Tags
Blues
12 Wednesday Mar 2014
Posted photos, phototheme
in12 Wednesday Mar 2014
Posted photos, phototheme
inTags
03 Monday Mar 2014
Posted musings, phototheme
inTags
Brown often has bad press. It suggests words like murky, undistinguished, gloomy, dreary, commonplace, lacklustre, unmemorable, banal, insipid. However when I began to investigate it as a photo theme I found that drab colour vivid and full of stories
At the Great Masters exhibition at the National Museum of Australia a tin of ochre chunks was on display as part of the kit of one of the master painters. Brown ochre was used as a pigment in the cave paintings at Lascaux and master bark painters in Australia still use it to create their subtle beautiful-toned masterpieces. The name for brown ochre is Goethite: suddenly Goethe, eighteenth century German poet and scientist, intrudes in the history of brown and on the palette of artists.
Mummy brown was a favoured colour for centuries, a brown of “good transparency”. And yes, it was indeed created by crushing up mummies. When nineteenth century artists discovered its origin, they stopped using it. Legend has it that the pre-Raphaelite Burne-Jones ceremonially buried his tube of mummy brown in his garden when he realised what it really was.
Isabelline, a pale cream-brown or parchment colour, usually refers to the colour of bird plumage and horses, but is also used to describe the colours of fashion. Elizabeth I owned “one rounde gowne of Isabella-colour satten … set with silver spangles”. The regal nature of the colour is undermined by a story that its name derived from the colour of underwear worn – and not changed – by an Isabella during an eight-month siege in the fifteenth century.
Made by combining red, black and yellow, brown is a colour of multiple identity, nudging its way into many shades of the spectrum: towards orange or crimson or white or green or blue. In the world it's gregarious, displaying itself best in judicious companionship with other colours or against a background that serves it well, maybe beige and dark brown fungus against sharp spears of green. The litany of brown is in fact poetry: burgundy, isabelline, umber, bister, beige, taupe, ecru, fawn, sepia, bronze, chestnut, sienna, sinopia, khaki, cordovan, fulvous, maroon, tan, wenge, russet, buff, mahogany.
Not drab at all.
Wikipedia is my source for the stories retold here, and the blog was inspired by a long-ago photo challenge whose deadline I well and truly missed.
22 Saturday Feb 2014
Posted phototheme
inI've been collecting images with this theme in mind for some time. I like collecting words too: cave, niche, recess, cranny, nook, slot, pigeonhole, cavity, trench, crater, depression, orifice, vent, chink, cavern, chasm, canyon, ravine, crevice, fissure, cleft, slit. As I list these words I can think of many ways of arranging them: by size, into a series of haiku, by shape.
My photos of holes and hollows are on a small scale, taken on the beach and in the bush near my home: more crevice than ravine; more depression than crater; more niche than alcove; more chink than canyon.
While I was accumulating hole-and-hollow images I came across this image on the Redbubble site to add to my collection. It's also a good chance to share the site that has given me a lot of visual and cogitations pleasure.
05 Sunday Jan 2014
Posted phototheme
inMy first early morning beach-walk with my grandson was very different from my usual solitary, meditative stroll. He whirled and raced and kicked and climbed and pulled faces and found a shearwater skull to add to his mother's bleached collection. When he scuffed the sand into a circle of footprints, a new post in the geometry series was conceived.
20 Friday Dec 2013
Posted photos, phototheme
inYears ago I somehow and unwillingly ended up teaching art. “Line” was in the syllabus and I became a bit obsessed with learning what it meant before I fronted year 7 who were well aware of my limitations: “You're not an art teacher, are you miss?” Suddenly my world was resolved into edges, outlines, verges, rims, borders, margins, perimeters, peripheries, boundaries, margins. That's all I saw. Fine in the familiarity of my Broken Hill home, but a bit disconcerting when I flew into Sydney airport and found the same thing happening there. I needed my airports to possess a third dimension.
It's happening again. This time my world is deconstructing into triangles, and my photographic eye trawls my landscape seeking out the triangular, sometimes enclosed by a third side, sometimes a third side only hinted at by absence, and sometimes sharp angles and straight lines wobbling into a Dali-esque swerve.
22 Sunday Sep 2013
Posted phototheme
inTags