In early spring 2009 I took the picture above of a weeping willow on Lake Bolsena, Italy. 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. Willow Pattern Spode, English willow pattern...
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 Art....
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,...
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...
I have taken to photographing the Belle in places that I have known of for some time, trusting that the beauty of the site, what the Romans called Genius Loci, will inspire both me and the model even though I may not have a very well formed idea of what I intend to do at the outset. I set...
How long does one look at a picture, a work of art, a piece of sculpture, a stanza of poetry? Seconds, minutes possibly, but compared to watching a film, listening to a concert or reading a book, a blinking of an eye. But brevity does not necessarily diminish the effect, it may even...
Cyclamen is dear to the muses and Hecate, the mother goddess of dark, chthonic places and witchcraft; cyclamen is the flower of opposites. In folklore it symbolised life and death; an ingredient of wedding cakes to increase fertility yet a woman who walked barefoot on cyclamen would abort; both a...
In the ancient world, given that fertility was of fundamental importance, sex and religion were entwined. Bacchanalian rites were famous for their eroticism. A Roman home would often have the figure of Priapus holding his oversized phallus prominently displayed by the entrance and the...
Place is ever so important to artists and Lake Bolsena is a unique place. A large and deep volcanic lake north of Rome with two islands it was the centre of the Etruscan cult for over a thousand years and here catholics believe not one, but two miracles occurred. A meadow slopes down...
Hamadryads are nymphs associated with trees, each one having its own Hamadryad. They are not immortal, they share their destiny with the tree: when the tree dies, so does the nymph. I have a particular love for the Maritime Pine with its unmistakable umbrella canopy. They are native...
One of the greatest paintings of the Renaissance, Sleeping Venus is an unusual, not to say mysterious work, even for an out of the ordinary painter like Giorgione. The work was unfinished on his death at 34 of plague to be completed by Titian who then went on to paint similar Venuses of his own....
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