Mobile Photography/Art Showcase – 25 July 2021
To many artists in this weeks Mobile Photography & Art Showcase, and beyond, mobile art is a coping mechanism. Creating art allows us to live alternative lives, offering escapism when reality becomes too unwelcome. Olivia Laing, (probably my favourite author) said in ‘The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone (possibly my all time favourite book), “sometimes, all you need is permission to feel. Sometimes, what causes the most pain is actually the attempt to resist feeling, or the shame that grows up like thorns around it.” This weeks showcase should be recognised as own emblem, forever moving forward whilst simultaneously sensing time’s passage. I have tried to…
Mobile Photography & Art Showcase – 11July 2021
I have dedicated my entire life to the pursuit of love and creativity and I spend most of my time encouraging other people to do the same because living a creative life filled with love is the most beautiful life there is. In many ways, the human artistic expression is blessedly, refreshingly, non essential. John Lennon once said about the Beatles, “we were just a band”. Some of the most sublime occasions of my life have been when I have been inspired by the many photographers and artists that I have been lucky enough to surround myself with. The quality of the images submitted to our Flickr Group and Instagram…
Mobile Photography & Art Flickr and Instagram Showcase – 21 March 2021
Marcel Proust describes, In Search of Lost Time, his own experiences of ‘involuntary memories‘, these are profound and unexpected glimpses of the past triggered by mundane and everyday experiences. Escaping time, is in essence the affect of ‘involuntary memories‘, they return us to past events. Photography, is the perfect medium to use as the physical connection to illustrate and explore this. Susan Sontag pronounced that, all photographs are memento mori, to take a photograph is to participate in another persons (or things) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to times relentless melt. (Sontag, 1979: 15). According to Roland Barthes photographs…
Mobile Photography & Art Flickr and Instagram Showcase – 7 March 2021
Reminiscing about touch… can you recall when you last touched someone that does not live with you? I can, it was when the brunette and I were in ‘our’ secretive riverside café eating home-made cakes and drinking freshly brewed cappuccinos. Chocolate cake for the chocoholic and carrot cake for myself. The staff are also the owners of this café and a mutual embrace is the norm for their regulars. It leaves an inner glow that lasts long after the visit is over, usually into the following week for me. But like all ‘non essential’ businesses in this pandemic, it has been closed for a year now. This is resulting in…
Mobile Photography & Art Flickr and Instagram Showcase – 28 February 2021
‘Revelations‘ by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan, is a new biography on Francis Bacon. Following his death in 1992, an abundance of books, mostly including personal accounts from his friends, were produced and thus contained an abundance of revelations, but just when you think you’ve read and know it it all, can there be anything left to say? Yes, there is actually. This book is much more focused on his early life and career, which were initially quite mundane. But that soon changed, as he fled to London aged 17, escaping his imperceivable father, with an allowance from his mother and accompanied by his nanny, who actually accompanied everywhere until…
Mobile Photography & Art – Saturday Poetry – ‘Roses’ by Ellen Bass with @dreamsandfields
This weeks Saturday Poetry, matched with mobile photography/art is entitled ‘Roses’ by Ellen Bass. Ellen Bass was born in Philadelphia in 1947 and grew up in New Jersey. She received a BA from Goucher College and an MA in creative writing from Boston University, where she studied with Anne Sexton. She later said that Anne Sexton “encouraged me to write more, to expand, to go deeper and wider. She breathed life back into the process. Without her, I might have given up.” She is the author of nine poetry collections, the most recent of which is Indigo (Copper Canyon Press, 2020). Her other books include Like a Beggar (Copper Canyon Press, 2014), which…
Mobile Photography & Art Instagram Showcase – 27 September 2020
Double Life a book-length photographic project by Kelli Connell has kept me entranced this week. At first, the viewer will imagine that the images are of shared moments in the life of two women, who possibly appear to be a couple. Then as each page is turned, we begin to realise that it’s not two women, it’s one, the same woman and the mystery begins. The images are documentary style and not dissimilar to the autobiographical work of Nan Goldin, albeit without the edgy undertones. Connell describes this project as “intimate moments experienced personally, witnessed in public, or watched on television“. This body of work is regarded as self-portraiture but…
Mobile Photography and Art Flickr/Instagram Showcase – 17 May 2020
Art therapy has the power to relieve trauma and I believe it should be used widely to help survivors rebuild their lives. There seems to be a general consensus that more should be done to end slavery and trafficking but still it is an area of criminal activity that appears to be on the rise, even as we now find ourselves in lockdown. Art therapy itself covers various forms, drawing, photography, painting, but it’s still not widely implemented in a role of healing for victims. This is a disparity that some aid organisations are not embracing, I wonder if it is because some donors are unprepared to invest in this,…
