One for the Classical fans

First off - Happy New Year and thank you to everyone who has taken an interest in my stuff.

Big Smiley Faces all round.

This little painting ('bout 30cms high) came out of a Life drawing class I gave some time ago.

To add a bit of interest I'd invited a beautiful local Burlesque dancer to model for the group, and she duly arrived in a taxi with a 6' python called Houdini in her handbag.

Casting around for a subject to place her in, I started researching the old Hebrew gospel story of Lilith.

If you recall your scrolls, she's the one who was originally created as a chum for Adam but who fell from grace when she objected to adopting a subservient position when required to, erm, - you know...do the thing that Adam had only been able to do before when he caught the wildlife bending over at the waterhole, if you catch my drift.

Anyway, she instantly became the world's first feminist icon, and Adam became the first bloke to look a gift horse in the proverbials...

In truth, this is a typically chauvinistic load of old twaddle designed to - once again - cast women in the role of demonic persecutor, rampaging through a male defined world with lustful, wicked intent.

So much easier to make the female of the species into a monster than for men to admit that most of their troubles emanate from an inability to control the contents of their thousand-wash-grey dadpants...

To offset some of the baby-eating/men despoiling/devil-humping aspects of the traditional Lilith, I thought I'd see what other cultures had made of her.

Would you believe it, prior to the Romano/Greek/Christian rewrite, she (or a very similar version of her) was a Pagan icon of female spirit, strength and Mother Earthliness; just the sort of White Goddess that my old favourite poet and First War veteran Robert Graves was so fond of.

Anyone spot a pattern forming here?

Again, I built the composition around the Golden ratio, only to find that the same proportions exactly match the construction of the pentagram which - you've guessed it - is the traditional symbol of Goddess wholeness, unity and protection.

Add a suggestion of the tree of knowledge, and a bit of Hebrew script carved into the surface in a reverse order (girls on top this time) , put the finished thing into a frame that looks like it goes out at night scaring small children on its own and there you have it - a quasi post biblical retro re-engineered proto feminist icon reclaimed for metrocentric non-gender specific intellectuals.

Looks a bit rude to me...

  

Showtime!

Ok, the bad news is it went sort of rather well, I think....

Soooo, brace yourselves for the full fat 3D extended director's cut of the show that redefines the word 'what?' coming to a cheap plastic pub fag gazebo near you in the New Year.

In the meantime, if anybody wants me, I'll be in my trailer in a pink satin smoking jacket...

Making an exhibition of myself

Right...

If you want to see a grown man reduced to a trembling squeak, here's your chance.

The show may contain some adult content, but absolutely no nuts at all.

Do please come along if you are able/desperate/easily pleased and I will attempt to entertain and inform you as to why I do what I do.

It's on Wed 30th Nov, 8pm.

The evening is a scratch event called ITCH where new ideas get trialled before an audience of KIND people who then give constructive feedback to the performers, as required.

I'll be doing a half hour spot to see what happens, and if it works there are plans for a full on performance in the New Year.

You have been warned.

The venue is the Wardrobe Theatre, situated over the White Bear in St Michael's Hill, Bristol.

Bring your own fruit....

Check it out:

www.thewardrobetheatre.com

Art! Tsk!...part 2

Following on from the last rant about making paintings pay, here's the update:

(I should point out that this is not a self-help guide to making art pay, more an illustration of what I've chosen to do. Everyone has to find their own path, I'm just pointing out that there are more ways of doing this than you might think)

So, I've set up regular, paid, creative sessions within several Care Homes in my area.

It's such a simple idea, and it's a joy to do.

I take my paintings along, the residents react/discuss/evaluate and generally air their opinions of them.

This then acts as the key to unlocking their own stories (which are frequently amazing, and always fascinating) which in turn gives me the source material for any number of paintings.

I then set up modelling sessions and paint them from life.

Painting someone's portrait is a remarkable experience, (both detached and intimate at the same time,) and a great way to get to know someone,

 I know of no experience like it.

At the end of it, we have another painting to discuss, we've showcased another person's experience, I've learnt more about painting, people and life in general and we've had a blast doing it.

Oh, and I get paid to do it (did I mention that already?), I still own the painting, and I can sell prints off the back of it.

The point I'm making is that there are more ways to survive as an artist than waiting in line for some ego in a bow tie to allow you into their gallery and then treat you like scum whilst charging you a fortune for the privilege.

Ok, so far so good, but it's not going to get you to the wider audience.

For that, you're going to have to get out there and shake your tail feather.

However you do it, you'll do it better than anybody else for the simple reason that people are much more interested in artists than promoters.

Does anyone remember the name of Leonardo's agent? - quite...

So I'm going for broke and turning my last two years worth of paintings into a one man show involving big screen projection, live theatre audiences, music, film and me standing in a spotlight trying not to soil myself.

My first ever appearance is at the end of this month and I have no idea whether this will be a turning point in my career and a whole new way of taking painting to a larger audience, or the last act of a desperate man who will never work in this town again.

Details in the next posting...

Comfort zones are for sissies

Meerkat

I'm doing an OCN in Creative Provision in the Care System (doesn't that sound grown up...) and as part of the course we're required to come up with some sort of mask related piece as a statement of our own creative experience so far.

So, rather than go down the papier mache and feathers route, I thought I'd opt for the difficult, painful and altogether messy/stupid alternative.

For anyone who has yet to try making a plaster cast of their own face (I'm guessing some of you haven't got round to it yet?) I would add a note of caution:

You're going to have to trust other people.

A lot...

You'll see from the photo's that it involves a lot of gunge, blindness, claustrophobia, hot plaster exfoliation, trust in people who enjoy watching you suffer, unexpected hairloss, taking of advantage whilst unable to respond and Vaseline.

Lots of Vaseline ( important to get that bit right, see unexpected hairloss mentioned earlier)

Anyway, never mind the suffering, check out the result!

Remember that what you are looking at is a negative, concave image taken straight off my chops.

Weirdly, though, when you light it, it appears to protrude from the surface as a convex, 3d face which rotates as you move around it, just like a hologram.

How mad is that!

I'm expecting a tick v.good and a gold star for this one....

Why meerkat?  Make one yourself, show it to your friends, watch them as they bob up and down to get the 3d effect, observe startling similarity with amusing upright rat thingies - simples...

Grey Matters

Whoever decided to make an Internet deserves a medal, a round of applause and a year's supply of free socks.

It really is that good.

You paint a picture of a retired lady living in quiet seclusion, and thanks to the power of digital earbending you are able to talk about it with her family on the other side of the world.
Add to that all the people who have seen and responded to it and all of a sudden you're global.

Nifty, isn't it?

Ruth is well pleased with the result, I'm relieved to say, as are all the other people who have their stories woven into the imagery around her.
For me it's been an education in allowing a painting to reveal itself through the people that it's built around, rather than dictating what should be.

It started out as a statement about age, indifference and the innate strength of people of experience but it's become something more than that.

Somewhere along the line it turned into a focal point that has got people talking to each other, formed connections and turned the spotlight ever so slightly onto a remarkable lady.

And just when I was starting to believe that I had the power to alter lives, shape the world and walk on water one of her colleagues casts a critical eye over it, declares it to be 'nearly as good as a proper painting' and sweeps past in a cloud of peppermint and disdain.

Feet back on the ground, on with the next...

Somewhere in France

Time to bring this to its conclusion.
I loaded him into the van and drove to France; to the battlefields, the stories, the events which no longer prey upon living memories.

I had always intended this.

In fact, the final chapter was the first thing I had envisaged.

The Great War has become part of a historical syllabus, a tourist attraction and a focus for the amateur militarist.
So what was I doing there?
As a subject it has a magnetic sense of drama. The statistics are so difficult to comprehend, the attitudes so foreign to modern sensibilities and the effects on the 20th century so seismic that it still has the power to draw us in.
For me, though, there has always been something else.

Despite all my understanding, all my research,and a sense of near tangible connection, part of me needed to know if in fact all of this actually occurred.
Was it real? Did this thing happen to living, thinking men?

I chose to place him in a wood overlooking a field where tractors trundled up and down collecting the harvest under gunmetal skies. Ninety five years before the weather had been similarly grim, and the wood had been a hollow in the landscape studded with shattered trees. The whole place has changed remarkably little, and dragging the inert weight of the wireman through the mud and undergrowth seemed fittingly macabre.

Adrenalin is a wonderful thing when you're doing something you don't want to explain.

I had dug into the top of the earth bank that bordered the site, cutting my hands and cursing the locals for filling the woods with broken bottles and cans.
Under cover of the foliage, I set the wireman in concrete, backfilled the hole I'd dug, filmed him and stepped away.

He's there now, and for who knows how long, facing what had been a section of No Man's Land well documented by war poets of the time and no end of historians since.

The bald facts are easily established. On a summers day in 1916 a battalion of the Manchester regiment (about 700 men) had attempted to cross this field and bludgeon their way into a position that was clearly visible about 300 yards away on the horizon.
It didn't happen.
Over 500 of them didn't come back.

The wood was a safe place then, a refuge from the gunfire. Men huddled together here before chancing the odds.

The tractors were getting closer now, ploughing up to the edge of the wood, so I packed up and left.
I gathered all the materials I'd brought, bundled up with the rubbish I'd unearthed, and crept back to the van, unobserved.

The next morning, I sifted through the rusted metal, earth and broken glass.

I'd seen the graveyards, the memorials, the lines of the old trenches still visible in the woods. I'd stepped around unexploded shells turned up by ploughing, visited museums full of artefacts, but nothing had really touched my sleeve and whispered in my ear of young men lost in a distant moment, far from families, never going home.

The dirt offered up it's secrets: a piece of barbed wire, a soldiers spoon, a fragment of a rum jar, a small unbroken bottle.

Was it real? Were they here? Can echoes last this long?

The bottle, heartbreakingly ordinary and yet, to me, so poignant has lasted nearly a century in the ground, and lived to tell it's tale.

This was the right place to choose, and the right thing to do.

I say goodbye to the lost boys.

The bottle's Yorkshire relish.