Hart Hill Again Part 4 (2020)

And finally then, we arrive at the last of the last. You probably feel as if you’ve spent as much time in this barley field as me!

Hart Hill Again Part 3 (2020)

After parts one and two, it’s part three of the series of photographs taken at Hart Hill, Kent. Just as you may be running out of patience with these images, I’m running out of ways to express my pleasure at this patch of land – but not quite! So see the way the whiskers hover above the barley like wisps of blonde blown smoke and how the wind furrows and ruffles with its soft quick fingers…

Hart Hill Again Part 2 (2020)

Back again in the barley fields at Hart Hill. There are at least two more thrilling episodes of ‘Phil’s rhapsodic photographs of arable crops’ to come this week, so this will be good news or bad – depending on your tolerance for my tolerance for impressionist in-camera happenings! Admittedly, a few of the images in this post look as if I’ve been photographing the pelts of placid golden retrievers; rather, I was trying to keep the light, and the dry brush work of the barley whiskers, and so capture the feeling of wanting to sink your hand into the plush feathering of this ubiquitous-extraordinary landscape.

Hart Hill Again Part 1 (2020)

At the beginning of the month, I went out to the top of Hart Hill, where a large field of whiskery barley covers the gentle camber of the hill. On that particular day, the sun was awol and the rain intensifying, so I didn’t stay long, though long enough to delight at the way the barley kept darting in the breeze like tiny startled fish.

We returned to Hart Hill yesterday evening under blue skies and mellow sunlight to find the barley’s whiskers even more pronounced and silvered, the field resembling an improbable crop of snare brushes. The view shimmered with greens, golds, reds and silvers, thousands of rustling whiskers lighting up with the sinking sun like fibre-optics.

So no, not fish this time, but rather the feathers of rushing pheasants or the flashing fur of big cats, and always the impression these photographs are comprised of paint, not pixels. More to follow – actually many more! (I couldn’t help myself!).