Holes

I've been trying to put together a sketchbook project based on holes. This was inspired by a quote from Henry Moore:

"A hole can itself have as much shape-meaning as a solid mass"

I started off by looking for holes and photographing them and the book then became very photo-dependent. I should really try to wean myself off photos and make myself draw.

sketchbook cover

The cover has a grid of holes cut through it (boy, was that difficult to do) and then slide cases stuck over the top, each with something holey trapped inside it.

first page

The first page is supposed to be trompe l'oeil (a phrase my mother used to torment my granny with as a teenager, making her say it over and over again and laughing at her French accent...). It's a photo of a hole but... it's also a real hole that goes right through the book. This has really been the downfall of the whole thing, I think, as every subsequent page has a hole in it now. The idea is to make an image on each page regardless. Doesn't quite work, I fear. The hole gets in the way too much. I don't like the wriggly brown sludge I've painted in at the bottom...

The first few pages consist of photos with all the spaces scalpelled out and interacting with each other.

But I've kind of ground to a halt with it. As with everything else recently. I've really lost my mojo, which makes me sad.
     I do love this photo of leaves all bitten away by the little shiny green bugs that have infested them.

But it was when I was busy scalpelling away at all the holes that the realisation came to me that cutting out the holes wasn't enough. The process wasn't transforming the photo or making it into anything else. If anything, it was diminishing the effect of the holes. That's when the whole -- hole! -- thing ground to a halt.

    

Magpies

acrylic on a screenprint background

I love magpies. If I had a 'daemon' (as in His Dark Materials), it would definitely be a magpie as I identify strongly with their love of shiny things and their look-you-in-the-eye cheekiness. Yesterday I opened the Guardian Review section and felt a stab of jealous rage when I saw this headline: "I save everything: envelopes because of the patterns they have inside; fabric from my childhood and from jumble sales". It was the opening of a piece on illustrator and writer Lauren Child, who I do think is brilliant, but I just wanted to shout, "Yes, dear, you and me and thousands of other people! You're not that special!" Meanspirited, I know. But the magpie in me is very competitive. In a future post I will feature some of the things I've picked up off the ground and which I now count as treasures.

acrylic on canvas and collage elements

 In fact this small painting features some found shiny things as well as a painted found image, to suggest the magpie sensibility at work.
     I was brought up to curse single magpies and I still do this even though I don't hate them and don't wish them ill at all -- but it's deeply ingrained in me to mutter the following curse:

"Evil be to thee

Good be unto me

Get thee gone where thee should be"

Sometimes my lips hardly stop moving on my drive to work, there are so many magpies strutting by the side of the road. I thought this curse must be fairly well known, at least up North where I come from, but there's no mention of it online. I'm intrigued! Perhaps someone in my family made it up and it's only us that's been saying it for the last umpteen years. I've taught my daughter to do it now, and I hope it catches on with other people. 
     In spite of my constant cursing of him, the magpie that hangs out in the car park at work brought me a gift. This is him (quite hard to catch a picture of him):
 

     He put this fabulous (gross!) ring in the top of the hedge for me to find:

Thank you Mr Magpie! I treasure it.
     There's all sorts of folklore surrounding magpies and I won't try to regurgitate it all here, just some choice snippets. In Mongolia, magpies are believed to be in control of the weather. In Somerset, it's thought that carrying an onion will protect you from the magpie's malign force. My first flatmate used to have to look at a magpie through three different windows in order to defuse its power, which meant she would often be seen jerking around like a crazy thing if we went out in the car.

On the etymology side of things, the strange practice of 'pica' -- eating things that aren't normally considered food, such as chalk or sand or earth (and a whole lot of other nasty substances) -- is named after the Latin name for a magpie, which is not only omnivorous but will also pick up objects fairly indiscriminately (yet not eat them, one hopes). The word 'gazzette' for a newspaper also comes from a word for magpie: "gazza" in Italian, so a newspaper was a 'little magpie', possibly because it contained a lot of chatter. Or maybe because it was black and white?

If I see two magpies together, I say, '"Good morning, Mr Magpie, good morning Mrs Magpie, how's your daughter, how's your son?" which takes so long that they're usually about a quarter of a mile down the road by the time I've finished. If I see a little flock, I get terribly excited. The other day I saw six ("for gold"). And in fact that same day or the day after I found a pound coin on the floor and became convinced the luck of the magpies was with me. So I bought a lottery ticket with the coin (I never normally buy lottery tickets) and waited for the jackpot to be mine. Well, it didn't quite work out as I got ZERO numbers. But, as someone pointed out, the magpie's prophesy had already come true when I found the gold coin. So there.

I have these Tatty Devine earrings -- good for bringing luck when hunting for shiny things

A is for accumulation

Here are all the letter A's I could lay hands on, not for any reason other than to do an instant collection for the fun of it and because I like the look of them. The trouble is you could start collecting absolutely everything and slowly (or rapidly) go insane.
     My definition of a collection is at least three of something, even though that may not make an overwhelmingly impressive display. But it's often when you discover you have a pair of something that the urge to get another one takes hold and that's when the collection starts. I don't honestly think there is much that can't be made into a collection because it's the 'rhythm' of the repetition that's so pleasing, not necessarily the beauty or value of the things themselves. By no means.
     One of the most memorable exhibitions I've ever seen was at the Museum of London. I came across it by chance on  a visit. It was a display of Londoners' collections, including tissue-paper fruit wraps, Elastoplast packaging (if I remember rightly) and, one of the best, plug wiring diagrams. Who would have thought such a thing could be so pleasing, but it was the crazy accumulation of them and also the graphic relatedness of each to the other, whilst being subtly different, that made that particular collection gel.

Blackpool

BBC4 had a Blackpool night recently. The place appeals to me in the same way as David Thewlis described it in the programme in which he was filmed visiting old haunts in his native Blackpool: kitsch, thrill-seeking, superficial (knowingly so and loving it), a bit like a cheap version of Hollywood or Coney Island.
      I captured these images of Sixties girls on Blackpool rollercoasters:

Blackpool has a special place in my heart at one remove, because my granny was obsessed with it and I've inherited her scrapbooks full of photos and postcards of the town.

Wow, I've just discovered from Wikipedia that Blackpool was the first town in the world to have electric street lighting. Its love of artificial light and the desire to stay in the vanguard of electrical wondrousness must have grown and grown until it became the surreal excess of the illuminations.

When we lived in Hebden Bridge, a few years ago, I'm sure I remember the (wonderful) local baker's still closing for a 'Wakes week' each year, the traditional week in each mill town when the factories would close and all the workers would head off on holiday, a huge number of them to Blackpool -- even if the weather was often awful:

In its heyday, up to seven million people a year went there for their holidays. It hadn't quite reached that zenith when this photo was taken in 1907, but the flying machine looks scarily ahead of its time.

I only ever went on holiday to Blackpool properly once, with my granny and her second husband (I wasn't allowed to call him 'grandad' as my mum disapproved of him). We weren't the sort of family who went on holiday together, so it was quite a big deal. In fact I didn't want to go at all, being a highly snobbish child and having picked up on the idea that Blackpool was somehow 'common'. But I think my mother must have asked them to take me because she was going through a rough patch with my dad and needed a bit of breathing space -- that's my theory anyway.
     This is my granny in Blackpool at about that time (maybe a tiny bit before), the late Sixties:

I must have been nine or ten. I have only patchy memories of the holiday. I remember the drive there over the Pennines from my home in the Yorkshire Dales and the first sight of the magical tower. I remember a new pair of purple Crimplene trousers. We stayed in a classic lodging house but I can't remember what our specific accommodation consisted of. Surely I must have had to have a room of my own, but that's almost unimaginable.
     I must have been a strange child to take on holiday: refusing absolutely to go on any rides, sitting reading Puffin after Puffin on the beach. Oh, I've just remembered that we went to the pictures to see the Steptoe and Son film and I was horrified and thrilled at the scene where Steptoe has a bath in the sink -- and I've just discovered that film was released in 1972, so that confirms the year. 1972, and I was ten. Oh, we also went to Louis Tussaud's Waxworks and I shuddered thrillingly at the anatomical section with its opened-up women and graphic illustrations of the ravages of syphilis -- I'm sure I read that the Yorkshire Ripper was disturbingly influenced by the same exhibits.
     In the course of our week away I became fixated on a little agate heart in the window of an antique shop near our lodgings. Yes, that's how strange a child I was. I had to have this little heart, and in the end I summoned up the courage to ask Granny if I could go into the shop and ask how much it was. I seem to remember it was rather expensive but I bought it with my holiday spends. I've still got it:

The coloured stripes are just from the scanner. It's made of 'hair agate' or possibly 'maidenhair agate', not quite sure. It's 1.25cm across. I still like it and feel it's a sort of talisman.
    My granny had a penchant for saucy seaside postcards which she collected in a big album. There were two still in this wonderful paper bag that I found recently. She'd written her name on the bag too.

I'm absolutely positive I would have deeply disapproved of those cards if I'd known she was accumulating them.

I recently found a book that belonged to my granny. It was a novel set in Blackpool about music-hall singers and actresses. She had covered it, amazingly, in a fluorescent poster for a Blackpool show and all through the book she'd stuck in bits cut from brochures about Blackpool -- pictures of donkeys, of the promenade and so on, as well as affectionate descriptions of Stanley Park and the South Shore. It's quite an extraordinary object and I've discovered that this process of adding to books has a name -- Grangerising -- named after the Rev. James Granger (1723-1776), who promoted the idea of do-it-yourself illustration and a lot of use of the gluepot. I can't lay hands on this book just now, so it will have to wait for a later post. Finding out that there was a word for what she did made me ridiculously happy.

Plastic people

After the miniature postcard people in the last post, I'm turning my attention to another set of figures -- tiny plastic personages.

Green around the gills ... this sailor is 1cm high

Over the years I've collected quite a lot of little coloured figurines, mainly from crackers. Blue seems to be the most popular colour:

The largest of these -- the elf drummer on the left -- is 4cm high. The smallest are about 1cm high.

I love the sporty cats:

What completely blows my mind about all these figures is the process involved in making them. People presumably went to art or technical college, learned design skills and also about the manufacturing methods. Then they got jobs in designing these characters, moulds had to be made, colours chosen, production lines set up with machines turning out thousands of each, and yet they are utterly pointless and inconsequential. They exist in the world more or less meaninglessly, functionlessly, but they are made nonetheless. And made with detail, with humour, with tenderness.

lovely shades of green

The baby is 1cm high with a little pot belly and a solemn expression:

totemic

I feel that, by loving these creatures with their roughly extruded bodies, their leaked flaps of extraneous plastic flesh, I've given a little bit of meaning to the process of making them, which, otherwise, would somehow exemplify the monstrous excess of the global economic system.

That sounds silly, and of course it's meant to, but I still kind of mean it.

I'll be your dog (1.5cm high)

Postcard people

One of my favourite games is finding 'hidden' people in old postcards, like the chap above, who must just have been minding his own business by the pool when this postcard photo was taken in Portugal in the Sixties:

I like to imagine the moment when the shutter clicked -- all those people on holiday, having fun, unaware (almost certainly) that they were being captured on film and that their images would be sold in due course.
     Here are some more 'incidental' characters from postcards:

It would make me really happy to think that I had stumbled on some private drama going on while the photographer snapped people unawares -- just like Blow-up!

Perhaps the child in that first image is lost, or the couple two along are meeting to plot a murder? Probably not.

Is that a ball game on the prom in the first picture, or a disturbing confrontation? Are those two ladies tussling over the picnic basket? I love the two girls with their lilo.

When you scan at 2400 times the size of the original, to ferret out these tiny figures, you get the dot pattern of the litho process in all its glory, which I also really like. I like it when the image pretty much breaks down altogether into fragments of colour, as in the first pic at the top.
     Here are some of the cards these people were discovered in:

Hands on

An odd collection of arms and hands

This is a photo of some of the arms and hands I've collected. I haven't tried very hard to find them; they seem to have found me. I do like them very much, mostly because they seem to have symbolic meaning beyond their actual plastic or china reality. I'd like to do more with them. I made this jewelry box:

the wonder of spray paint

The hand has a long history as a symbol, figuring in many cultures as a lucky talisman and, I discover, having strong links to ancient fertility cults. The site I just linked to, www.luckymojo.com, is the most extraordinary, sprawling site, with information about every conceivable lucky charm and more, and is the almost-singlehanded work of Catherine Yronwode, whose life story is one of the most interesting I've ever read.

letter-holder -- touching

The hand stands metonymically for the whole person. I wish I had the nerve to use the word 'synecdoche' here as that means a part standing for a whole, but I just don't know how to put it into a sentence properly. Not only does the hand stand for the person, but it's a particularly significant part, the part that touches, holds, connects:

sparks fly

Hands ward off the evil eye -- it's almost intuitive in the way we hold up a hand to say 'stop'.

Browsing on LuckyMojo.com has made me want to buy tons of milagros and other charms. I already have a Mexican cross studded with milagros, including several hands:

I don't have any kind of faith, but I enjoy the idea that people have invested power in objects and body parts.

I do have two personal lucky charms which are my 'lucky stones'. I found these as a child and have kept them safe ever since. They're naturally shiny, not polished. I've photographed them on my computer to give an idea of size.