The Three Graces, Part 1: in the church

The shot of The Three Graces was on my list of projects for over six years, but I could never get three friends together at the same time. Two beautiful Canadians, Kelsey and Renè walked into my Orvieto Gallery in mid October and looked attentively at the pictures both on the walls and in the...

Rusalka’s Song to the Moon

Rusalka, a Slavic folk tale set to music by Dvořák Rusalka was suggested  to me by a professional opera singer who had herself performed the role in Dvořák’s eponymous opera. A folk tale found in the slavic world akin to Andersen’s Little Mermaid and equally tragic. Rusalka is a beautiful water sprite living in a...

Art Photography Inspiration – Luxe, Calme et … Choco Pie.

Unusual connections sometimes can spark art photography inspiration and creativity. Baudelaire’s poem “Invitation du Voyage” and a news item about Choco Pie are behind the making of this image. Luxe, Calme et Volupté comes from a line taken from Baudelaire’s poem Invitation du Voyage, but it was a news item about a chocolate confection popular in communist North Korea that inspired this image, the coveted Choco Pie.

The inspiration behind art photography. Le Spectre de la Rose.

Poetry,  music and painting,  all converge in this photo-shoot, setting the mood for the final image. This picture had its origins in the sight of a freshly painted blue boat on the shores of Lake Bolsena which reminded me of a painting by Carl Moll, a mysterious, unsettling picture of a blue boat in a flooded...

On The Beach

We set off to take a photo on the beach in mid October despite the awful weather because this was the last opportunity of the year. We had planned to take the picture back in 2007 when I met her shortly after opening my gallery in Orvieto, though something had always conspired to postpone time...

Whiter Shade of Pale

A Whiter Shade of Pale, one of the all time great song titles, and in effect a one line poem. The Procol Harum song, came into my mind as I arranged this picture on the basalt rocks in the gorge near the ruins of the Etruscan city of Vulci on the Tuscan-Latium border. And so...

Dio stramaledica gli Inglesi!

Sometimes I come back to a picture with a new idea, usually to add something - such are the wonders of Photoshop - despised I know by many purists but manna from heaven to someone like me who never knows when to stop. In this case I have tinkered with a 2006 picture called Correspondent...

Weeping Willow Woman

In early spring 2009 I took the picture above of a weeping willow on Lake Bolsena. A fortnight later a high wind ripped off  the upper bough and for at least a couple of years it lay semi-submerged, rotting in the shallow water below. I grew up with Willow Pattern. As a child I was...

Flotsam

Back in October 2007 I set up a picture based on a painting by the French academic painter Gerome called The Judgement of Phryne. I had to shoot 5 pictures in the course of a week as a Swiss TV documentary crew were following both me and my models for a film entitled Woman Portraying...

Moonshine

The location for this picture is a nymphaeum, the so called Diana's Bath in a cliff beneath the Pope's summer palace at Castel Gandolfo on the shores of Lake Albano near Rome. The ravages of time and the depredations of robbers as well as legitimate excavators have left it a dripping, mysterious ruin with wonderful acoustics. ...

Carpe Diem

A remarkable feature of Italy is the amount of  history simply abandoned to nature. A walk in the woods can lead to a ruined church with peeling frescoes, even entire towns abandoned and overgrown or as here a Renaissance sculpture park outside Pitigliano constructed by the once powerful Orsini family. Amongst the oaks are moss...

Spirals

Though the name is  This Autumn Evening,  how I got there is something of a spiral. I was intrigued by the idea of a spiral suggested by the form of the belvedere. This is the original shot. In fact the working title was Vortex. This took me to Wyndham Lewis and the Vorticists which in turn led...