…And Pears

Finally removed those Chinese 'Ya' pears (see earlier post) from their protective cocoons & photographically explored their form & spatial relationships between them in a variety of natural lighting conditions (different times of the day, angles of light, different rooms). I must admit to finding these images unsatisfactory on a number of levels, not least in the failure to adequately capture the subtle beauty of the surface colour of the pears, a gorgeous pale, creamy gold, to which I was primarily attracted in the first instance: this, I believe, could have been better explored through the medium of oil paint, the consistency of which could have more appropriately represented what I can only describe as the creamy quality of the pears’ skin when experienced in the flesh.

Aesthetically, there remains something profoundly fascinating about their still, mute forms, their monumentality, their essential ‘pearness’ & ‘thing-in-itself’ quality, & I think this is communicated in some way by the photographs, yet photographing them seems such an unsatisfactory means of exploring & capturing this in comparison to drawing & painting, where time spent looking, in contemplation of formal and surface qualities seems much more rewarding and is capable of producing a more profound result.






Given what I considered to be the failure of the camera to adequately communicate the surface colour and quality, I consequently decided the pears were photographically more interesting when wreathed once again in their protective coverings, & thus snapped a few more images. I enjoy here both the surface qualities and the hints as to what lies beneath, within: form and colour, for instance. Perhaps here photography, in representing the strangeness of something actually existing, achieves a better result than drawing or painting, whose results may appear more contrived or invented, self-consciously surreal even, and therefore less convincingly believable. As ever, it’s instructive to explore the potential of any given medium for achieving the most appropriate aesthetic resolution to a given visual problem.