November
2003
November
2003
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November 2003 Kasanka And The Case Of The Movious Bats
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News From Around Zambia
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Foto–Sketchi
Artist Quentin Allen and nature photographer Steve Robinson have joined forces on several bush trips this year, seeking out some of Zambia’s lesser-known, remote landscape scenery. Some of their work, in their different media, will be shown jointly in an exhibition and sale in Lusaka commencing on Friday, 28 November. The exhibition will feature scenic pictures from various trips this year including a foot expedition down the Muchinga Escarpment and back up it via the spectacular Mutinondo River at the very height of the rains; the Mutinondo Wilderness area; and the Lunsemfwa and Lukusashi Rivers in the Luano Valley. Also included will be some new pictures of the better-known Nyika Plateau, Lower Zambezi, Victoria Falls and Batoka Gorge areas. But why ‘Foto–Sketchi’? Because, during their Muchinga Escarpment trip, they gave their porters appropriate nicknames. But the porters reciprocated, claiming that they had to become Foto-Foto and Sketchi-Sketchi because that was all the two ever seemed to do. (Although, Foto and Sketchi claim they drank some beer too.) Quentin says “The most interesting and exciting thing about this exhibition is the mix of two media – paintings and photographs of the same areas and sometimes the same scenes. Sometimes similar, sometimes very different”. Quentin Allen has worked his pictures in pastels, watercolour, pen and ink, and acrylics. Steve Robinson’s photographs are what he describes as a mix of the old and new. He uses a medium format panoramic camera and ultra wide-angle lenses to make the photographs on high quality fine-grained transparency film. They are then printed using a digital process but with old-fashioned pigment inks (for light-fast permanence) onto traditional archival photographic papers. The result being fine art quality prints, produced in limited editions. The painter and the photographer have found their respective techniques and media have more in common than they first thought. First, the all-important part of looking to ‘see’ the picture with two pairs of eyes resulted in more pictures to make. Then they found that the painter’s primary skill of creating the required colours by choosing and mixing shades was not that dissimilar to the photographer’s craft of using filters to balance and correct light and to get what is seen by the eye recorded onto the particular type of film being used. Steve Robinson comments “That’s why most people are disappointed that their photos rarely record the colours, shades, contrast and detail that their eye saw in that beautiful landscape. Even the best professional film can’t come near the human eye in exposure latitude, handling contrast between land and sky, or recording a ‘real’ green. So we have to learn what a particular film can and cannot do, how it handles contrast and what colours it is biased toward or against – and then when to use what filter, if any. Then you hope you got it right”. Quentin Allen has recently illustrated a new book on the trees of the Miombo Woodland, due to be published soon by Kew Gardens, London, with text by the Kew Gardens botanist Paul Smith. Quentin says “We hope to combine the book launch with another Foto-Sketchi exhibition. This will be of pictures from a trip that we’ve just done – to the Mutinondo Wilderness area in Northern Province to see the Miombo forest during its “flush”. This is the African spring, when the September heat suddenly brings out the new leaf and there are stunning colours right through the bush. It lasts only a very short time, so you have to be there and wait for it. But when it happens there’s yellow, brown, russet, crimson, orange, every green imaginable, and all of them tinged with gold. A real event. Wonderful!” Sketchi and Foto hope to combine their pictures from that trip in an exhibition to launch the new tree book. “But that’s another one for later...” says Quentin. |
