What On Earth Can This Be?

Photo by author, Stuart Aken.

A Slippery Response To That Question

What can this be? Where might it be found?

Valid questions. But the simple answers may be thought mundane. I’ve been making pictures with a camera for many years: 66, to be precise.

I had a stepfather who was a workaday photographer, recording weddings, christenings, family groups, at which he was expert. A great handler of people. And a proficient technician who taught me well. But a man with no idea how to ‘make’ a picture.

My mother, on the other hand, was a gifted artist who’d won a scholarship to a famous London art school in her teens. Her father, a man with little imagination but an exaggerated idea of his worth, forbad her to go. In those days, a daughter was obliged to obey such directions. But she was, once free of his command, at least able to indulge in painting.

I recall, as a lad of but six or seven years, watching her painting in oils on the rough back surface of hardboard sheets she used instead of canvas due to cost. I was fascinated by how she captured movement in the waves of the sea that broke on the beach below our seaside home, the way she portrayed the softness of those white fluffy clouds floating gently against the blue sky of an English summer. From her I learned how to create pictures.

So it was, that passing a silent puddle in the mud of a forest track not too long ago, my eye was captured by the strange, unearthly pattern coating the surface of the water. I, in turn, captured that abstract pattern with my camera. There was the need for some small enhancement to create a little more contrast than the elements of the actual piece naturally exhibited.

This is what I present to you here. A simple depiction of oil on water. Two liquids that generally fail to mingle but, in this case, form entrancing images with which imagination may play.