In this issue

1. My Artwork of the Week

2. Frontispiece

3. Waiata mo te Ata-The prodigal wind

4. On patterns and rhythms and where to stand

5. Fevered Mind Links (to make your Sunday morning coffee go cold)

6. Endpapers

My Artwork of the Week

As we have slowly descended the season's staircase towards winter for the last fortnight, the sun has been rising later as it arcs further north. As a result, it takes some time to emerge above the tall hedges on my neighbour's property to the north.

In the front corner of my garden, the fabulous cherry tree has protected me from the hottest parts of summer and has shaded the house during the day. But, watching leaf-fall all over town, littering the footpaths and filling the gutters with the red gold dandruff of the season, I began to wonder when it would finally get around to doing the same.

And, as if I had spoken to it (and perhaps I had), it answered me.

One day, at the beginning of last week, as I was returning from the mailbox at the end of my drive, I looked up at the north side of the tree. I don't usually see it since the view from my patio always takes note of its south side. And the south side had stayed stubbornly green, refusing to follow the gold-written program of autumn. Instead, the leaves remained as lush and vibrant as ever.

However, as I looked up, I noticed that the leaves on the side facing the sun had withered and faded, turning a wonderful rusty red. At odds with what I was used to seeing from the house, the view made me stop and take stock. I walked around my cherry tree, studying it from every angle. And then I noticed something I had never observed before.

The red leaves on the outside to the north yellowed as they progressed through the tree's centre to the green ones on the south side. And then I got it.

The wintering sun worked its relentless way around the outside of the tree, picking summer from the leaves as it passed by each day.

Over the last few days, this process has continued in earnest. The metronome of the days has created a steady tick-tock of leaves that abruptly let go of their branch and tumble to fall on the lawn.

Now the leaves have such a tenuous grip on their tree that the slightest breath of wind causes them to shiver and tumble downwards.

Today the warm, waterlogged wind from the west stumbled across the mountains and staggered drunkenly against the tree, which promptly spilt its half written odes to the year onto the ground and into my neighbour's property.

And then I realised the thing I held to be true was wrong.

Winter does not advance from the south.

It comes from the north, cast away by the watering winter sun.

It seems to me that the more closely we peer into Nature, the more it appears into us.

Frontispiece

Atamaarie e te whaanau:

Good morning everybody:

Welcome to issue thirty-six.

Each week, as I gently usher the newsletter out the door on Sunday morning, I shake my head in amazement that I have managed to create yet another one. I shake my head in wonder that there is still another one within me. Somehow, there is always something to say, a story to share. As the late Terry Pratchett puts it:

May it never end.

I suspect sometimes I may have created a rod for my own back. Worse still, that I am making the rod ever stronger.

For the last few weeks, thinking of something to say, I became determined to make new artworks to accompany it and avoid dipping into my (albeit extensive) back catalogue. Perhaps that is because I have a very low boredom threshold, as soon as I've made a new work, I'm ready to move on and make something better, to draw nearer to a place where I can stop and rest and say: there.

I have done it.

I have arrived.

However, the possibility of reaching the end of the road terrifies me, for what would I do then?

Take up golf, the game my father snortingly derided as being "an expensive way to go for a walk"?

Suddenly discover a passion for bingo or bridge or lawn bowls?

Perish, you nasty little thought. Haere atu. Sod off.

Breathing Light has become a 6P commitment for me, a way to Plan and Play and Produce and Polish and Perfect and Present.

Perhaps that is the whole point of art (and I include writing here- it is an art form with its own Muse). The secret joy lies not in the accolades that may or may not come when the work is finished.

It lies in the footprints we make with bare feet in wet sand on a beach only we walk.

So, each week, the newsletter which in a way has become something of a benign dictator, starts pressing me to begin on the next issue sometime around Wednesday. I find myself scrolling through my aggregator feeds, looking for interesting material I think you will like, and saving it to Pocket, my online archive.

Then I am constantly studying what is happening around me, because, as the great Canadian photographer, Freeman Patterson states:

Perhaps the best place to do anything is where you are rather than the siren song of a foreign land.

Perhaps that is the secret recipe for a happy life.

Waiata mo te ata-The prodigal wind

I wonder how many of us there are sensitive to changes in weather.

Have you ever woken in the middle of the night, wondering what woke you, and made you suddenly surface for no apparent reason? Then, as you fumbled your way into consciousness, you felt a change in the weather or perhaps the air pressure as a front arrived?

This morning's poem is about that.

The prodigal wind

Fresh from pulling an all-nighter

in a drunken party over the back of the mountains

the rough-breathing, rheumy-eyed Westwind

tottered blaring and bleary-eyed up the street,

stumbling and bumbling and mumbling,

and looking for a place to rest.

Full of slurred vowels and windsong and whispered curses,

and muttering darkly of dimly-remembered arguments,

it lurched up my drive

bounced off my apologetic, apoplectic fence

and staggered into my disdainful cherry tree

waiting stiff-upperleaved at the gate,

branches folded in disgust,

in its dressing-gown coat of many colours.

Embarrassed (to a degree, but not really)

and shoeshuffling shameful,

it muttered a dank, purple, winewind apology

for the mess it had made on the shrinking violet lawn,

then it drifted prodigally away to the east

to the waiting crack of dawn

and first drinks opening-time in the sky.

On patterns and rhythms and where to stand

Many years ago, I attended a weeklong workshop with the Magnum photographer David Hurn. One of the things he taught us was that there are only ever two decisions in photography:

-where to stand and

-when to push the button.

So, put another way, all our photographic decisions are about time and place. This is so obvious that it isn't almost worth discussion. However, there is more to it than that. Much more.

Landscape photography or, more accurately, photography of the land and the relationship between you and your subject tends to be biassed towards making a picture at the "right" time of day. So we plan to be present at sunrise or sunset or, if astrophotography is our thing, to be present and ready to make our images when the stars are truly aligned. But unfortunately, most of the discussions on social media focus (pardon the pun) on the when rather than the where.

And, because we are so focused on being on-site at the correct time, we do not give place its importance.

Allow me to let you in on an essential and overlooked secret of landscape photography. Where you set up your camera is critically vital to the work you are going to make. It will completely alter the possibilities you have. Assuming you are using a tripod, changing its location by as little as 30 cm will completely alter what your sensor records. Here is why.

All landscape photography is about relationships. First, there is the relationship between you and your subject (physical and spiritual) and the relationship between the various elements in your scene.

Once you get beyond the wow factor of what you want to photograph, you need to begin to analyse the structure of your subject. You take the labels off, ideagrams such as Lake, water, mountains, and trees, and then study them as design elements. Thus, the shape words of circle, triangle, and rectangle if you are thinking in 2D, or sphere, pyramid and cube if you are thinking in 3D and want to see your subject as forms. Remember that it is light that determines whether a shape becomes a form. Study your scene, and break it down into a series of shapes and forms. Look at the relationship between them, left to right and top to bottom. How do they interact with each other, and how do they interact with the camera frame?

Now let us consider front to back. How do the design elements in the front of your picture interact with the design elements at the back? For example, which parts are major and which elements are minor? What impact does their relationship/interaction have on the possible meaning of what your work will say?

As you can see, serious landscape photography requires a lot of dispassionate and objective thought, along with consideration of the subject and your relationship to/with it in every sense of the word.

And good things take time.

This is a great reason to use a tripod. It slows you down and makes you think, makes you study your subject and consider both the elements and the relationships within it.

When I need to get out of the office, I will often go downtown, buy a coffee and drive around to the back of the domain to sit by the lake and study the mountains, which I've done for some years now.

And, despite my many attempts to make a likeness of the scene, I've never made one which truly resonated, which said: now I see you, and you see me.

Until this week.

A small inner voice told me to take my camera with me, that the scene had potential. A warm West wind was pushing clouds over the front edge of the Murchison Mountains, bringing drama to the early morning.

I got out my camera and moved around, first left, then right, forward, then back, and it still didn't work.

Then the penny dropped. I needed to be further away, to look from a greater distance with a longer lens.

I hopped back in my car, drove around the lake's southern end by the yacht club, parked my car, and got out.

Now it made sense.

I retrieved my camera and tripod from the back of the car and set it up. As I do, I made many exposures, varying the framing ever so slightly. Sometimes, those slight angle and/or framing changes will make or break a successful image.

Of course, the weather wasn't holding its breath for me. The clouds came and went, the mist drifted, and the tiny ripples on the lake moved backwards and forwards. I kept shooting until the mystery moved on.

Then I went home.

And there it was.

The image I had been seeking for nearly four years.

My beloved Fiordland in all its glorious drama and mystery.

Because great photographs are not the quick-fix result of one-night stands.

They take time, study, patience, love, and commitment.

Fevered Mind Links (to make your Sunday morning coffee go cold)

Evolution Didn’t Wire Us for Eight Hours of Sleep — www.theatlantic.com

This article was originally published by Knowable Magazine. On dry nights, the San hunter-gatherers of Namibia often sleep under the stars. They have no electric lights or new Netflix releases keeping them awake.

The Lost Words: An Illustrated Dictionary of Poetic Spells Reclaiming the Language of Nature — www.themarginalian.org

“Words belong to each other,” Virginia Woolf’s melodious voice unspools in the only surviving recording of her speech — a 1937 love letter to language.

Edward Burtynsky – Manufactured Landscapes — www.johnpaulcaponigro.com

Edward Burtynsky’s photographs deftly weave together aspects of a well-researched documentary expose and a beautifully constructed formal artistic statement, but it’s unclear which is more dominant, or if they’re something else entirely.

Recipe: Fried chorizo and potatoes with poached eggs — www.stuff.co.nz

There is nothing like the smell of a fry-up like this to kick-start an appetite. To make enough to feed four, boil 4 potatoes, in their skins, until just tender.

From The Conversation — www.bbc.com

The human eye can physically perceive millions of colours. But we don’t all recognise these colours in the same way.

Piet Mondrian on How to Be an Artist — www.artsy.net

Piet Mondrian’s particular brand of pared-down abstraction—pulsing grids in a palette of primary colors—revolutionized painting. Already by the mid-1910s, before he developed his signature style, the Dutch painter’s canvases were being hailed as distinct from their Cubist predecessors.

Periwinkle, the Color of Poison, Modernism, and Dusk — www.theparisreview.org

On a stretch of rural road not far from my house, there is a small wood where, once a year, for just a few short and cold days, the ground turns a magnificent shade of purple. In a reversal of fortunes, the stand of gracious Maine trees becomes secondary to the ground cover below.

How Memory Makes Us and Breaks Truth: The Rashomon Effect and the Science of How Memories Form and Falter in the Brain — www.themarginalian.org

It is already disorienting enough to accept that our attention only absorbs a fraction of the events and phenomena unfolding within and around us at any given moment. Now consider that our memory only retains a fraction of what we have attended to in moments past.

Color or Fruit? On the Unlikely Etymology of “Orange” — lithub.com

The human eye can distinguish millions of shades of color, subtly discriminating small differences of energy along the visual spectrum.

End Papers

Lately, I've been thinking about photography as a form of music. Perhaps my article last week about synaesthesia has put me on a track to reflecting upon seeing Nature's internal music. I'm going to mihi (acknowledge my respects) to all the wonderful deciduous trees in my neighbourhood. That includes the flowering cherries surrounding my house.

It is a small wonder that they are regarded as taonga (treasures) by the Japanese.

I've been looking at them and imagining them as sound, seeing them as notes on a visual stave. The wonderful thing about this is that I sense that all of Nature is a symphony in perpetual performance, without beginning or end.

Perhaps Ansel Adams, a core influence for me, was very aware of this. As you may or may not know, he was a very gifted concert pianist who opted to pursue photography rather than a career as a musician. I think I will go back to his iconic photographs and look at them as if they were music. Who knows what I will find? Whatever happens, I will be richer for the experience.

Perhaps each of us is a symphony in our own right, a glorious work of art, performing a composition of our devising. However, as the composer of our work, the work that is us, perhaps we need to acknowledge the wonder of what we are creating daily and do this every day.

We must live our lives as something joyous and beautiful rather than fill the work that is us with discordant disharmony.

Let us co-create a hymn to the wonder of the human race.

Ka mihi arohaa nunui ki a koutou:

Much love to you all, wherever you are.

See you next week.