..DARKNESS ON THE EDGE OF TOWN..........

I had been down to the Longden Gallery in Macclesfield to discuss my pictures for the current show and came across  two small heads in ceramic by Jan Lewis-Eccleston who works out of the gallery .

They looked spooky enough to me, as if someone had just dug them up, and this gave me an idea............I asked Jan if it was ok to incorporate them into an art work and she said 'fine ', so I put together a box suggesting that a certain building had been boarded up in the early 1980's .......a couple of skulls ( and maybe the rest of the bodies ) were discovered under the cellar floor some fifteen years later . Further investigation suggested that a couple of women had gone missing in the area some thirty years earlier. Hhmmmmm......

Jan really liked the idea , so maybe we will collaborate further on a joint project or two............

" There is violence that all individuals inflict on spaces by their very presence, by their intrusion into the controlled order of architecture. Entering a building maybe a delicate act , but it violates the balance of a precisely ordered geometry "   Bernard Tschumi



....MORE SONGS ABOUT BUILDINGS AND FOOD.........

  ......" the discipline of Architecture is a minor branch of cake decoration  "........Bertold Lubetkin, on receiving a gold medal from the RIBA.........

.......A most excellent quotation, I thought , to introduce the current posting and the question of ' The Cake ' . My mother's ninetieth birthday looms, and given that the family are all getting together , a cake was required . Your standard ' Happy Birthday / Candles / Ribbon ' affair just wouldn't cut it - something special is required here , so lets see ........construction - fruit cake or sponge ? hhhmmm , opinion seems divided ...........and what should it look like ? what are her interests ?............well , she has always enjoyed walking. Ok, then , a fruit / sponge cake with a walking theme...............

...........and here it is , courtesy of Kirsty at the Sweetie Pie Bakery in Macclesfield - a most excellent cake that should taste as good as it looks . Kirsty has made over five hundred cakes since she started up three years ago and is now in the nice position to be able to turn away work she doesn't like - specifically wedding cakes , which she finds too stressful and don't give her the room to relax, create and enjoy.

This posting is not just about cakes - it's about the return to hand made / hand crafted products that through the interaction of eye and hand result in a degree of satisfaction for the creator that is not achievable through sitting at a keyboard. Designing via a computer interface is all well and good , but to me it's a bit like doing all your cooking via a microwave; it will produce what is required but hardly provides the same sense of physical well being that actually making something with your hands does. We are increasingly insulated from the physical earth beneath us by rubber tyres , rubber soles - we are becoming increasingly insulated from the physical process of creation via the increasing capabilities of the electronic world and the keyboard .

Sorry - rant over.....................and the cake did taste as good as it looked..........wonder if she can do a cake in the shape of a drawing board for my next birthday ....!

...LITTLE RED ROOSTER .......

...Well, not so much a little red rooster, more like Three French Hens - ok, two hens and a rooster then. It's a watercolour that I have done for a good friend of mine, Liz Cox, as a much appreciated thank you for doing all the framing for me for the show of my works currently on at the Longden Gallery, Macclesfield.

Liz and Kath run their company 'LCT Interior Solutions' out of Chester, specialising in picture framing and providing bric-brac mainly for operations within the leisure industry and have provided an excellent service over the years ...and I have to say are really good fun to work with. Check out their website at http://www.lctinteriorsolutions.co.uk/

I should also point that their rather nice logo was designed by Jonathan who you can contact at Artistic Type.

Thanks again, Liz

..JE SUIS UN ROCK STAR....

Cultural Differences Part Three.......................Having spent my formative years growing up in the late Fifties and on through the Sixties, it was perhaps inevitable that the sound track to my life should be pretty much based on blues and rock.............folk rock , country rock , country blues , urban blues , Dylan , Springsteen , The Stones , Neil Young ,Van Morrison , together with  the more obscure corners of Americana and of course jazz - Armstrong , Duke Ellington and Johnny Hodges , Miles Davis , Chet Baker , Billie Holliday and Sinatra .....oh, and The Clash .

Walk into any record shop ( record shop ? ) in the UK - well, ok,  if you can still find one ( it's still difficult to come to terms with the fact that one of the most enduring images of my life , the album cover and the vinyl album , had a life span of less than fifty years  ..... " what are these , Grandad ? They're LPs , James....Oh  - what are they ?  what's a ' record ' ? ) .......walk into pretty much any record shop and most of the floor space was given over to rock, pop , metal , punk.......and with most artists the usual suspects , all very familiar.

Walk into a music department in France and you are lost at sea , a completely alien culture alive and flourishing , names I've never heard of - Mylene Farmer ? The artistes , the musicians that I know from Abba to Zappa are located over in the corner somewhere, filed under ' International ' , and allocated about the same amount of space as ' world ' music or ' independent '. By far the biggest allocation of space is given over to French artistes , most of whom are completely unfamiliar to me. My perception of American blues based music as the fountain-head, the source from which all other music flows , is gone with the wind . Jazz has a solid presence , given its wholesale adoption by the French as part of the zeitgeist of bohemian Paris in the Fifties, but other than that its a different world...........and Mylene Farmer is no local somebody - sales of over 25 million and ten number ones' in France - this is a major artist by any one's standards, an icon in France , probably as big there as Madonna.

Whether it's because that for most of my life - I am of the baby boomer generation - the UK has been firmly looking westwards to the US of A for guidance , culture , aspirations and defence.......a bias that has almost totally effected my entire life........the more time I now spend in France the more I come to perceive the UK as a small and isolated ( indeed, insular ) off-shore island on the edge of a Europe that could quite happily manage - and does - without it.

vive la difference ??

........EVERY PICTURE TELLS A STORY..................

' Working on mysteries without any clues '.....

......Having spent most of my life developing my skill at visuals , I have occasionally tried watercolours , purely for relaxation . Relaxation ?  it is a lot harder medium to work with than markers , and I never have been too happy with the results , some of which can be seen on my web-site. Last year I thought I might have a go at oils, which then developed into mixed media. But the subject matter............hhmmmm.

    ' Works In Progress - towards buildings as narrative '

Buildings are recorded history , architectural plans and drawings are information data banks , blueprints for the past present and alternative futures , maybe even alternative pasts, all waiting to be decoded. The watercolours are recordings of buildings that have interested me ; the oils and mixed media works are very much exploratory , works in progress as I work towards a method of visually establishing alternative histories for building that may - or may not - have happened.

Reading buildings - mysteries, clues, plans - and visualising them will form the basis  as I take up an

MA course at Manchester Metropolitan University this coming September : investigating and proposing alternative histories and futures for three or four buildings in the city centre - buildings that will have other lives....

........and in the meantime , the works in progress are on show in the Longden gallery in Macclesfield , from February 27th through until March 26th this year . Given that this is the first time that I have actually exhibited since the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham in 1967 it should be fun ....and most of the works on show , both watercolours and mixed media , are pictured in the portfolio section in my web-site

" The more enlightened a building becomes , the more its walls ooze ghosts "  

      Italo Calvino

....GIMME A PIG'S FOOT AND A BOTTLE OF BEER...............

Cultural Differences Part Two....................Spending a lot of time in south-west France the different attitudes to food to that in the UK become apparent very quickly. France is still very much an agricultural society ; most of the food is regionally biased and you get the feeling that pretty much most things, particularly the salad and vegetable sections , don't travel far to market...............

.......and there is a much greater acceptance of the odd, the miss-shapen - none of this visual conformity to an arbitrary ' perfect ' standardisation - it just needs to taste good. Even our local fish counter , in Orthez, wouldn't disgrace Harrods and the fish market down at St-Jean-de-Luz, on the coast is a visual delight.

Charcuterie , both in France and Spain , is elevated to a fine art - the Pata Negra , the jambon Iberico - is to die for. Pretty much all of the pig is used , and whilst you won't get every cut you get in the UK, such as belly-pork , the sheer variety makes up for any loss ;  terrines , pates', rillettes, saucisson , brawn all feature regularly on a cold plate at lunchtime. Pigs trotters appear regularly on menus , both at our local restaurant in Bayonne and up in the brasseries in Paris, so being an enthusiastic - if weekend - cook this got me thinking , and in the run up to Christmas I asked our local butcher Rob out at Chelford, who is excellent , if he could get me some pigs trotters and ears...........................

" Oh ", he said, " No problem , we usually throw all those away - do you want a head as well ? "

Vive la Difference.