I am uncertain if being kind is the most underated life skill, or the most easily forgotten. Many people view it as a weakness or something that need not apply to them. Others think it is a selective skill used sparingly at times and then gushingly like an incontinent water main. I find this sort of person somewhat awkward to interact with.
That being said I do possess some unkind bones in my body , everyone needs just a few for protection or good comedic moments. But a whole skeleton of them is not a good thing in my opinion.
People with full skeletons of unkind bones see kindness as a weakness. I think of it as a bit of a superpower. Kindness brings warmth into most situations.
Humans are funny old things we tend to remember the bad stuff or the sad stuff: the unkind words and deeds much more readily for some reason. Which is why kindness is just so important, used effectively it can make the sad and bad stuff just a little bit more tolerable and balance, where possible its nemesis, unkindness.
I’ve been playing around a bit, with colour temperatures for prints created using photographs and digital manipulation as my practice place. This cool hued image above represents the early morning of a day that turned out to be the most delicious Indian Summer day in early October. But I stood in the exact same place searching for a breeze in the midst of the summer heatwaves. Looking at the actual photographs there is not a huge amount of difference but by changing the colour of a future print version I can get the essence of oppressive heat in an open space.
Similarly on a very hot day on our recent trip to Brittany. We sought refuge in a bookshop with a cafe.
This is what we got, but what we hoped for was more like the image below.
But sometimes there is no escaping extreme heat. And as October wends its ponderous way towards November I will be dreaming of those over-hot moments soon enough.
Does bright yellow signify the beginning of the ‘Scrag end of Summer’.
We have had a most unusual summer, 5 heatwaves have rendered our back yard almost unusable because of excessive heat. Evenings being the only time we could comfortably sit out, or tinker with our plants.
Nearly a week since the last heatwave left the area, the later part of sitting in the yard last evening required rugs.
So heatwaves apart, we are now in an entirely normal late summer pattern. Mentally we extend summer into the whole of September. Optimistic that Autumn will only descend on the 1st of October with a crescendo of pumpkins.
A very interesting question in light of the 5 heatwaves + 1 more scheduled for September, is what will the 2026 Pumpkin season look like? 1st World Problems.
Painting pumpkins is one of my favourite fruit and Vegetable art moments.
Which leads me somewhat circuitously to the the art drama of my past week. Two hybrid prints featuring the moon were sent off for a test print. One came back looking good the other did not. So back to the drawing board in the literal and actual sense.
For my image I wanted the moon to look soft and mythical, exactly like cream cheese.
The Moon is made of green cheese” is a statement referring to a fanciful belief that the Moon is composed of cheese. In its original formulation as a proverb and metaphor for credulity with roots in fable, this refers to the perception of a simpleton who sees a reflection of the Moon in water and mistakes it for a round cheese wheel. It is widespread as a folkloric motif among many of the world’s cultures, and the notion has also found its way into children’s folklore and modern popular culture.
Queso fresco (“fresh cheese”), a green cheese, with typical white, round appearance resembling a full moon. The phrase “green cheese” in the common version of this proverb (sometimes “cream cheese” is used),[1] may refer to a young, unripe cheese[2][3][4][5] or to cheese with a greenish tint.[6]
My first attempt , which I was entirely happy with until the test print, did in fact look very much like a green and slightly misshapen cheese. I wanted gentle swirls of Philadelphia.
Cream Cheese Moon 🎬2
Cream Cheese moon, created by swirling wet Posca pens with my finger has successfully been inserted into my original image and the nasty green moon banished. Another first world problem to ponder on a Sunday evening in a yard which is, for the first time this summer pleasantly warm rather than roasting.
It is just over a week since I bobbed during the partial eclipse with 9 other bobbers. At the time the experience was both peculiar and beautiful. Peculiar because we swam for virtually the whole of the eclipse experience. Quite often with special Eclipse glasses which gave us a completely safe experience to view the eclipse in real time, but our vision was limited to black and red vision of the black moon obscuring most of an orange sun . While our bodies were experiencing the sensations of the sea and our ears were hearing the happiness and exclamations of a bay, full of happy swimmers.
When we didn’t have the glasses on we were experiencing ever changing highly saturated colours that slowly darkened and changed as the moon crossed the sun. One of my Eclipse glasses visions was of sparks of light like golden diamond twinkles firing off the perimeter of the sun. I think caused by drops of sea water on my eyelashes or on the plastic lens of the eclipse glasses.
I knew I wanted to create an image of the experience, but which one?
Until I decided to throw caution to the wind and put all my recollections into one image. Not as mad as you might think for someone who worked in medical imaging. For example a CT scan image is made of many amalgamated pictures taken from lots of different angles at slightly different times.
My hybrid printmaking technique with photography and painted or mono printed images uses exactly that technique, modified a little.
Yesterday I had to get a bit of a wiggle on to get this image off to a printer for a test run Giclee print. It is still not the finished article but I will need to see how a print looks.
So that’s where the image is currently but what about my personal recollection?
Really one of the loveliest things I have done in a really familiar home environment. I still haven’t quite found the words to describe the experience. But I have found the many layers of a half decent picture.
This one tells of the late summer clear up. All family guests have moved on to different holiday destinations and our home has eased back from peak occupation. The crocs belonging to three small girls are gathered in a bucket by the back door while the girls themselves are away on different holiday adventures.
Using a similar colour scheme I am trying to tell the story of a set of swimming steps that are much quieter this week now the heatwave has moved on.
I am at heart a story teller either with words or pictures.
A regular blog reader, who is familiar with these steps, said yesterday that I had made them look very posh. That was not the intention, but I agree. They may have been posh once upon a time but shabby shic is a better description now. Most of the time they are entirely tolerable and are regularly washed by incoming very high tides.
At night they can be a gathering place for smokers of weed and men who like to do a wee. Not so posh then. Not so great as a swim destination either. Not so great a picture.
But I don’t need to tell that story about these steps.
Years ago a little pair of discarded crocs by the back door of the actual Old Mortuary used to break my heart. A small person and her family had left us to live abroad. That would not have made a great story or a great picture.
3 pairs of crocs in a bucket is a much better story.
However in the interests of story telling I also wanted to show the earlier set of steps at the peak of the August heatwave. I am not interested in the crowds of people who used these steps recently just the steps as a metaphor for extreme atmospheric and radiated heat. Just too much heat.
The heat blistered out of the rocks at night. And the sea languidly lapping the steps, warmer than we have ever known. Not quite cooling enough perhaps. Oleaginous even.
A different colour scheme. A completely different story.
Which outdated technology do you miss the most, and why?
As a lifelong image maker the outdated technology I miss the most is the magic and alchemy of a photographic or radiographic darkroom. The basic skills of wet processing and later automated processing, that are enhanced by the knowledge and experience of knowing how to manipulate negative and positive images to create the best possible outcome.
So many mental filing cabinets of know how have been stored in my brain gathering dust since the dawn of digital imaging. Until a February in Penzance when I had a lightbulb moment and decided to start using some of my old analogue knowledge alongside the digital knowledge of contemporary image making.
I am a time-hopping digital immigrant. Using skills taught to me by people called Sheila and Ron in the 70’s ,an era when a dark room technician could turn a disaster into an acceptable picture by clever thinking and the use of tricks and accuracy to make an image better.
This is the first successfully manipulated image created by overlaying three separate digital photographs to create one picture.
The feet below are my most recent meddled image.
The others are just some of the picture journey. The acceptable part of the journey. Not the many many images that have ended up in the digital bin
My day was hijacked , first by a sound then an image and then later again by another image that just nagged away at me until I had sketched,painted and photographed it into existence. Until I was done.
Lola and I were out walking early this morning , almost from the start we were followed by the slightly worrisome and slightly exciting sound of someone hurrying with a suitcase on wheels. At one point we were overtaken by a woman who had laden herself with everything she would need for a day on the beach. She was a woman on a mission. As she sped past me I grabbed a quick photo which I have altered to anonymise . There was no beach, we were both walking at exactly high tide. She was way ahead of us and as I looked over the wall she was patiently waiting for some beach to appear. By the time we passed again, on our way back, she had claimed her spot on a tiny ribbon of wet pebbles.
She had unloaded and set up a one woman encampment. Sun lounger, parasols, cooler box and books. She was oiled up like a sausage on a barbeque . She was not alone, the thin strip of pebbles had grown and she had neighbours, but none who had hauled quite so much stuff. When I got home I decided to donate her my empty beach of yesterday.
It was the least I could do. I had an interesting afternoon sketching her arriving on an empty beach then watercoloured and did a pen and ink sketch before sticking them all together digitally.
Friday was always going to be a full day of creating images. There was a fair amount of digital manipulation to create some images of the previous evenings skinny dip and an afternoon of watercolour and ink work, to depict the wind which is always, to my frustration, the hidden element in all art work. Painting wind is a little project I return to now and again.
In the future I would quite like to add a wind cherub to my wind paintings, those fat cheeked toddlers who appear on the sides of old maps.
Wind cherubs are quite a niche interest, I suspect our local library will not rise to that particular subject in their reference section.
So currently my wind paintings are sans windy cherubs.
Firestone Bay with a South West Wind, no cherub
The day of working in the studio was missing something else too.
A chocolate digestive at work
The chocolate digestive did not work. What my creative juices required was a piece of fruit cake. Not a rich winter version but a pale sort of fruitcake. Often sold by the slice in plastic wrappers at the lower end of the cafe industry. There should always be a cherry in every slice.
Not expecting to appear in public I was wearing an old sundress, no bra and my gardening crocs. A quick trip to Lidl might just provide me with the cake I desired without meeting anyone I know.
This is where the day took a lovely and awkward turn. I blame the blog
Lidl had no cheap fruit cake. I did not meet anyone I know. But I did meet someone I don’t know who reads the blog. A friend of a friend etc. We could have talked about the blog but she really kindly, said that she saw me about often and admired my style. She didn’t mean my writing style. How thoughtful and delightful. We chatted briefly and I did not move from the back of my car. Not a single part of the day’s outfit was visible to her. No illusions shattered and no fruit cake.
Creatively I have grown like a weed. I chose to step away from exhibiting at formal art exhibitions for a year and just let art and photography grow in their own way.
The kite surfers at St Michaels Mount were the first sign that something was up . Goodness knows why I had never considered that the skills, both analogue and digital that I used in Medical Imaging could be transferred to photography and art.
The epiphany occurred on Mounts Bay beach during a cold winter weekend in January 2025. I could get mediocre photographs of a great location and some kite surfers but nothing particularly Zingy. Until I tried sticking three photos together and slightly altering their angles and magnification.
18 months in and I happily stick anything that I have photographed or painted together, to create an image which pleases me. Along the way I have used screen printing tricks like deregistering and sometimes registering, different renditions of the exact same subject. Altering perspectives, angles, magnifications and colours. Anything goes really. No guarantee of success, the failure rate is high, but when the serendipity goddess is in a good mood then anything can happen.
Like all experimental creative processes there are more duds than there are successes. But there is always some learning lurking even in the duddiest of duds.
Sometimes I flip the process and paint one of my amalgamated images as an original painting.
Yesterday’s blog featured one of my hybrid images that I was always planning to paint.
There was more flipping, flipping because the image was of a small yacht haven on the Peloponnese in Greece. Just a tiny jetty that offered overnight, safe mooring just off a shingle beach. Double flipping because my digital image was created using three different photographs, superimposed, simplified and then overlayed on a hand painted watercolour background.
Then flipped colour wise because everyone knows that all images of boats in Greece should be represented in shades of blue, green and turquoise. But I wanted to represent the warmth of the evening and the moment.
Painting this image yesterday I abstracted it a little further.
I also had a go at doing a digital deregistered double image. A pencil sketch overlayed on top of the watercolour.
Just like growing weeds, I never quite know what will pop up next .
Just like weeds quite a lot of these ideas end up in the bin.
One person’s weed however can be someone else’s flower.
Not exactly four seasons in one day but almost. A very chilly start in Plymouth. Followed by a couple of hours of basking below The Hoe, in bright sunlight with too much caffeine, the right amount of nattering and laughter. Watching boats near the Lido.
Before returning to our yard to work off the caffeine in a yard that has declared Spring very much here with buds and blooms and sharp shadows.
Before rain chased us indoors. Then off to the Tennis Club to enjoy the views and rehearsals for Sri Lankan New Year. Coats were definately needed. But worse was to come…
Woolly hats were needed for the evening dog walk. April. What are you doing to us
