North Pennines
The long, hot, dry summer has been lovely! It started off with half a term in the studio, teaching and painting, followed by taking over the whole studio to paint in for duration of the summer break, punctuated with some short breaks; five days driving up to Northumberland (taking in the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Hepworth Museum, Victor Pasmore’s Apollo Pavilion and Gormley’s Angel of the North on the way, then meandering back down through Northumberland National Park and the North Pennines); a long weekend in Dorset; and a week with friends near Saumur, France (and a couple of nights in Wimereux on the way back – who knew there was this little gem near Calais!?).
Quite a few of the photographs I’ve taken this summer seem to connect in some way to ones earlier in the year (see Gently Out Of Time and the photographs from my trip to India earlier this year). I continue to learn about what I notice day to day and how I see things. I do a bit of editing to try to capture how I remember things, which often removing some perspective and lightening.
Although I share photographs, sharing isn’t on my mind when I take them; I just snap to record and remember visual moments that stirred something in me. This summer I seem to have taken a lot of photographs of skies, horizons, sunsets, beaches and, oddly, sculpted figures, but there are also the usual suspects of supermarkets, typography, mid-century styled interiors, broken things, and the moon.
Victor Pasmore’s Apollo Pavilion in Peterlee.
Antony Gormley’s Angel of the North
