seeing stars

I am lying on a woven-effect plastic sun lounger in a strangers driveway, or at least the space to the side of the driveway that is just big enough to fit a chalet-cum-shack thing on and hire it out to people like me. The Atlantic is crashing into the rocks at the end of the field and there are loads (probably more) of tiny sparkling dots wrapped around the wooden deck, painted on a background of mid grey. It is 2am and I’m watching meteors slash the sky with blink-and-you-will-genuinely-miss-it energy.

Weeks ago we read about the solar eclipse and the best places to get a glimpse of it and I jokingly marked 3 days in our calendar as ‘Cornwall?’ And now here we are on our favourite headland having witnessed a quietening of the world around us and feeling really quite odd about having stolen a few days ‘holiday’ in a busy summer of making hay while the sun seemingly never ceases to shine.

When I’m working, I immerse myself into my subject and my eye trains to see whatever it is I’m looking for, kind of like an intensive period of seeing only that thing… If it’s gardens I’m photographing then I’m constantly searching for leading lines and hero plants. If I’m working on something more still-life orientated then my brain fixes on objects and how they relate or surfaces and their textural quality. Basically I get into a ‘zone’ to help me communicate a three-dimensional (maybe more) multi-sensory experience into a series of flat lines, squiggles and colours. Of course there’s a crossover in all these areas and my eye is always my eye so it tends to be heading for the same things over and over but I’m always aware that once my camera is ‘done with’ and out of reach I keep seeing these things for a long while afterwards.

Those few days in Cornwall has turned everything into stars.

• the gradient of the sky at dusk, pink at the edges where it touches a turquoise sea

• hundreds of swallows - swapped at night for bats and a single owl

• olive oil, tomatoes, salt

• making two cups of tea and drinking both

• Dew! Cloud cover! A light breeze!

• two cats, one standoffish and wide-eyed, the other smushed up against my legs weaving figures of eight and purring despite having only just met

• sea carrot umbels gesturing (mano a borsa?!) and fried sea-thrift constellations

• soup and a sandwich is unrivalled combination (I don’t believe in soup having a season)

• the marbling of coffee and milk in the bottom of the cup

• pink red brown orange colour combination is really satisfying me at the moment

• getting all my books out to make a physical moodboard

• the shrubs in the communal garden after a fresh trim: some are spheres, some cubes and some are like skittles

• total satisfaction in Very Important Research - finding the best leaf to crunch underfoot

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Ordinary beauty in Newport, Rhode Island.

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