Friday 6 April 2012

St Ives: Inspiration


I thought I’d do something new today. As you can see from my last blog post I recently went to St Ives for a week. I had a fantastic time and almost overdosed on inspiration. I wanted to blog about my trip some more, but couldn’t decide what to focus on. Should I talk about all the fantastic galleries I went to? Or my visit to the Barbara Hepworth museum? What about Alfred Wallis maybe (especially since I stayed in his cottage!) or something about the Tate…?

But as I was going through all the photos I took, I got distracted. Instead of picking some nice pictures to illustrate a blog post about what I’d seen, I started playing around with the images themselves.

I take lots of photos. In fact I will admit that I’m not really a fan of sketching. It’s probably an outrageous thing for an artist to say! But I’ve always found drawing outdoors a cumbersome way of retaining the ideas I get when walking around. Instead I take photos for reference, and having a digital camera (instead of my old ‘analogue’ SLR) allows me to take literally hundreds of photos without incurring costs. When I’m out and about I can click away, capturing colours, forms and ideas in a fraction of the time it takes to fuss about with pencils, numb fingers and sketchbook pages flapping in the wind.

Anyway, the point is, looking back over my St Ives photos today brought out some interesting ideas. I noticed recurring themes as well as some details which I quickly snapped at the time and moved on from, that now - after some time has passed - seem to stand out. I started putting these together into little groups and then decided to blog about these instead! Here's just a few of them. Because in an odd way these images capture something of what it was like walking around St Ives, soaking in the inspiration. Much better than me waffling on about it! I hope you enjoy them!

See more St Ives pictures on my Flickr Set.

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