Drift #13: Redondo Beach 2005

David Burdeny made this photograph, Drift #13: Redondo Beach, with what I guess you'd call a slow, deliberate blurring. The colours are these dreamy blues, like a faded memory of the sea. The image is all about the surface, the way the light skims across the water, creating these horizontal bands of color. There's a physicality to it, almost like you could reach out and touch the texture of the water. It makes me think of Rothko, but instead of stacking rectangles of colour, here we have these shifting, dissolving lines. Look at the way the white light bleeds into the blue, blurring the boundary between sea and sky, it could be the real thing or it could be total artifice. Burdeny's work reminds me that art is about seeing, or maybe, about feeling the world in a different way. It's not about capturing a perfect image, but about creating a space for contemplation, where we can drift between reality and imagination.