Walking the dog is great.
The world just keeps throwing up these little compositions, and a particular kind keeps catching my eye. It’s invariably on the floor, and invariably shallow — an inch or so max. Sometimes there’s a feeling of narrative, other times it’s just a “field”.
Mulling over where that kind of visual interest comes from, I’ve always loved painters who play with that line between object, surface and picture.
And I took a snap on holiday that for some reason I’ve always been inordinately pleased with, which seemed to me to have a related play between abstraction and figuration.
From snapping bits and bobs on the phone, it finally morphed into a bit more of a formal exercise. But still “fun”, honest.
As an unrelated thing, I’d been mucking about in Illustrator doing “rules based” generative stuff. The whole:
- create a grid
- attach something to each point on the grid
- treat that thing with some randomness attributes-wise
So I’ve formalised “shallow plane” stuff in a similar way by applying a few (admittedly loose) rules:
- shoot at the ground from straight above (near as dammit anyway, got no tripod)
- must be a found composition, no shifting of objects etc.
- no cropping after the fact
- 4:3 ratio please
Going forward, my plan is to fill up this site with pretentiously titled pictures.