Soaring

I am still working with simple shapes and allowing them to suggest things to me. In this case I started with a long simple shape - the darker blue below - and while playing added another shape. The two together reminded me of flight whether of birds or of fish.

Soaring in the Current

Another set of combinations called for a circular container with opposing pairs, circling round each other.

Circling

Shoals

I continue to be fascinated by the use of simple shapes to build an image, theme or idea. This time I chose a simple shape of two curves - one a simple curve and the other a compound curve. I began playing with them and came up with a shoal.

Shoal 1

Further playing produced a variation, producing opposing and interacting pairs.

Paired Shoal

Further application of these shapes and a few other random shapes lent themselves to this oval.

Shoal 4

In doing these things I sometimes think of Christopher Alexander's "The Nature of Order". I have only read the first book, and that took quite a while. Perhaps sometime I will give my reactions - for what they may be worth - on his theory. Anyway, the patterns I develop are initially done without concern for obvious aesthetic, but as I begin to adjust and slightly re-arrange things, some of his comments about pattern, repetition and flow do come to mind. Although I wish they would not. They interrupt the flow of what I am trying to do - be spontaneous - too much. Too much theory gets in the way, unless it can be so woven into practice that it is instinctive.

Lansdowne Church

Just recently I along with others, was given access to Lansdowne Church, Glasgow by a group of photographers interested in the future of the building. It is one of two spires along Great Western Road, a major road from the city centre to the west. The building has a good architectural heritage - Mackintosh was later a member of the Honeyman practice. From my standpoint, the greatest interest are the surviving windows of Alf Webster.

However there are other windows of interest too. So before cleaning up my pictures of the Webster windows still installed, I would like to show some of the other windows. The church because of its orientation has no East Window, and so in unusual. The West window, over the (now disused) entrance to the church faces onto the River Kelvin and so is open with no buildings to diminish the light. It is a very formal affair, possibly installed at the time of building, and does not take advantage of the amount of light that is available in the evenings.

As you can see it has a lot of formal grisaille with three figures.

On the left is Moses

In the centre Christ

And I am sure someone will tell me who this is on the right.

These are windows typical of the period just before the aesthetic movement began about 1870. Formal decorative elements with little narrative or drama are typical of the period.