Rambles
Who or what am I.
A yes as I was saying , a long time ago someone somewhere lifted a stick marked a line in the sand and art was born.
I don`t know what was different that day, maybe the sun was in the right place at the right time to bring the textures out or this was our first child prodigy, that will have to remain in the mists.
Just imagine it, they get all excited and start showing their friends and everyone they meet (as you can guess the first critic was born that day aswell) many of whom go off and tell their friends about the weirdo they just met .
Well as time moves on our hero starts getting carried away and just can`t stop messing about with sticks and sand ( remember the word drawing didn`t exist yet) and then one day he finds a burnt stick, whooa ¿ You can see what happened next can´t you, yes graffiti was born.
Now while John, yes we will call him John: John Smith, is running around lost in a passion along come the pretenders and they start marking the walls as well, standing about in groups trying to look smart and wearing their hats with a silly cock, though it would seem looking at history some of them actually produced some lovely pieces of work.
.Lascaux.
Well unfortunately Mr Smith didn`t attain the immortality that he sought and he passed on leaving the next generation to build on, John Junior and so on, the legacy he had left, you get the picture, no pun intended.
Through the passage of time man became more and more sophisticated and moved on from the stick and started to use paint ,hard to know if the word painting was in existence but lets assume it was.
In this manner man moved forward evolving constantly creating new more refined tools to do the same job and continually extend his intelligence beyond his biological limitations through imagination.
Now whether art brought about philosophy or not I don`t know but it got to the stage where they were undecided (no we are talking about man) they were arguing about light itself and how it worked. There were two theories, "Emission theory" which suggested light was emitted from our eyes and collected by them again enabling us to see, and "Intromission theory" which suggested our eyes were receivers for an external light source, but that each object we saw emitted its own light and not like our modern theory were we receive the light reflected off objects. Then there is the"Trippyhippy theory" it might just be a dream :-)
Then along comes Ibn al-Haytham ( relative of John´s no doubt ) who proves with the use of a curved piece of glass (a lens or infact in this case a camera obscura) that light does in fact travel fom the object and not from our eyes.
.The Book of Optics.
Now this is were it gets interesting because as we know man likes to cheat, or is that overcome obstacles through imaginative creation of tools, whatever.
Well John Smith XVI the painter gets hold of one of these camera obscura jobbies and starts using it to improve his painting, tsk tsk, but what do you know it catches on and even Mr Da Vinci is known to have dabbled.
Now with man being the insatiable beast that he is, this still isn`t enough and one Joseph Nicèphore Nièpce gets carried away and places a piece of pewter plate coated with light sensitive salts into a camera obscura and photography is born. ( For the sake of alacrity I have left out all the minor details of the inventions of glass, woodwork, metallurgi, chemistry ,mathematics, physics and so one that were required to bring this into reality)
As you know history likes to repeat itself and out come the copycats again each adding there own ingenuity to the situation.
Louis-Jacques-Mandè Daguerre, William Henry Talbot Fox and many others improving very quickly on the initial carnation enabling for photography to go mainstream, for all men finally to be able to see themselves and their world encased in time.
.Timeline.
Then poof! 178 years later I wake up one morning and for a reason unknown to myself I want a camera. So I get a camera, a small one and I begin to explore, to study the langauge the mechanics and the metaphysics.
Study what I have to do to bring forth what now with hindsight has been an urge from my teenage years to express the beauty the colours and textures of this magnificent life and this I now lay before you.
So who or what am I ?
I`m really just a guy with a stick.
Brian Mclernon
September 2009.