Mulgrave Creation
On the creation of a painting at Mulgrave
By July 2012 my Mulgrave work had real momentum. Every chance I had to escape for a few hours to Mulgrave – which was limited – seemed to generate new strong images. This trip was two weeks after the remarkably productive session I had for the On Landscape interview and I had time for a couple of hours on site. I made two images. My pattern was typically fairly consistent. I would start working the sheds and boats and then move onto the beach.
The first image – the alternative – was a painted bench. I was starting to play with the idea of transformation of the objects at Mulgrave and I had seen this bench – painted blue – on the balcony of one of the huts almost every time I came. It finally occurred to me to photograph it. The film was almost perfect for the job – it threw the background shadows into black, an interpretation that would have been hard to imagine with a higher dynamic range capture such as modern digital sensors or colour negative. And the ability on a technical camera to run the plane of focus from the front to the chair and working the perspective in camera was crucial to making it work. It was later I came to realise that this image – a transformed bench – could become the seed or lead image for the third chapter.
After the warm-up act, I walked out onto the beach. I wandered around with an open mind amongst many of the rocks I had worked earlier in July. Almost immediately I saw the staining on the sandstone – something I had not noticed on previous visits – I remembered my painting theme and the idea of Renaissance painting and the religious overtones came to mind. I had evolved the idea of symbolic representation by this point – though not yet given it a name – to move beyond just seeing faces in the rocks to seeing a wider range of symbols and metaphors.
I needed to adjust the stones under the rock to remove the wrong coloured ones and arrange them neatly. Something I learned to be more precise about on the 2009 Advanced Large Format Workshop. I set up the camera and executed the image with my 240mm Fujinon. Two images. I had no idea what I was going to do when I arrived. Happy with what I had created, I headed for home.
