I love this image of the submerged leaf with the fairy dust specular highlights, and the water softly flowing past. It’s very peaceful and calming. It’s almost as if the leaf is being caressed by the water. I love to hike up the mountains here. Rivers bathed in sunlight look like melted gold. (Yes, …there is gold up in them mountains.) And you return home so much richer.
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Monday morning and I am running late. Might have something to do with the Wimbledon finals and us being on the other side of the world (it started at 1 am in the morning here).
This image here is called Down the road from the fairytale garden. People who know my hometown, know where it is. It is really down the road from the fairytale garden.
This image was taken on an island in the Baltic Sea, called Rügen. I think every German knows the scenery, it has been made famous by the romantic painter Kaspar David Friedrich. Even though the scenery is engraved in the common German memory, I don’t think that quite as many people have actually seen the white cliffs in nature. The island belonged to Eastern Germany when the country was still divided. It was military territory and therefore out of reach.
It is a mystic place, I could not describe it any differently. We went there in winter (summer might be a different story), and we had the place all to ourselves. The image I had in my post Friends!? was taken at the same place, but at the bottom of the cliffs.
When I look at this image I can hear the silence of the place and feel the protection of the trees all around me. I can feel the springy layer of humus under my feet and smell the damp moss. It is a huge problem I personally have as an image maker in that only I have all this additional information that went into the image and everything comes back instantly when I look at it. My images are always personal memories and this is the reason why I am hesitant to share them. They might evoke emotions in other people, but what the viewer feels will always differ from what I felt.
Of course we all know that advertising imagery is build on the common memory. It is never-fail generic imagery that evokes feel-good moods. But what is going to happen when we sit in front of the computer day in, day out and never learn what damp moss smells like. Will these images still work?
Landscape images are not really my thing to take. It annoys me tremendously that I can’t capture the grandness of nature. They always look flat. I usually work right at the other end of the scale in space by exploring the minute, the intimate, what’s right at your feet. Here I am often after a simplicity and a sort of flatness (for a lack of a better word). But unlike portraits of people (which I don’t ever attempt to take, except of people I know extremely well) I do sometimes try landscapes.
This morning I couldn’t decide which of the two images I should use today. They couldn’t be more different, so they have both ended up on the blog in one post. One is the weather as it is outside, the other represents more of my inner landscape at the moment. Which is which I won’t say!
I thought I would finish this week with a generic feel good photograph I took this morning in the garden. It is a glorious day out there. Monday is a public holiday, courtesy of the Queen. It’s her birthday (as an aside for all those people who are not living in the Commonwealth – or is it Common Wealth? Ah no, impossible!).
I have a lot of stuff lined up I want to continue on. The dede puppets had some news this week, but they are still pondering whether it is a blessing or a curse, so they are not making a statement just yet…
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Looking back through my posts, it appears I have a rather limited and dull colour palette. Yes, I admit, I like earthy and subdued colours. But there are also times when I enjoy the bright and cheerful. It is not a contradiction.
More often than not I visit Germany in Winter. I usually arrive around Christmas and stay throughout January. This is the time when we in New Zealand have our long summer holidays. Everybody is on the move then. However, it means that I am always in Europe, when it is cold and drab and miserable….
Last year I did a trip at Easter. I was there for the first balmy days of spring. The difference really hit me. These two tulip pics I took will always bring back the mood.
When I arrived back here, the wet and stormy autum had set in.
Sitting in the car on the beach watching the sudden deluge through the window. This was Christmas 2011! It should have been a nice hot summer day – in our neck of the woods.
The new dede puppets are not finished yet. I will have to complete them during the day, as I don’t have a daylight lamp in my studio. It makes it very difficult to choose the colours at night. Unfortunately I won’t be able to continue on them over the weekend, as I am teaching a workshop on Saturday and Sunday. In the meantime I have put up an image that sums up this last summer for me (the reason why I started the puppets). I took this image, sitting at the beach in the car, looking at the grey yonder. I am driven by chance, but it doesn’t mean what I do is an accident.
Most of my work is digital and often consists of a series. The image shown here I turned later into a “Mood” Cycle, which I will post later today.
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