Katherine Mansfield - a symposium on Flanders Fields.

Risk! Risk anything! Care no more for the opinions of others, for those voices. Do the hardest thing on earth for you. Act for yourself. Face the truth.

Katherine Mansfield ... one of my favourite New Zealand writers, the only writer Virginia Woolf ever envied, a woman who truly went out there and lived life. 

Stylistically, the influence of Katherine’s writing was profound. Virginia wrote: “You seem to me to go so straightly and directly – all clear as glass – refined, spiritual…” After Katherine’s death she confided to her diary it was: “the only writing I have ever been jealous of.”

She was a remarkable woman left out of all of my school curriculums - a fact that stuns me now that I realise just how remarkable she was, both as a writer and as a woman.

Anyway, September 26-27, 2015 ...

On Flanders Fields ...

The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world.

Marc Chagall.

Yesterday was one of those slightly epic days ...

Sander and I headed off to Flanders Fields on an assignment that involved using a panoramic tripod head to capture a series of precise images.  I had prepared a folder of lists, directions, and maps however ... we couldn't control the weather.

And so it was that we lost an entire morning of work to raindrops on the lens when taking a particular series of shots.  The umbrella didn't help as the rain varied between wind-blown sideways and simply drifting.  It was never of the straight-down variety ... a fact I wouldn't have noticed unless trying, so desperately, to keep the lens dry.

Bone-achingly cold, we stopped for lunch.  I found myself obsessed and watching the puddle out in front of the fries shop ... to see whether rain was disturbing its surface.

The rain stopped and we headed off again.  We covered the kilometres required to find those specific shots, again.  And the rain held off.  Finally, at the last location and voila, Flanders Fields did what it has so often done to me after a day of trudging about in the rain with my camera.  The clouds shaped themselves into something extraordinary, the sun broke through in places, and the landscape looked like some kind of beautiful painting ... just for a little bit.

I didn't manage to capture it in all its beauty but you get a small sense of it here, perhaps.  Just as the change started to happen.

Just a Note ...

You know ... I don't remember where I found this shot, or ... but I do know it was taken some place in Antwerp and I didn't how unusual it was until I saw it here on my computer.

There's another place I inhabit when I take photographs.  It's difficult to explain.  It simply is.

Meanwhile I'm gearing up for a rather interesting photo-shoot out on Flanders Fields this Wednesday. The panoramic head arrives tomorrow.  Lists and directions are printed and ready.  More on that in the months ahead .. when the story of it all becomes news I can share.

And the exhibition in Brussels.  It's still happening.  More on that as soon as we have dates.

 

Rain ...

 

Waitakere Rain

Ernest Hemingway found rain to be
made of knowledge, experience
wine oil salt vinegar quince
bed early mornings nights days the sea
men women dogs hill and rich valley
the appearance and disappearance of sense
or trains on curved and straight tracks, hence
love honour and dishonour, a scent of infinity.
In my city the rain you get
is made of massive kauri trees, the call of forest birds
howling dark oceans and mangroved creeks.
I taste constancy, memory and yet
there’s the watery departure of words
from the thunder-black sand at Te Henga Beach.

Paula Green.