What is one way you have grown this year?

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.

#1510 theoldmortuary ponders.

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.