Doing nothing

“I'm looking for the unexpected. I'm looking for things I've never seen before.” (Robert Mapplethorpe)

Ministract is a portmanteau word. I made it up because often I didn’t know if my pictures were minimal or abstract or something in-between. Soon, I stopped using the term merely to classify my work and instead (upcoming ‘arty-farty remark’ alert!) began exploring the fertile territory where minimal and abstract collide.

These four pictures are a product of those investigations and reveal the influence on my work of Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto’s seascapes, Rothko’s vast canvases, and the broader Colour Field school. In three of the pictures the ‘something’ was a metal column reflecting the lights of a bar or of cars passing by, then turned through 90º to create the sense of a horizon with the sky occupying two thirds of the frame.

In Pooh's Little Instruction Book the great philosopher bear begs us "Don't underestimate the value of Doing Nothing, of just going along, listening to all the things you can't hear, and not bothering". These are my Doing Nothing pictures – the ones that help me relax both in the taking and the viewing.

Moving clockwise from top left, the first two were taken in a cafe in Bologna; the third in Galería Elvira González, Madrid; and the fourth - an inlet near Comacchio, Italy at blue hour - is the one shot that’s not of light reflected on a metallic surface.