DISTINCTIONS

JEREMY RODWELL ARPS (FINE ART)

The back streets of Chania used to consist of a mixture of ancient wrecked houses, shops, workshops, and even palaces; now most of it has been redeveloped into tourist accommodation and wine bars.

In the days when I wandered those streets, camera in hand, there were all sorts of bits of colourful wall lying around, inside and outside the ruins. And the surfaces had interesting patterns caused by rain, sun, earthquakes, vandalism, plant life and general rot. That’s what I photographed, usually with a cheap and cheerful camera – they didn’t last long in that very dusty atmosphere.

Often I thought I could see “forms within forms” on the surfaces – odd shapes and patterns organically created by the elements and time.

When I was making these photographs I had no thoughts of creating an ARPS panel from them – they were just interesting – and anyway I was then working towards my LRPS, which itself took a lot of really enjoyable time and effort, entirely disconnected from these “wall art” images.

As I learned more about photographic processing, I began to realise that by using Photoshop with plugins like Topaz Labs and Studio, and the Nik Collection, I might be able to “extract” those intriguing shapes and forms from my now quite extensive wall art collection, and make something of them, perhaps even an “A” panel.

The most useful tool was Topaz Adjust 5. This is easy to use, and I tended to concentrate on the filters from the Classic Collection. You open your image in Adjust 5, then run through the filters one by one, seeing the often amazing changes that just happen. Then you can fine tune the filters just as you like. And there were plenty of other intriguing plugins to try, including Glow and Detail Extractor. Some were really effective and creative, others less so.

One by one I created images that looked interesting and perhaps had some artistic potential. They didn’t look much like the original ancient walls any more, that was for certain.

Eventually, after months of fine tuning, there were 60 or so usable images to start the very long process of extracting a possible “A” panel from. That took more months, with two RPS Advisory Days and loads of guidance and encouragement from my elders and betters, on everything from choice of the right images at the right size (we settled on 8” x 5.3”), to the right printing paper and mount board, and how to arrange the panel itself for best impact.

It finally ended with a stressful but thankfully successful day before the Fine Art Panel at Bath in March this year. It is perhaps worth saying that though my panel was passed, one of the assessors didn’t like it, and another felt that though they did like the images, the printing paper – Titanium Lustre for “pop”

- was the wrong choice and should have been a white matte art paper to give the feel of chalky old walls. Other assessors did like the work, thank goodness. It was all very valid criticism, but so hard to listen to at that critical point – I really thought it was thumbs down!

Statement Of Intent

For some years I lived in Chania, the ancient Venetian capital of the island of Crete.

The old streets were lined with tumbled-down stone and timber palaces, houses and shops, abandoned as ruins.

In the colourfully painted plaster walls - still vibrant though broken and transformed by sun and rain and the passing centuries - I could see strange pictures and forms within the patterns of smeared pigments and leaching minerals.

My photographs are intended to reveal some of these fleeting images.

Hanging Plan