Wednesday 29 June 2011

..WHEN THE GOING GETS TOUGH...

.......The tough get going..............Its that time of year again. and Le Tour gets going on Saturday 2nd July for three tough weeks in the sun.....

It seems a long time ago, now , but four weeks ago , back on the 4th of June , the English football team struggled to a 2 - 2 draw with Switzerland in  a Euro qualifier - the manager of the team struggled to explain their tiredness and lack of motivation. Motivated to play for your country ? Tiredness ? And  there was me , thinking footballers were highly trained athletes......

In this context , it's interesting to read the Guardian Sport  ' Big Interview ' this week with the cyclist David Millar of Team Garmin , whose autobiography has just been published , already odds-on favorite for Sports book of the year. Last year was a hard Tour and he suffered , but he didn't realise until after he had spent the last week climbing in the Alps and finished the Tour that he had three broken ribs.......broken during the first week. Interesting to read , also , his comments with regard to his fellow British riders Mark Cavendish and Bradley Wiggins......

The full interview can be read at


Good luck to him, and good luck to Cav . Bradley Wiggins ?  Lets see...............



Saturday 25 June 2011

....REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL.........

Well , the canvas that was discussed in the posting of 12th June was duly submitted for the Derbyshire Open art exhibition held in Buxton , one of over 400 entries . Stiff competition, then  ....................







.........and this Monday a postcard duly dropped through the letterbox advising that not only had it been selected , it had received a commendation from the judges . Given that this was the first time that I have ever entered a painting for any competition anywhere , to be one of ten commended works to go alongside the ten prize winners is no mean achievement , so I am really pleased .........although having now seen the rest of the selected entries I am slightly embarrassed by my own technical shortcomings - there were a lot that were better than mine. 

112 of the works go on display from this weekend at the Museum and Art gallery in Buxton , running through to 2nd September , and many are for sale.................including mine ( although posted at a price that in retrospect was a mistake ) The Derbyshire Open website is at
www.derbyshire.gov.uk/leisure/buxton_museum/derbyshire_open 

........hhhhmmmmm - and so for next year I have some ideas........maybe ' What Mary Did Next ' ?

Wednesday 22 June 2011

.......DARKNESS AT THE EDGE OF TOWN.......



He breathed in air, he breathed out light..............

Clarence Clemons was my delight.

R.I.P

( with apologies to Adrian Mitchell )

Saturday 18 June 2011

.......RAG DOLL ( MATERIAL GIRL )

..........This last weekend it was the annual Barnaby festival here in Macclesfield and a lot of creativity was on show , including the opening of a new gallery - Jack Sevens Art Yard - which in a small town like Macc is only to be welcomed . The exbibition space is really good , and lets hope they attract some good work and help raise the profile of the arts in this area. 




....To my mind , however , the most creative and interesting event by far was an installation  - 'Tales From the Tower ' by Teresa Wilson in the Savage Chapel Tower , St Michael's Church .

For a start , the church is just around the corner from us here in the centre of Macc and I pass it most days , but I had never noticed the medieval tower just off to the side ; a fascinating space in its own right with a small footprint spread over three floors. The art work consisted of four discrete but interrelated installations on each level of the tower. " She uses puppets made from rags and recycled materials to suggest stories to the viewer and to explore emotional , challenging and sometimes uncomfortable subject matter in a gentle and playful way. The work is about the transmutation of undigested experience ; timelessness , darkness and enchantment "

To my mind though , to categorise them as rag-dolls diminishes them somewhat ; in their thin, gaunt , reduced state their more direct references to me are as mummies , their memories and remains enbalmed in cloth now reduced to rags  .......quite dark and very impressive .

Teresa's website is at http://www.teresawilson.co.uk/ and she is one of the Vernon Mill Artists based in Vernon Mill in Stockport ; on a day when the sky went dark and the heavens opened it was quite a dramatic experience.

Sunday 12 June 2011

...OFF THE WALL.......

well ok , a painting that's a bit off the wall , about a wall - or walls - and , hopefully , to be hung on a wall shortly.......


I have finally managed to finish the painting that I am going to enter for the Derbyshire Open art event in Buxton . Entitled  " Landscape series 01/02 : Mary's Grandfather Demonstrates How to Build a Dry-Stone Wall " , it's based on photographs of Mary's paternal  grandfather building dry stone walls in and around Chelmorton , just outside Buxton. Technically its not brilliant and in retrospect there are other ways I would have chosen to do various things ; artistically it's fine and hangs together well as a compostion ; narratively I am really pleased with it , so some positive thoughts there and some negative . I have no idea what the judging panel will think of it , and no idea whether it will be selected for the exhibition . Its basically oil over a photomontage , and it sort of grew - I had no real idea of what it would look like when I started it ; overall I am fairly happy with it , might fine tune it a bit . It gets handed in on Friday 10th June , so we'll see..............and no, the canvases don't slope - I photographed at the last moment.

If it's not selected , at least it gives me a chance to completely re-vamp for next year....................

Tuesday 7 June 2011

.....END OF THE LINE.........

Cultural Differences Part Four - Its a Generational Thing.................

......For all my life I have been surrounded by stuff - cultural stuff ; cultural artifacts in the form of books , newspapers , albums ( ah, vinyl and the feel of an album cover ) , CDs , videos  ( and later on , DVDs ) , catalogues , prints , drawings , paints - and for me , most importantly in my line of work, a drawing board.

I like stuff - apart from the obvious storage problem ( last time we moved I had 46 boxes of books ) most stuff is easy to access , doesn't require ( at least in the case of books or pictures ) a power source , is easy to layout in groups for comparisons , easy to cross reference between two , three or more sources at the same time ; and because you can lay it out in groups then the 'stuff ' can form its own relationships - books , pictures laid out at random can generate connections that you were not previously aware of. I suppose the most extreme form of 'stuff ' for me is something like Francis Bacons studio which I discussed at length in my posting ' On Reflection ' dated 23 / 10 / 2010 : you get this very visceral feel of the creative process through the accumulation of visual references with which he surrounded himself in his working process.

.....And now I understand that ' stuff ' is disappearing from our lives ....all I need now is a laptop / kindle / ipod / iphone , some apps for streaming / Flickr / Skype / Netflix etc and a credit card..............everything is reduced to streams of digital information.

This worries me - the further we become divorced from the tactile process, the further we become estranged from reality . As soon as money started moving from a purely cash transaction to an exchange of information we started to loose a sense of value , partly at least fueling the credit boom and the subsequent crash . Lets take an example - there are a couple of books I want , one costing £5.00 , the second one costing £50.00 . I go into a bookshop - remember those ? - and hand over £5.00 for the first one. Handing over £50.00 for the second one I am immediately aware how much more valuable it is - ten times the worth of the first one - so I wonder is it worth it ? and do I really want it / need it ?  Ok , now lets look at Amazon - I can buy the books on line ; great ............but the transaction is now exactly the same - just a click of the mouse . There is no differentiation in the process , no sense of added value between the purchases.

Lets stay with books for a moment and their replacement by the Kindle and downloads - just a click away. Well, maybe not ; one of my most treasured books is ' Fra Angelico at San Marco ' by William Hood , a detailed analysis of the fresco cycle at the monastery of San Marco in Florence . Superbly illustrated , a double page spread when the book is opened comes in at 290mm high by 500mm wide. This doesn't even fit on my laptop screen , and to reduce it to suit reduces the size of the images and - more importantly - the font size ; maybe at the reduced size I can't even read it..............yes, downloading six books onto a Kindle is by far the easiest way of taking a good read on holiday , agreed , so maybe we have to be selective here.

The sense of touch is one of our five senses and we are rapidly loosing it , literally ; all tactile awareness is now reduced to an interface with a keyboard - everything is a click away. We are moving from a state of active participation to a passive state - art students don't even know the feel of paper on pencil anymore as design programmes become more and more sophisticated : for ' artisan / craftsman ' read technician.

The phrase ' to loose touch ' means to loose contact.........maybe it IS a generational thing, but I don't want to loose touch with stuff just yet, please.