Boatscapes – Digital

Imagined landscapes found in boatyards around the East Anglian coast.

The ‘Boatscape’ series happened by accident.

Like many things I get involved in, this project started by chance with some casual images of boats on Mersea Island, Essex, back in 2006. As a lifelong devotee of black and white photography but loving the colour and form of artists like Albert Irvin, Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock I was interested by the appearance of these images after processing. I liked their ‘painterly’ look, which made me think of the early pictorialists and their efforts to make photographs appear to be paintings, although these are, of course, far removed from their vision.

The act of observing, selecting, framing, photographing and post-processing these abstract colours, textures and shapes encapsulates all that I enjoy about photography. Not being a gifted artist in any of the traditional painters’ skills, these are as close as I get to producing my own personal rendition of a scene that exists in reality but which becomes transformed by process and presentation.