Ella Rose Muse: the story: May 2014

Thursday, 29 May 2014

Electric blue, rain, shapes; workshop & London exhibition

In stark contrast to the blog post below, I will leave it completely to you to imagine how this image was created. It's a weird, freaky one - I love it!

(Taken by the ever-eccentric-in-a-good-way Eric Kellerman at a Dobbelmen workshop he and his colleague hosted, during my visit to the Netherlands last month. It was really fun to see what weird and wonderful shapes and patterns we could create!)

I had a really blissful time shooting in France recently (images on their way..!) and was picked up by a taxi, once back in London, to rush to the evening private view for a painter's exhibition I am currently featured in. I felt very jet set and glam (in my rain-sodden hippie dress and wet feet.... Upon arriving in London, a man even took it upon himself to mention to me that my long dress was going to get wet at the bottom(!). Ha.) Anyway, it was fun to spot 4 new drawings of myself I'd never seen before (I'm rarely allowed to view the results in situ...) and I was struck, as always, by the immense talent and vision of the artist across the whole exhibition. It's lovely (and unsurprising) to see that at least one piece I modelled for had sold already.

Right, over and out - just a quick update. Gallons and gallons of images to come very soon; I'm herding them up gratefully to show on here from the incredibly generous and creative types who have pointed their lenses at me in recent weeks...

Actually, in other, tentative, should-I-mention-this news, I'm working towards a poetry collection on the subject of appearance/reality/identity/performance. Same old preoccupation... But I'm gathering a significant section of thought on the concept of 'muse-dom'. It's a lot of fun. I would publish things here but then that would mess up copyright/permissions, etc etc. (That's the annoying part.)

Thursday, 22 May 2014

Into the Deep

I absolutely loved working with Clayton Bastiani on the Isle of Wight earlier this year. He is just so incredibly creative and it's really no wonder that his images have been published on hundreds of novel covers all over the world.

I was thrilled to be booked with the aim of producing a few more for his novel-cover stock (though we also did some different things as well). As someone who is rather fond of books and stories myself, I find it very exciting to be able to find myself on the front of another person's story, representing some aspect of an imagined world - it's a similarly wonderful feeling to know that a complete stranger has a portrait of you hanging in their house (or indeed, perhaps a bronze sculpture!) - really quite bizarre and odd (I always wonder what kind of person they are, and what it would be like to meet them and also how odd for them it might be to meet me). It will be interesting to see what stories out there will be matched up to my image, and why... Anyway, I'd better not get too ahead of myself, but I'll update on here with any news down the line... :-)

I'm allowed to show four individual images here on my blog, followed by a composite grid of some of the other images. It goes without saying but I'll say it anyway: all images are strictly owned by Clayton Bastiani and may not be used/reproduced in any way without permission.

I should mention that Clayton wrote a ten-part series on photo creation and photo manipulation for Black & White Photography Magazine, the May edition of which featured the first mermaid image below. In the article Clayton explains all about how it was made, and you may be surprised to hear that I didn't actually grow a tail especially for the purpose of the shoot (I suppose I'm just not that dedicated.. ;-))

Here's a snippet of Clayton's own words (from his facebook page), from when the magazine came out:

One of the driving forces behind many of my pictures is improvisation, finding ways to create images on a tight budget with minimum resources. This month I wanted to make a picture of a mermaid swimming in the murky depths of the sea.At the beginning of a recent shoot with Ella Rose I asked her to stand in the bay window and pretend to be swimming underwater. After the shoot I popped to the shops and bought a small fish tank and an assortment of plastic plants. Through trial and error and a little bit of torch light I spent a couple of days (in my usual to-ing and fro-ing manner) and created the following piece.

The Deep:

It's always so kind of photographers to send prints to me after a shoot and I was really excited to receive an actual 'moving image' of this one; when you walk past it looks like I'm swimming in the reeds! Very magical! :-)

Mermaid on Rocks:

Moon Dance:

Sword and Fire

And here's a grid of a few more from the day:

A lot of the images above were created in the most unlikely set ups: a lot of hocus pocus went into them and so the results were such a fun surprise for me (even knowing what the intended outcomes were, via some pencil sketches!).

You can look through more of Clayton's work and purchase some prints of his fantasy and storytelling work from Stephen Bartels Gallery here.

Right, time for me to finish packing for France tomorrow!

Sunday, 18 May 2014

Sunswept Sisters

I'm a bit behind on updates here, sorry! (I've been slightly occupied with various modelling euro-jaunts, and then an amazing hen do, amongst other things.)

Catching up, catching up (in absolutely no particular order, as always)...

Here are some images taken by the ridiculously talented Mel Brackstone, who makes everything dreamy and amazing simply by virtue of pointing her lens at it.

The other model is the brilliant Anoush Anou.

(Infra...)

A sisterly-looking image of me on another day with lovely Ivory Flame:

And to finish is a bonus shot Mel took of me snapping those incredible Jacaranda trees. (I don't normally wear quite so much tie-dye, but had just been picked up from Byron Bay, after all, so it was essentially decreed by law.)

Friday, 9 May 2014

Tryst

More by Malvin Jan Dyb, shot in Norway...

Friday, 2 May 2014

Black Feet & Metal

The first of the Holland updates...

I really enjoyed working with Barend Jan de Jong in a rather unusual location... a working metal factory in Rotterdam! Such a good idea to find something a bit out of the ordinary. You can imagine how filthy I was, within roughly 7 seconds (not least because I kept volunteering to lie on things). The last one is called 'Secret Symphony'.

(More will probably follow; these images arrived very quickly!)

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Walter De La Mare, 'The Listeners'

‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,

Knocking on the moonlit door;

And his horse in the silence champed the grasses

Of the forest’s ferny floor:

And a bird flew up out of the turret,

Above the Traveller’s head:

And he smote upon the door again a second time;

‘Is there anybody there?’ he said.

But no one descended to the Traveller;

No head from the leaf-fringed sill

Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,

Where he stood perplexed and still.

But only a host of phantom listeners

That dwelt in the lone house then

Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight

To that voice from the world of men:

Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,

That goes down to the empty hall,

Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken

By the lonely Traveller’s call.

And he felt in his heart their strangeness,

Their stillness answering his cry,

While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,

’Neath the starred and leafy sky;

For he suddenly smote on the door, even

Louder, and lifted his head:—

‘Tell them I came, and no one answered,

That I kept my word,’ he said.

Never the least stir made the listeners,

Though every word he spake

Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house

From the one man left awake:

Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,

And the sound of iron on stone,

And how the silence surged softly backward,

When the plunging hoofs were gone.

Natasha Khan/Bat for Lashes, 'Horse and I'

Got woken in the night,
by a mystic golden light.
My head soaked in river water.
I had been dressed in a coat of armor. They called
a horse out of the woodland.
"Take her there, through the desert shores."
They sang to me, "This is yours to wear.
You're the chosen one, there's no turning back now."

The smell of redwood giants.
The banquet for the shadows.
Horse and I, we're dancers in the dark.
Came upon the headdress.
It was gilded, dark and golden.
The children sang.
I was so afraid I took it to my head and prayed.
They sang to me, "This is yours to wear. You're the chosen one, there's no turning back."
They sang to me, "This is yours to wear. You're the chosen one, there's no turning back."

Mark Doty, 'A Display of Mackerel'

They lie in parallel rows,

on ice, head to tail,

each a foot of luminosity

barred with black bands,

which divide the scales’

radiant sections

like seams of lead

in a Tiffany window.

Iridescent, watery

prismatics: think abalone,

the wildly rainbowed

mirror of a soapbubble sphere,

think sun on gasoline.

Splendor, and splendor,

and not a one in any way

distinguished from the other

—nothing about them

of individuality. Instead

they’re all exact expressions

of the one soul,

each a perfect fulfilment

of heaven’s template,

mackerel essence. As if,

after a lifetime arriving

at this enameling, the jeweler’s

made uncountable examples,

each as intricate

in its oily fabulation

as the one before

Suppose we could iridesce,

like these, and lose ourselves

entirely in the universe

of shimmer—would you want

to be yourself only,

unduplicatable, doomed

to be lost? They’d prefer,

plainly, to be flashing participants,

multitudinous. Even now

they seem to be bolting

forward, heedless of stasis.

They don’t care they’re dead

and nearly frozen,

just as, presumably,

they didn’t care that they were living:

all, all for all,

the rainbowed school

and its acres of brilliant classrooms,

in which no verb is singular,

or every one is. How happy they seem,

even on ice, to be together, selfless,

which is the price of gleaming.

Kate Clanchy, 'Poem for a Man with No Sense of Smell'

This is simply to inform you:

that the thickest line in the kink of my hand
smells like the feel of an old school desk,
the deep carved names worn sleek with sweat;

that beneath the spray of my expensive scent
my armpits sound a bass note strong
as the boom of a palm on a kettle drum;

that the wet flush of my fear is sharp
as the taste of an iron pipe, midwinter,
on a child's hot tongue; and that sometimes,

in a breeze, the delicate hairs on the nape
of my neck, just where you might bend
your head, might hesitate and brush your lips,

hold a scent frail and precise as a fleet
of tiny origami ships, just setting out to sea.

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