My Favourite Artwork - the Flight into Blue
The Flight into Blue - 100 x 120
Regularly I am asked what my favourite artwork is and my response is always the same – my most recent work. Each new set of photographs challenges me because of what they potentially offer. When I know intuitively I have a new work from a set, it is an epiphany. I guard these epiphanous moments with great care because I never know whether there will be any more. That is the excitement in creativity!
Each new work reveals itself very differently though. Sometimes the photograph offers an embellishment of an established theme or style in my work such as the Land Escape series.. Sometimes it is just a single photograph that stares straight back at me and dares me not to crop or straighten it in any way. This breakthrough moment of clarity is exhilarating!!
The Original Photograph
More rarely, another mode of invention for a new work evolves out of a slow smoulder with a prospective client’s unintentional comment or suggestion. Whilst,the client was viewing the work “What To Call It”, she remarked she liked the colour in the work, yet wondered if I might remove the word, in other words, Photoshop the word “”Imagine” out. I am quite strict about not using Photoshop on any of my works so I suggested I might seek out the original shots from this day’s shoot to see what was in the vault.
The result is my current favourite work - the Flight into Blue and I am thankful the prospective client in a creative conversation opened my mind to new possibilities in my work. I love these types of conversations. Creativity often comes an incidental aside and can become the basis of a very satisfying collaboration.
The more I cropped and moved into the original photograph, the more my brain began to see the works of the modern masters such as the founder of the French Impressionist movement, Claude Monet’s wonderful reflections on the water. Van Gogh and the deep blues in his work made a strong appearance and it was French Nouveau Realist painter Yves Klein who said “Blue has no dimension, it is “beyond dimensions”..Klein invented and patented what is today known as the International Yves Klein Blue, the colour force in the Flight into Blue.
Very rarely does a work surface such a combination of influences..Will I find something to match this?
What To Call It?
