-
Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 8 September 2019
This week, I’d like to talk with you about courage and it’s scary, being creative is a path for the brave. If you lose courage, you lose creativity. Each one of you has hidden treasures within you, as do I and we need to bring them to light and it takes a lot of faith and hard work, not least devotion. It’s important to say ‘no’ at times, I suppose, not that I’m one for that, it’s easy to say ‘no’, you’re off the hook but if you say ‘yes’ then what happens? It’s showtime! There are times, when you might need to lay low, as I have this week,…
-
Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 25 August 2019
“Everything was calm. The sun was shining. I was swimming in the deep. And then, when I surfaced twenty years later, I discovered there was a storm, a whirlpool, a blasting gale lifting the waves over my head. At first I wasn’t sure I’d make it back to the boat and then I realised I didn’t want to make it back to the boat. Chaos is supposed to be what we most fear but I have come to believe it might be what we most want. If we don’t believe in the future we are planning, the house we are mortgaged to, the person who sleeps by our side, it…
-
Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 30 June 2019
Her body is “like a car that you park in the projects, you don’t leave anything valuable in it ’cause you can’t keep it from being broken into,” a frustrating but all to realistic quote from ‘Baise-moi’ (1993) a novel by Virginie Despentes. The quote calmly describes her friend who was gang-raped, she reasons, ‘at least they left her alive‘. The book itself is about two young women on a revenge sex and killing spree following the gang rape. The author, Despentes, herself was gang raped at 17 and had a knife in her pocket at the time but was too terrified to use it. She writes in her memoir…
-
Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 2 June 2019
As humans, we have the unique ability of utilising our skill of habit, to our own disadvantage. We can fail to take note of what is always around us. Thus, we suffer emotionally because we lose sight of the value of what we have and then yearn for imagined attractions elsewhere. We live on auto pilot. As an example, if you think back, to when first learning to ride a bicycle, we become hyper aware of everything, as we sit on the saddle and place one foot on a pedal and the other on the ground, to steady us. As we try to push off and bring up the other…
-
Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 26 May 2019
“As soon as the vote of Brexit came through, half the people I know were trying desperately to work out whether they had Irish grandmothers. But I would never take dual German nationality because I owe this country too much, and I wouldn’t want to dilute it”. Deeply loyal, Judith Kerr speaking in the Financial Times in 2017. Commonly known, within Britain, as our ‘national treasure’, Kerr led a remarkable life and wrote and illustrated the most enchanted children’s stories. I was so saddened to read that she had died this week, born in 1923 into a bourgeois Jewish family in Weimar, Berlin. Her father, Alfred was a famed theatre…
-
Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 19 May 2019
“Few travelled in these days, for, thanks to the advance of science, the earth was exactly alike all over. Rapid intercourse, from which the previous civilization had hoped so much, had ended by defeating itself. What was the good of going to Peking when it was just like Shrewsbury? Why return to Shrewsbury when it would all be like Peking? Men seldom moved their bodies; all unrest was concentrated in the soul.” ―E.M. Forster, The Machine Stops and the first book that I immediately reread thrice, when I was thirteen. It was the first book that interrupted my thought processes enough to relieve me of outside pressures. It was transient,…
-
Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 12 May 2019
My daughter’s school prom this week manifested into the creation of a taut, magnificently controlled week, with smidgen’s, in my case, of personal survival. The entire week was one of lucid reflection as the period of her school days came to an end with an almost surrealist picture of her leavers celebration. The limpid clarity as an observer and witness to the life changes as she transgresses can only be compared to Claude Cahun’s photomontages, it looks like life, but it’s not life, exactly. Only art can achieve this degree of realism. I end this week, with a juddering heart, strangely close to tears, knowing that the true emotional nature…
-
Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 5 May 2019
“Whenever the world throws rose petals at you, which thrill and seduce the ego, beware” Anne Lamott. I was told a similar thing, not quite so poetically, when I was promoted and became the technical editor of a print camera magazine, many years ago… it’s long gone. “Many congratulations Joanne, but keep those feet on the ground“, cautioned the main editor of the title. Sound advice, but doesn’t it get a little boring sometimes? For years now, I’ve noticed that I have become more and more sensible and it’s getting frustrating. I’m organised, at least in my mind, it might not show physically in my office. I keep my children’s…
-
Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 21 April 2019
Earlier this year, I attended the press view of ‘A Fortnight Of Tears’ by and with Tracey Emin, at The White Cube Gallery, London. What has interested me, particularly, since the exhibition are the wide ranging and diverse reviews and critiques of this show. Having spent time speaking with Emin, as well as sharing the exhibition and space with her, I felt closer to this artwork and to her psyche than I ever have before. Many of the reviews were critical, she is an artist who has always attracted harsh critics. Her most infamous work “My Bed” (1988), is in many ways, metaphorically, part of this exhibition. It’s re-inacted as…
-
Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 7 April 20019
After scoring a hat trick, I am back! As some of you will have noticed, I was off last week. Not one to take life easy, I managed to cram it with, Mother’s Day, my 50th birthday and a serious lung infection. An accomplishment even by my own standards. The lung infection leading the way, I spent my days and continue to do so, (desperately trying to avoid another hospital admission), dosing up with antibiotics, sleeping sitting upright (it can be done, I’ve learnt, once complete exhaustion sets in) and reading a wide variety of books. I got it down to two books every two days, a record for me.…
