We can’t divorce the earth, so let the marriage counselling begin…

Art & Science

As I was drinking my tea and flicking through the endless menus on Netflix’s (a common affair for me) I came across the documentary ‘Chasing Ice’. I had noticed it before but I’m sorry to say due to ‘Breaking Bad’ taking over all my Netflix time I’ve only just got around to watching this. I love frozen landscapes, especially after me and a friend were lucky enough to head up to the Arctic Circle in 2009. Everything about these places is pure magic. I know that sounds cheesy, but the stillness, the limited colours, the emptiness of sound and sense of size is pretty indescribable.

Chasing Ice, in the words of its synopsis is…

…”the story of one man’s mission to change the tide of history by gathering undeniable evidence of our changing planet. Within months of that first trip to Iceland, the photographer conceived the boldest expedition of his life: The Extreme Ice Survey. With a band of young adventurers in tow, Balog began deploying revolutionary time-lapse cameras across the brutal Arctic to capture a multi-year record of the world’s changing glaciers’.

See more at: http://www.chasingice.com

‘Oh look a rabbit jumping over a fence wearing a top hat’…’where? I see a cumulus cloud, which is likely to turn into a cumulonimbus and soak me on the way home’…’oh’

Seeing the world

Project Paint Plane was about sharing my vision and experiences of the world. It’s about exploring how ‘vistas’ & places interact with our emotions, how the brain turns light into colour & sound into a sense of size, and how together they create a memory. It’s this memory that is the inspiration behind my work.

I remember in images. My memory doesn't seem to work well in any other way. I struggle to remember names, even if you tell me them 10 times over; not the name of an author I love or a song that inspires me will make its way into my head. But I can recall every detail of an image, the light, the shadows and it's overall 'mood'. This is great for art, but not so good in day to day life, and can be frustrating when I want to share something 'amazing' I can't remember the name off (and I don’t always have time to sneak a look at google).

’Have you no interest in making money? I ask. ‘You could be like Robert Crumb. You could be a rich man’ Jon Ronson

Art is for the Artist?

Before I ‘created’ Paintplane I would say I was pretty frustrated with art, so much so that I repeatedly packed everything away and vowed never to touch it again. People tell me I’m good at art – but what good is technical skill when you can’t pinpoint what it is you want to say? Actually that’s not totally true I did know what I wanted to say; I wanted to express myself, my views, my opinions, what touches me, my beliefs, my ideas, what makes me angry etc; Basically I wanted to express ‘me’. I never figure out how to do this – seriously how do you paint a feeling, how do you capture a moment or the firing of trillions of synapses on canvas? I tried a lot of things to get through this block, I got a studio but ended up just sitting in a small room with a brush, a blank canvas and an empty brain (my synapses were defiantly not firing then). I put my hand to lots of careers, signed up to lots of courses, and I tried to create what I thought would sell (I can recommend never to do that – the biggest destructive force to creativity is commercialism in my opinion). Nothing, zilch, diddily squat!