The Clowns' Grimaldi Service

This afternoon I went to the Clowns' church service at Holy Trinity Church, Dalston, London. I've been wanting to go for three years but only got it together for the first time today.

It's a unique occasion with clowns in full 'slap' and costumes joyfully turning up and making the most of the huge interest in them -- there were dozens of photographers there -- possibly more photographers than clowns! The clowns were charming, patient, very happy to engage with anyone who wanted to talk to them or just say hello. I really enjoyed photographing them.

There were old clowns and young clowns, male and female clowns. The clown below was from Denmark:

The service is dedicated to the memory of Joseph Grimaldi (1778-1837), the Regency clown. There was a case of Grimaldi objects and a lot of clown history in panels on the walls. This case of eggs records well-known clowns' individual faces:

They also have the last costume worn by Coco the Clown. He died in 1974. While I was looking at this, a clown came up and said that he'd been inspired to take up clowning by Coco, who he loved as a child.
Coco's suit had badges that I coveted:

The service was very joyful, with individual clowns reading poems and singing songs as well as a very jolly sermon by a vicar in a red nose. One clown, Mattie, read out the lyrics to 'Be A Clown' as sung by Gene Kelly in The Pirate. Terrific. All the clowns joined in on the chorus.

This rather lovely young clown was actually dressed as Grimaldi, I think, if you compare him to the print below:

 

 It was fascinating to attend the service and very interesting to see how the clowns, en masse, were able to step over the line of what is normally expected behaviour in church without offending anyone but, on the contrary, collectively generating joy. I won't forget it for a long time.

I missed the clowns again!

Picture © Joelle McNichol used under Creative Commons

Dang! I've missed the special Clowns church service again. It's held each year on the first Sunday in February at Holy Trinity Church in Dalston. Last year it was too snowy for me to venture into London and I vowed to go this year. I've just realised I've missed it. I'm bitterly disappointed and will ensure I go NEXT year.
     By way of compensation, the photography John Claridge was there and took some absolutely beautiful clown portraits, which are shown on the Spitalfields Life blog today -- do look at them. Utterly memorable.

My earlier post on clowns is easily the most visited of all my posts. So, here, for clown fans, are just a few more:

Clowns, and scary clowns

I'm amazed to have received another present through the post. Lesley, another Postman's Knock friend, sent me this wonderful Seventies Ladybird book on clowns. It's a great book that I've not come across before and I'm very touched by Lesley's kind thought -- thank you.

Well, I took my new book to work and showed it to my friend that I work with. I know she suffers from 'coulrophobia' or fear of clowns. I'm afraid I find this quite amusing -- as long as there isn't a real scary clown coming through the door of our office (like Mr Jelly, the Psychoville clown, above), I think she can cope. She looked through the book and announced it to be 'wrongy wrong wrong'. Whereupon, I looked up 'fear of clowns' online and found a wealth of weirdness.

Children were consulted about the redecorating of a children's hospital in Sheffield -- clowns were the theme, but the kids rejected them out of hand and psychologists, following up with research, announced that children are frightened by clowns because they are similar to normal people but at the same time disturbingly different. This brought me to the concept of the 'uncanny valley', which conjured up wonderful images of a creepy location, a listless stream overshadowed by grotesque rock formations or some such, but in fact refers to a phenomenon in robotics: when human replicas look and act almost, but not perfectly, like actual human beings, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers. The 'valley' is a marked dip in a graph of the positivity of human reaction as a function of a robot's human likeness. A strange concept, but you can see how it applies to clowns.

On eBay I found this nasty-looking fellow for sale -- for £144! I'd love him, but that price is out of my league.

I do find clowns disturbing but it's that that makes me like them and want to gather images of them around me. The creepy combination of merriment and hostility is a winner every time.
     Just to bring things back within the realms of sanity, I also found these ... lovely cushions:

One of a series of eight from here. There, nothing scary about that, is there?

A painting completed

I've been working on a large painting for about two months now, getting up early in the morning to do a bit before I leave for work. It's acrylic on canvas and is about four feet by just under three feet -- bigger than the table I was working on. I was hoping to finish it before I went on holiday but have only just got to the point where I feel I can probably leave it now.
     Here's a sequence of pictures that I took while it was in progress.

Mini collection 28

Some heads (not all) including some clowns (still not quite all) and a few stray deer from the herd to the left

Mini collection 27

some beloved clowns -- not all

Brighton excursion

I'm just back from four days in Brighton with my daughter while my son was on a school trip to Rome. What fun! Even if, for the first two days, we did have to beat our way along the sea front through film-set rain that fell in sheets. Oh the shopping! The endless fripperies and cupcakes and gorgeous junk and expensive beautiful things that we don't need. How the wind enjoyed blowing up our shopping bags like balloons as we struggled back to the hotel with our haul on Tuesday and Wednesday. Then the weather settled down a bit and there was an extravagant sunset on Thursday:

I loved both piers, but perhaps especially the poor, skeletal West Pier which is just a ghost structure now:

The early evening sky turned the sea a lovely pearlescent pink:

The shops in the North Laine were wonderful, especially the giant vintage emporium, Snooper's Paradise. But I was overcome with shyness when I had to ask the slightly daunting woman on the cash desk to open one of the cabinets for me. I only wanted a couple of tiny plastic deer out of it and was almost too embarrassed to say what I was after, seeing as it was so humble. I managed to get it out by pretending I wanted them for a 'Christmas project' (not true, I just like them):

The thing I most wanted to buy was an amazing wall mirror by Anna Tilson, very similar to this one:

But her stunning work is a bit out of my league price-wise. I'll have to stick to the plastic animals. I found a couple of clowns, though:

A Jack-in-the-box and a biscuit tin.

We visited the Pavilion -- at last! I've wanted to see inside it for years and it was worth the wait. I don't terribly enjoy 'stately homes' on the whole and find them stuffy, but this was such a wonderful fantasy and so over the top. There were even palm trees in the kitchen, and dragons everywhere.
     You couldn't take photos inside the Pavilion and all my exterior shots were grey and fuzzy, like the weather. The only shots that came out were of this pigeon and squirrel in the gardens outside:

They were perched on different branches of the same tree. The pigeon, a rather battered specimen, was minding its own business when the squirrel threw the nut it was eating at it and then leapt after the nut. The poor pigeon got such a shock it almost fell onto my head. The squirrel has a naughty gleam in its eye in my photo but I've perked up the background on Photoshop as it was so grey.

The most exciting thing we went to see was The House of Vernacular, at a venue called Fabrica in an old church in the centre of Brighton. This was part of the Brighton Photo Biennale and consisted of seven linked rooms, all curated by my favourite photographer (and collector), Martin Parr. Parr's curatorial hand was so exuberantly upon these seven mini-exhibitions that it felt as though he could have taken all the photos himself -- wonderful. There was a room of Brazilian family portraits 'enhanced' with highly stylised overpainting; a room of photos showing the kitsch interiors of dictators' private aeroplanes in the Fifties and Sixties; Bogota street photography; wonky-looking babies lovingly posed in front of luscious phoney backdrops (flower-filled meadows and so on); a collection of litter bins and some saturated slideshows of Americans and Germans enjoying the good times between the wars. All highly enjoyable.

A Brazilian 'retrato pintado'

It was quite hard to return home to the solid life we lead here in Hertfordshire. Above all, I love Brighton because it's...

Rollercoaster structure