Further reflections

Trap Grounds, 27 June 2010, around which I liked to walk thus:

Field maple leaves with cast shadows

Burgess Field, 26 June 2010.

Shadows are negative in being holes in light (and may as in the self-shadows of the second picture burn holes in positives - here too the negative spaces and the self-shadows are similar in form, or rather inverses). But shadows are also like imprints in casting shapes. Plato in the Republic says of images that they are "in the first place, shadows, and in the second place, reflections in water and in solid, smooth and polished bodies and the like."
Shadows lose more information about the object producing them than reflected light, and in this they are eloquent reminders of the dimness of our perception. Any image is just that, an image, and a shadow. (Plato's Cave.)

Cast shadows are, of course, the Origin of Painting:

It was through his daughter that he [Butades] made the discovery; who, being deeply in love with a young man about to depart on a long journey, traced the profile of his face, as thrown upon the wall by the light of the lamp. Upon seeing this, her father filled in the outline, by compressing clay upon the surface, and so made a face in relief, which he then hardened by fire along with other articles of pottery.
-- Pliny, Natural History (c. 77-79 CE), Book XXXV.

In the eighteenth century there was both a vogue for silhouettes (so-named along with other cheaply produced objects á la Silhouette in times of austerity under the brief spell of Etienne de Silhouette as French finance minister in 1759) and for the theme of Dibutades (the Corinthian Maid) in such paintings as David Allan, Origin of Painting (1775), Joseph Wright of Derby, The Corinthian Maid (1782-1784), Joseph-Benoît Suvée, Dibutades, or the Origin of Drawing (1791), and Jean-Baptiste Regnault, The Origin of Painting: Dibutades Tracing the Portrait of a Shepherd (1785).

The role of shadows in the perception of shape, and their relation to light and space, are the subject of Michael Baxandall's Shadows and Enlightenment (Yale University Press, 1995), as well as the problem of how to paint them (for which also see Ernst Gombrich, Shadows: the depiction of cast shadows in Western art, (Yale University Press, 1995).

Reflecting chamber

Hinksey Stream, 25 June 2010.



Still water here acts as a reflecting chamber, echoing the capture of light within a camera. Light is muted in its dark depths, the surface serves as picture plane, and flares of light hover in indeterminate relation to it. What is above and what below? Things are transformed while being turned around. The surface calls attention to itself in its disturbances and disruptions by floating material, such as white willow leaves, early fallers, caught by twigs stalled in their course downstream, their still airborne kin behind them in reflection.

Flowering Rush and Yellow Water-lily

Flowering Rush (Butomus umbellatus) and Yellow Water-lily or Spatterdock (Nuphar lutea), along Hinksey Stream, 25 June 2010.

Banded Demoiselles

Banded Demoiselle (Calopteryx splendens), 25 June 2010.

These darting blue males flew in packs criss-crossing bank to bank, at a place where the slow-moving stream prepares to round a bend. Between dances all would rest, each on its own plant stalk or blade of grass. In a still image they are too much as though pinned in a display case, mitigated in the first by the various aspects of flight in which each of the three damselflies has been caught - lending a sort of Muybridge motion to it, and in the second there is a chiasmus in the two pairs below left and upper right. Just as the half-seen iridescent blur of a passing kingfisher, their flight is conjured in memory by more allusive means, such as Hopkins' line "As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme". Only here damselflies rather than dragonflies (the distinction mainly lying in how they hold themselves when at rest: damselflies fold their wings over their body, dragonflies keep them outstretched; also, dragonflies have larger eyes that touch).

Two adjacent pairs of telegraph poles

21 June 2010.

Telegraph poles stride across the land in seven-league boots, the wires they carry plunging towards the horizon along perspective lines. They hum and hiss when one approaches too close. Seen out of train windows they can be malevolent:

The door of the compartment was open and I could see the corridor window, where the wires – six thin black wires – were doing their best to slant up, to ascend skywards, despite the lightning blows dealt them by one telegraph pole after another; but just as all six, in a triumphant swoop of pathetic elation, were about to reach the top of the window, a particularly vicious blow would bring them down, as low as they had ever been, and they would have to start all over again.
-- Nabokov, Speak, Memory, 1951

In their geometry of straight(ish) lines – as the crow flies – they represent our idealization of space (Euclidean geometry, perspective). They map out the physical expanse of the land but on the other hand they make possible that near-instantaneous traversal of distance that has been instrumental in causing spatial perplexity. In their vague air of menace, or their uncanny giant reach, or their consorting with the birds, flying or perching, they are agents of that psychical space in which we try to situate ourselves.

Walking past a gate

21 June 2010.

When walking and looking at a fixed point – such as a lone tree in a field – the land appears to rotate around this focal point (an effect more noticeable when gazing out of a train window at a fixed point in the middle distance). Here a gate, which turns around a fixed post, is a surrogate for this rotational sense.
In the first picture the configuration of elements – steel gate, wooden posts, the square formed by two crossbars of an old stile(?), ragged blue plastic on barbed wire – stand together on a horizontal base like a sculptural group. While turning my head to keep looking at the configuration the elements move relative to each other in a mutually dependent way that articulates the space they occupy. In the picture plane there is the flattening of the square to a thin rectangle, the expansion and contraction of the gap between gatepost and fencepost, and the turning of the gate about its corner post (left of post to hidden by post to right of post). Within the sequence of three pictures these shifts can be inspected at a remove from the original movement that produced them. For example, the gatepost and fencepost begin to the right of the picture frame as almost parallel verticals; in the second picture they are enlarged, move toward the centre of the frame and begin to lean toward each other (further, a secondary echo of implied motion and depth is introduced in the receding line of fenceposts diminishing vertically up to the top edge of the frame); and in the third picture the gatepost and fencepost return to their first size and have moved to the centre of the frame, where they lean toward each other a little further.
To the left of the frame the square and post move in counterpoint.

Shadow branches

Thames Path, Binsey Green, 8 April.

Felled poplars

Binsey Green, 8 April.


Binsey Poplars (Felled 1879)

MY aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,
Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,
All felled, felled, are all felled;
Of a fresh and following folded rank
Not spared, not one
That dandled a sandalled
Shadow that swam or sank
On meadow and river and wind-wandering weed-winding bank.

O if we but knew what we do
When we delve or hew—
Hack and rack the growing green!
Since country is so tender
To touch, her being só slender,
That, like this sleek and seeing ball
But a prick will make no eye at all,
Where we, even where we mean
To mend her we end her,
When we hew or delve:
After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.
Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve
Strokes of havoc únselve
The sweet especial scene,
Rural scene, a rural scene,
Sweet especial rural scene.

-- Gerard Manley Hopkins

Blackthorn blossom

Burgess Field, 8 April.

Over time

4 April.

Tangled

Barbed wire fence

4 April.

Door and ladder

Between North and South Hinskey. 4 April.

Passage

North Hinskey to Oxford path. 2 April.

Mud impressions

Towards Cumnor Hill

2 April.

Puddles

Track near Chilswell Farm, 2 April. Last pair 180 degrees, next pair 90 degrees.

Above Chilswell Valley

2 April.

By Hinskey Stream

2 April.