foam abstract #2

This picture was made during the recent  stormy weather that took place  in early May.  This  particular  abstraction refers back to this earlier  foam abstract. Both of these  are abstract in the sense of the image being removed from its  context. 

However, there is a context to this abstraction which removes itself from all context.   The picture was made during during the Covid-19 lockdown.   It is not often that there is foam amongst the coastal granite rocks. It is generally happens  during a  big storm,  but the waves from the   surging seas usually prevent access to most of the littoral zone. The foam doesn't hang around for that long either.   

I am attracted to foam on granite  because it creates a starkness ---the colour is close to  just black and white.  There is a richness that I cannot achieve with converting a colour  image made with a digital camera to black and white. The latter  usually comes out an insipid muddy grey.   So my concern  here is  the modernist concern with the materiality of  the photograph. 

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granite abstraction #12

This  abstract photo  was made in January 2019 whilst I was on a coastal poodlewalk along the southern Fleurieu Peninsula with Kayla. The picture  or image was  made  in  the  early morning near from Petrel Cove in the summer light.

The word 'image’ often gets tied to the  arbitrariness entailed in individual perception and opposed to the external solidity associated in the vocabulary of ordinary language philosophy with the ‘picture’. Susan Sontag held that  images don’t tell us anything, they remind us what is important. This  implies that   the ‘image’ as a type of inner perception, or mental idea, impression or memory. 

This can be interpreted  along the lines that an image that exerts a hold and that lives beyond its medium presupposes an agent who is engaged by it, i.e., who finds it meaningful or significant. An image is a sensuous experience of meaning that organises a world.  It possesses a communicative force that is surplus to its perceptible form.

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