Gratuitous Colour

AKA ‘Some Bird’s Arse’

A friend of mine once tetchily dismissed this picture as ‘some bird’s arse‘ and of course he was right. It is some bird’s arse. 

He’d asked me to frame some prints for a last-minute exhibition and, without much thought as to the audience, this was one of my choices. Anyhow, the exhibition was a bit of a disaster: turned out the audience was a tad parochial and refined for such gratuitous colour.

But to describe it as ‘some bird’s arse’s is to miss the whole point of the image  – I mean, just LOOK at those primary colours!

Whose arse?
No fekin’ idea. She was just floating in the pool where I was shooting photos for a holiday brochure.

I should emphasise that I’m not in the habit of hanging around hotel pools to snoop on people’s primary colours: everyone at the pool knew why I was there (and with a fast aperture telephoto, I was hard to miss).

But this gal’s fella was the owner of some bad tattoos, a Sons of Anarchy mullet and a drunken scowl, as he sat splat drinking in the midday sun on a pool-side recliner, so I reined in my trained eye to save any potential bother. However, when he dozed off into a drunken stupor, my photographic eye seized the moment and I set about trying to frame those colours for posterity (why are you smirking? I’m serious).

Getting back to my dismissive friend. If he’d seen the accompanying out-takes to this image, perhaps he’d be more appreciative of how much effort was expended on finding a winning form to showcase these primary colours. And I did wonder at the time if he’d describe the Mona Lisa as ‘some bird’s face’?
When all’s said and done, that’s what it is.

Some Bird’s Face?

Obviously there are qualitative differences. For starters, the tactfully cropped primary colours floating in this pool did not have the face of a Mona Lisa, and there’s not a face to be seen in any of the out-takes

Nor has she been tickled into life by painstaking brushstrokes mixed from a moody palette by the hands of a master.
But on the flip side, I reckon Mona Lisa never had legs and two smiley buns like these: methinks her primary colours would’ve looked like a hobbit’s armpit floating on a busted horse-hair mattress.