April 2012 - THIS week's PICTURE

Tom in a Car : Joiner photograph by Malcolm Aslett

00

A confined space. Besides the fact the windscreen, back window and two door windows are simultaneously visible, the pleasure of this is the dynamic quality of the proportions of objects. The difference in size of something a foot away from your eye and three feet away changes things dramatically. Reminds us of the psychology involved, how we ignore certain objects, how we focus on the human and automatically adjust proportions to a consistent, internal rationale.

The boy is sitting in the back in his baseball uniform (They don't call these things 'kit' or 'strip'' in the US) putting on a daft, cheesy smile. He's what I'm interested in. When I start to take shots of the windows and chairs and steering wheel the nature of what is in front of me takes a different turn. That wheel is clearly the biggest form. Circles are good and I'm superstitious about not making them circles. There is a discomfort in a broken circle (makes my think about Klee, Kandinsky, Delaunay, all those abstracted circles and whether they had that supestition to fight against too). So I make it mostly the right shape.

Large areas were empty and I coloured them in with local colours. The big black eybrows in the upper section help to bring the eye back to 'the centre of interest, the boy. Due to differing exposures due to the camera reading either inside or outside values you get the big transitions in bright blues to black.

I'm tempted to do another version of this to 'rationalize' the interior, to transform those formless colours in the foreground to actual car-type shapes. Do you get what I mean? To make the whole interior look as if it is real and has a form-filled logic to it. We'll see.

 

 

 

Home
Contribute