Christchurch College - Limited Edition of 1 Print

I am ownimage. The God who created the world created mankind in His own image. Creativity falls on an artist like mana from heaven. I own my creativity, I will take all that I can, fall on me. I am ownimage. I was born to wonderful parents in Watford a little north of London. I now live in Stroud in Gloucestershire where with my wife we run Fresh Ground Cafe and B&B. It gives me enough space for a gallery and studio and generally what life is going to be like in a post-employment world. What does that mean for people's identity and sense of self worth. One of my earliest memories is being in St Pancras hospital and my parents visiting and bringing a camera as a gift. I remember waiting for slides to come back in yellow boxes only usually to be disappointed. Now everything is digital, instance response, instance change, infinite opportunity for disappointment. My photography almost over took me and prevented me from being who I was supposed to be. I was chairman of Stroud Camera Club, and a judge for the Western Counties Photographic Federation, but it was not enough. To merely be a recorder of the truth is not enough, a mere scribe. I need to be an interpreter, a guide to a deeper way of seeeing. Perhaps I see the world strangely. I do not see the world full of color and shade as if the retina of the eye were a sensor of a camera. The ghost in the machine spins these nerve impulses, these echos of rays of light, and creates an inner world full of shape an form. 'Perception' was the name I gave to my first major project in trying to explore this. The defining question was 'how can a picture of a field of poppies show the fieldiness of the field and the poppyness of the poppy?' In real life we experience both. The images that came out of this were strange geometric transformation, sometimes from 360 degree image captures. The aim was to redefine the perspective of photography, rather than capturing the drama on the stage it sought to capture the grandure of the theatre. Rather than capturing what was in front of the lens, it captures where I was when I created the image. The images that came out of this process, this laval stage, were soft with so many images, so many pixels were fighting for their voice, that clarity became cacophony, I was not happy. Then I realized that the world is not about color. My desk is one color the carpet is another that is how my eye can tell them apart.