Spain | The Puddlewonder Press

FromCadaquesScreen
I haven’t been taking a lot of photographs recently. I’ve been feeling like I need something new to explore with the camera, but while I wait for that to arrive, it’s given me reason to revisit my archives. There are a lot of images there for that I like for any range of reasons, but I have never worked with them to any finished form. So recently, I have been working at creating collages. I like the way that layers of things allow you to look at them for a long time and continually see different things make new discoveries. I like how it allows different compositional impulses to work at the same time – symmetrical and asymmetrical, static and dynamic. I love the sense of play in the process of creating them.

This image was created primarily out of images I took on the way home to Barcelona from a day out in Cadaques. A combination of light-noise shots derived from long exposures of the road and traffic, and dark silhouettes of road-side trees. There’s also a shot of some trees from Beijing in the mix.

I printed this image and hung it in our school community art exhibition. It’s sale has helped to raise funds to support our student service groups.

I like the feeling here of the coolness of a fading twilight, the ghosts of dancing shadows.

How does it strike you?

Barcelona, Spain. June 2011.

It’s hard to live in Barcelona without falling, at least a little, for the architect, Antoni Gaudí. The first time I saw la Sagrada Familia, it didn’t have a roof. The center of the nave was filled with scaffolding that rose and rose and became its own sort of ceiling, from which showers of sparks rained down as the workers hammered and filed and cut and constructed. The floor was littered with pieces of mosaic that were tagged and waiting to be assembled somewhere in the arches above.

Three years later, I had the chance to visit again. Though it is still under construction, the interior is enclosed and, I think, mostly complete.

Gaudi’s vision is astounding and beautiful. There are few interior spaces so large, so filled with the soft brilliance of natural light. Spaces so open to whatever you hold sacred.