Dream Theatre

Charmouth Beach, 28th December 2022

We had a rather quiet break over Christmas and New Year. As has been our custom in recent years, we hired a place down in Dorset for a family get-together, but all of us either arrived with or shortly went down with a horrible flu-ey cold and cough that has persisted for weeks but is, surprisingly, not the result of the obvious candidate virus: it's been a case of "I can't believe it's not Covid". On top of that the weather was mainly awful – gloomy skies, strong winds, and driving rain – so, unless you want to hear about how I forgot to remove certain components of our Christmas dinner from the side oven of an unfamiliar stove, or how gratifyingly well-stocked the Nisa convenience store in Charmouth is, there's not a lot of general interest to report back on.

I didn't even get many decent photographs. By contrast, last year I had a couple of excellent walks that yielded some unusually spectacular landscape images. I used one of them, "Pickaxe Cross, 23rd December 2021", as this year's Christmas / New Year card. In fact, that same photo has now been selected for the Royal West of England Academy's new open photography exhibition. Which is great, except for the fact that it was what I regarded as the "safest" choice of the three I submitted; the other two were more typical of my work and, in my opinion, more interesting uses of photography as a medium. Among the judges were Jem Southam and Susan Derges, both photographers I have admired for many years, and I can't pretend I wasn't disappointed that they went for this striking but conventional landscape photograph.

Pickaxe Cross, 23rd December 2021

I've been amusing myself over the past month or two by fiddling about with a new book of digital collages, which I think I have now pretty much completed – or at any rate it has now reached the point of diminishing returns – and so I have put it up on my Blurb page. For now it's semi-private, visible by "invitation only" via the following link:

Dream Theatre

Mike Chisholm

Some of these pictures will be familiar from previous incarnations that I've shown in these blog posts, but I think it works as a sequenced whole, a sort of fitful meditation on the subject of dreams, dreaming, and dreamers. I'm not expecting anyone to buy it in this 30cm square hardback version, and will be making a much cheaper version in the 18cm square paperback size, once I'm sure I've got it right. Feel free to comment, and even to buy a copy of the super-cheap PDF version, if you want to have a proper look at the pictures [1].

Charmouth, Christmas Day 2022

Lyme Regis, Boxing Day 2022

1. If you do, for the best viewing experience you need to set your PDF reader (typically Adobe Acrobat) so that you can see a two-page view with a separate cover page. This ensures the correct pages face each other. In Acrobat the settings are: 

Under the menu "View" choose "Page Display", then choose both of "Two Page View" and "Show Cover Page in Two Page View". You may also want to select "Show Gaps Between Pages".