Art meets history

 

Over the weekend Fiona and I checked out the new annex building at the Strathnaver Museum. It was a great surprise to see a derelict wooden boat in the annex parking area - maybe awaiting work before becoming part of the museum collection.  Today I did a couple of small watercolours (above) of the boat (below).

Over the past year I have been creating works that reflect the betrayal of the Scottish farmers in the Sutherland shire in the northern highlands. Farmers cleared-forced from their land to make way for capitalist enterprises; and forced to subsist on small crofts and forced to become fishermen even though most had never been to sea. Many went to sea in unsafe boats and many lost their lives.

A few images of my work follow.

How eerie to find a boat that seemed to have, for me anyway, a strong connection to those sad historical times and to my recent work.

A Year of iPhoneography

I realised about 3-4 weeks ago that I had just about reached 12 months on my journey with iPhoneography. I thought I'd mark the first year with the production of a Blurb book that contained a selection of my altered iPhone photos.

©2012 Barry Smith - Cover of Barry's iPhoneography Blurb book

As you can see from the screen dump above, I have started the process - in fact the job is about 80% there and I hope to publish in the next couple of days.

The process has taken some time as I have done a couple of hours each day over the Easter period - there has been much gardening and 'autumn cleaning' to be done in the Dempster-Smith household so only so much time for frivolous activities like Blurbing.

©2012 Barry Smith - Screen dump of section of Barry's iPhoneography picture folder

©2012 Barry Smith - Photo of section of Barry's  iPhoneography picture folder

©2012 Barry Smith - Photo of section of Barry's  iPhoneography picture folder

One of the challenges in the process has been the selection of photos. As you can see from the screen dump and photos above, not only are there quite a number of altered shots to select from; but I wanted to think about themes; and in the end found that some of the photos I wanted to use did not quite have the resolution required to fit the Blurb template I might have wanted to use and also result in a high quality photo.

Still it has been fun to re-learn the Blurb publishing skill (I previously published a Portfolio Blurb book) - with periodic advice from my trusty IT guru (Fiona).

So a work in process - should be done in a day or two.