Writing with Light

Thinking, making, connecting: MA Illustration

Posts tagged ‘draw’

Writing With Light

I-HEARD

I Heard what You Were Thinking (c.2008) H. Newall

When I’m not holding a camera up to a car windscreen, I’m opening its shutter on a bulb setting onto lights in the night from a standing position. It only takes a few in and out breaths to write light onto the sensor, so now I write things in the air with the lens, and then when I want to move to something else I cover the lens momentarily and set up again.

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Love Letter II (c.2008) H. Hewall

And whilst it’s all about chance and not knowing what will come out, the more I do this, the more I can control the effect because I can sort of predict what might happen and adjust accordingly.

The image at the top of this post, Alastair on the Hill, is not a Photoshop blend: the city lights were drawn onto the sensor, then a strobe was deployed onto the figure while the shutter was still open. The other images above are, however, straight out of camera. At the time I took them and first looked at them, I was blown away. I’d found a new thing to do with the camera. Now they look unfinished: now that the initial joyful ludic impulse has been satisfied, images like this are raw material photographs to blend in Photoshop layers.

The images below are some of the ones I’ve been experimenting with over Christmas, the season of darkness and fairy lights. This has to be done in darkness bar the lights that will be the ‘pencils’, to steal Fox Talbot’s metaphor, because any stray light will smudge and begin to print the room features onto the sensor. I wait till everyone’s gone to bed. Then, it’s easy to spend time into the small hours filling a camera card with photograph after photograph of lights drawn over the sensor by the action of moving the camera around when the shutter is open. It mystifies the cat.

BURN

Burn (2014) H. Newall

Burn, above, and the images below are layered and blended so that I have some artistic control over a final outcome. I play with different lenses and different focal lengths. I shift focal lengths on the zoom lenses during the shot. I spin. I wave the camera. I write my name in the air…

LIGHTS

Lights (2014) H. Newall

All of these images were made in Photoshop using the same photographs but in different combinations. In this sense, the aleatory aspect of the work continues in Photoshop, since I cannot anticipate the outcome, I can only experiment and see how things turn out. I love this phase because it has a zen sense of now. There is no before or after. Bayles and Orland write that, ‘Art is like beginning a sentence before you know its ending’ (1993: 20). Here, the work isn’t finished, to paraphrase Leonardo da Vinci, it is abandoned. 

CHANDELIER

Chandelier (2014) H. Newall

Chandelier is at least two photographs blended together. The final image is then tightly cropped in to make a composition out of the flow of the light streaks. It’s hard to compose in camera because it’s difficult to judge where the light streaks will end up on the sensor.

FLASH

Flash (2014) H. Newall

Flash is a blend of a close up and a long shot. It’s almost the same blended image as Pale, but with different blending modes applied.

PALE

Pale (2014) H. Newall

I like symmetry, although I acknowledge there can be nothing more pleasing than a pattern disrupted. Blue Orchid was made by repeating layers over themselves and blending them through so that the architecture created by the light is repeated. Colours were adjusted in a Hue and Saturation Adjustment Layer and in Curves. I like glowing colours against darkness: it’s what it looks like inside a head full of synaesthesia.

These images feel finished, but my plan is that they are the raw material for a further process of integration with the silver people of the old photographs. They may end up as animations, or as stills, maybe both…

Blue Orch

Blue Orchid (2014) H. Newall

Preliminaries: A Lonely Impulse of Delight

I have just started an MA in Illustration at The University of Hertfordshire. ‘Madness!’ you might say, if you know my life’s chaotic schedule of unremitting deadlines. I’m so busy most of the time that the thought of engaging with another major time-dependent project sends half of me – the sensible half – into a tailspin. The other half – the dreamer – is flying way above the clouds, doing what I think I’ve put off for far too long, which is admitting to myself that making images makes me happy. So, I have on my hands a battle of two halves, and all the while, a fragment of a half forgotten poem floats through my head… “A lonely impulse of delight / Drove to this tumult in the clouds”: it repeats and repeats and repeats…

These lines are from William Butler Yeats’s lyrical 1918 poem, An Irish Airman Foresees His Death, and while the poem deals, with beautiful drifting ambivalence, with the hostilities of the First World War, set against the unalloyed joy and freedom in what was at the time the novel experience of flying aircraft, the lines for me bring to mind the joy, and tumult, of the creative impulse. (Perhaps, bearing in mind my crazy deadlines, the first lines of this same poem are also germane: “I know that I shall meet my fate / Somewhere among the clouds above…”) And so, lest I forget, I must remind myself: I have embarked upon an MA. In Illustration. And for the first assignment, I must pick a keyword. So now delight and terror are swooping in a great big dogfight up in the clouds. I am flying, and so far, terror is winning!

I picked the keyword Photo-Graph because I’m often messing about with cameras, so it is, as a concept, something familiar – the terror insisted it must be familiar – but it is also a concept I’ve almost taken for granted up until now, because, up until now I’ve not given myself permission nor time to make more than a cursory exploration: yes, I’ve presented papers at conferences on the photographic documentation of performance; I’ve even just had my first exhibition of photographs at The Arts Centre, Edge Hill University, but I’ve never before examined deeply the concept of photograph as object. This is not a new idea: this is about the transparency that Sontag (amongst others) expounds in Against Interpretation (1966) and On Photography (1971). Photography, she claims, is a transparent medium because more often than not we look through it to see the content, or subject without recognising what she calls, ‘the thing in itself’, and what we might call the medium or surface that contains the subject (or, for the critics and commentators, the message). So, I want to look at this surface; to examine it (and scratch it) as another form of mark making, and so I have made the first sortie by cutting the word in two – hence the hyphenation – to break what is familiar into its constituent Greek halves: phos light and graphê write or draw, and thereby, de-familiarise it. This blog records my conceptual explorations: these entries are the first skirmishes of a tumult in the clouds. This is a tumult driven by that lonely impulse of delight. This is what I have always wanted to do.

Sontag. S., ([1966] 2009) Against Interpretation. London: Penguin Classics.

——— ([1971] 1979) On Photography. London: Penguin Books.

Yeats, W. B., ([1918] 1965) Men Who March Away: Poems of the First Wold War. London: Chatto & Windus.