Author Archives: peter

About peter

'Death by Sushi' Fish can kill me. When I was very small (maybe 3 or 4 years old) my grandfather, who lost the sight of one eye from a bullet fired by a German sniper (fortunately not a very good one) during the Battle of the Somme in World War 1, wiped my face with the corner of his apron, an apron he had used to wipe his filleting knife on. He was a grocery shopkeeper who specialized in wet fish.

Found somewhere to develop my 35mm film

With the demise of Jessops in Barnstaple I thought I was going to struggle to get my 35mm colour film processed – I found a place in South Molton so the panic is over.

Swingboats Woolacombe Beach by 35mm_photographs

The image above was taken with my trusty Pentax P30 35mm camera (no 3702885) using an out of date roll of Kodak Gold film (Kodak GT 800-4). There is something sad about motionless swingboats.

These are on Woolacombe Beach and I always look forward to them being re-erected after the long winter – their colours and painted swirls bring the promise of  hope to the desolate beach.

The winter population of Woolaconbe is very small (around 1,000), but during the summer large numbers of people come to the village for their holidays. Many are motivated to visit because of the excellent surfing conditions found locally.

Swingboats Woolacombe Beach, a photo by 35mm_photographs on Flickr.

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The Pentax P30, 35mm film camera  has a semi-automatic mode, which chooses most of the settings but allows for more creativity.

Pentax P30 has shutter speeds from 1/1000 of a second to 1 second. The automatic mode on this film camera chooses the best shutter speed and aperture setting for the natural light available.

In 1952 Asahi Optical introduced its first camera, the Asahiflex (the first Japanese SLR using 35mm film). The name “Pentax” was originally a registered trademark of the East German VEB Zeiss Ikon (from “Pentaprism” and “Contax”) but, as all Germans patents were annulled with the country’s defeat, the name “Pentax” was taken by the Asahi Optical in 1957. Since then the company has been primarily known for its photographic products, distributed under the name “Asahi Pentax” (equipment was imported to the United States from the 1950s until the mid-1970s by Honeywell Corporation and branded “Honeywell Pentax”). The company was renamed Pentax Corporation in 2002. It was one of the world’s largest optical companies, producing still cameras, binoculars, spectacle lenses, and a variety of other optical instruments. In 2004 Pentax had about 6000 employees.

Swingboats Woolacombe Beach

Jessops Europe Limited

Jessops Europe Limited, trading as Jessops, is a British photographic retailing company. It was founded in Leicester in 1935 by Frank Jessop and traded under the name of The Jessop Group Limited. The business entered administration on 9 January 2013 and all Jessops retail stores ceased trading on 11 January 2013 until the British entrepreneur Peter Jones invested several million pounds into the company and formed Jessops Europe Limited.

Six stores opened on 28th March 2013. The re-launch at Oxford Street in London on 28th March 2013 received a huge amount of media interest & was attended by celebrities including actor James Corden.

Creating new artist groups/collectives could be counterproductive

Creating artists networks can sometimes be a pointless exercise. In the social sciences a social group has been defined as two or more humans who interact with one another,  share similar characteristics and collectively have a sense of unity within their interests. Theorists are a wary of definitions which stress the importance of interdependence or objective similarity. Instead, for researchers in the social identity tradition “a group is defined in terms of those who identify themselves as members of the group”.  The idea of sharing experiences, gallery contacts and clients etc. sounds like a very good idea on the surface. The reality is actually rather disappointing.  Social groups come in a myriad of sizes and varieties. For example, a society can be viewed as a large social group. Artists are no different from any other group of people and have an underlying self serving agenda,   they are simply out there to make a fast profit and steal contacts and ideas – well at least the majority are…

Here is an article stolen from Sitemaps-xml.com: New Art Groups Fail – #marketing – promote your art

Often artists’ groups have a core of members who initiate activities and support the rest of the group. Not only is it important to support new groups, it is important for these founding members to fully understand the structures and reasons for creating new groups. They must be asked ‘Why are you doing this?’ and ‘Are there other groups around that already fulfill your needs and aims?’ Creating new artist groups/collectives could be counterproductive and create an even more fragmented environment. It is important that a robust armature is created for a network to succeed. If this is achieved then it would be a formidable and powerful organisation.

A mentoring scheme which enables artists and crafts people to get access to strategies and processes needed to create successful art and business practice would be highly beneficial to individuals and groups. North Devon Web can help you with setting up an artist website and help you to promote your art.

Our skills are at the ‘start up’ phase of businesses and organizations, where the creativity of the entrepreneur or group is at its most inventive and vulnerable. We find the energy that is created very infectious but we also know that this enthusiasm gradually dies and needs ‘mothering’ to take it to the next growth phase. To achieve sustainability is key, and we have wide and varied experience of achieving this both in a traditional business environment and in pioneering innovations.

North Devon Web belongs to a network of websites that host in a green way. North Devon Web is helping to prevent the release of 2,660 metric tons of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere each year by hosting on ‘Green Servers’ – as a result, the network’s energy efficiency is equal to planting about 2,390 acres of trees, not driving 6.1 million miles, or removing 510 cars from the road. We are here to help you stay in business.

Contact them for a FREE quote

Wikio - Top Blogs - Online marketingBeing in the blog charts is a massive reward for everyone who has helped and contributed to this blog. We are still looking for writers to contribute to this growing blog. Contact us if you would like your work to be featured on sitemaps-xml.

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A nude in my garden – Le déjeuner sur l’herbe

Nude In The GardenI have always wanted to paint a version of ‘Le déjeuner sur l’herbe’ this is my photographic version.

Edouard Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe (a large oil on canvas, during 1862 and 1863) caused a big stir at the Salon des Refusés in Paris, having been rejected by the Salon jury of 1863. Manet seized the opportunity to exhibit this and two other paintings, at the 1863 exhibition and reveled in the public notoriety and controversy that followed.

The painting has historic and pastoral overtones, depicting the juxtaposition of a female nude and a scantily dressed female bather on a picnic with two fully dressed men in a rural setting. This painting references previous works of art by Titian (c.1487–1576) and Giorgione (c.1476–1510). The piece is now in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. A smaller, earlier version can be seen at the Courtauld Gallery, London.

The image above was created using 35mm negatives that had been taken using a Pentax SP1000 that was previously owned by my late father. The photographs were taken in 1981 and 2012.

Bow Wow Wow‘s version of the same painting:

Famously, coinciding with Annabella Lwin’s posing for album cover work, her mother alleged exploitation of a minor for immoral purposes, and instigated a Scotland Yard investigation. As a result the band was only allowed to leave the UK after McLaren promised not to promote Lwin as a “sex kitten”. This included an agreement to not use a nude photograph depicting Lwin as the woman in The Luncheon on the Grass (Le déjeuner sur l’herbe), though the picture was used as the cover of the band’s 1982 RCA EP  The Last of the Mohicans, which became their best-selling album in the U.S.

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I have always loved the drawings of Degas. The way he portrayed women, sensually and simply is to be admired. In the late 1880s, Degas also developed a passion for photography and this new skill influenced the composition of his paintings… Continue reading

The Nude

I have always loved the drawings of Degas. The way he portrayed women, sensually and simply is to be admired.

In the late 1880s,  Degas also developed a passion for photography and this new skill influenced the composition of his paintings. He photographed many of his friends, often by lamplight, as in his double portrait of Renoir and Mallarmê. Other photographs, depicting dancers and nudes, which were used as source material for some of Degas’s drawings and paintings.

Nude - Woman through glass

As the years passed, Degas became isolated, due in part to his belief that a painter could have no personal life. The Dreyfus Affair controversy brought his anti-Semitic leanings to the fore and he broke with all his Jewish friends. His argumentative nature was deplored by Renoir, who said of him: “What a creature he was, that Degas! All his friends had to leave him; I was one of the last to go, but even I couldn’t stay till the end.”

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Royal Academy of Arts

‘Manet: Portraying Life’ has been organised by the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in collaboration with the Toledo Museum of Art and is the first ever retrospective devoted to the portraiture of Edouard Manet. The exhibition consists of more than 50 of his works, a vast number of which were ‘never exhibited in his lifetime’ (and maybe should never have been exhibited).

Born into an upper class household with strong political connections, Manet rejected the future originally envisioned for him, and became engrossed in the world of painting. He married Suzanne Leenhoff in 1863. The last 20 years of Manet’s life saw him form bonds with other great artists of the time, and develop his own style that would be heralded as innovative and serve as a major influence for future painters.

Manet’s ‘Olympia’ is one of my all time favorite paintings but…

If you were not already familiar with Manet’s painting I think you would get the wrong impression from this exhibition – the quality of the majority of the paintings is ‘second rate’ at best and most definitely not typical of his work.  This exhibition has done him a massive injustice, threatening his status as an important innovator. He is one of the greatest artists ever but this exhibition portrays him as a mediocre one – a massive shame.

I think you have to view this exhibition as ‘work in progress’ or ‘paintings to be resolved’.

The painting of  Berthe Morisot  is one of the ‘stars’ of the show and does the man credit. Morisot herself is credited with convincing Manet to attempt plein air painting, she also  became his sister-in-law when she married his brother, Eugene…

Unlike the core Impressionist group, Manet maintained that modern artists should seek to exhibit at the Paris Salon rather than abandon it in favor of independent exhibitions. Nevertheless, when Manet was excluded from the International Exhibition of 1867, he set up his own exhibition. His mother worried that he would waste all his inheritance on this project, which was enormously expensive. While the exhibition earned poor reviews from the major critics, it also provided his first contacts with several future Impressionist painters, including Degas.

I wish I’d painted this (maybe?)

Manet’s Olympia (which is in the Musée d’Orsay) is an important painting. In 1974 at Stourbridge College of Art I did a series of paintings based on ‘Page 3 models’ and I was intrigued how Manet’s Olympia … Continue reading ?

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