Waiting at the Butter Factory

to start painting the Nexus Gallery, an annual undertaking.

We were peckish after 2 hours of birding, after a blood plum  and a rest I looked around the small garden. Photography can help you see. This is what I saw.

There is the cultural and aesthetic message of a photograph and a reality that the photographer may only see back in the studio, on the screen, where art happens independently of the intentions of the photographer.

Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida contrasts the stadium and punctum. ‘To recognize the studium is inevitably to encounter the photographer’s intentions, to enter into harmony with them, to approve or disapprove them, but always to understand them, to argue them within myself, for culture (from which studium derives) is a contract arrived at between creators and consumers.’ The punctum is an individual response, wild, emotional, unexpected. Hence, the first image of the flower is a typical flower image, the tear is what entranced me. the punctum.
(Though I’m not that keen on technical terms like these.)

Rather than the epistemic nature of photography, I am wondering here about the nature of seeing. So much surface, so many textures, the flesh of the flower, the patina of the old sculpture.