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Pattern Problems | |||
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On 28th March President Richard Scaife scarpered (to Spain?) leaving the field wide open for would-be Presidents to make their mark. Tony Redford showed the traditional Speakers reluctance as he was pushed to preside over the evening. It was to be a mixture of Prints, Slides and Digital presentations with Barry Pearson opening the proceedings. It appeared that Barry had completely misheard the title as he presented his first sheet of Patten’s . Mistaking the reason for the howls of derision from the audience Barry apologised for the fact that one of the twenty or so portraits was actually that of his Grandfather, who presumably had once fought with General Patten. His second print was of 21 spirograph patterns, arranged in a spiral, thus destroying his excuse for the first print “that he had misunderstood the aim of the evening”. These ‘light patterns’ originated from his school days. We were left to assume that he did these doodles when he should have been paying attention to his English master. Endeavouring to distract us from this line of thought Barry then showed prints of Amazing Circles and tried to flummox us with examples of Cartesian to Polar co-ordinate transformations as applied to images. If you reversed the image before transforming back again you got weird but wonderful results. Bringing us back to sanity Jill Hargeaves illustrated the fascinating patterns within a Peacock’s feather before moving on to natural patterns in palm tree leaves and man-made patterns of enclosed grasses in plastic frames on country car parks. John Ade continued this approach with a wood grain example, a collection of Chatsworth apples in rectangular display and a wonderful patterned window from Coventry Cathedral. Gordon Robson gave us a dozen examples of his own interpretation of patterns including Rusty gates, door locks, rocks on a beach, bridges and plastic buckets. Roy Cheetham ,Brian Turnbull and Colin Pickles added their contributions before we turned to the slides where Colin again amused us with bits of buildings, boats and engines. Stuart showed us an early example of his work looking at coloured sheets of paper through a bathroom window. After the tea break Tony Redfordset up the Digital projector and illustrated his and Dorothy’s pattern pictures, which had been stored on CD. Bill Chadband provided Tony with his contribution in the form of images on a Compact Flash card. Here the story gets a little murky. In the darkness Tony tried to hide Bill’s card by stuffing it down the inside casing of a card reader. He claimed it was lost, and Jon Allanson stated that the Reader would have to be dismantled in order to retrieve the card. However Bill saw through this ruse; took hold of the Reader, inverted it, gave it a sharp whack on the table, and extracted the card. By putting the card back in it’s PCMCIA adapter, and inserting it correctly into the side of the Laptop computer, we were able to see Bill’s efforts to discover patterns in the Peak Garden Centre; and could endeavour to spot the pattern in the Pictures-to-Exe presentation of a circular walk across Mam-Tor to Hope, and back via the disintegrating road below the “shivering mountain”. Brian Turnbull finished the evening with pictures from his recent trip to India. He particularly liked the pattern pictures formed by shadows on stairwells and we all agreed that they were striking and well seen. The evening ended at about 10.10pm but no-one seemed concerned about the hour; everyone having enjoyed the relaxed and informal event. Bill Chadband |
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