Still.
Like a lot of people I guess, it’s been tough to keep myself motivated since March, and lockdown. As each day blurred into the next, it was far too easy to not do things: there was always going to be another tomorrow very much like today in which to do the stuff I thought I would be doing that day.
The cameras went untouched for days, weeks.
But one day I picked up the ‘Letters of Vincent Van Gogh’ from the shelf and began reading. Using a collected works to see the paintings develop from his mind onto the canvas, made me hunger for work again. There’s nothing I love more than that buzz, that creative fizz, when everything about an idea seems possible and pregnant with hope, before the hard work begins of translating it into a reality.
I just had to get out and take some photographs. But more than that, I really wanted to use the big old 5x4 film camera as well. I wanted some of that struggle, to use the time I had on my hands to slow down and find the photographs, rather than just take them.
So I bought a rucksack that the 5x4 would fit in and, like Vincent in the Artist On His Way to Work, headed out into the wilds of Oxfordshire. But the photographs I found I wanted to find were closer to home.
They were the things I live with, that I’d spent a lot of time with: the still life of lockdown made me want to take still lifes again.
As chance would have it, we’d been given an old chemists’ chest – one of those things with lots of little drawers in it – and having nowhere else to put it, it ended up in the corner of my office/dining room. The wobbly old painted wall behind made for a great backdrop: the texture made all the more beautiful by the grain and the imperfections of working with film.
So, roses, peonies, an absinthe glass picked up from a market, watering cans, even my old Panda which I‘ve had since 1965, were all photographed in what daylight reached into the room, with long exposures of anything from one to four or five seconds.
That is to say, made with light – and time.
Peonies, May 2020.