world of creativity and chaos. Moving from cities to the countryside has provided boredom, the ability to stop and stare, think deeply, be at peace and start to wonder and wander, contemplate, remember, look forward. Internal conversations becoming clearer as the fog starts to drift away, lifting from the valley floor and revealing a beautiful landscape stretching into the distance, providing the first glimpses of clarity on life.

Winter

It used to be a time I dreaded, long nights stretching, engulfing days but as I get older there seems to be greater romance in those cold winter days. Jumpers, snuggling, battling through rain. The dark emphasising the light, neon glowing. Xmas. Glowing lights. Mulled wine. Waiting for change. Looking forward rather than at the present. I am determined to luxuriate in the wrapping up of winter, to stroke the deep woollen knit, put my feet up towards the roaring fire, gentle puff on a pipe, reading The Hound of the Baskervilles. I love the low searing light of winter. In summer it is expansive and flat, but those cold wet dark months are crossed with laser like strips of sun, striking from far to near, providing depth and excitement. Waking up in the dark and gradually arising with the light unlike summer months where it is instant, turning a light on, no sun to full sun. You can leave your garden to just exist rather than spending hours fighting off excessive growth, hacking at weeds, willing the grass to stay short. Winter is romantic. You two or three of more against the world. Summer is full on, everyone out there, festival, party, active, blinded by the flat light, wide angle, no place to hide as the sun engulfs. Splashing on suncream to protect against a deteriorating ozone layer, a thin film with holes puncturing through. No aircon. Instead, dark dramatic atmospheric winter world, wrapped in blankets, fire on, lights twinkling, a season of thought and anticipation. Wrapping up the year. The worst thing about winter is the thought of its arrival. Increasingly my summer months are ruined as summer solstice disappears in the rear-view mirror veering towards it’s winter equivalent, the days getting inexorably shorter. The long lead up to dark wet cold depressing months when I should just be enjoying summer days and nights drifting along. Never ending days to be replaced by never starting moments. Some of our friends have the right idea, lucky sods. Enough money to luxuriate in English summers and then plan their winter escapes to South America, Asia, Australia, Africa, maintaining the light of life, following the sun, keeping winter at bay. Up in space there is no issue with the seasons. If you’re looking down on earth they fly past, daily, providing a dazzling display of summer, autumn, spring. But surely embrace the winter. There is a stark beauty, a low light which plays enormous shadows, providing greater depth and interest onto vistas. Wrap up warm and get outside, look at the views, seep in the world. Neon Lights twinkling in the gloom, providing a vibrancy and electricity. Colour and interest. Beautiful cold thin morning sunrises where metallic light purples and thin warm oranges litter a pastel sky. Look to the now but also ahead. Winter can be cold and lonely but there is also the promise of something better ahead, the winter solstice a marker, the most hopeful day of the year when gradually more light and interest arrives daily, the football season coming through its phoney war into games which actually means something, there is jeopardy. The long slog of league games developing into a tussle for the top, to move up or down a level, settle on a new normal. Cup games in muddy fields, ball stuck in treacherous puddles as wind rattles around the stands blowing you sideways. Fearful of the journey from changing room to pitch, vaseline caked over freezing limbs. The winter is also a time to luxuriate, to cuddle up with some of the great authors of our time, let ideas and knowledge seep into your brain. Relearn. Recharge. Rethink. Settle into new and old concepts, philosophy, AI, culture, stories of war and peace, light and shade, action and adventure, beautiful prose or edge of the seat excitement. Winter seems to be the longest season, to go on inexorably, dark following dark, where illness can lead to death. But it is also the most romantic, when friends and families come together, to talk and argue, to annoy and rejoice. The last time in that house. Setting markers, remembering departed family and friends through stories, games and laughter. The rest of the year you can be apart but the winter forces families together, to eat too much, watch too much, slobber on the sofa until the hope and joy of new year arrives. A fresh start. A new beginning. The chance to reset and go again.

Walking around

Going on a trip with friends it was a difficult choice. Where could we go which was in a couple of hours, that we hadn’t been before and was great for photography. Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Prague. In the end deciding on the Polish city of Krakow. Near Auschwitz, Resonating with past wars and brutalities. Unknowable pain. A pretty city. Picture perfect. Scanning the weather before you go on your trip, praying that BBC, Accu, Met etc.. are wrong in their forecast of incessant drizzle. There to take pictures but no light. Mizzle, more insistent but lighter than drizzle, a constant blanket of gentle spray. You don’t really get wet but there is a dampness, a coldness that starts to seep into your bones, breaking through Gortex through non stop lightness. You start to walk around the city and apparent photo opportunities jump out, peering through doorways, into shops. It’s a great way of looking at a city, as a photographer, especially when the light makes your task really difficult. Walking around, constantly, circling the city, heading for landmarks, the grey relentless. Night time and colours arrive, the neon glow of multicoloured bulbs elongating across vast squares, reflections more dramatic than the actuality, peering down, Crouching down by pools of water, reflections illuminating, doubling images. Adding to the misty intrigue. Umbrellas dotting the skyline, adding shape and colour, providing context and interest. Armed with a pocket camera, fixed wide angle, 28mm. No opportunity to zoom in but stay in the same perspective. Interest in the fore and background. Occasionally relenting from the clicking to move indoors, sample local beers. Atmospheric locales, stylised but resonating with Coldwar, Second World War menace. Dark brooding deep reds, greens and blues. Faded. Old photos, people lost to time, coming back to life. People creating new images, taking the space, providing film sets, stuck in time. Continue to walk, searching for images. The mizzle continues. Searching for a shipwreck, graffiti providing colour contrasting to the grey unchanging sky, no shards of light to provide interest just a grey blanket providing consistency. Statues and memorials. Crumbling buildings, memories hanging in the air, trapped, nowhere to go. Keep walking, searching for form, for light. Trams providing blue and red relief, the lights inside glowing through the dank grey. Previous lives trapped in, nowhere to go. Keep walking, observing, a sadness that is flat, not overwhelming, no drama, just constant and plaintive. Puddles continue to reflect, we walk, we peer, the mizzle continues.

Autumn

Sitting in a coffee shop underneath the arches waiting for my train to arrive. All manner of people, Bristol people, venturing in and out, collecting baked goods created in front of their eyes, too bleary to understand the lack of mystery. Various fashion, individualism, collective lives, coffee. Expectant and a little fraught, a workday in early September provides a unique buzz. The calm beauty of summer gradually seeping away towards getting your head down for the graft of winter. Jumpers and jackets back out of storage, straight away, no real meander but straight back into the thick of it. No time to sit and contemplate what has been, just marching on to the next stage, free flowing downhill into the abyss of winter.

The lcy coldness of early autumn mornings, where the memory of summer is still present but the heat is starting to dissipate. Skies radiate with an orange, purple blue cobalt metallic quality, much lighter than in previous months, a pastel thinness as the light is lower and less intense. The sun more gradually rising, a lower trajectory that adds greater interest like the lamps you have in your rooms rather than the over bright overhead light. Birds seem to talk and fly more delicately, less insistent, waning in energy as they start the process of either heading south or hunkering down. The squawking youthfulness of spring and summer replaced by a thoughtful resigning to the gradual onset of darker and colder times. Like the birds I sometimes get Seasonal Adjustment Disorder, sadden by the onset of darker, colder and often wetter times. The lack of light proving difficult to cope with. I love wrapping up and kicking through fallen leaves on country paths or city avenues, my camera coming to life as vistas take on greater interest, the flatness of summer replaced by interest and hue. I stare at the sky a lot more in autumn, slightly wistful but also thankful for the beauty. September, which veers uneasily between seasons, getting colder but often dry and mini heatwaves providing the last remembrance of fanciful summer times. The last chance to dive into the sea, it’s warmest time of the year, a fitting memory of immersing in nature. The classic colourful months of autumn. Woodland walks. The last chance of light. Bitter sweet. The end of something and the start of the new although it feels more like gradually disappearing, going into a cave, going underground, darkness enveloping. Memories of light transferred into darker days. Wet, cold, neon lights. Avenues of golden trees glinting in the lowering sunlight, rays softly etching patterns on the forest floor. Autumn seems to start earlier every year, snatching summer moments before they have even been fulfilled. Leaves browning and falling in July. I am sure that never happened in my youth where long hot summers seemed to stretch for eternity. Now though early autumn provides a somnambulant air, sleepwalking into colder, wetter and shorter days, life snatched from your very grasp. Before the beautiful colours emerge, it is a prewinter state, a warning sign of life passing. Time turning. Gradual ageing. The garden goes into hibernation, plants stop growing and start to wilt. Stasis is on the horizon.

SUMMER

The Longest Day

The long hot days of summer are something that many of us look forward to. A yearning for sunlight hours stretching beyond infinity. In the UK this can lead from 4am to 10.30 pm but the timing and amount of light varies depending on your longitude. As author Lavinia Greenlaw ponders in the Vast Extent there is an almost overbearing happiness to sunlight, commenting on the experience of Nordic countries leading into the artic circle, when sunlight can be almost constant by mid-summer. Without the madness of throwing yourself off cliffs. The light never disappearing. Just slightly dulling before rising again. Following the rhythm of light is a healthy way to exist, waking and sleeping with nature. In the winter you need to fight through this, to rise before the sun. Days stretch out in the summer, festivals arrive, people come outside, there is a buzz of happiness and life that emanates. In the summer you can go to the beach after work, meet up with friends for a drink, go for a walk, swim. Life is so much fuller. It’s way it is so tempting to follow the sun, move to Australia every winter. There is almost a forced element to being happy in the summer though, which can be overwhelming to some people. The need to stock up on vitamin D and happiness, ready for the long gradual march through autumn and winter. As a photographer the light is less interesting in summer months. It’s too flat, overbearing, constant, whereas the glimpses through winter cast long arrowing shards that pinpoint elements, highlighting and throwing vast shadows. The colours out to sea have a metallic vibrancy in winter that is rare in summer, where the haziness adds pastel shades. Paddle boarders silhouetted in waters which seem to lose their definition, floating in mid-air, Fata Morgana. I am always waiting for the summer. The gorgeous scents emanating from hedge rows. Freshly cut grass. No mow May, wildflowers dusting the air streams and delighting visual colours. June always seems to arrive too soon. A month of change and extremes. The longest day, leading onto the nights gradually starting to get darker. The hump month. Mid way through. Festival season, the end of school and university years, the start of summer for some, the gradual waning for others. In the UK it’s a beautiful month, beach swims, country walks in shorts and sandals, gardening, after work trips to the beer garden, a run along the coast. Always with the looming figure of Glastonbury at the far end, bookending the month and providing the turning point of summer. There is a sadness to summer I can never quite put my finger on. Maybe it’s the fact that it will end. Be existing, summer shows that it will finish. A bittersweet symphony. Or maybe it’s just the hay fever which is making my eyes itch and head swell. Hot, sweaty. Waking up in a tent slightly hung over, dry, parched. The expectation of summer. Looking forward to it through the long winter months only to be disappointed when it arrives. Although some days are magical, stretching out for ever, picnics under trees, by winding rivers. A lightness to the sounds. The longest day, eternal daylight stretching beyond your imagination, a dream state. Pastel coloured shades lighting the sky, drawing pictures of longevity and life.