Well, I did say...

...I was going fishing. A nice catch of our favourite table fish. A 45 cm Flathead with 5 plate sized Tailor. Yum! The Flathead was caught on a soft plastic lure, the Tailor on a metal slug at a slow troll in the tinnie. Definitely my preferred form of angling. This post for CK in  the UK :-)

Renunciation

Lets kick off the new year with piety! Why? Am I feeling guilty about too much indulgence over the silly season? Of course not! Don't be silly in even starting to think so. It is simply because it all gets more depraved from here on in...

Postcard c.1920's?

Philip Hermogenes Calderon, St Elizabeth of Hungary's Great Act of Renunciation, 1891, Oil on canvas, Tate, London

An interesting comparison between the gravures interpretation against the subtlety of the original painting. If you don't know the story here is the Tate's description: 

"Elizabeth of Hungary (1207-1231) was the wife of Lewis, Landgrave of Thuringia. After his death in 1227 during one of the Crusades, she entered a convent and devoted herself to good works. Before becoming a nun, she passed through a spiritual crisis, torn by the need to renounce the world, and therefore her children, in order to fulfill her desire to serve God. Pressed by a domineering monk, Conrad, whose natural affections had been starved by celibacy, Elizabeth finally vowed that 'naked and barefoot' she would follow her 'naked Lord'. Calderon's picture shows this moment of self-abasement.  

Calderon took his subject from a play by Charles Kingsley, 'The Saint's Tragedy', first published in 1848. It was based on fact."

Poor Elizabeth...dead at 24, sanctified sure, but ending up the salacious subject matter of late 19th Century 'Salon Art', where the plethora of nude women in subservient poses is as much of a crime as her very brief life. More details about Elizabeth from Wikipedia...

...and on that note I am off to listen to the latest emptywhale release 'That Grey Place We Go'. Happy New Year...

Immaculate Deception

Fra Angelico, The Annunciation, c.1430-32, Tempera on wood, Prado Museum, Madrid

Regular readers might be a little surprised to find Fra Angelico adorning the pages of this blog, but don't worry folks...I am not about to change my wicked ways and find God! I suppose technically I should have posted it around 8 months and 3 weeks ago on the basis that despite divine conception the little bastard would have gestated full term before landing in the manger. 

I used this image in a talk I gave a few years back at the local regional gallery on 'Eroticism in Art'. I began the talk with it not because it is in anyway erotic, but it is very revealing. Why? Because I believe that without religion (or at least Christianity) eroticism would not exist, or at least in the form it does today. Call it simplistic if you like, but the churches effort to suppress human desire has created the 'forbidden' nature of eroticism that makes it so interesting.

Above, we see the Archangel Gabriel do the 'Ave Maria' bit while in the top left hand corner Adam and Eve are expelled from the Garden of Eden. Take home message: Mary good, Eve bad, and it is this 'evilness' of Eve as temptress that led to Christ and his disciples adopting chastity as a desirable quality. And what a wonderful little chain of events and attitudes that has left us with for the past 2000 odd years.

So, while I will certainly be enjoying the company of family and friends this Christmas I won't be celebrating the birth of Christ. I will be thinking about an increasingly fragmented world that sadly appears on a collision course with itself, and on that cheery note I am shutting down the system for a couple of weeks and going fishing...

The Doors of Perversion

Bob Georgeson, The Doors of Perversion, 2012, Photomontage

Just to get into the festive spirit...time to hang out the stockings!

emptywhale

emptywhale is a dark ambient outfit from the UK that formed in 2011. The above is the cover to the first album, released into the public domain by the independent and non-commercial netlabel Haze, which is based in Belarus. Haze specialises in experimental, eclectic and avant-garde music...

I came across emptywhale by a chance encounter on the Internet Archives. I had been searching for a soundtrack for a film I had visualised but not yet made. After what seemed like hours of sifting through some pretty weird and wonderful stuff, there was something about the name, title and cover art that drew me to start listening to the tracks. And what a pleasant encounter it has turned out to be. I was particularly drawn to the track 'Suburbs' which I ended up using in the film 'The Lunar Machine', or maybe I should say it used me, for, rather than finding a soundtrack that fitted with existing footage, the soundtrack ended up determining the feel, sequence and continuity of the film. It was a fascinating (to me at least) exercise in process because there was no attempt on my part to 'visualise' the music, nor obviously any attempt by emptywhale to 'auralise' the visuals. It just fitted the feel I had wanted to achieve...an uneasy feeling that all is not quite right...

So, I was more than pleasantly surprised to get an email from emptywhale last weekend saying they liked what I had done with 'Suburbs', and to be privileged to a sneak preview of the new album due out in a few weeks time. We also had some discussion about processes, working in the public domain and possible future collaboration. I am not an expert on the dark ambient genre, but I find these sonic journeys full of humanistic concern for the environment and direction of society. As I wrote to Chris, listening to his music, or soundscapes as he calls them, took me to places that I had never been before. A whole new door has opened for me, and I'm excited! I'm steppin' through!

You can download or stream 'fearscapes' by clicking here...

eye candy

This one is a mashup of footage of 60's glamour model Candy Earle and a documentary about mapping in Australia. Sourced from the Internet Archives (of course). It is the first film I have made using Adobe Premiere Elements (thanks Paulo).

Suzanne's right arm

Bob Georgeson, Suzanne's right arm, 2012, Digital photography

This time of the year life gets a little hectic, so I had shot this in a hurry in an effort to keep up the momentum of where I wanted to go with Suzanne. I am not sure why I used this setting because she can't read, she can't see, she can't hear. In fact there is not much she can do at all except dumbly stare into a space unknown to us all. It was only after I had looked at the shot more closely that I realised that I had made a terribly politically incorrect mistake. Wonder if anyone can pick what it is...