IT'S A BEAUTIFUL DAY - ( down by the salley gardens. Altamont ) Print

IT’S A BEAUTIFUL DAY - ( down by the salley gardens. Altamont ) Raw image captured on colour analogue photo in the wind hills of Altamont, California. Some two hundred years ago Romanticism found itself a bright new home when it removed to American shores and variously breathed itself west through the Hudson River, Russel’s Montana and Yosemite to the California coast. There, with nowhere left to go, it became moribund in the tar pits of its own incestuous re-imagining. The cotton wool dream of Hollywood. When I was young, a flare rose in the western horizon, blossoms of music briefly flowering. The flare rose from the burnt grass and alchemy and the freedom of not having to earn money to survive - as if the consumer wage society could instantly opt out, for more than one summer, back into some balanced subsistence on the buffalo plains. That flare was only a breath of fresh air and Altamont has passed down as one of the last sighs. An emblematic band of musicians of that time and place called themselves Its A Beautiful Day releasing an album of the same name with an iconic painted cover showing a young woman on top of a hill in the summer breeze, head held high, looking out to a far horizon. There were girls and days like this also in ancient Greece and in the land of the indigene Iroquois, in Cambodia and Londonderry or call them what you will. “She bade me take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs; But I was young and foolish, and now am full of tears.” W. B. Yeats and Cormac McCarthy both speak of men who were natural hunters in disrupted lands where hunting had turned cannibalistic. Today, it seems, when you dream in California the only place it can take you is the soul-filtered pods of Silicon Valley where robotic servers sell super-imposed selfie apps of the fresh air on mountain tops. Where the original Whole Wide World is reduced to a background for Me and blue sky is the cynical acquisition of promotional jargon. In my personal work I am not a purist photographer but photography has long been my tool of choice because of its fundamental and inescapable grounding in reality which I see as the generator of all imagination. The beauty of the finely crafted classical monochrome print is undeniable but many years ago I tired of the puritanism which I felt deadened the delight of discovery. Journeying in the craftwork of a pedigreed train is best felt when it bursts out of the tunnel into expanding colour and light - and when you can drive your own discoveries beyond the tracks laid down by the agenda of others. The freedom of a child to be lost without fear. I like the fascination of occlusions in my optics rather than the predictable perfection of well-behaved mathematics. Seduction and possibility hold more attraction than purity and certainty. In many of the works shown here I have developed the luscious micro detail which makes these images best viewed as larger prints. I use this energetic texture to challenge the perception - from where are realities derived - to where are they projected? My path explores form, colour, surface levels and possible meanings. I push off from the shore but leave the journey to the winds and to the tides. The concept of destination is something I have never understood. I am looking to create sideways glances rather than documents or statements. The glimmer intrusions of parallel worlds. In the realms of Art, the camera is the only true voyeur - on the real battlefields, in the satin boudoirs of power, under the volcano, on the snub nose of a probe - it sees worlds we are too timid to seek - lets us imagine we can directly care. My philosophy - what informs how I see the world and put it into what I present? - The failure of humanity, through the ages, is that we have been taught, and have come to believe, that some future Heaven is more desirable than Eden. Our content to be what we are is destroyed when we look in the mirror and see ourselves haloed with gurus, profits and angels. Personal delight, beauty and peace are not things which can be bought or taught by any form of teacher - these things do not come from adrenaline hits of small cans of over-priced holy water laced with caffeine. The things which sustain us, give us nourishment, grace and stimulation, lie freely around us. But we have to find them alone and pay for them with patience, questioning, openness and the reduction of “self”. Maybe that’s not a very 21st Century philosophy. Take the time to listen to the storytellers, folks - and to the shamans and the poets - not the modern ones who only, endlessly, talk about themselves, but listen to the ones whose stories multiply our worlds and show us unfamiliar colours - who challenge the unconsciousness brought on by the narcosis of comfort and security. All the images here derive from single, in-camera, exposures. Everything you see was once, for me, for a brief moment, some kind of reality on the other side of the looking glass.

Print:Giclee on Fine Art Paper

Size:9 W x 12 H x 0.1 D in

Size with Frame:14.25 W x 17.25 H x 1.2 D in

Delivery Time:Typically 5-7 business days for domestic shipments, 10-14 business days for international shipments.