Colorising green

Onto the pure, stark, manipulated, black and white images shown here, I've put colour using the colorise function on hue/saturation in Photoshop Elements. When applied to black and white images, it is very useful in producing pure, uncomplicated colour. I use it quite often when I'm experimenting.

In this case I've added a vivid, acid green.

The results with their limited colour palette, take me back almost to the less abstracted, more complex images stitched for the Gardens Gallery in Cheltenham. In other words, by reintroducing colour, I've now gone very nearly full-circle - but with the colour simplified and abstracted as the images themselves have been.

This feels right, everything stripped bare of detail so that the simple images tell the story.

Tricks of light

The cut out trees mentioned a couple of posts ago held up in bright sunlight against a cream paper background produced more extraordinary photographs that may lead nowhere but have given me pleasure.

And they now sit in my work journal with the thoughts they’ve sparked so perhaps they’ll lead somewhere after all. 

Things left over

While making recent Chenonceau pieces, I produced unexpected ‘ghost’ versions of the images. These came from the backing papers which were left over after the process of printing onto fabric for stitching and the cutting out and were then found in a random curled up heap to be thrown away. Fortunately, I stretched these out before they went in the bin and realised their possibilities.

I had cut out the images together with their stiffer backing papers to make the cutting easier. Sometimes this had happened while the fabric was still stuck to the carrier papers for going through the printer and sometimes once the images had been ironed on to Bondaweb.

This produced papers of different weights which I overlaid and glued onto black paper. I played also with which papers to use and how they should be layered.

Fine Bondaweb backing paper shapes 

Bondaweb backing paper and heavier paper carrier for printing 

I’m left enjoying the unexpected results of using up leftovers and am now adding the effects produced to the set of ideas currently playing in my mind. 

Going back to black

The developments on the new work linked to my visit in the summer to the chateau and gardens at Chenonceau in France have gathered pace this week.

I have been manipulating further the rose tree images I photographed in the garden of Catherine de Medici who lived in the chateau in the 1560s. I have returned to my enjoyment of the contrast produced by black on white and distorted the images further.

I printed out onto paper the five rose tree images that were previously used in the long piece shown here. I then cut out each one and held them in several different positions to explore the posibilities of the shadows they cast. I made use of some sunny weather and the excellent light in our conservatory and set about taking a variety of photographs.The distortions were developed through photographs of the shadows. They were then further manipulated in Photoshop as usual.  

Revisiting Chenonceau

Brunel Broderers will be taking their exhibition Bloom to Illminster in the autumn of next year, augmented probably with some new work.

Having had a successful time at the Gardens Gallery in Cheltenham with a couple of sales, I now have to replace two of my pieces. This is giving me much to think about as I really don't want just to come up with further itterations of the small pieces I produced for the exhibition in September, though I could well do so. I worked myself up to a crescendo to finish that work and going back to exactly the same approach seems too much like revisiting an old and perhaps tired haunt.

However, I do want all my works to relate to one another and to belong to a series which shows some development. Fortunately, it seems there is still much to explore and develop in the shapes, colours and imagery I used for that work. So I am currently trying out all sorts of ideas.

In the meantime, I'm completing one further, similar piece which was a development I was working on before the exhibition but didn't have time to complete. It measures 29 cms square which is much larger than the individual pieces and involves further layering of the rose trees. It is currently giving me something to think about as I work out how to scale up the stitching.

Meanwhile, I'm developing some other ideas on much the same theme but with a very different look.

Through the window

I’m collecting photographs of unusual views through windows, some with reflections, as I begin to develop some new work.

At this stage, subject matter is not important. I’m looking for images where intersections, meeting points, shape and line offer the possibility of abstraction and where objects are placed interestingly off-centre. While on holiday in the last few days, I’ve found shapes and patterns formed by doorways and window frames, fence posts, field boundaries and interwoven lines of barbed wire down a wall at the Prison Museum in Peterhead, Aberdeenshire.

In this case, each photo was taken from the inside of the building looking out. Looking in detail at the structure of windows and buildings from the outside would provide another interesting perspective. I’ve taken this approach on modern buildings in the past. Perhaps this time I might look at buildings with more history.