Paintings

Just a quick post in partial explanation of why I'm hardly posting at the moment. I've been grappling with this painting for ages and have decided to stop. It's not a great photo of it and you can see the doormat, but at least that gives a slight idea of the scale. It's 50cm x 40cm, in acrylics, and shows Dannii Minogue in the back of a car with two friends/minions.

A weekend in Hastings

Hastings bus shelter

I can't believe a week has already passed since we went down to Hastings for a weekend treat. The visit was more or less a spur of the moment thing and motivated only by my vague memory of there being strange dark 'towers' on the sea front that I would enjoy photographing.

The towers surpassed all expectations. I thought there were only two of them, but there was a miniature city of them, an English San Gimignano.

They're fisherman's shacks for drying their nets.

I'm afraid my photos weren't actually very good, so I've gone a bit overboard with the Photoshop.

The towers lend themselves very readily to Gothic fantasies.

But there was SO much more to see in Hastings. It was a fantastic town, full of interest and charm. It may have been a bit down on its uppers a few years ago but it has come right back up and seemed very alluring.

 Is is obviously a place that originated as a fishing town

Nothing I like better than a rotting hulk

The Jerwood Gallery opened in Hastings in March. We went to see the exhibition of large paintings by Rose Wylie. There was a documentary film about the artist (who has only recently come to prominence at the age of 77) playing and I got very disapproving looks from a couple of the other people who were watching because I'm afraid I laughed out loud. Rose Wylie was shown to be extremely eccentric and she seemed to me to revel in her difference from boring 'normal' people. She seemed to have an almost calculated childishness, for which I salute her. Who wants to be all grown up and sensible? I felt sure the film was celebrating her kookiness, but the other viewers clearly didn't agree.
     Then we discovered that Hastings Old Town contains a labyrinth of junkshops, with some of the yards full of stalls and insane junk stretching back behind the shop fronts into large plots behind. Some of it verged on the post-apocalyptic, it being hard to imagine anyone wanting to buy what appeared to be the detritus of a lost civilisation. But it was very enjoyable trawling through it all. I managed to keep my hands in my pockets for most of the time, and just bought an old game:

Make your own landscape with the magnetic picture elements

There were beautiful new shops too and, straddling the two, very high quality vintage shops. One shop deserves a special mention. Hendy's Home Store was just unbelievable: a Georgian house stripped back to its original features and filled with museum-quality kitchenalia, office furniture, bathroom fittings -- each room was full of appropriate things. It was stunning. You can't imagine how they could keep it so well stocked and actually bear to part with anything.

The office department in Hendy's

My photos are useless. Here's a much better set, plus an article about how the house was restored.

We had dinner at St Clements in St Leonards, just along from Hastings, and I can really recommend it -- lovely food and very nice atmosphere. Then we stayed the night in a nice, old-fashioned little hotel in Sedlescombe, which looked like a beautiful, chocolate-box village.

Derek Jarman's house at Dungeness

The next day after a spiffing breakfast (it was the sort of hotel where the waiter brings your toast and whips away the napkin that has been keeping it warm on its way to the table with a flourish), we went for a walk at Dungeness. I would absolutely love a little weekend place here, if such a thing were within our means. It is a unique, wonderful, otherworldly landscape. The wild flowers were unbelievable.

When we had been thoroughly scoured by the wind and been restored by a cup of tea at the miniature railway station, where they were having a special Thomas the Tank Engine Day, much to the excitement of a great many small children, we went on to Bexhill where we had lunch at the fabulous De La Warr Pavilion.

It must have been just before they put the 'Italian Job' style coach on top:

Richard Wilson's new installation on the Pavilion roof

More fantasizing: this beautiful house is for sale just along from the Pavilion. What I wouldn't give, etc, etc....

It was a lovely weekend. I could spend weeks down on the South coast, exploring. I could imagine myself moving their to live out my old age. Already I'm planning another trip -- there's Rye, Pallant House in Chichester, the Weald and Downland Museum, Down House (Darwin's House) -- so much still to see...

Catching up

part of my homage to Richard Hamilton's 'Swingeing London', 

acrylic on canvas, 40 x 50cm

I've been pretty invisible on my blog recently but I haven't been idle. I don't have too much time around the edges of my job, so I've been trying to use it more productively. I've been continuing with what's turning into a series of paintings of people being intruded upon in cars and other vehicles. First there was Charles and Camilla getting mobbed on their way to the Royal Variety Performance. Now I'm edging closer to the painting that is inspiring this whole project, Richard Hamilton's 'Swingeing London 67 (f)'. I've been back to some of the original paparazzi photos of Mick Jagger and Robert Fraser handcuffed together in the police van in 1967 and have painted my own version -- the first of several I'm planning to do, all different. I painted this one in black and white, which is a good challenge.

Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, acrylic on canvas, 30 x 23cm

I've also done this one, which is smaller scale, in sepia tones. I like the image because you can actually see the camera taking the picture reflected in the car window.

Skater Girl, acrylic on canvas, 30 x 23cm

Third is this little painting which is the first in what will be a short series of sunny skaters.
I recently joined the countywide artists' forum (Hertfordshire Visual Arts Forum) and it is already proving valuable as they email through lots of opportunities to submit work to exhibitions. Some of these are really tantalising, some less so.
     I am very happy to be able to report that my friends Ben Fletcher and Karen Pine liked the portrait of themselves that they very kindly commissioned me to do. The whole thing was highly enjoyable. I started off feeling that I needed to find out a little more about Ben and Karen to inform whatever approach I was going to take. As they're both psychologists, I thought it would be interesting (and fun) to turn the tables on them and do a psychological 'experiment' on them. I devised a questionnaire and printed out three copies. They had to fill in one copy each, separately, seal it up in an envelope and then complete the third one together. The idea was to explore individuality vs coupledom with a view to making that a theme of the portrait. Obviously it wasn't a serious 'experiment' in any real sense but the answers they gave me were genuinely fascinating, revealing an incredible closeness between the two of them. My original idea was to do a painting of the two of them, a single image, but split across two canvases. Each of them would dominate one of the canvases but there would be a strong pull between the two halves as they would naturally make up one larger picture. However, when I went to visit Karen and Ben to do more research and take some photos, they told me, in the nicest way, that they were hoping I'd do something other than a painting... Yikes! This turfed me out of my comfort zone but turned out to be a good push in another direction -- directions, even, as I ended up making two pieces for them.

Ben and Karen under their trees, mixed media, 20 x 29cm

The first is a montage constructed inside an enamel dish. The main individual elements are painted in soft pastel.

Ben and Karen represented, various objects in perspex drawers

The second piece isn't figurative but nonetheless represents Ben and Karen. It's a set of five perspex drawers (from the 60s, I think), about 18 x 12 x 18cm. Each drawer contains objects relating to an aspect of Karen and Ben's personalities or their life together.

It was very exciting, not to say nervewracking, showing them how I had portrayed them, but they could not have been more positive. It was unbelievably thrilling when they liked both pieces. I won't forget that feeling for a long time.

The last thing I've made recently is a completely redone version of a little book I made to go with my explorations of old postcards. It's called 'Incidentals' which refers to the people who are captured on picture postcards without their permission.

It's just struck me that it's a little bit like an arty version of Where's Wally. You get the full postcard and then a 'hidden' (or just small) person or persons, plus an imaginary monologue of what's in their head/s. It pleases me anyway. I could spend my whole life delving into the world of old postcards.

Final final thing to catch up on is that Dora and I finally made Scandinavian Kitchen's recipe for Kladdkaka and it was absolutely delicious. It looks like brownies and it is similar, but more chewy and with the slightly different flavour from the Scandinavian cocoa powder. Highly recommended, as is the Scandi Kitchen blog.

I'm stuck into another 'inside the car' painting now, featuring Danni Minogue...

Brooklyn Sketchbook Project 2013 -- yes or no?

This is just a very quick post to ask a question. To anyone reading this who made a sketchbook for the Brooklyn Sketchbook Project this year, are you going to do it again for 2013? The new project is already open for business and you can buy your sketchbook.
     I poured my heart into my sketchbook but it has only been 'borrowed' by two people on the tour so far and has only one comment on the website. There are so many thousands of sketchbooks on the tour that the odds of your individual sketchbook being taken out and looked at must be pretty slim. Too slim? I just can't decide whether to spend the huge amount of time it takes to make a sketchbook or whether to save that time for something else. The best way to look at it is as something you do for yourself, so that it doesn't matter whether or not many or even any other eyes fall upon it. However, I think we all know it feels good if other people see what you've done.
     I'd more or less decided not to do a sketchbook this time round, then I saw my little sketchbook in a video the Brooklyn Art Library people had posted on Vimeo and that has almost given me a change of heart -- but it still doesn't mean more than three people have seen the insides.

a glimpse of 'Audrey'

 I would really love to know what anyone else is thinking.
    

Poundland -- I've seen the light!

All this for £9...

When the Woolworth's on our high street closed, the shop space was empty for a very long time and it felt as though it was dragging the whole town down. Then, at last, the site was split into two smaller shops and both opened. One was a Peacock's, which closed about a week after it opened when the chain got into difficulties. The other was a Poundland, which filled me with despair as it didn't feel like the right sort of shop for the town. I only went in it once, last November, to look for things to put in the kids' advent calendar and it was depressing. I vowed never to set foot there again.
     Then... yesterday I was catching up with all the blogs I follow and saw Sue's fish slice challenge. I find it hard to resist challenges, specially arty ones, but that meant going back to Poundland to purchase said fish slice (the challenge is to transform it -- Sue does amazing things with enamelling and cutting).
     Mentally pinching my nose, I stepped back inside the scorned shop. The first things I saw were some cool Royal Family masks for the Jubilee. I'm no royalist, but I found myself thinking, 'Hmm, those would be a good bit of ephemera to buy and store away for 100 years' time...'. Then I saw a very nice stripy tea towel in the colours I particularly like. Then three packets of ibuprofen for £1. Then I found the metal utensils for Sue's challenge -- a set of 3 for £1. Surely just the metal is worth that? (Oh no, now I'm suddenly having dark thoughts about the cheap labour that makes all these things -- that wasn't part of the planned post...)
     It suddenly seemed as though I was no longer in Poundland but in a specially created Janestore, stocked with items uniquely suited to my tastes. In the weird selection of CDs I found two I liked. In the even more random selection of books was a perfect book for me by an author whose book on the Rolling Stones is next on my bedside pile. Then, finally, I grabbed three huge packets of plastic straws, just because the colours were so beautiful -- in my mind art projects spiralled out like kaleidoscope patterns.
     All this for £9 -- it doesn't seem possible. So although I know it was just the chance coming together of my profound randomness and Poundland's randomness to make a happy moment, I won't sneer at Poundland too readily in future.
     And why don't you join in with the Fish Slice Challenge? It could go viral...

More scary clowns...

Of all the posts I've ever posted, the one on scary clowns has had the most views. So, to scare all those clown-phobics out there -- just a little bit -- here are some more creepy clowns.

I absolutely adore this louche chap. And he wobbles too...

The rest of today's boys are from a Funny Face board game. I like them because they look to me as though they're based on real people.

Look at the sadness in those eyes...

In this game all the eyes, ears, mouths, noses and bow ties pop out and you spin a pointer to see which body part you replace next. By swivelling eyeballs and mismatching ears you can make some real grotesques. But the moveable parts have never been pushed out in my set, so I intend to keep them mint, I think. They're so beautiful, I've half a mind to frame them and hang them up.

Which one do you like best ... or fear the least, children?

"Wicked cathedral" -- a day of art

Yesterday I had a day in London doing galleries. It started very instructively. I got the train into London at 10.30 and it was full of Arsenal fans going down for the home match. Across from me were four Arsenal supporters, all men in their forties or fifties with buzzcut hair and football shirts. At a certain point I heard them start talking about Banksy so tuned into their conversation. They were big fans of Banksy and knew about the latest Banksy pieces to be discovered. One of them had seen the film, Exit Through the Gift Shop (very good film in my view). Then they moved on to Van Gogh and how he had never made any money from his art while he was alive. Finally they had a good old chat about Gaudi, Barcelona, Parc Guell and Gaudi's 'wicked cathedral'. I recount this not to laugh at them but, on the contrary, to celebrate their awareness of and enjoyment of art, a happy thing.

Ron Mueck's woman carrying sticks

So I managed to get to five galleries in total yesterday, but two of them only had four artworks each on display. First I went to see Thomas Ruff at Gagosian then I walked a couple of minutes round the corner to Hauser & Wirth to see four new sculptures by Ron Mueck. The gallery director was giving a talk about the work, so at least I found out that Mueck's name is correctly pronounced 'Moo-eck' (and not 'Mook' or 'Merk' as I had tentatively thought). There's a debate about whether Mueck's incredibly lifelike but smaller- or larger-than-life pieces are 'not really art' because they are somehow 'just models', but I like them very much. There's no 'shame' in an artist aiming for realism and the pieces carry 'meaning' in just the same way as a photograph or a realistic painting might. In the new show, there was the woman carriying a bundle of sticks, pictured above, whose pale, blotchy skin was scratched by the jagged wood she was struggling with. What context should we imagine for her? Is she a primitive woman or someone living in a naturist commune in the backwoods of America, perhaps? She stood so beautifully on her pudgy feet, tipped back to counterbalance the weight of her load but solidly grounded. The other pieces were a half-sized man with his arms outstretched on a lilo who, having been mounted on the wall, resembled an odd kind of crucifixion, a very small model of a boy in jeans examining a stab wound in his side, and a huge chicken hanging upside down from a hook. Apparently Mueck makes all the items that his figures are adorned with himself -- their watches, sunglasses, clothes and so on. Everything looked absolutely authentic but on an altered scale. I don't think it would be enough if one's only question on seeing this art was, 'How does he do it' -- but it evokes a strong sense of presence and you feel a connectedness to these imaginary people as you stare at them. There's an element of the uncanny, too, but more of a sense of shared humanity (pace the chicken).
     Next I went to a gallery I hadn't heard of previously, Pippy Houldsworth, just off Regents Street. The gallery was hosting a show where artist couples collaborated on a piece together. It was very lively and stimulating. In some of the work you could see two different hands at work, in others the collaboration was completely enmeshed.
     Gallery 4 was Lucian Freud at the National Portrait Gallery, still really busy well into its run. Since I've started trying to paint people, I couldn't not go to this. You don't need me to tell you he was an amazing painter. Just his ability to mix colours was extraordinary. Looking at his images of nudes, both male and female, completely laid open, the artist I felt he connected to was Sickert, who had a similarly consuming gaze. There were some incredible late paintings where the 'bodies' were just laid around the artist's studio like corpses, in one case there was an extra body sticking out from under the bed where the main model lay with a dog. The paint gradually took on a rather terrifying blistered appearance as though it was reacting on the canvas, bubbling and scabbing. It was very powerful. You felt the rather fetid atmosphere of the studio with its grubby mattresses and piles of rags and it seemed like a ward in a field hospital where the 'disease' of art was being battled like a burning fever.

Finally I caught the bus to the Serpentine where Hans Peter Feldmann has a show. I've had my eye on Feldmann for a while as he is interested in things I'm also interested in -- found images, things grouped into sets, little books of found images. Quite a lot of the people at the show seemed to be rather nonplussed by it. I overheard quite a lot of people expressing disappointment or confusion. (I was also very amused by a woman who was 'mmm'-ing so enthusiastically to what her friend was saying that she was virtually singing: 'Mmmm...mmmm...MMM...MMMMM'.) A lot of the work did seem rather inconsequential. The room, pictured above, where rotating discs with arrangements of odd objects (an Eiffel Tower, a doll, little figurines) cast ever-changing shadows on the wall was rather gorgeous. You imagine a child watching it as they went to sleep and being captivated. His latest thing is to acquire old-master-ish portraits and repaint the eyes with a squint or add a red nose. Hmmm. It was the sort of show where you think, 'Damn the art world -- why isn't this me?' But it isn't.

Absolute final port of call was the actual Scandinavian Kitchen that I had the mail order stuff from before. This time I was able to buy fresh cheese as well as tons more crispbreads and some more sweeties (I am LOVING Skum Banan, a mallow & chocolate banana not done any favours by its name). Why can't I live next door to this place? I also got the proper scandinavian cocoa powder to make the addictive-sounding cake on their website at the moment -- Kladdkaka...