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This project began during the winter months of 2006/7 when I took my first photographs of the landscape surrounding the mill house that we had just bought in Northern Italy. This part of the Emilia Romagna region remains unspoilt and eminently photogenic. Few holidaymakers venture to our small fortress town of Bardi, the site where Hannibal’s last elephant died. The countryside has a unique, unblemished beauty with winding roads, undulating hills, rock-filled rivers and swathes of forest wilderness, home to delicious porcini and wild boar. It is quite distinct from neighbouring Tuscany (‘Chiantishire’), with its exquisitely planted cypresses, manicured meadows and elegantly positioned hill-top hamlets. The most striking quality of our more rugged landscape is how completely it becomes transformed by each season. In springtime, purple and lime-green wild orchids bleed through the fields. The baking summer heat brings the bluest skies and the greenest of forest canopies which are transformed into brilliant orange and gold, during the autumn. Winter in the Apennines heralds impenetrable mists, bitter frosts, ice-storms and waist-deep quilts of snow. When out walking or driving I noticed particular trees and before long, subconsciously began to select my favourites. These were then photographed at various times of the day and under various weather conditions. It became my rule never to leave the house without the cameras (film and digital) and I would return having filled entire rolls of film with shots of perhaps only a single tree. Dozens of contact sheets began to pile up and, after three successive winters, I’d amassed thousands of images of my preferred trees: silhouetted against the last glows of a sunset, dissolved in a pea-soup fog, brutally pollarded by the local farmers. Of course it’s difficult not to invest these trees with similar character traits and temperaments possessed by the resilient and stoic people native to this area. The titles of the selected works on display are derived from the villages and hamlets closest to those trees featured in each piece. Earlier this year, I printed the raw photographic images in the dark room and spent the summer experimenting and hand colouring them with various media. For over twenty years my work has been entirely abstract but while working on this project I realised that photography afforded me the opportunity and the means to engage again with figuration, without having to resort to drawing – the camera could do this for me. The resulting images are perhaps hybrids or crossbreeds since they are neither photographs nor paintings but take on qualities of each medium. But what exactly are they? I am not entirely sure what to call them - ‘paintographs’ or ‘photings’? G. H. 2009
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© 2007, Gerard Hastings |