Julie's Art Blog

I have found this project slightly frustrating as I don't feel I have had the opportunity to obtain photographs I can be really proud of, I find that I have had to make the best of what I could get. There are plenty of reasons for me to blame this on - the time of year and the weather - what a rubbish time to have a photography project, everything is so wet and dull! The short duration of the project - I know Niall has said this is a an easy project but there has been so much to be done in such a short time. My circumstances have meant that I have had a very unexciting life over the last four weeks so I haven't managed to get anywhere more visually stimulating to me e.g. up a hill or to a beach. I haven't even managed to get to Edinburgh. And my subject of choice would normally be landscape. However, I have gone round all the time with my photography head on and have taken around 250 photos to play with. My final four used a variety of zoom and macro lens, the tripod and ...

I feel that recently I have rarely seen a street and I haven't seen a street that inspired me so these photos are of the streets and paths I have been walking. And all of them have been taken with my camera phone rather than my Nikon, I think. I have been taking so many photos that I can get confused! I got myself closer to the ground for this one so I could get a greater sense of looking up.  I increased the contrast and turned it infrared which made the dog stand out so much better. I loved the light shining through the trees with this one. I slightly cropped it to put my sister not so central, then I used faded black and white. I tried lots of combinations but this was the one I liked best and it is not one I would normally use. I was driving down to my parents' house and jumped out the car to snap this avenue - I loved the lines of shadow on the road. I increased contrast, lights ect - what I usually do - then this one is a brown tint. This one is a...

I took lots of photos of cut flowers. I switched my camera to the macro (flower symbol) setting and used my zoom. I played about with the settings. The top photo is taken in a sunny room hence the over bright flashes.   I took a close up of the rose below, liking its shape.  I cropped it to get rid of the darkness around it then I increased the contrast and the highlights and added a brew tint.  With this one I added a red tint.  And this one is just red. I think this close cropping works really well although I realise it is unoriginal, you get cards like this. However it is nice to know I can do this.

I took loads of photos of the birds at the feeder with not great results. I had issues with the light (the feeder was in the shade), the light was poor in general, the wind (the feeder was moving), the obvious things like the birds didn't stay still and the dog scaring the birds away. I had difficulties focussing the camera, the auto focus wasn't coping with the swing of the feeder in the wind and although I did resort to the manual focus, I had to focus on the feeder, not the birds, so the birds are generally a little bit soft. I put the tripod outside in the garden and manually focussed the camera and put it onto auto (I had tried lots of different settings but my previous attempts had been too dark). I then attached the cable release and sat myself inside (so not to scare the birds) and I pressed the release when the birds were there. This allowed me to get a metre closer to the birds. The auto activated the flash.  This photo above is what I got, this is my maximum zo...

Just outside my parents' sunroom there is a leaf I found interesting, particularly when the morning sun is shining through it. The shape isn't perfect as there is decay setting in however the curvy shape contrasts beautifully with the stripes of the sun coming through the fence. I took a few photos with my Nikon, using the zoom and the auto focus. They are all very similar however I preferred the top one. Unfortunately if you zoom in you can see the leaf has moved during the photo - it was a very windy day, so I have had to work on the second one, as that had stayed still.  This is the photo as I took it.  With the majority of my photos I tend to increase contrast, highlights and shadows in photoshop express and the photo below is a result of just that.  For this photo I cropped it to make it basically square and I have used pinhole black and white. This leaf is such a bold design that I think it lends itself to a more design based compilation - I might p...

Considering the eight themes  Street life - I did have a trip to Melrose however over the last few weeks I haven't got out much so I dont have many traditional street images. This photo hasn't been touched up.  Up close and personal - At my parents there were lots of cut flowers so I did have the opportunity to try to photograph them with the macro setting of my Nikon. I exaggerated the contrast and the blacks to get stronger definition.  I visited Ancrum graveyard which feels very peaceful and is a very beautiful spot, so its connection to decay is a bit tenuous. I haven't touched up this photo at all.  I thought I had better try and photograph me and I planted myself beside a window as my portrait blog suggested. I used the tripod and cable release for this one and I added a bit of "gleam" and strengthened the contrast to improve it a bit. The photo was taken in poor light though.  All that glitters - this is also an action shot! This photo w...

How artists have painted the sea Monet painted the sea in many moods and this led to the sea becoming a standard subject for painters who lived by the sea or holidayed there, painters such as Georges Seurat (1859-1891). Seurat was a neo-impressionist who followed the way of thinking that small dots of more primary colours would merge in the viewers’ eyes to produce a whole range of colours which would create a livelier effect than if the paint was already mixed on the palette. As the Divisionists (Seurat didn’t like the word Pointillists) often met at St Tropez, they did many paintings of the harbour and the nearby coast. Seurat here has established a solid fairly classical composition however the whole effect lacks the spontaneity of a Monet.   If we look more closely at Monet’s The Rocks of Belle Isle 1886, we can see he depicted the cliffs and rocks as fairly solid masses using densely laid strokes of deeply shadowed tones. With that he contrasted the sea which he exec...

Seascapes I have chosen to explore how some artists have depicted the sea in their paintings as this is something that interests me for I have attempted quite a few paintings that have the sea in them and I am particularly interested in learning how to depict movement, energy and weather in paintings. But ultimately for me to be moved by a landscape, nine times out of ten it has to have sea in it. The poet Heinrich Heine said “My heart altogether resembles the sea, it has its storms, its ebbs and floods, and far down in its quiet depths rests many a shining pearl.”                                           Landscape with the Fall of Icarus - Pieter Brueghel     A Brief History of Seascapes We find the earliest examples of oceanic subjects in things like the Egyptian pottery and Chinese porcelain. However seascapes, as a genre of painting, developed with th...

Julie Brook (b. 1960) is a British artist who works in a variety of mediums which are strongly connected to the landscape.   She studied art at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford. She has lived and worked on Hoy in Orkney (1989), on the west coast of Jura (1990-94) and Mingulay in the Outer Hebrides 1996-2011). She currently lives on Skye. More recently she has been working in different parts of the desert in Libya. She makes large scale sculptural work outside using different materials using photography and film as part of her process of working.   In the 1990’s she spent 2 years living in a cave on Jura. She wanted to create a type of art that encapsulated the elemental forces of fire, stone and water. And from that came her fire stacks. She built dry stone column bases at low tide on the beach. These would take several days to build as she could only make them when the tide was low. Then she stacked wood on it and lit it. As the tide came in there...