Influences. We all have them, I suppose. What makes me, me and you, you? We often seem very attached to our roots, our national identity, and in many cases also our regional one. I was born in a tiny cottage at the east end of a small Yorkshire village, high on the Pennies, closer to Lancashire than most of the rest of Yorkshire. And having been born there, I spent most of my early life living at the west end of that same small village, until I left to go “down south” at the age of eighteen.
The downside of living there was that it felt incredibly isolated (during teenage years, at least), and in winter it was cold, bleak, dark, and wet. The rainclouds piling up against the Pennines as the prevailing wind drove them from across the Irish Sea dropped their contents on us. Except that the rain didn’t fall straight down; it always seemed to be closer to the horizontal.
But in summer - oh, summer - there was no place on earth that could beat it. Lush green fields giving way to purple heather in an otherwise minimal landscape of open moorland. Blinding blue skies split by the white arrows of airliners travelling north from Heathrow or other places in Europe before heading out over the Atlantic to the New World on their Great Circle trajectories.
That landscape of block colour, long undulating horizons, the cry of the solitary Curlew, big skies and lots of weather has certainly had an impact on me and coloured my visual response to the world. Simple, minimal, graphic, shapes and simple, strong, colour schemes tend to be how that influence manifests itself in my photos and also my artworks.
But, although landscape played a large part in making me, there were lots of other influences, too. I find a connection with all sorts of things; engineering, architecture, aviation, graphic design, electronic music, to name but a few. All sorts of words come to mind when I think of those things – neatness, precision, purity on the one hand, passion, beauty, complexity on the other.
So, lots of influences that are evident in my image making. But landscape is definitely one of the important ones.
What about you?