Sep 2, 2012

Duncan Holmes

Please tell us about the work you will be showing in the 2012 E17 Art Trail?I'm showing photographs of places and buildings in Walthamstow: those are the red dots on the map. It's a personal selection, places where I took photographs and liked the results, not a comprehensive survey. It does tend to focus around the areas I know best, so there are clearly some gaps. I wanted to do something local and this is just how it turned out.



Is this your first time in the Trail or are you an E17 Art Trail veteran? Third time, showing photographs from different places each time.

What are the challenges of getting everything ready for your Art Trail event?
Assembling all the photographs was a long-term project, going out to find locations and taking photographs, then more work sorting, choosing the most effective and usually quite a bit of processing in Photoshop to bring out details. A lot of the buildings I wanted to photograph face almost but not quite north, so to get the best result I'd have to come back at the right time of day. Then there were some events like the Olympic torch when you could catch places with more people than usual. The actual event is fairly easy to organise because it's shown at home, but that does tend to get left until the last minute.


Do you remember the first artist that really influenced you? Does that artist’s influence still have an impact on your work?
My father was an art teacher so I was aware of art from an early age. In retrospect that wasn't an entirely good influence, because as a result I wanted to be able to draw realistically. I could do it up to a point but it didn't prove to be that useful. I think that happens a lot, people see art they like and want to succeed in the same way, when they should follow their instincts and see what they can make of it. But photography isn't so subject to influences, you take pictures of what you see and it's more a matter of what you find interesting to look at and what you discover about the way things look in a still image.


The E17 Art trail has become bigger every year. Do you think it is because more artists are calling it home?
I think it's more to do with people visiting some of the events and thinking, I'm going to try this next year. That's how I got started.

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