096 - Summer Heat

096 - Summer Heat
Originally uploaded by gingerpig2000

I think I should add a graded color as the background, but I did this quite quickly when I actually wanted to go and sit with my wife on our balcony. Perhaps some texture, too?

This part of Poland has a lot of influence from Orthodox Christianity from further to the east. A lot of it hides under the surface, which it has to do in order to survive an erosive Catholic Christian culture that is sold at every opportunity as defining what Pole is.

The best part of summer for me is when everything is going dry and brown, the sun burning down and there is nothing better than hiding out under a tree. I have never been to Ukraine or the Steppes, but I wanted to mingle my memories of summer in Britain and Poland with this actual church and belfry and what I have come across of the Steppes in film and literature.

When the owner of a Flickr group about Orthodox churches asked me to add this image to his group, I was more than pleased to oblige, I am mostly easily pleased with anyone's request to use my images. Seeing this among photographically accurate images of other churches I was reminded of van Gogh's ever-popular sunflowers. They are not exactly the color of any sunflowers I have ever seen, more like dried if that were possible, and yet they are more what sunflowers are than what they look like. My church, at least to me, is more about what a church is in the late afternoon of a baking hot day than any photographically exact image.