SPARK – the online project which pairs writers and visual artist (and a few musicians) for mutual inspiration – just completed round 14. I participated by providing a couple of inspiration pieces and created one response piece.

The inspiration piece I responded to was a short story written by Hildie S Block entitled “The Box”. Here’s my response:

Remains

Click here to see the image and read the story in the SPARK website.

Typically, when I’m trying to come up with an image for a piece of writing, I’ll skim it quickly, just to see what image “sticks” after I’ve finished. For this piece, the image I couldn’t get out of my head was one of a crematorium urn containing a mixture of human – and paper – ashes. Of course the challenge then was to figure out what’s possible to photograph (unfortunately, I can’t make a picture of whatever I imagine — I have to go out and find my image in the real world!)

My first approach was to focus on the process of destruction – in this case, the transition from valuable document to worthless ash  (- and by analogy, cremation of the human body, also). The idea was to capture a sequence of images to illustrate the progress of the dissolution of the material over time.

Burning stuff has to be done outside, of course, and at night I don’t need to worry about distracting backgrounds, and the flames clearly stand out. At least it was dry and not windy – it was December however and darned cold!

That resulted in the grid picture you can see a little further down. (I added a larger image of the final square so you can see it better — so many colors!). I also have some nice close-ups of the burning paper.

Having done all that, however, it was the image of the papers after the burning which seemed to fit the mood of the story best, and in case you think this is a black-and-white picture, it’s not, this is in full color! True, the color is very subtle, but it’s critical to the final image (changing it to black-and-white ruins it!). This was taken outside at night, illuminated by just a single bulb, using a long exposure.

I like the contrast between the shapeless flakes and the sheets that curve up through the core of the picture – and also the faint evidence of writing that still persists, but which is so fragile it will just crumble and blow away in the wind…

Here’s the burning image that I rejected (click on the thumbnail to embiggen):

Transformation

And the detail of the final square (check out the amazing colors!):

Burning

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As well as creating work from writing I provided images for writers to respond to. You can see the results in the SPARK site by clicking on the images here:

SPARK Inspiration #1 (Story: Sky High)

SPARK Inspiration #2 (Story: When The Celebration Ends)

Don’t forget to explore the rest of the SPARK site – and leave comments if you like what you see!

Have a wonderful holiday season everyone!