Flowers, brings to mind sentiments, memories, an aromatic bouquet as well as vivid colours and textures.
My passion for flowers is as endless as there are varieties. Anywhere I go I am drawn to their swaying brilliance, whether on some variety of trees, to gardens in the Spring and Fall. In fact I find it a good reason to leave the house or office and go for a stroll.
They can impart a calm as well as a certain excitement. We use them in several celebrations throughout our lives from beginning to end. Their potent colours and short exuberant lives are welcome in our homes and memories.
We leave our homes as the winter wanes. In spring, crocus and hyacinth are some of the first to burst through the cold earth and pervade our senses with whimsical colours and fragrance.
Photographer Mark Siddall takes a long view of the natural world in ’Scapes.
Here, the artist’s susceptible lens captures the essence of a natural scene, whether it be the gravitational miracle of a waterfall, the solitary journey of a country fence or the enduring indemnity of a forest bridge. Under Siddall’s watch, the marvelous secrets of the natural world come clean, colours and seasons assume positions of prominence, and time’s most mysterious conversion from present to past is uncovered—in transition.
Here, the artist trains his sensitive lens on some of the world’s most mysterious inhabitants—and shares the brilliant results of his exploration in the most bold and colourful strokes.
Long a popular motif in visual and literary art, the order Lepidoptera proves vivid fodder for Siddall’s admiring eye. Sun-spattered and expansive, these antique insects flutter into new view in this exhibit, where myriad examples of their rare loveliness enjoy unique focus in a dedicated show.
In Butterflies, powdery, stained-glass beauties cast kaleidoscope impressions across the gallery walls, jolting ancient, nectar-scented memories among the transfixed visitors, lost in their power. This is yesterday, these floating miracles. This is childhood. This is gardens and greenery and a thousand impossibly graceful flights of fancy.
This is Butterflies.
Photographer Mark Siddall celebrates the towering dignity, ragged riot and grey glory that is Toronto, with a visual tribute that takes in the full breadth of its urban brilliance, from lake-kissed shores to suburban peripheries. The city, oblivious to the photographer’s lens, allows Siddall rare access to its secrets, and he responds with a striking assemblage of photographs that capture brilliantly the complicated, careful and eminently colourful personality of Canada’s biggest metropolis.
In his photographic tribute to New York, Mark Siddall captures the gritty, urbane and utterly unique urban geography of one of the world’s most vital cities. This accomplished photographer approaches all of his subjects with an extraordinary eye, offering fresh glimpses of an unreservedly distinctive landscape that famously never shrinks from the camera lens.
This photographic journey invites participants to clamber up dangling fire escapes, admire the golden Prometheus in his Rockefeller Center throne and marvel at Times Square in all its neon glory.
Long, leaf-swept scenes of utter desolation—where crumbling masonry tributes hang tough, even in spite of the work of the elements—take centre stage in this heartfelt homage to our ultimate destiny. Here, we confront our endings, in the company of stone angels with heavenward gazes and the barren landscapes against which we imagine them playing out.
This is Cemeteries, photographer Mark Siddall’s latest photographic diversion, and it is a poignant acknowledgement of those low-slung, rambling patches of headstone-studded land that make us catch our breath and stop our tracks and summon our Wordsworth.
The stonework, the ironwork, the statuary of a cemetery are all relics of another time; all desperate efforts to solidify forever the ephemeral breeze of life with concrete evidence of Earthly existence; all agonizingly perfect fodder for an extraordinary photography exhibit called Cemeteries.
Hard bodies are on prominent display, where photographer Mark Siddall explores the muscular business of being male in his exhibit, Men.
An uncompromising, unapologetic, unflinching tribute to the masculine experience, this collection showcases some of Siddall’s finest work in a stunning parade of photographs that’s a genuine visual treat to the eye. The artist’s subjects reward his easy, comfortable style with shots that offer a candid view of the male body in repose, and a rare glimpse into a man’s personal physical space.
Through the photographs of Men, Siddall tells the sumptuous, sensuous story of a man’s physical life. The tantalizing collection invites viewers to witness the excruciating beauty of a man’s hands, the provocative bend of his knee, the heartbreaking promise of his lips.
All sinew and steel, the subjects of Siddall’s shots go to some lengths to exquisitely distinguish man from woman. It’s a distinction that visitors to the stimulating visual evidence of same will find a profound pleasure to contemplate.