Looking ahead to Assignment One I am thinking about concentrating on the Sublime, rather than the Beautiful, as this should give me greater scope to explore the ideas of presenting the unpresentable and of nothingness/emptiness that I have written about recently.

What I would most dearly like to do, as I have lady suggested, is work on a seascapes project. However I have to admit that this would in many ways probably be far too derivative of Sugimoto, even if I was to go for somewhat more dramatic scenes, such as those made by Garry Fabian Miller. From a practical point of view I doubt the feasibility at the moment of making such work given the length of the round-trip to the nearest bit of coast.

As an alternative I am currently thinking more along the lines of James Turrell’s Skyspaces. This will link back to the cloud paintings of the likes of Cozens, Turner, and Constable all of whom I mentioned in Exercise 1.3. It also still fits with the idea of the void in Sugimoto’s work, and the concepts of the sublime that have appealed to me from the outset.

Again it is not really practical at the moment for me to make repeated trips to the nearest Turrell to me at Kielder. It is not that far away but still at least an hour’s drive in each direction – it is easy to forget how big and relatively empty this county is! Really though I do not need to go there and can shoot sky scenes in the comfort of my own garden.

Here are the first couple of experiments, taken yesterday and today. Yesterday was very overcast so the picture actually reveals little – it is a void, empty, a picture of nothingness. Today was a bit more broken so the picture is more easily recognisable as clouds.

I will continue with this experiment over the next couple of weeks (weather permitting) and try a shot each day and see what we get. I will also, in the meantime, think about some other possible approaches.

These were all taken over the course of the same afternoon. It was quite breezy so the sky was constantly changing. Though not easy to see, the third in this day’s sequence managed to catch the moon, a very small crescent in the middle towards the booth of the picture, just below the cloud edge.

While working on this I have been giving further thought to other potential influences on what I am trying to achieve. One of course has to be Alfred Stieglitz and his “Equivalents”, photographs of clouds that are arguably the first abstract pictures ever made. I do not though feel any conscious influence. Yes of course I am doing something similar with my cloud pictures but only up to a point. Stieglitz was, I think, very much pursuing a pictorialist line of approach. His could pictures do not carry, so far as I can divine, any deeper meaning or significance. It is not clear to me that he “meant” anything in particular in making these pictures. In a way what he was doing was more closely aligned with what Cozens, Turner, and Constable were doing.

The other is Gerhard Richter who made a number of sea- and sky-scape paintings in the late 1960s and early 1970s. While working on my pictures I had this nagging feeling at the back of my mind that a contemporary artist had done this sort of work but it is only now, now that I am just about ready to submit this first assignment, that I have realised that it is Richter that I have had in mind and have gone back to look at this work. Although not an active, conscious influence this work has clearly had an effect, even if only at an unconscious level because clearly Richter was seeking to do with his cloud paintings what I am trying to do now. As Mark Godfrey points out (2011, at page 83): “these are not just paintings of skies – they are paintings that show Richter’s attraction to the ‘unknowable and unrepresentable’…” This fits exactly with the interpretation that I have sought to place upon the Sublime.

Godfrey, M, & Serota, N, (2011). Gerhard Richter: Panorama.  London: Tate