....WHEN YOU WALK IN THE ROOM......

....An installation at Jordangate House , Macclesfield , until sunday 30th June , and when you walk into the room this is what you should see..............

..........and the worst thing about exhibiting - the bit they don't tell you about - is the invigilation.......boring ..........so anyone who wants to come along and have a chat........please ?!

......THE ART MOBS OUT TONIGHT...

I suppose it's a bit late to be posting this , but better late than never ; my only excuse is that real life has tended to get in the way these last few weeks , as it does...........Anyway.................

THE BARNABY ART's TRAIL - Macclesfield's Art Festival , is happening 14th / 30th June  - and we have an installation at Jordangate House , Jordangate , in the centre of town.  ' We ' are Angela Davies ( who is doing an MA alongside me at MMU ) , Noel Connor and myself , and the installation concerns itself with buildings and memories.......................A lot of the work I have produced for my MA over the past year or so will be on display , together with Angela's structures and Noel's photographs. If you can get into Macclesfield it's well worth a visit as there are some forty venues open over the fortnight.

In the meantime its back to the MA work..............and I will post some pictures of our installation as soon as I have some .

...LIPSTICK , POWDER AND PAINT......

' Lipstick , powder and paint.......
  Lipstick , powder and paint
  Lipstick , powder and paint
  .....is you is ?.....or is you ain't ? '

Back to the MA - and ' work in progress '...............Having already sketched out some ideas for
a ' Tunnel Of Love ' ride down in the basements , linking the House Of The Art Lover through to the House Of The Dominatrix , this piece takes it a stage further, I suppose to a ' more finished ' state. The idea of the ' ride ' , the ' journey ' is taken here to a more advanced state , starting to tell a story . Our hero buys his ticket - Admit One - and enters with trepidation , as so he should ........for this is a journey that takes him well away from his comfort zone ...........a journey cross the divide ,a journey of trans-formation.........and the ' Reveal ' is a surprise to us all.

Lipstick and paint.......well , you have to make your choices here ; the colours are all there to help you in the predela..............

So put your penny in the slot and take your ticket...............

' ...Then the lights go out and it's just the two of us

     You me and all that stuff we're so scared of........

     Gotta ride down baby into this tunnel of love.....

......But the house is haunted and the ride gets rough

     And you've got to learn to live with what you can't rise above.....'

 

...IT AIN'T WHAT YOU DO.......

' It ain't what you do , it's the way that you do it..
  that's what gets results '..........................

I suppose that having spent most of my professional career designing and/or illustrating interiors for the Leisure Industry then restaurant interiors should figure more often here..............so lets start off with a couple in Manchester.

First one up is Australasia , another one of Tim Bacon's creations and positioned at the entrance to Spingingfields on Deansgate - although if you blinked you would miss it , as the whole of the restaurant apart from the minimalist entrance is undercover , below ground...........................

...................a restaurant in a basement , no natural daylight - and no way of seeing in from the outside ; a recipe for disaster , especially when you are looking for a good lunchtime trade. The interior , however , is particularly impressive without ever being too pretentious - you can eat here quite happily for around £20,00 for a light lunch . Light , bright , airy , this is one of the nicest interiors that I have seen for a long long time . The colour is predominantly white , offset by pale natural materials - bleached wood , linen fabrics , pale lights - and there is no feeling of being locked away underground , it is so light and airy . It took me a while to realise in fact that the interior would probably not work so well if there was natural daylight coming in ; daylight is too variable , whilst in an enclosed space you have full control over the lighting.

 

 All in all a particularly nice interior ; I have worked myself for this particular client and know the designers who created it ; could I have done it any better ? ........I seriously doubt it............... 

 

 

 A really nice experience - and the food is good too..........................

 

 

Meanwhile , across town , another restaurant , another interior - and another client I have worked for.

The new ' French ' restaurant at the Midland Hotel , fronted up by signature chef Simon Rogan with a view to securing the first Michelin starred restaurant for the City .

  

 

Unfortunately  this interior doesn't do it for me - stark Scandinavian furniture sitting in that large open space ? A carpet designed to look like floorboards ? The interior to me lacks warmth and comfort , and does little to enhance the dining experience...............too cold , too overawed by the historical ' not to be touched ' interior........

 

A Michelin star experience ? maybe ..................but meanwhile ,  somewhere in Manchester , Tim Bacon and his team are also working towards a new restaurant with Michelin star aspirations................

 

I know who my money is on.

..PICTURE THIS..............

 

' All I want is a room with a view......

  A sight worth seeing , a vision of you.....' 

 

A  socially inept amateur photographer , an undeveloped roll of film , dodgy nude pin-ups from the late 50s/early 60s , and a mystery............and wonderful illustrations - what more could you want from a book ?

 

Opening up the latest edition of Varoom magazine , an illustration at the bottom of one page caught my eye - Graham Rawle ? ' Diary of an Amateur Photographer ' ? ....never heard of him - or it - and all literally cut out and pasted together like some anonymous note ?...............no technical artifice ? no computer generated images ?

 

Hmmm - a mystery about a mystery............... 

 

 

 

 ........and having tracked down a copy of the book it did not disappoint . The story aside - which is excellent - the way the book is designed and assembled is most impressive . Constructed ( ? - designed ) as a diary / scrapbook each page is lovingly and individually assembled , pages overlapping each other in a way so that you suddenly realise that what appears to be an error in continuity is in fact the previous - or next  - page reappearing as the page you are actually reading is smaller - and stapled in. Each page looks cut and pasted up , just as a real paste-up diary scrapbook....... 

 

 

.........and just in case you think that this is just computer trickery , a photo of the designers desk shows his working method.......boxes and boxes of cut-out type , waiting to be selected and pasted up, 

 

 

Dating from 1997/98 this is real cut-and-paste - ant the seedy world of the late fifties amateur photographer - and the adverts offering various ' services ' live again.

 

Wonderful............. 

' All I want is 20-20 vision..........A total portrait with no omissions..........'

..COCKTAILS FOR THREE

Ohhh cocktails for three.....
It's not natural to me
Hey not for me and you
Should be.....cocktails for two

Working as an interior visualiser , the visuals produced are always at the front end of a project where you have little more than a plan and a mood board to go on - if you are lucky. Its always interesting , therefore , to see a finished project , particularly if it is not one of your own . Does it look like the sketch ?

 

 

Having done this sketch quite a while ago - last autumn ? - for Dre Masso for his new cocktail bar Opium in Gerrard St , Soho , it was quite interesting to actually get to have a drink there last thursday night with Dre.............and , yes , it did look like the sketch although I didn't get to take a picture from the same viewpoint.............

 

 

 

 

The cocktail of choice was Opium No 2........which arrived as a three part drink , complete with smoke...............

 

 

 

 

.............and all the graphics and the sketches on the menu were by Jonathan at www.artistictype.co.uk who introduced me to Dre in the first place . Jonathan's blog posting from 13th march shows some of the sketches he did............

 

 

 

 

.....' Cocktails For Three ' ?

 

Check out Terry Allen's ' Lubbock on Everything '. 

 

 

 

 

 ..........and thankyou , Dre , for the drinks.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

..WHEN THE WHIP COMES DOWN

Kiss the boots of shiny, shiny leather
Shiny leather in the dark ,
Tongue of thongs , the belt that does await you
Strike , dear mistress , and cure his heart

It has been a bit quite on here recently , mainly because - with a second stage assessment coming up in January - I have been concentrating on work for my MA course and trying to develop my illustrative style. The second stage of the ' Tunnel of Love ' is well on its way to being finished , together with three new pieces  - ' Cabaret Burlesque ( Cabinet of Curiosities ) ' and ' Backstage the Hoochie-Coochie Girls are Getting Ready ' , both from the House of the Dominatrix , together with ' The Back Lot ' from the House of the Art Lover . Hopefully all pieces should be finished by Christmas , but it still surprises me how much time and effort they take.

Anyway , in the process of working on ' Cabaret Burlesque ' I came across the work of photographer Maria Coletsis. Maria obtained a Master's Degree from the San Francisco Art Institute , where she specialised in feminine identity and sexuality. Always having been interested in subcultures , she began photographing the fetish scene whilst working in London as a commercial photographer. Through this she met a professional dominatrix who wanted pictures for her website , and from here a whole new world opened up.

The images and texts on the Dominatrix and their dungeons interested me for a number of reasons ; firstly ( and obviously ) because one of my focal points on my  MA course is ' The House of the Dominatrix ' , investigating both the persona and their environment; I can never understand why with this most theatrical of spaces most dungeons illustrated on the Internet are all almost totally devoid of any sense of theatre at all , certainly within the UK , and at least part of my work was to try and address this through designing a top-end bordello/dungeon on Canal Street in Manchester. I posted a comment on here some while ago on a book that I had picked up in Paris - ' Maison Closes Parisiennes ' - which detailed at length the establishments in Paris at the beginning of the 20th C , and the quality of design and finishes was extremely high . The other point of interest , however , was Maria Coletsis approaching this from the point of view of investigating established sub-cultures and the question of feminine politics .

One of our Context lectures on the MA course offered an option on 'Feminism', but after what seemed an interminable sequence of images of ' yarn-bombing ' , ' tanks covered in quilting squares '  and  ' a never ending shopping list embroidered onto a roller towel ' my enthusiasm and sympathy had wained somewhat . All the images seemed to do was to re-inforce the stereotypical idea of feminism as a passive /craft based ideology. Maria's series of interviews with Dominatrix from across the globe seemed to offer another perspective altogether , where the woman fully controls the situation and dictates / defines any relationship purely on her own terms. You could argue here of course that for this to work then the male has to be fully compliant anyway , and the role only works in a male orientated world but nevertheless it provides a different point of view .

 

 

 

One of the aspects of the dom/sub relationship that suprised Maria was that the typical male sub , far from the timid and shy person she was expecting , was generally a high powered exec in an extremely demanding position , and the role of the sub allowed them - for a period of time - to relinquish all responsability and decision making ; for once , to give up all control. Having run a design practise where everyone is looking to you for the answer , I can relate to that.

 

Interestingly , Maria recalls seeing one ' super good-looking guy go into the bathroom and appear as a dog on a leash , wearing only a thong '.............................one of my own works suggests our hero dressing up in a dog-costume at The House of the Dominatrix...........

 

 

 

There is a DVD to go with the book , and you can see a full interview with Maria discussing the book

at  www.youtube.com/watch?v=67pnMjEMwlw

 



Hhmm- wonder if they will let me have another go at my Context Presentation ?