Gothic, what…

Gothic.

Seldom has a word carried such a range of similar, but really quite different, meanings than that one. Somehow, we all think we know what it means, but try to tie it down and it’s slippery. Pointy arches? Ivy covered walls? Vampires? Victorians? Languid long haired girls in black frocks and chokers? Anything black? Anything brooding? Pugin? Would Pugin have wanted aforementioned young ladies draped over his architecture? And what happens when ‘gothic’ turns into ‘goths’? Whole new can of worms to open there.

The OED defines Gothic as:

1. relating to the Goths or their extinct language, which belongs to the East Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family. It provides the earliest manuscript evidence of any Germanic language (4th–6th centuries ad).
2. of or in the style of architecture prevalent in western Europe in the 12th–16th centuries (and revived in the mid 18th to early 20th centuries), characterized by pointed arches, rib vaults, and flying buttresses, together with large windows and elaborate tracery. English Gothic architecture is divided into Early English, Decorated, and Perpendicular.
3. (also archaic Gothick) belonging to or redolent of the Dark Ages; portentously gloomy or horrifying: 19th-century Gothic horror.
4. (of lettering) of or derived from the angular style of handwriting with broad vertical downstrokes used in western Europe from the 13th century, including Fraktur and black-letter typefaces.
5. (gothic) relating to goths or goth music.

Well, bad news for the Goths but nobody seems to consider them when they think of Gothic, which is a bit sad really given their impact on the shape of post Roman Europe, but that’s how it is, we’re ignoring them. Future blog on the art of the Goths: promise. Not really sure the popular imagination is really down with number four either. Lettering and typography isn’t really featuring much. Which pretty much leaves us with a mixture of two and three with a smattering of five; architecture with added portentous gloom. Which sort of really does sum it up if you think of all the aforementioned women in black dresses as being gloomy.

What rather, I think, throws the candelabra in the coffin of the Gothic, as seen on Instagram, Facebook and so forth, is that much of it seems to via away from the portentiously gloomy and into a kind of romanticism; pre-Raphaelite dark if you will. It’s an aesthetic which is as much about long curly hair and long victoriana dresses as it is about any sense of gloomy foreboding. Then, these days, you also get some overtones of it in Steampunk; when that alternative reality nineteenth century meets the supernatual, you can pretty much see the ‘Gothic’ in it.

Of course, and this is really the point towards which I was rambling, this whole gothic meets romantic meets PRB is actually a great combination visually.

It makes for great photos and paintings.

Art – or ‘art’?

Yeah, it’s cryptic title time, only this time not because I wanted a cryptic visitor-hooking title but because I actually couldn’t come up with something which said what this post was about any better than that did.

I found myself today looking at a website of art by somebody I sort of know, I knew she did art but had no idea what it was like – she’s called Bryony Aston and the site is here if you want to take a look. I think it’s good, in fact I think it’s really good: I’d have one of her paintings on the wall any time (this one if I could pick). So that got me thinking about all the amazing artists we’ve never heard of, which got me thinking about why some artists sell for millions at auction, which got me thinking about all the artists who don’t even exhibit. What is it about some art and some artists which suddenly makes them, if not famous, then at least well known. When does somebody’s art become Art?

Now there is a part of me which has always thought that art really shouldn’t ever be monetarily worth more than the materials and time involved in its creation. Let artists be fairly recompensed for their creativity and effort, and gallery owners for their work in selling the art on, but they should be the ones who benefit, not somebody who really never even knew them years down the line, not people who buy art as an investment. Think how much more visually interesting the world would be if that were the case, nobody would buy pictures as investments and stick them in vaults where people can’t see them, public galleries would be able to build their collections easily without having panic funding drives to keep something in the country. What’s more with low values on the stuff it might be easier to borrow and exchange works (dunno about that though). People who owned art wouldn’t be forced to sell it off to cover taxes, and folks could take their pictures along to the antiques roadshow without the risk of finding it’s so bloody valuable the they can’t really have it on the wall of the living room any more due to the risk of theft. So yeah, I’m opposed to investment art in general. I’m in favour of art because the more art you have the better civilisation you have, your world is a better place.

So what about all the unknown art? What about all the hundreds of thousands of creatives like Bryony out there? What about the art you and I have never heard about? Well, I reckon without Art there would be more respect for art – Joni Mitchell said ‘he knew they’d never been on their tv, so he passed his good music by’ and that’s the lot of a load of artists out there, they make stuff which immeasurably improves our world, but it doesn’t get shown. Frankly, if I had a choice of a reproduction Old Master and one of Bryony’s paintings I’d take hers any day, because a reproduction isn’t the painting, it lacks everything which makes the painting worth looking at. I’d rather have a picture by somebody unknown which I loved on the wall any day. Okay, I have a lot of prints of pictures, including one I’m not ever going to take down, but that’s going to be a future blog post (‘spoilers, sweetie’).

See, frankly, I’m not convinced that Art is actually any better than art. Certainly much of it is brilliant, though a lot isn’t I think that great – I’m not doing the old master v modernism thing here, it’s got nothing to do with the type of art, some is just better than others. I accept that ‘better’ is a personal opinion thing though. For example if Millias had not painted after Ophelia I’d have been happy, it would have saved us from mawkish dreck like Bubbles. We clearly can’t think it’s all good because it’s famous because if you watch anybody visiting a gallery they wander the rooms and stop at some paintings because those are the ones which engage them. You know what? I reckon if you took one of Bryony’s paintings and put it in an exhibition of art by well known abstract painters as many of the public would stop to look at it as they wander the rooms as those by famous painters in the same genre. Because deep down art lovers, real art lovers (it’s my blog, I can be as polemical as I like) look at and enjoy art which engages and captivates them. The Ecstasy of St Theresa doesn’t captivate because it’s by Bernini, it captivates because you swear that if you reached out and pushed on one of her feet it would swing.

The Cass Arts chain says “lets fill this town with artists” – they’re actually wrong to say that (though I totally applaud the sentiment), it already is full of artists, we just need to realise that everybody who paints, or draws or sculpts, or scrapes, or prints is an artist, even if they’re not Artists.

 

Victorian Fan Service

Last week I was in Bristol, and took a turn round the City Museum and Art Gallery, which I’ve not visited in years – very good it is too, in the foyer look up and marvel at the replica Bristol Box-kite (made for the film Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines, at Vickers when my dad worked there).  But this post isn’t about early aircraft, though a future post might be if I can find a way to work it in.

No, this post is about Victorian paintings of somewhat less than totally clad women, of which the City Museum has a few. I was walking away from them when I found myself musing about the fact that really they’re an excuse to show women with less clothes than the respectable Victorian lady might wear under the guise of putting them in a classical setting. Then the phrase popped into my head…

“It’s just fan service really”

And once it was there, it stuck there.

For those not familiar with the term, ‘fan service’ is an expression to describe young ladies with no clothes in Anime and Manga, generally they take their clothes off for no apparent reason, or they’re somewhere clothes aren’t required. They go with the whole Anime/Manga territory. But really, apart from a century or so, there isn’t as much clear blue water between chaps like Alma Tadema and the illustrators of manga like Battle Vixens. At this point I’m going to say that you can go off and google for images if you want, both of them feature heavily on the Internet and by not posting images I can’t be held responsible for doing NSFW stuff. Just don’t google at work or college, that’s all I’m saying here…  You might well say that Alma Tadema is by far the superior artist, and I’d say if you’re talking about painting then yes he is – but Manga and Anime artists have to produce a whole load of graphic images in short order so the skill set is different. Though I admit it’s not likely that pages from High School of the Dead are going to be hanging on gallery walls in a few decades. But they’re art of their time, and they both in some way serve to provide images of unclothed ladies under the guise of a storyline which somehow requires that.

So, there you are, a brief ramble on based on an idea which made me giggle in the gallery.

It’s not about the camera

One of the great sayings about photography is that it’s not about the camera. Actually, sometimes it is, if you’re shooting for Vogue then using a £50 point and shoot probably isn’t going to hack it. In the broadest sense though it’s always true, if you watch the Cheap Camera Challenge on Digital Rev you get to see top pro-togs (their phrase) using the direst cameras and getting great results. If you haven’t watched this series then I’d really recommend it. The camera is the tool: the skill and experience of the snapper is what makes the difference.

Personally, I’ve realised how right this is.

After years of shooting film we got our first digital camera, a Fuji Finepix S5000, not top of the line by any means. Took adequate photos, though I never felt that happy with the results. I’ve taken photos for years but a few years ago I decided to take it seriously and, you know, practice and be more self critical. After a while I found myself in a position to upgrade to a DSLR and got an EOS 450d which is much better than my Fuji and which I’ve used a lot. Last week I was up in London and took the Fuji because it’s small and light, and if something happens it’s not a significant loss (though having seen the second had price of the 450d on EBay that’s not as big a concern). It’s got really slow autofocus, and low resolution by modern standards, and a really crap digital viewfinder. But when I was looking at my results I realised something.

I’d taken better photos on my old Fuji than I was taking on my EOS when I first got it

Clearly I’d improved as a photographer far more than I realised I had – as a result of my own “cheap camera challenge” I’d proved it really isn’t about the camera.

Andrew Wyeth – marmite artist

What is it about Wyeth?

Up till a few weeks ago the only Andrew Wyeth painting I knew was (yes you’ve guessed it) Christina’ World. This wasn’t down to intentional avoidance tactics, just that somehow I’d managed to miss the rest. So while working out what I was going to say in this post I’ve been spending some time exploring his work. There’s a lot of it. I think it’s really good. I’m not planning on talking so much about him and his life because loads of people have already done it really well (links at the end); I want to talk about his marmite effect. See I’ve found that he’s somewhat contentious, people love him or loathe him. Not all people of course, that’s a rhetorical effect again. I like those. As in my previous post.

He seems to be the depleted uranium round in the war with modernism. The laser-guided munition fired against all the drippers and splodgers. The American Artist (in fact the ‘premier American Artist’ of which more later) who painted real people doing real things in a proper painterly manner with real skill, unlike all that stuff 5 year olds could do. It’s all bollocks of course, apart from the real skill part, he was all that. He picked on a difficult medium, egg tempera, which requires a lot of skill to master and which gives his work it’s texture. Spent a lot of work out in the field sketching and was a bloody good draftsman.

But a painter of real life, no way. Wyeth no more paints real American life any more than Ansel Adams photographed the real American landscape or constable painted 19th century rural England. The cheerful rustic dream of the Hay Wain isn’t the real one of poverty, under-employement and the poor laws. Take the painting we all know – now it’s easy to read this as young girl, in a field on her nice family farm. Touseled hair, sprawled on the ground, dreaming of her future. Easy reading isn’t it? I read it like that and so did at least one other person I ran it past. But it’s not: it’s a 55 year old woman crippled with polio looking at the house where she eaked out a poverty stricken existence…and it’s not even her, other people posed for parts of her because Wyeth wasn’t happy about asking her to pose too much. He’s not guilty of pulling of any deceptions here, he painted what he wanted to paint in the way he wanted to paint it. He’s not staking any claims to be a particular type of artist or to be opposed to anything.

1948, the year of Christina’s World has Pollock getting really into the dripping and De Kooning abstracting for all he’s worth. The year after would see Life ask of Pollock “is this the greatest living American painter?”. As time goes on Wyeth is either loved or vilified, depending on what side of the abstraction fence you were on (or indeed perhaps still are). He’s either about real art or a reactionary has been depending on how blinkered your viewpoint was. I think, and it’s a personal view though not an original one, that the reason Wyeth is so much a poster child for ‘real art’ is about what he isn’t.

*“In today’s scrambled-egg school of art, Wyeth stands out as a wild-eyed radical,” one journalist wrote in 1963, speaking for the masses. “For the people he paints wear their noses in the usual place, and the weathered barns and bare-limbed trees in his starkly simple landscapes are more real than reality.” *

So there you are; he’s the painter of the person on the Maine omnibus, the one it’s safe to like, the one you don’t have to think any of those wild modernist ideas to like. It’s very easy to remember the 60s (if you can) as the summer of love, woodstock and all that sort of thing, but most of it wasn’t like that. In 63, black people were still using separate drinking fountains in much of the south, the pill wasn’t easy to get (and it’s way before Roe v Wade), fuel was cheap, the US hasn’t yet realised where it’s involvement in Vietnam was going and the Hayes Code still pretty much governed cinema. I reckon it’s the America the republicans wished they still had. Talk to many conservatives in the US today and they view Europe as a place from which all the dangerous and left wing ideas flow…and modernism was just so very European. Who is the journalist in the above quote talking about who paint people without their noses in the right place? Sounds very pre-war too me, not really very 60s art at all, not Pop Art or anything. I’ve just read an article which takes the position that one of the candidates in the current American election isn’t fit because he’s a socialist and that all the countries in Europe do that and are somehow ‘bad’ because they state control a lot of things.

In 65 Time called him America’s Pre-Eminent Artist (in an interview in which he, interestingly, called himself an abstractionist and said he detested the sweetness in muc realistic paiting) – now that’s a heck of a big accolade for anybody and one which Time doesn’t justify in the article. It throws it in right at the begining, twice, and then moves on. I’d say it’s an empty bit of rhetoric for any artist at any time and in any place and is more interesting for what it says about Time than about what it says about Wyeth. The article is free to look at on the Time archive and is worth reading for anybody interested in Wyeth and drawing their own conclusions

Personally, I think he’s generally very ‘modern’, he may be right in calling himself an abstrationist but not in the sense of the abstract expressionists, cubists, futurists, vortacists or whatever. His work is not chocolate box stuff, apart from Christina’s World until you lean what the image is about at any rate. So I’m not going to join in the line drawing and name calling: he’s an artist, he’s a good one too. Job done in my book.

Some other interesting articles

Andrew Wyeth dot Com

Smithsonian Mag

His obituary

Looking Out, Looking In

 

Why I Hate Poundbury

Okay, so I don’t actually hate Poundbury.

The title is there for rhetorical effect I’m afraid, so if you were hoping for an amusing anti-Poundbury rant you’re in the wrong blog. I’m sure it’s a great place to live, convenient for both central Dorchester and easy to get to other places, lots of trees, always seems clean and vandal free, designed to encourage walking and cycling rather than driving. Apparently there are rules about what colour you can paint your front door, but for Poundbury-ens that’s probably a small inconvenience though from what I read on the Internet the gravel paths are. My grievence with Poundbury isn’t it’s existence, or even how the individual buildings look, it’s the fact that the whole place is built so completely to match HRH’s Vision of Britain that it fails to look like a real English village. It lacks the modernism he so fervently detests, but it goes so far the other way that it even has false windows the sort which used to be found in the days before the window tax. It’s a film set, it’s a pastiche. You ever watch cult TV show The Prisoner? That’s sort of how it feels to me when I drive through it.

Housing the population has a long history as an issue, especially when you need to deal with an influx of people into an area and has frequently been approached by the building of estates, or sometimes entire towns. Swindon has The Railway Village , built to house workers in the GWR works. It’s very victorian and quite a tourist attraction. Then after the first war you get Garden Cities like Letchworth and Welwyn, then post WW2 we got the New Towns like Harlow housing the bombed out from the cities. It’s not a UK only thing, mass housing projects are a feature of the Europe and the US too. Anywhere you need to house your workforce, or just an increasing population, people have commissioned and built places like this. So I’m not knocking the concept of Poundbury one bit. Where I think it went wrong is that it’s not, I think, really about housing an increasing population or a mobile workforce, but about somehow proving that you can build mass housing in some kind of traditional manner.

It is according to The Guardian about being a ‘vibrant place to work as well as live – like a traditional English town centre’. But English town centres do not spring fully formed from the head of a member of the royal family, they develop over hundreds of years as buildings are put up, torn down, fall down or burn down, get rebuilt, altered, knocked together, divided up, change use, etc. This is how real town centres develop, over time and as their use changes. Look at any real English town centre and you’ll see a huge difference in building ages and styles, you’ll see old fashioned shop fronts, brand new ones made to look old, and ultra-modern ones scarfed onto the front of old ones. You’ll see a riot of colours and design. You’ll see everything you don’t see in Poundbury.

It’s fashionable, among many people, not just among some members of the Royal Family, to decry modern architecture as though there is something intrinsically (or even somehow, morally) wrong with it, as though the failings of the brutalist estates are inherent in the very concept of them. They did fail in many ways, but that had as much to do with poor mainteance and management by the authorities as the design. To say that the dark alleys between the blocks made people feel unsafe is ridiculous as a criticism of the estates when traditional English town centres have loads of alleys and paths in them; is a 20th century concrete alley somehow more dangerous than an 18th century dirt one? But we’ve learned a lot about managing and designing estates over the past few decades, so why isn’t Poundbury an ultra modern place, incorporating the latest materials in exiting modern designs managed in the light of all the mistakes made in post war projects?

It seems to me that the desire to produce new housing has become mixed up with the Prince’s desire to create his vision of what a traditional English town should be like. So Dorchester wound up not with a new community which has grown organically and is full of buildings which learned, as Stuart Brand put it, nor full of buildings which say clearly when they were built and which fit in with 21st century design and technology, but with a rather boring pastiche which, because of the controls on what can happen there, will always remain more one man’s dream than a real place.

Pop Art: Child of it’s time

I have to say, I’ve never been sure about Pop Art; never been sure if my response to it is positive, negative or just plain indifferent. It’s a bit like any movement really, can any of us really say that they like x-ism or dislike y-ism in their entirety? No of course we can’t, all it really comes down to is saying how we feel generally.

Well generally, I’m pretty indifferent to Pop Art.

Some of it I respond to positively. It may be hackneyed but I’ve always like Whaam! – child of the 60s that I am…but then again I’m a bit ‘so what’ about the cover for Sgt Pepper (okay, I said it, sue me). Wasn’t sure about Andy Warhol until I saw an exhibition about his work at MOMA Oxford last year and felt more positively disposed. So when I got an opportunity to get to one of the last days of The World Goes Pop at Tate Modern I decided to give it a go; I thought an exhibition on Pop Art which wasn’t American would be interesting and maybe give me some new insights. I paid my entrance fee (discounted with my Art Pass, first time I got to use it) and ‘did’ the show…and ultimately found my opinion on Pop Art unchanged, I’m still not sold on it. There were a couple of, for me, stand out pieces which made going worth while. Cornel Brudascu’s Youth on the Building Yard,  the timber and fabric newsprint of Joe Tilson, and Komar and Melamid‘s reworking of post-holocaust canonical American pop art impressed me a lot and made me want to look at more of their work.

But what I really found myself thinking was that it was all very 60s counter-culture, it’s a child of its time. Pop Art is, inseparable from the summer of love, Vietnam and throwing rocks at coppers. I don’t think it’s just the fact that for those of us who are children of the 60s the visual effect is just so there, it’s that the whole central idea of Pop Art means that it’s totally rooted in that period. Pop Art is about taking imagery from commercial art, graphic design and popular culture and making art with it…which means that it shrieks it’s time of creation. Adverts and popular culture have limited shelf-lives and the imagery is transient, very few things are timeless. The Tilson news paper pages (like this one) have to be from the 60s, not only because the photos say that but because the look of the page isn’t like newspaper pages today. The colour choices are those of 60’s commercial products. The idea of Pop Art too is of course only noteworthy for the 60s because it was new, nobody now would bat an eyelid about an artist incorporating commercial or news imagery in their work, it’s accepted, it’s what many artists do.

And that, I think, in a burst of introspection, is why I’m largely indifferent to Pop Art – because it’s embedded in the world which created it. I remember my sister (who was 16 years older) having loads of weird friends, and being into the Maharishi and TM, and I wonder to this day how much pot I may have passively smoked hanging around with them. I remember seeing the Grosvenor Square riots on tv and the news being full of Vietnam and Watergate. These are part of my memories of being 8 or 9. When I look at Pop Art I can see this time, but I can’t see anything relevant to any feeling beyond that time. Nothing which says that what I’m looking at says anything about what it is to be human, or which is bigger than me.

Nothing which moves me for good or ill beyond a sense of nostalgia.

 

Exhibition review on ArtsDesk

Sharp Images: Fuzzy Concepts

“There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.”
Ansel Adams

The great Ansel Adams was famous for pre-visualising his images before he photographed them: prior to pushing the button he already knew in his head how it was going to look when he’d finished the entire process from setting up the photo to hanging up the print in the darkroom. Though this isn’t true of all his images, the famous Moonrise was a grab shoot in the finest sense of the word, involving the car skidding to a halt so he could leap out and get the shot. But generally he was a considered image maker who thought and planned his images

“The simple lesson of previsualization – that is as applicable today as when Ansel Adams was capturing his spectacular images of Yosemite National Park – is that while one might get lucky, and capture a fine image, the far more likely result of approaching a subject without an idea already in mind is disappointment”

Andy Ilachinsky

Great artists of all kinds produced in the past, produce today, a great number of sketches and working drawings before committing paint to paper or chisel to marble, refining the idea and exploring alternatives as they worked towards the finished piece. Sure, Paul Klee said that drawing was taking a line for a walk, but that doesn’t imply that he was unaware of the path it was going to take.  I, and I’m sure most other creative people, know what it’s like to work on something, trying different things and ultimately realising that what is wrong is the idea itself rather than the execution; to use the expression from the joke about the tourist who asks somebody in rural Ireland for directions and gets the response, “if I was you I’d not be starting from here”. When I was at university I often realised that if my essay was boring and pedestrian then the problem was the structure I’d picked for it. Before you create something, be it image, sculpture, dress, hairstyle or building, you need to know clearly what you want the result to be like, not necessarily exactly how it is going to look, but how it makes you feel.

Last year I found myself disatisfied with my photography. I knew I was better than I had been but felt I wasn’t improving or getting to where I wanted to be. So I asked a professional friend of mine if she’d mind looking at the photos I’d made on holiday that summer and give me one or two pointers; a critique which would just give me a couple of things I could concentrate on getting right. One of them was this image of Eastbourne pier, with which I was rather pleased actually, I wanted some beach and a low viewpoint and the line of posts in the foreground and the clouds were interesting, all of which I’d thought of when I made the image.

Then I read her critique in which she said “the thing with that is I don’t know what I’m supposed to be looking at, the pier, or the posts, or that clump of weeds”. She’s right of course, totally right. The flaw isn’t in the execution, I’d got into it everything I wanted…what was wrong was that I’d missed the key fact that it wasn’t really a photograph of anything. I should have thought about what the main point was and then asked myself if the other things were detracting from it. Looking at good professional work it’s clear, once I’d internalised it, that there is no doubt what we’re supposed to be looking at in the image; they’re not photographs of this …they’re photographs of this. Go and check out the amazing portraits of of Bella West, her subjects are not always in the middle of the frame filling the space, sometimes they’re off centre, or quite small, or not looking at the camera…but they are always full of intention – Ms West knows exactly what photo she’s taking before she takes it. There’s a nice interview with her here if people are interested in finding more about her and her work – Mike Browne calls her compositions “off the wall”; it’s fine to go off the wall if you know why you’re doing it!

So is this entire blog post a fuzzy concept? Let me know in the comments!

Too little imperfection; why we like analogue

Okay, this is not the blog post you were supposed to be reading today. That was going to be originally one on ‘sharp ideas: fuzzy concepts’ but after seeing Pop Goes the World at Tate I was going to blog about pop art.

You’ll get those in the future.

So why the suddent deviation from the plan (yes, I have a plan)? Well it was inspired by three things
1) Occasionally I put a roll of film through my Pentax, sort of for old time’s sake, which I was doing today
2) I was in my local Boots, The Chemist, when I saw that they were selling rolls of 35mm roll film, their own colour and Ilford monochrome
and
3) Watching tonight’s countryfile and seeing an item about photographer Jack Lowe and his project to photograph all the UK lifeboat stations using a vintage ambotype plate camera.

Which all got me thinking about using film (and plates), about analogue photography, indeed thinking about it to the point where I thought I may as well turn my thinking into a blog post. Analogue: What’s the Attraction?

There is, among audio engineers old enough to remember, a nostalgia for what is called ‘analogue warmth’, it’s hard to pin down exactly what this actually is but essentially it comes down to a desirable level of imperfection really. See this great article in Sound on Sound which also references digital imaging for some insights. Back in the days of the old Victor Blackman column in A.P. he always said medium format was better than 35mm as the resolution was better, and lens tests always involved blowing up images from the corner of 35mm frames to insane levels to see how much detail they had; my memory is that these were always of dockyards, maybe the office overlooked one, or maybe I’m imagining this. It was all about ‘sharp’ because sharp was good, the holy grail of a good image. But now we’ve got sharp, we’ve got sharp as never before, we’ve got sharp so sharp that if they weren’t photoshopped to within an inch of their lives even photos of top models would make their skins look less than perfect. Bizarrly, what do we do as part of our post-processing workflows pray tell? We apply sharpening, as though the bloody things weren’t already sharp as razors. Then we apply some extra contrast (I say ‘we’ because I do it too) because somehow contrast looks good, we’re used to contrast being on the high side. Hey, film never looked like that…

And, I suspect, that’s why many of use who remember film (and some snappers who don’t of course) are happy to go back to it. Because the photos look like photos. Take a look at this photo of mine, the year is 1979 and it’s from the first roll of film I put through my K1000 which was my first 35mm slr (I still have it, it still works). No idea who any of these people are because in 1979 it was okay to wander down to the local school fete and photograph kids with whom you had no connection, which in retrospect is quite alarming. It’s not a great photo, though I love the expression on the little girl’s face, but the blacks are nice and rich without needing too much contrast, and it’s sharp but not un-naturally so. It looks better on the print rather than this scan by the way, because it’s a totally analogue process from start to finish on the print.

Now I’m not going to type here and say that digital is rubbish, or even bad, because it’s not, it’s really good and I shoot most of my stuff on digital cameras now and I love doing that, but I love shooting analogue too. I think the issue is that everything that was said about the wonders of digital audio and imaging are perfectly true, that it would be sharp and clear; I remember a friend who heard one of the first CD players saying “the amazing thing was that there was no noise between the tracks!!!” That they’d be portable, and storage would be bigger and so we’d get more sound onto our players or more images onto our cameras. That with a digital camera we wouldn’t have to either do all that smelly stuff with chemicals and black out the bathroom, or wait for them to come back from the processor’s. All those things are true, and what made them such attractive concepts was that at the time they seemed to offer solutions to the things we disliked without us realising that a lot of those things were fundamental to what we enjoyed. We didn’t realise that actually, we could have too much sharpness and contrast, to much clarity and perfection.

Choose Simplicity over Fussiness

I came across the following quote on the blog Esme and the Laneway

If in doubt, choose simplicity over fussiness

Esme writes mostly about vintage fashion, and in this post she’s interviewing Nicole Jenkins of Circa Vintage in Melbourne, about a book she had written. When I read it I thought how much it reflected my views on what looks good; what I think counts as good design and visually satisfying art. In fact I think it’s a great maxim for many other things beyond the visual; think about how much we like the devices we use to be intuitive and simple without loads of knobs, buttons and dials. We don’t like to have to fight our way through technology to use our devices and I don’t think we like to fight our way through needless fussiness in our visual environment. So how am I interpreting ‘fussiness’ here? It’s not ornamentation per se, it’s ‘ornamentation for the sake of it’, ‘ornamentation to no point’, ‘ornamentation which doesn’t know when to stop’, ‘ornamentation just `because you can‘.

I’m going to say here that I think this viewpoint isn’t new, however much it seems very late 20th century onwards. We think of the victorian living room chock a block with ornaments and patterns, or the over the top and over-wrought craziness of victorian gothic and, let’s get it out there, the Albert Memorial. But at the same time you have the whole arts and crafts thing going on which produced some very clean design. “Now hang on!! (I hear you crying) William Morris Wallpaper!!”. Well, to be honest, I think Morris is right out there on the edge of pointless ornamentation, the same way his buddies the PRB are in painting. Not arguing there. But it was about so much more than Morris; take a look at arts and crafts furniture and much of it is very clean and non-fussy. I’m not going to take a trip through the art and design history of the last couple of hundred years, apart from saying that Art Nouveau is going to be my exception in that a lot of it is very fussy but I really like it…in moderation.

So what is is about simplicity which is so satisfying? I think it’s because you can have a lot of it without it clashing. Patterns are much easier to over-do. Fair Isle cardigan + muted dress = looks great. Plain cardigan + floral patterned dress = looks great. Fair Isle cardigan + floral dress…you get what I’m driving at here. When you start introducing ornamentation you are putting limits on what you can do, how much of it you can have without it looking like a mess. When I was a kid in the 60s and early 70s we had wallpaper, patterned wallpaper, every room different…and patterned upholstry on our living room suite…and patterned curtains. Takes a lot of skill to pull that off; looking back at old photographs it was skill my parents didn’t have. The only saving grace is that my parents weren’t picture people because it would have been bloody hard to hang pictures on it. What do we do now when we decorate? We paint rooms in ‘white, not quite’ shades (I remember when those first came in) and quite often use the same colour throughout the house. It’s so much more forgiving than the wallpaper of my youth, you can pick rugs for the floor, or hang pictures on it, or cushions for the chairs with much greater ease and change them around without having to redecorate because the walls aren’t going to fight with anything. In fact, hopping back to Art Nouveau, you could get a wonderfully fussy Mucha print and hang it on those plain walls and it would be fine, becuase it wouldn’t be fighting with other patterns and colours.

One final clothing analogy…why is the classic evening wear for women the LBD? No points for getting this one right