THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT...

A nice sketch, just a scratchy pen and ink drawing with watercolour, no technical aids, not even any under drawing as far as I can see and reproduced here pretty much life size. An illustration, one of a series recording the day to day life of a boy scout troop... an age of innocence long gone.

And no, they are not by me. Those of you who follow this blog on a regular basis might by now have picked up the occasional references to Jonathan @ Artistic Type and may have realised - by dint of the fact that we both share the same surname - that we are related; he is my son. The sketches on this post are however by another member of the family and I have only just realised, when I was writing this post that my father, whose sketches they are, was only 15 when he did them. I had assumed he was at least 18 or 19. In a perfect world he would have loved to have gone on probably to train as a commercial artist, as you did in those days - we are talking of the mid 1930's here. Life however is not that perfect; his parents couldn't afford to send him off to be apprenticed to a studio so he started life as a wages clerk. Conscripted into the RAF he spent the war in a spitfire squadron; postwar he went on to qualify as an accountant and ended up as a financial director.

He never lost his appreciation of art though, and it was through him that I came to appreciate Rembrandt, who was his favorite artist. I never really had the chance to talk to him about these sketches and how he did them, and he would no doubt be highly amused to know that after all this time some of them are now seeing the light of day for the first time, out in the public domain. The sketches are from an exercise book that he kept as a log-book over a period of some six months or so in 1934 -35 and I suppose it's a minor miracle that they survived at all. The sketches are shown here as they appear on the pages - click in the images to increase their size.

They are here now anyway; enjoy them... and just to show that the artistic skills of the family are in safe hands, the final sketch is by Jonathan's daughter Edie Mae, age 4 - my granddaughter. Hey, Dad, its ok - the kids are alright...

THE FUTURE STARTS HERE...

The images above are of a scheme that we produced some 2 years or so ago at RCA Interiors for a site in the Northern Quarter, Manchester. It had strong links to both the musical and bar culture of the city. The current owner had approached us with a view to converting the upper floors of the site, currently empty and in poor state of repair, into a boutique hotel of some 30-odd rooms together with a re-vamped bar and club on the ground and basement floors. The idea was then to thematically structure the design around the Manchester music scene.

Having spent a good 12 months developing the project, opening up the centre of the long thin site with a full height glazed atrium and finally achieving the nod of approval from the City Planning department, the client then decided to pull the plug on the whole project on the grounds that it wasn't what he wanted at all and we were wasting his time; refusing, needlessly to say, to pay us. Immensely frustrated, the plans, sketch, model and ideas went back into the cupboard to rest alongside other lost opportunities, and there they would have stayed...

At around this time, completely independently, I had started to consider applying for an M.A. course at University. I had completed a B.A. course in Art History - mainly on Renaissance Art - some 12 years previously and realised that I was missing the mental stimulus and the buzz of ideas. Or, I was thinking, maybe I should apply for an M.A. at the old Poly, in the Art Department - brush up my artistic skills? Hhhhmmm...

Then, via Jonathan at Artistic Type, I was introduced to the dynamic of the 'Design and Art Direction' M.A. course at Manchester Metropolitan University - a course that seemed to combine both the rigours of intellectual discourse and thought processes with the hands-on approach to creative development. A number of thoughts and ideas then began to coalesce ...what if? ...could I? ...maybe if?

The upshot was an application and subsequent acceptance onto the course, starting in September 2011.

So where do the pictures posted above fit in? My submission for the M.A. is essentially to re-visit 4 or so sites that I have worked on in Central Manchester over the years. Outside of the real-world parameters dictated by practicality, commerciality and the wherewithal or otherwise of clients, an alternative past and future would then be constructed for these sites, investigated through the dynamic of architectural presentation but with the opportunity to overlay texts, narrative, artworks and illustration to create the experience of an alternative reality.

A House for an Art Lover, A House for a Book Lover... the site in the Northern Quarter? A House for a Music Lover...

The future starts here...

...ITS ALL IN THE MARKERS...

...and before anyone says anything,yes I know that the markers shown on the web site header are the old stubby Magic Markers; I still have a box of them lying around, and whilst they must be at least 10-12 years old most of them are still working - unlike most of the Letraset / Tria markers I have, which seem to have a working life of about 3 days... maybe the cap is badly designed or something, but they dry up very quickly. Magic Markers for me, every time please.

Rant over.

So welcome to the blog site, a rolling review of my thoughts and ideas on stuff I have seen, stuff I am going to see, and maybe some stuff that doesn't even exist yet apart from in my head. At this moment I am still actively involved with RCA Interiors, but will be concentrating more and more on developing my ideas on a purely visual basis - visuals of the past, the present and the future... a work in progress... enjoy.

Oh, and the first thing I must do is to credit Jonathan at Artistic Type for designing and setting up the web-site. Without whom...