doing the salsa [painting with red]

Meet salsa, the next in a sequence of not-so-randomly-titled intaglio abstracts on paper on canvas, according to my colour rules...[SALSA, 2010 - mixed media intagio collagraph print on paper on canvas]Salsa, being both a food (Spanish for sauce) and a latin dance or music, from Spain to Cuba (linking nicely to its companion piece, the painting Havana)...but it's all about loving rust really... and my craving of anything with a little chilli... chocolate, soup, marmalade, bread...I just typed in 'salsa rust painting' into google and curiously what was returned was an American poet, Jonathan Penton, who has two published anthologies, Blood and Salsa and Painting Rust - which I've yet to read (but I will)... within those few chosen words perhaps lies the bones of my next artist statement...

mist opportunities

There have been some strange, ethereal mists this week in the valley - and quite a lot of flooding in low-lying areas. I took these photographs with my mobile phone. Thinking about it, these photos are somehow more truthful than when I have used a DSLR camera.Here, there's no manual focusing, no setting of exposure or white balance, no post-fixing in photoshop, no sharpening, no filters applied, no cropping - just as it was - in all their grainy, washed-out and mundane glory...suffolk winter mist river[river and marshes]suffolk mist winter day lake photograph[mist at edge of lake, suffolk]suffolk lake - winter mist - photograph[mist over lake, early morning, suffolk]norfolk mist winter meadow[flooded misty meadow, norfolk]norfolk misty winter ploughed field[misty ploughed field with remains of snow, norfolk]These are like the landscapes of my childhood memories: of cold, bleak school days, recalling breakfasts of ready-brek and red jam, clinging to the old cast-iron radiators on school 'rainy day' break-times, the school canteen reeking of boiled cabbage and liver gravy casserole, and the unbreakable chocolate-flavoured dessert with pink-coloured custard, of hockey fields and cross-country running, of chattering teeth, wet plimsolls, muddy knees and pallid skin, of stale rich tea biscuits and orange squash, drawing on the steamed-up foggy windows of a rattling mini-bus, and then later home watching grange hill and shepherd's pie for tea.I wonder if there is group devoted to mundane mobile phone photography on flickr…?