Twinned with Wales

No idea, so don't ask...

LCD

feeling inspired to create something musical with my very good friend MK, a dirty disco punk experiment, to add to the mountain of failed dirty dosco punk experiments already out there...

Cold Old Lady

The beloved old Victorian Lady that is this beautiful house, is fucking freezing. I am enjoying a saturday night in, had a shower, washed my hair, put on a soft cashmere and set to work in the kitchen on a smashing bolognese. Only problem is that the Old Lady has quarry tile flooring and no heating in the kitchen except for the cast iron range that I definitely cannot bearsed to light up. So it's KimJones jacket zipped, scarf on and LCD blasting from the speakers to keep me toasty. Whilst chopping onion and squirting paste I have been ruminating on the nature of Truth, the current favoured topic for active project of the moment... having deliberated over the various theories of truth I have realised that to actually expound my five or so universal (or noble, if yer buddhist) truths, I have to actually hang them from some apparatus (parables, folk tales, anecdotes, songs, visions etc). This is no great discovery- perhaps all of knowledge or idea-ism has been thus communicated over the centuries- but its a bit of a revelation for me, as initially I was tackling the pure truths themselves, and this was simply too visceral, too flaky and obvious. Not that I plan to luxuriate in the world of allegory or parody. Really it's just the realisation that I am at liberty to roam in personal and indulgent realms of personal experience, and utilise, hijack and exaggerate these for the purposes of addressing the truths- Illusion, Laughter, Greed, Communication, Lies,  Loss, Taxes, Cyclic life and Linear Eternity, to name but a few...

Unapologetically purloined from a hero

Saw this on my beloved MG's blog. Said like a true believer, and heartening to think even the mighty are self doubters too, sometimes

WIRED

In various conversations this piece has become known as Wired Thomas. It was never concieved as a portrait of a living person, and never really intended as a deliberate artwork, but that doesn't preclude it from being a slaeable, genuine art commodity. From it's completion I have been very satisfied with it's simplicity, and it's a shame to see it go. It has inspired a new series however, more of the simple visual floating expressions that depict little moments of everyday and not so everyday. I think I will call the series Nick Hersey's Brown Jumpers, though none of them have v-necks in.

happiness

Samuel Pepys wrote in his diary that he was "As happy a man as any in the world, for the whole world seems to smile upon me!". I, like Pepys, am Lucky.


Not always, yet not infrequently. 'Musn't grumble' would probably nail it. 

The Message

All too often I find myself ranting, spitting and fussing at various expressions of modern media and society- balking at Television's gaping maw, whingeing at the Saturday supplement in the newspaper. My wife's fatigue at my cynicism, and my own realisation that I am a grumpy old man, have eventually galvanised my resolve to do something about it, turning my views into creative expression.

The T Shirt has become occupies a strange position in contemporary culture, in that it has forged a place for itself among the wardrobes of the masses, with the accepted faculty of some message or graphic being intrinsic to its being. People who would never normally choose to express themselves, or a view or opinion, seem happy to convey a particular message or aesthetic choice through the adornment of a t shirt. Here I speak generally about the type which has some kind of printing on it, be it a logo, image or text. Very few t shirts (in the wider scheme of t shirt production) are actually sold without any such embellisment, those that are are vehicles of expression through overall colour choice.

Graphics, text and slogan have become an accepted aesthetic choice through the t shirt. DC comic characters are celebrated, then re-pastiched for mass market bands, then re-adopted by cutting edge fashionista's to ironically subvert the message. The given trend in graphic visual communication does not spend long in the pages of Eye or Wallpaper before being squeezed through the meatgrinder of mulitnational consumer powerhouses such as ASDA or Topshop. Buyers now are sifting through design blogs and hanging out at Threadless, reducing the gap between Purple Cow and Mainstream Fodder to almost nothing. In the words of Dash Parr, "Another way of saying evryone is special- Nobody is special". Trendy is a redundant term in modern society.

However, the position of the T Shirt as vociferous statement or political intent has not entirely disappeared. It is porbably just the case that you'll buy it from Matalan instead of some dingy stall at Kensington Market or Posh Unit in the Kings Road. By choosing this medium to air my ill tempered outbursts, I am not trying to be ironic or subversive (obviously, as the designs achieve neither) but instead capitalise on a mainstream medium to dilute any pompous or high brow intention. They're just T shirts- all post-philospohising can be bolted on later when they appear in Dazed :)

More T Shirts

T Shirt Project

More info here soon...

If you go down to the woods today

One of the defining factors in the decision to return to the UK was the possibility that the family might enjoy some of the rural charms that English life may have to offer. A 10 minute walk from our house is this beautiful woodland. Couple that with some autumnal early afternoon sunshine, and you have the recipe for poor amateur photography, a sense of tremendous well being and a belief in some kind of higher consciousness...

Couple Trouble

More random gouache-ness. There is a definite and consciencious intention in these simple works. They are intended as conceptual pieces- I have been tempted (but avoided) including graphic or text to support and enhance the image as an illustration would- they probably say more as slightly more ambiguous statements in their own right. Ultimately it might be nice to set them in resin blocks, or hang them from the washing line and watch them decay... but I think Clarke deserves better than that, the old smoothee!

double trouble

Best of the Worst...

As previously mentioned, the Frieze was a mixed bag indeed... however some elements did manage to shine, among the manure.

These typographic pieces were quite fun- the lazer cut aluminium here was notable much more for the medium and technique than for the message itself- marshal mcluhan would have been impressed more than I.

 The message here, however, engaged me a little more. Set in front of Broadway style lightbulbs set in a rough grid, the rusted type was an aesthetic object as well as metaphysical prospect. Quite fun, and has that essential humorour element why I so often crave...

Illustration- pure and simple... elevated to status of high art- quite common apparently now days, the artists seem to be hijacking the base methods which illustrators have been peddling for years. Whether this is done with an ironic twist (yawn) or genuine flattery in mimickery I know not and care less. Looked ok to me though.

More illustration as Art. Chuckle, yawn... Next!

 Now here's something else that tickled... a kind of Takahashi meets Man Ray, and such a proposition was encountered a few times that afternoon. Not entirely bad, though.

I think I only liked this because it reminded me of a double chair drawing I had done years ago. Again though, I feel the gimmicky strip/serial number at the bottom is something I would do, and I come here to have my eyes opened in awe and inspiration, not to think 'I would have done that'. Next!

 Nuff said...

One of my favourites, this. Does exactly what it says on the tin- but what does say on that tin, eh?

These too- concise, direct, funny, simple- 10 out of 10.

This was OK, a touchof Max Ernst, a smidge of Man Ray or someone, or was it just crap graffiti? Not sure

Fresh Romantics...

Feeling the romanticism love, after a trip to the Tate Britain... some beautiful examples of personal fave Sam Palmer,  great examples of JMW "can't do faces" Turner, Henry "eccentric" Fuseli at his shakespearean best... and my wife's favourite picture, ever: Death of Chatterton. She's such an old romantic!

The image shows a large Chestnut tree near my Dads house, on a kentish Autumnal afternoon.

Lost MOJO...

Kind of Epiphanic moment, as I stewed about the next installment of this blog- epiphany thus: I have become entirely lost in the preconceived notion of quality and suitability- over obsessing with clever, intuitive, righteous posts... a moment of clarity effervesced into view- just to work automatically, intuitively, immediately. Snapshots, photos, responses- the minutiae of my everyday does not have to pass a quality test on order to be posted.

Hopefully the contributions will now be more free flowing, more genuine and more personal- as that was the original intention of the blog back in the day (Shanghersey, as it was then).

Frozen, A review...

The Frieze Art Fair, London 2010

My first time at frieze was a bit of an eye opener. The old cliché of the artist reacting/rallying against the over commercialised art-as-commodity market is indeed a tired and naïve one, and not one I wish to expound here. However I was truly awakened to the mechanics of the galleries and art market for the contemporary art world, given the display of contemporary art that was on display. It seemed that ‘quality’ in the traditional sense- i.e. some identifiable inherent characteristic that was universally accepted to be present in a particular piece by a general consensus- was discernably absent. As such, it seemed that the galleries (the art market, manifest in Frieze) played out some emperors new clothes magic to an extent I have never been witness to before… at one point I pitied the man with broom and portable flapped dustbin on a pole whose job it was to collect rubbish from the floor- how could the poor chap possibly discern real art from discarded detritus- some discarded detritus could indeed have been put there by an artist (my mind races to an artist mindlessly tossing a chewing gum wrapper, and a gallery racing up behind him and putting a little cordon around it and a price tag) or convolutely, the chap with the broom could have been an artwork himself… Truman Show anyone? Anyhow, the artwork on display by many of the galleries seemed to defy any accepted standards of taste or quality. Note that I say ‘many’ of the galleries- some rubies did indeed exist within the dust. But I am an artist- I get contemporary, I get awkward intellectual challenges to status quo and to the cultural zeitgeist, so why was the selection of artworks so impossible to understand. Even the projects, especially commissioned by Frieze, at times appeared obtuse and clunky. And so we were left on the outside of a strange world, looking in and feeling like we were meant to be on the outside- we were not included on the joke. What we were party to were the obvious machinations of an industry where special children of the art world have been picked mindlessly and thrust into the limelight because of nothing in particular, while critics and journo’s slobber around dreaming up that magical reason that none of us can fathom, performing their essential role exactly as the machinations of the performance require. Then posh people run around trying to buy some of it, usually ending up with the cheaper work-on-paper editions or badly finished sculptures by unknowns who show promise. Artists who have not yet been plucked from anonymity also drift around looking interesting, sporting unfeasibly pointy shoes (the longer they are the further they are from success) and desperately trying to look nonchalant and not starvingly desperate (I of course put myself in this category – minus the pointiness). Even middle class parents were seen dragging helpless children around, while specially commissioned child friendly ‘advisers’ rammed palatable impish art sound bites down their tiny throats. “and why do you think he chose pink?” Bless.

This all sounds so critical- there was some really bloody good stuff there- and not necessarily by the Hauser and Wirth’s of this world. I saw humour, I saw poignancy, I was genuinely arrested by visual inspiration. I intend to analyse in greater detail some of the findings, and put my own unqualified and immature opinion to some of the pieces on display. For now I just wished to get down my initial impression of the circus that is the Frieze Art Fair.

Sketches from the bedside table

Swimmer, from LIFE book I picked up in a charity shop....

...More sculpture from Chatsworth

Thoroughly enjoyed this one too... I think its got a great sense of humour, its very illustrative and very drawn. It could have been a quirky dark Dazed illustrator, but then it would have been crap. 

Glam Girls Lost Forever

Left 'em in the Gallery where I am sure they will be carefully looked after... but doubt Ill ever be seeing them again soon...

Dierdre

Margaret

Sculpture at Chatsworth House

Surprised how much I like this sculpture from Yue MinJun, so sick of it all back in China but here it works quite well...

My Favourite Drawing

The Piano Tuner

Once upon a time nearly every English house would contain a piano, on which children would on occasion be bullied into performing very dull songs, whose purpose generally was to improve technique but with no musical merit whatsoever. Children spent (and sometimes still do spend) many hours being nagged into practicing such tunes, so that if some distant relative or visiting dignitary should pop in to the home, they might be entertained by (unlikely) or impressed by (less so) the families’ richness of cultural character. The parents never play, but are insistent that their children sit miserably complaining for 20 minutes on a Sunday evening, before painfully tinkering about with half of one page from a practice book. The torturous habit usually lasts until the child reaches maturity or leaves home, or until the piano falls out of tune and becomes unplayable.

We proudly maintain this very British tradition, and have an old upright piano in our home. Rather than let our children off of the hook at the wooden monstrosity becoming tuneless, we decided to enlist the help of a piano tuner, a man whose sole purpose in life is to drag these monolithic devices of child torture back into the realm of usability. There is not a great deal of use for Piano Tuner’s these days, as the accepted attitude in modern parenting and certain European Union laws deem piano practice as against basic human rights and at times a form of cruelty to children. Thus the disheveled aspect of the man standing at our door came as little surprise, nor his mode of transport to get himself there- a small and powerless motor scooter which he had peddled up the hill as the motor was past its best. A practical man more than an aesthetic one, he was clad in practical wellington boots that had been roughly cut down with a blunt object so that they did not ruffle his practical easy iron polyester trousers. His shirt though not dirty did have an unclean aspect merely because it was well worn and perhaps because it strained just a little too much around the frayed button holes as it tried to circumnavigate a slightly over-large stomach that it once facilitated with ease. The polyester tie around his neck was somehow slack around his neck yet tightened into a small ball of a knot that would probably never again be undone. Perhaps most striking about his appearance was his hairstyle. The term ‘comb-over’ generally refers to the practice of growing ones hair to cover an area of the scalp that no longer can produce hair on its own, thus disguising the lack of hair in the first place. I could not exactly say that our piano tuner sported such a look, because the hair that grew wildly from one side of his mostly hairless head and which could have perfectly performed the function of ‘comb-over’ with its ample grey length, was in fact left to dangle freely down one side of his head in freefall. Initially I gathered that the ride on his moped had dismantled the effect, and that with a sweep of his hand the disguise of his head would be restored. This never actually happened though- the closest he came to combing-over was 30 minutes into our encounter when he laboriously lifted the entire matted thatch, scooped it gently across his head and let it fall gently right across his face, obscuring completely his left eye. This did not even distract him- it seemed entirely the desired effect as he continued our conversation unperturbed from behind the cascade of grey. He combed it a few more times throughout the morning, each time letting it slide from the bald patch on top to fall precisely across his face.

As you would expect of such an Englishman, he entered when welcomed with over the top politeness and excessive apology for nothing in particular. He carried a small metal suitcase with reinforced metal corners, and a pair of dirty flip-flops. He placed the latter on the floor, kicked off his little rubber boots and proceeded to squeeze his socked feet into the flip-flops by digging a little furrow in his sock with his finger and slotting it either side of the toe strap on each one. This little ceremony completed, he turned to address me regarding the task in hand, resting his hand reassuringly on the old piano like he was calming a tired mare. He was clearly an expert in his field even though he had not even opened the piano- one could tell by the way he even rested his hand on the lid over the ivory keys. He turned back to his little metal box, which now had been opened to reveal almost nothing at all save a small tuning fork and a tired wooden handled wrench. He confirmed once again the task in hand, the expected duration of the visit and- typically apologetically- the fee expected. He did this all in a slightly peculiar manner- his watery blue eyes stared fixedly upon mine during this very important part of the proceedings- fixedly at every moment until he began to actually speak at which point his gaze would slip instantly and unexpectedly into the distance, until he had finished speaking and would then fix his gaze upon me again. Every part of his speech followed this format, but one soon became accustomed to this odd twitch in his communicative manner.

After an hour or so of relentless battle with our badly tuned excuse of a musical instrument, he turned and sipped his now stone cold tea once or twice, then packed his things back into their little metal case. After a brief exchange regarding the state of contemporary music, and his unexpected sympathy for electronica of the early 1980’s, he apologized once more (this time for charging me the agreed fee) and slipped back into his little rubber boots. With a watery grey smile, he bid a fond farewell and packed his little metal box and perished red flip flops under his arm and left. The piano has played beautifully ever since.

Matlock Postcard

excerpt from elsewhere...

Cannot necessarily find time to populate everyhere with everything, so here's a lil' sneak from my other blog, as and when the whole post goes live...


"...He was accompanied by his ‘mate’- Vinnie, a strapping 6ft 6” bulk who appeared through my front doorway carrying a dozen 8ft steel scaffold pipes in one hand and a pneumatic drill in the other. He was a man mountain, and not least because of a thick bushy beard looked to me like a real actual Giant shipped straight to my house from the beanstalk of some fairy tale or other. He dropped the steel poles to the ground with a crash, turned to look at my gawping face, and grunted before heading back out to the van to retrieve more equipment. The stereotype portion of my brain was in full flow when he again returned to the room- I fancied that he had been hired by Kelvin specifically for this job on the grounds that he would make light work of chewing through the stone walls with his teeth and grinding the redundant brickwork to make his bread."


Apologies now for the over the top gass-bag style :)

More destruction from Maidstone

I particularly like the Mills and Boon style font on this one...

...and the scope of the services offered here...

'...I'm hot for you'- oh, please... what cheese!

From the Archives...

What I particualrly enjoyed with this piece was the conceptual nature, the humour and the low-fi approach. The exhibition theme was loosely based on compulsion for death or pain, or libido mortido. Tart cards advertising roadkill id something you just don't see enough of, well nor round here anyway. They probably do in Maidstone...

From the Archives

GRRRR

...on a more REAL note

Can't find my fucking PSP charger anywhere. House is a mess, and I really fancy a game of Pro Evo Soccer. I could really have enough of fucking new houses in Derbyshire.

Fourth Plinth

Adrian Searle captivates me, somewhat unwillingly, somewhat mesmerically, but he has a knack of sounding convincing to mine ears to the point of belief and conviction that I find hard to resist. I take the case in point of the fourth plinth. Perhaps it is just that his opinion of the most suitable candidate sounds convincing in his argument, and the physical impregnation upon us of that choice is perhap the most pleasing/least offensive, but is that reason to fall for a blunt-cultured hack? His arguments are convincing, or atleast his reason for liking his choice seem sound, or rather seemed to chime with my own sensibilities...  the subtlety of Elmgreen/Dragset's proposition- the slightly oblique and quiet approach that tries not to be clever nor bask in simplistic irony- seems as Searle points out, to be a far more sophisticated option than anything so crass as the organ piping a monotone everytime you withdraw, sloppily, from a used ATM, or the obtuse map of england that works from no effective vantage point. No, AS's words have struck a chord for me, and much like the Christian who applauds the sermon with eager glances to fellow clergy, I feel I am endorsing something everyone already is on board with... OK so its a gold boy on a model horse- but heck, its utterly simple thus allowing critics to lavish reasoning and critique with equal measure as they see fit (or indeed need to, to demonstrate their intellectuo-steroid induced critical acumen to their editor) and also allowing Joe Public to lament the obvious simplicity, the 'its just a golden horse- I don't get it' mentality. And therein, I think, lies the nub. It is just a horse- and no- you DO get it- accept it- read it- what are little boys on wooden horses doing after all? The beauty lies in the honesty. It's something that I struggle desperately with. Alway I am seeking the clever irony, the sarcastic sucker punch, the 'oh I see what he's doing here' .... if an art-punter says that, then its all got a bit too Agatha Christie... it's all become a bit 'oh I knew it was the vistorian posturing, even though it looked like the post-modern iront did it all along'. The simplicity has it, the honesty, the purity. It's a lesson I'm always going to find hard, a bit like maths. Im looking forward to the day when - as we all did - I leave school and just use a calculator instead... artistico-metaphysically speaking anyway!

Back to front Jumper

I notice as I clean my teeth that my jumper is on the wrong way around. It's a really nice maroon and grey stripe number I picked up at a charity shop a few weeks ago, and the thriftyness appeals to me, in line with this new austerity . I am impressed by the zen-like purity of just appreciating the garment as it is, not how some preconception makes me think it should be (my father's favourite zen lesson is the matchbox to hat tale about a monk who changes the object according to how he uses it). This however is of little general interest to the wider public, I think. I'm sure, in fact. However having spent weeks in therapy, I have established that it's not self important or selfish to languish in self declaration, and so I go over the jumper situation in my head a few more times. As an artist, I constantly struggle with the belief in oneself, against the egoist notion of self importance that is essential to any success in a field of solo artistry. I don't like selfish people, can't stand people going on about their plight, yet isn't that exactly what an artist does for a living?

I finally comfort myself with the notion that many years from now, should a digital archaeologist unearth the musings contained herein, whilst studying the canon of my work and its relevance to early 21st Century society (resist the urge to confine my output to irrelevance and have the faith that yes my output is not just relevant but essential) might find the context that these 'self important' give. Think Samuel Pepys, I keep telling myself. And here we are, jumpers on back to front and all.

Dusty

As I notice two dusty old cans of carlsberg nestling at the bottom of an almost extinguished box set, I am touched by their archaeological appearance. The constant renovations in the house have made a thick layer of dust a permanent feature, and for a moment a thought of myself as howard johnson unearthing a can of carlsberg brought a smile to my mind- I thought to note it here. Then I got to the point on that internal discussion in my head where I take every permutation of a decision through to its final conclusion, where I noticed that to endless talk about how much you are drinking becomes absolute tedium.  Bit like those annoying people at raves who only ever went on about how fucked they were, like their camel jaw didnt tell us anyway...

I digress. Point is, it's funny how analytical one becomes about their thoughts when sharing them, (and then they become blog bores, going on and on about how funny it is to think how boring they sound, when they talk endlessly about what to write... :))

Such grand ideas

One of the last things I bought in Shanghai was  beautiful little collection of discarded photographs- a whole bunch of random photographic examples from professional portraits to family snaps, all (by the look of them) upwards of 20 years old. Some looked more like 40. I plan to scan and give away these gems as downloads, as soon as I get a decent scanner installed. Promises promises...

For starters

Gardening

The days have slipped by in liquid fashion like the languid sloth if the greasy limpopo river. One would think that this would be the finest of lifestyles to adopt upon return to this fair and pleasant land, but just recently the pace has begun to grate. Restlesness, niggling temper, irritable dad syndrome- all have begun to plague the house. So was with great relief to my family that I discovered the therapeutic merits of turning over grass clods in late afternoon sun, pitch fork as sword in noble battle against feral garden. Tonight I am refreshed.