Painting and Photography

This article in the Guardian makes me faintly smile; that desperate yearning that photography has had for a century now to be recognised as an art form.

At Art College my chosen discipline was painting. I was a term into the three year course when I realised that being stuck in a corner of a studio with introverts was going to bore me. And I began to strike out sideways, looking for a more adventurous outlet for my energy. Tried ceramics but found it too slow, etching ditto. Then photography! Took to it like a squirrel to acorns.

It wasn't just that it was an instant experience, taking photos, developing film, making contact prints, printing images, not just that. What appealed to me were the people, the students. They communicated with one another, showed each other their images, smoked and drank too much and weren't so damn serious like those painting types.

So this is where my life divided and I found myself equally fascinated by painting, which slowed me down and Photography which sped me up.

Then I become equally bored by the Art Institution itself and started an art adventure club which did daft things to keep minds alive. I would hire a plane for a day and fill it with a hundred students and lecturers and fly off to Amsterdam to see an exhibition. Such stuff. It was performance art of a sort.

So even then I couldn't stay still enough to be considered as one thing or another in terms of a definition.

And after all those years I still think the same way. Which is what?

It is this. I tell young people to just get on and do stuff. That creativity is all that matters, and when you get on that train, it could take you anywhere and you don't have to stop at any station.

And I like to create art communities, to mix things up to turn folks upside down. Just because art can never be static, creativity is a wild river which cuts its own  direction.

And my photography and painting live happily side by side and have a relationship, one with the other. I paint images which drift into my head from the Gap. Then (and it could be any time later), I see that very same image out there somewhere in photographic reality. Oh, not the exact image graphically but they are the same to me in the zing effect they have on my imagination, that wondrous clearing house in my mind.

Here are two images which I offer as an example

 

Don't ask me for an explanation, it would spoil things.


I have opened a community 'The Creative Village' on Arthur Fox's site Innovation Global Network which you might like to join and find out about workshops planned in Italy next year.
Costs nothing to join and is full of interesting people

Michael
At Starstone
Next retreat in Assisi, Italy  'Wellness, Mindfulness: Painting your Life, 12 to 17 October