Distressed Paint (in colour)

Your macro shot of bright white paint, peeling off a royal blue background, makes powerful use of a limited, two-tone palette. The textures resemble an aerial view of a fast-disappearing, sun-bleached riverbed. A trickle of water is fighting for survival whilst it’s tiny, cracked tributaries have all but dried up. As photographer’s, we take photos that satisfy our own creative vision and hope that others will appreciate that vision. Your subtly understated photo has achieved this with a well-deserved, less-is-more, winning composition.

As photographers, we sometimes don’t know what it is that draws us to take an abstract photo of a given area. We could just as easily have pointed the camera, in any area, around our selected focus. Maybe, you subliminally saw what I saw:- the half face of a clown, peeking out from between two red circus curtains. Whatever it was that drew you to the image, your photo has a definite, joyful cartoon character, with it’s red, blue and yellow comic book colours.

I’ve always had a penchant for old painted advertising with their weatherworn features, and this one, illustrated directly onto wooden shutters is a cracker. Even with the missing jigsaw-shaped pieces of the logo, the primary colours are still recognisable, as a Pepsi-Cola bottle cap. Fortunately, your sharp eye was able to detect, this hand-painted poster, from amongst the rich tapestry of Mexican street life. Nowadays, the poster would have been printed in CYMK inks onto lightweight paper, which wouldn’t have aged, or lasted as long, as this beautifully distressed objet d’ art.

The contrasting, juxtaposition of clean furniture lines, set against a distressed patterned wall, absolutely makes your composition for me. Muted square blocks of colour in the abandoned interior, put me in mind of Mark Rothko’s abstract, impressionist paintings. You had wisely resisted the temptation to zoom in on a small selection of the wall, but chose to step back and take a much wider picture to greater effect. The inclusion of the table and chairs gives your photograph a sense of scale, without which, your composition would have looked like another close-up of peeling paint.

Who would have imagined, that a macro shot of distressed paint, could act as a clever ploy to include a distant landscape. Your well-observed streak of disintegrated red paint, against the white painted panels, allows us a glimpse of a waterscape, on the other side of the enclosure, through a jagged hole in the fence. It’s important when judging entries, not to have preconceived perceptions of what to expect, but to expect the unexpected, which your photograph manages to do by both surprising, and delighting, at the same time.

The two floral-shaped eyes, streaming golden tears from their sky blue pupils, immediately stopped me in my flow of looking through the competition entries. Like a tourniquet wrapped around injured eyes, your abstract portrait, manages to squeeze emotion out of an inanimate object. Minimalism is a gamble one takes, in a challenge that encourages full-blown use of distressed shapes and colours. But, as it turns out, your calculated risk has justly paid off for you.

Like you, my immediate thought when viewing this abstract photo, was that the distressed paint shapes were a section of a cartographer’s typographical map. I can make out fertile green land; deep blue seas; brown mountain terrains; as well as traces of golden yellow beaches. Jagged black coastal lines complete the three-dimensional delineation. With this seemingly aerial photo, you have managed to convincingly capture, something that is what it isn’t, and perhaps, fooled other viewers into wondering where on earth, this map fits within the world’s contours.

It’s not unusual to see individual distressed doors, but to come across three in a row, and butted up to each other is a really lucky find. The red, blue and green vertical lines interspersed with white flecks resemble disintegrating spines of old, office box files. Your photo is a perfect document of how aged wooden doors can be used for recycling; in this case, as a dividing wall inside a farmer’s barn. I particularly like the three-part harmony between the now defunct windows and letterboxes, which makes me want to join in and sing Pink Floyd's:- “Another Brick In The Wall”.

Having read your backstory about this leg of a swing in a children’s playground, I immediately commended your photo. You write that, whilst watching your child swinging, you became wistfully aware that within the generations of distressed paint, there was a layer, which was there when you swung from the very same swing as a child. Just shows you that, when push comes to shove, a backstory can help swing a photo in the judges direction.

I'd virtually settled on my top ten when your latecomer entered the fray to muscled out one of my contenders. Your close-up of compressed plywood from Bali, is a unique subject matter for this challenge. I like the unusual higgledy-piggledy angle of these multicoloured wooden planks. Without your description, I wouldn’t have known what your sandwiched objects were, but that’s part of what makes your appealing photo so intriguing.