Ray Gumbley Derbyshire, United Kingdom
Gumbley is a self taught fine art portrait, landscape and still life photographer, spending his earlier life writing poetry and scripts for his own personal wellbeing until he picked up a camera in the late nineties. Gumbley, went professional in February 2020 and works from his home studio in Long Eaton and sells his prints both locally and Internationally.
Through landscape, Portrait and still life images, Gumbley explores play, perspective, loss and isolation. Gumbley, explores those moments where in our mind the past, present, and thoughts for the future find themselves converging in chaos, leaving us trying to make sense of it all. Our minds playing with time, place and setting. What is the point of it all, love, life, death, why me, journeys, is there life after death, change, what if I had done, said, or asked this instead of that? Endless questions leaving us wanting for answers. The bend ahead in the river curving away into the distance like life itself, no one knowing really where we are going or where we are really from. In the mist, gaps in the hedgerows give us glimpses to somewhere else over the fields, but we are unable make out where that somewhere else is, we are left with our thoughts, imagination, our fears, our hopes, accounting for our next decision and action. Trees gnarled and twisting under the strain of the morning winds remind us of our past and the horrors of the battles we have fought. Thought’s processing, identifying with the beauty in the scars of the fallen trees as they give way to that same call of the wind. Bonding, the broken branches, become our losses, new shoots become our hope for the future. Our thoughts processing, continually choosing, deciding, either the dark or the light, the chaos or the calm, the ugliness, or the beauty, all converging, all locked, all in the still of the moment.
