2 minute read
Escape To The Garden, David Townshend
DAVID TOWNSHEND ARPS
This has been a year that none of us have ever experienced before - locked in our homes for months. Yet constraints can sometimes act as a stimulus to creativity. My garden is my great escape – not only tending plants and enjoying the emerging flowers and foliage and their attendant butterflies and bees, but also making images. My response to the coronavirus lockdown has been to see how many ways I could portray ‘My Garden DC’ (During Coronavirus) using my impressionist photography techniques. Far from being limiting, this approach proved to be a great source of inspiration and opportunity.
Mine is only a small garden, but there are so many possibilities - leaf and flower shapes and colours, light and shade, texture and shadow, structures and ornaments, all of which can be combined in many ways, and which changed as the season progressed. Each image was created in camera, so reflects the garden at that particular time.
Colour is important in my images and lockdown seemed the perfect time to abandon any inhibitions and embrace the joyous palette that impressionist photography can produce. Shapes also help to create strong compositions – I have used allium flower and seed head stars, the sinuous curves of hostas, even fallen eucalyptus leaves floating in the bird bath.
Textures can enhance,
even ‘age’, an image, and they came from both plants, such as rosemary, box and deadnettles, and inanimate objects such as paving slabs.
Looking at my images, I imagine exploring a longabandoned attic in which I discover all manner of treasures - Japanese silk screen prints (1, 2) and an Arts & Crafts tapestry – William Morris school? (3). Perhaps the design for a Clarice Cliff teapot (4)? In the corner sits an old framed botanical print (5). But not all is old – here is a modern abstract landscape painting (have I found a Howard Hodgkin?) (6) and a 1960’s lithograph print for the local squash club (7). Those fizzing Liberty scarves (8, 9) - and that disconcerting eye that follows my every move (10).
There is no limit to the possibilities – except time! I plan to produce a book of my images, which I can pick up whenever I think my creative juices are running dry. It will say to me there is always something to photograph, always images to create, and such a sense of achievement waiting at the end.
No.1
No.6
No.7
No.10
