...HE WAS A FRIEND OF MINE

....He was a friend of mine , he was a friend of mine...................

I am writing this on a Tuesday morning , and finding it very hard ; a week ago , last Tuesday , I was at a meeting at Velvet on Canal Street in Manchester with Mark , Sunni and Sue fine tuning the proposals for re-vamping the ground floor bar , the future wide open.............



Mark was found dead in the early hours of Saturday morning in a hotel in the center of Manchester.



Having spent all my working life , 45 years and counting , as a designer then I know that good clients , those you enjoy working with , are to be cherished . I have known and worked with Mark for the past twenty five years or so , from those early meetings at Atticus through to the opening of Velvet as a basement bar in 1996 , through the opening of the ground floor bar , the development of it as a boutique hotel and the positioning of Velvet now as pre-eminent on Canal street  , an institution in Manchester. It's fair to say that Velvet has shared my best of times , my worst of times................... Mark showed faith in us as a design practice and let me breath , and few clients let me do that.



And now he is gone ; everything else is still here - Velvet , Canal street , Sunni , Sue - but it doesn't feel the same at the moment . No more grumpy Mr Toad , no more acerbic wit , no more grudging
appreciation of effort , no more carping put-downs.................... I shall really miss you , you bastard.

.....ANOTHER ONE BITES THE DUST............

" Another one bites the dust , another one bites the dust ............
  ....... and another one gone , and another one gone .................
  ....... another one bites the dust "

Another day and another scheme doesn't see the light of day . Not our fault this time , or indeed the client's , who had been in negotiations with a particular PubCo for the past nine months or so with
regard to taking over the lease of a particular pub in Cheshire . Deal done , keys handed over at the end of January - or so our client thought.


Without much fuss or warning , the government pushed through legislation at the back end of last November revising / relinquishing the tied trade agreement between PubCos and their tenants . Good
deal for the tenant , who can now buy his beer from wherever he wants without being tied to a fixed supplier . The collateral damage / fallout , however , is that the PubCos , having realised that they can no longer screw the tenant , are now taking tenancies back as managed houses - over which they have better financial control .


Result - the keys to the property are no longer available . Sorry lads , nine months work now in the bin , along with our fees , clients solicitors fees , etc etc etc. Anyway , here are the sketches............

........TEA 4/2

Tea4/2 , Manchester.......................

Yet another client who fucked me over and didn't pay......

" Oh we've decided to go with someone else . thanks but no thanks ".............You would think that I would have learnt by now . Did they tell me I was in competition ?

No.....

This was for a tea shop over at Media City in Salford , wanted for the end of last

November . Did it get built ? Did it end up like this ? I have no idea , but I might as well put the sketches out there.......

..........someone might like them and fancy a tea room.................

.......YOU BETTER WATCH OUT...............

 You better watch out , You better not cry , You better not pout , I'm telling you why
                                                  Santa Claus is coming to town......

It's nearly Christmas , so Merry Christmas to you all from here at Interior Sketches , and I hope that you get what you want in your stocking..............

What would I like from Santa ?............................ hhhhhmmmmm...........................

MERRY CHRISTMAS

......THE PAINTER......

....Well , we got down to London last weekend to see a couple of exhibitions , a couple of painters who I really really like and who have tracked  my life over the past fifty years or so . For starters , 

' Rembrandt - The Late Works ' at the National Gallery , a once-in-a-lifetime collection of sublime works including some stunning self-portraits ; the first room in particular I could have stayed in for hours.........

.........and the ' Syndics ' , a personal favourite as my father loved this picture..............

..........just to see them..............................in my personal space .

..........if only............No chance...........................

This was the queue to get in to the exhibition ...." Six only at a time , please "

...........and once you were in there........ten deep , and fighting your way though pushchairs , buggies and noisy babies into the bargain..............and this was just at 3.30pm on a weekday afternoon..........

...........apparently it was a stunning exhibition - but I really would like to have seen a bit more of the paintings..................I suppose it is inevitable , given the ' big name draw ' that it would be popular , but with timed tickets a degree more numbers control would have made the viewing a far more enjoyable experience , and the chance to view the brushwork and technique in detail was non-existent , let alone the opportunity to experience the works in peace and quiet..........And don't even get me started on the ubiquitous audio guides ; a more selfish intervention I have yet to  discover .........

Fast forward ( please ) to the following morning and the Royal Academy........the Allen Jones exhibition . Having been a student at art college in the sixties ( now being heralded as ' The Golden Age ' of the art colleges ) , I was more than familiar with his work , and this was an opportunity to see a lot of works together 

.

The big surprise to me , although it should have been obvious , was how good the metal cut-out sculptures looked in real life , having only ever seen them in photographs with a fixed view point. The fact that they are essentially two dimensional painted surfaces , cut and twisted into a dynamic

three dimensional form , transformed their 'cut-out' nature and imbued then with a great sense of movement and rhythm . By contrast , the three dimensional figures , perfectly formed and perfectly precise , looked curiously static by comparison.................

.......and given that most of his work is about movement....................

Saturday morning , the gallery was light , airy and pretty empty and it really was a most excellent exhibition. For a moment there I was back at art school.....................

...T'AINT WHAT YOU DO.......

" T'aint what you do..............It's the way that you do it.........
   That's what gets results............................................."

Last week we had lunch at Mr Cooper's House and Garden , Manchester , located in the Midland Hotel , food by the ' signature chef  ' Simon Rogan .

Food - excellent , really good and highly recommended ................

Value for money - excellent

Ambiance - bloody awful ; no warmth at all , no atmosphere - the lighting was dreadful.

Having a reasonable idea of who both the client and the designers are , I can guess that the design briefing went pretty much on the lines of ' This is the Midland Hotel , so you must respect the heritage and the fact that this is a grand hotel ........we need an interior to show that off '.................

Result - an uncomfortable and confused mash-up of ' fine dining ' and ' brasserie ' .

Leaving aside the question of the lighting for the moment , the problem for me is the positioning of the operation. Simon Rogan had already launched the ' French ' restaurant as the Midland Hotel's Flagship restaurant ; Mr Cooper's appeared some six months later offering a cheaper alternative , presumably to optimise the ' signature brand ' . This to me positions the customer as the ' poor relation ' to those who can afford the full dining experience of the French . Much better to offer up the operation as the best brasserie in Manchester , regardless of it's location , offering up a quality dining experience at really good value for money . The fact that it is located within the Midland should be an irrelevance .....................................

.............Just don't start me on the lighting ; I have seen better ambiance in car showrooms.. Where's the warmth , where's the fun ? Mr Cooper's House and Garden - there is a clue there , in the name , and it took me all of a couple of minutes to find these garden pendant fittings......

....................So just change the bloody chandeliers , for a start.............

...LET'S STICK TOGETHER.......

" Let's stick together...........
   Come on , come on , let's stick together "

Sometime in the last week or so Richard Branson ( in an attempt to blow smoke over the abortive Virgin Space mission ? )  came up with an offer of some £500million for the remaining members of Led Zeppelin to reform for a 35-night tour................an offer that , with add-ons , was estimated to be worth some £190 million to each of the band members.....................

To his eternal credit Robert Plant ripped up his copy of the contract in front of the astonished promoters......
........at last, someone makes a stand for artistic credibility over rank commercialism . Led Zeppelin ceased playing as a group around 1978 , but the resurrectionists still want their day........


During the same week I was wined and dined by a couple of people I worked for in the early seventies , reminiscing  over how good we all were together , the manner of my leaving long forgotten.......and I still appear on the photo heading up their web-site ..........obviously still their best line up ....................................

........and - yet again in the same week - we get out of the blue a call in the studio from my ex business partner - with whom I have not spoken for some twenty years - wanting to have a chat with us ' about putting some work our way ' , and ' wouldn't it be great to get the old team back together again.......'.

Dream on , it ain't going to happen ; there are some things that money just can't buy.............and in the words of Paul Mccartney ' You can't re-heat a souffle ...........'

.....I THINK I'M GOING BACK..................

Way back when , somewhere around twenty years ago this week , as it happens , we designed a bar  in the centre of Manchester on Mount Street - Citrus . Not too bad a scheme as it went , but we never got to grips with the basement and like most operations it eventually faded and died.................. 

 The opportunity to revisit a site or a scheme does not happen that often , but in this particular case it did. A few months ago Mark and Sunni from Velvet on Canal Street had an opportunity to purchase the lease of the Mount St site off the then current operator - another fading bar - and asked us to re-vamp the site as Velvet Central . The site is long and thin , with full height windows along one of the longer sides , so quite a different site to the Canal Street one ; we did I think however manage to capture the feel of the first one , and at least had an opportunity to re-address the basement .

.......and we managed to keep the ' fish ' element in the basement.............

...I LIKE THE CHRISTIAN LIFE.....

" My buddies all shun me since I turned to Jesus
   they say I am missing a whole world of fun........."

Having done a BA majoring in Italian Renaissance art I am more than familiar with the
iconography of the painted crucifix , particularly the suspended ones that seem specific to
Italy , mainly due to the altar at that time being in the center , towards the crossing.

This particular example is by Cimabue and is suspended above the altar in the church of San Domenico in Arezzo . Stylistically this format was pretty much of a dead end from a pictorial point of view , as  within the nature of the form there was no room for any visual development or storytelling - the only areas available for embellishment were at the four extremities.........

.......or , as in this example , just the two horizontal extremes ; the format thus remained pretty much inert........................... and then I came across this example.............

......' Maquette for Crucifix ' , an illustration from the book ' Gods of Heaven and Earth ' by
Joel-Peter Witkin ; a radical re-interpretation of the form , stripping in photographs at the four median points .............Saints ? Sinners ?..........Gods ?

The book was published in 1989 and was the second book of his photographs to be published , Was it intended as a maquette ?  Did he intend ever to construct the piece as an artwork ? I have no idea but
I found the re-working of the format interesting enough .........................suspended as the highlight of a photographic exhibition it probably would have courted controversy enough......

..GOING TO THE END OF THE LINE.....

" Well it's all right , riding around in the breeze ........
   Well it's all right , if you're living the life you please........"

David Millar rode his last race last week - at least , his last race as a professional cyclist.
Most professional cyclists , mainly road racers , expect three - five years at the top , if they
are lucky. Millar had seventeen.

The Grand Tours are I suppose the highlight of any road racers career - Millar rode in and
finished 5 Giros , 7 Vueltas and 12 Tours . He has said that a couple of stages of Le Tour were for him the most memorable , one in 2002 when he won the road stage into Beziers - " because at
that point I was still clean " , and Stage 9 in the 2010 race , riding in the Alps from Morzine-Avoriaz down to St-Jean de Maurienne , a distance of some 204.5 km. He felt as soon as he started that day , having previously crashed , " that something was not right " , and dropped by the peloton on the first climb of the day duly rode some 194km at the back of the field with two broken ribs , finishing some 45mins behind the stage winner . " .....it wasn't too bad on the flats , but on the climbs I could feel the
ends rubbing together ...."

The stage profile shown above would suggest that there were no too many flats that day .......and the temp was probably in the mid-thirties.

Strapped up , he continued in the race and on the morning of Friday 23rd July we saw him duly ride out at the start of Stage 18 from our home town of Salies-de- Bearn on the stage up to Bordeaux. . He

went on to finish the Tour in Paris on the sunday , Still strapped up.

Sometimes , when footballers being paid upwards of 100k a week complain of ' being tired ' you

wonder ......................

During his two years suspension , and on his road back to eventual redemption , he lived a couple of miles away from where we were living at the time , near Chapel-en-le-Frith in the Peak District .

Unsure at that time of where his future lay , and whether he would ever be allowed back into road racing , he applied for a job as a shop assistant at Borders in Stockport ( anyone remember Borders ?) and realised that he wasn't even qualified for that . 

Once you find out what you are good at , stick with it - through all the ups and downs.

KODACHROME.................

" They give us those nice bright colours........
                                ......makes you think all the world's a sunny day "

..........and if the early sixties were , to my mind at least , captured in black and white - ' The Seven Samurai ' , ' Alphaville ' ,  ' L'Avventura ' , Paris ,  Blue Note album photos , even the iconic images of the early Beatles - then by the mid sixties colour had arrived..............

............and Monica Vitti...................actress , icon ..............' L'Avventura ' , ' Il Deserto Rosso '........

....she's now 83...but some images never date.........below , as 'Modesty Blaise.'from 1966..........................

.......and maybe even resurface decades later having lurked in the subconcious .................................

but then , the original is still the best..........................even in black and white.................................

FOR YOU WERE MY FIRST LOVE.....

For you were my first love......
......and true love never ever dies...........

....... the early 1960's , reading ' On The Road ' and ' The Dharma Bums ' , listening to Miles Davies and Chet Baker , reading Satre and Camus and falling in love with the idea of 'cool ' , of Paris , existentialism and endless coffees , early Godard films - and the beatnik girls , all dark hair , black roll neck sweaters , plain grey skirts , black tights .........everything is in monochrome , black and white........

........and Juliette Greco.............chanteuse , icon    ..what's not to love ?.................

...........its late May , 2014 , and I am down in the south of France ( still in love with France ), on the edge of the Basque country , walking the foothills and painting.................and much to my surprise there she is , Juliette Greco , playing a festival in early June , just down the road at Laas..............

Nnoooooo...............oh my god..........................

She's 87....................

Should I stay or should I go ?

HEROES - just for one day..........

They say you should never - ever - meet your heroes ...................

This is me and Willie Nelson , in a bar somewhere in downtown San Antone , sometime earlier this year .

.......the memory is a little hazy as exactly to where and when ............

'Is anyone here goin' to San Antone ? '

....ALL THOSE YEARS AGO.............

I posted on here two or three weeks ago some pictures of John Hunt and Associates taken some forty odd years ago by someone I knew well at that time ...........Peter Mannox

As well as being a talented photographer , Peter was / is a talented sculptor , having come up through Moseley Road School of Art and then the Fine Art dept at Margaret Street - Birmingham Art College.
A friend of John Hunt , Peter got talked in to making a fair amount of fired clay panels that were going to form the wall decorations for an Indian restaurant that we were designing at the time . Needless to say , the client changed his mind , the bricks were thrown out of the pram and the scheme never got built .......forty years ago and clients are still the same................

Anyway........here she is...........a little piece of India...............

......forty odd years old and starting to look her age a little , having lost a few toes and her lower arm along the way , but still looks mighty fine to me .These panels are some 225mm x 225mm square x 70mm deep and are bloody heavy ; they were designed to go into a gridded pine frame 75mm x 75mm square section , each one set individually into the frame................

Even now , I think that the finished interior would have looked spectacular , and I have never met anyone since who would have the ability or the capacity to single-handedly produce so many tiles............these two have survived forty odd years and some eight house moves - and I wish I had more of them.

Thank you , Peter

I don't suppose that you could repair her arm ?

...PICTURE THIS

Saturday , 7th December , and it's the first day of the Macclesfield Open Art Exhibition , the first year that it has been held............

...........  and I have had a couple of works selected to be shown. Both have figured on this page before , but I haven' t had too much time lately to finish any new pieces.

This one was re-titled ' New Order ' for the exhibition , which was more appropriate given Macclesfield's Joy Division and New Order................

.........and this one I selected as it incorporates a really nice small ceramic piece by Jan Lewis-Eccleston who is based at the Longden Gallery here in Macc.

The exhibition runs until the begining of Feb if you can get along.......................

....GO YOUR OWN WAY

      Go Your own way............
      You can call it another lonely day...............

Outsiders in art , the lonely ones plowing their own furrow , going their own way. Sometime last week I caught up with a programme on BBC 2 - ' Imagine ' - a late night magazine programme on the Arts , this particular one on  ' outsiders ' , those who produce art solely through their own driven needs , way outside the normal , conservative , gallery /dealer system that seems to so much to dictate what is ' in '...... a lot of the artists featured were autistic or in other ways socially disfunctional  to the extent that ' art - the act of creation ' was  to a large extent their sole means of expression . Some I liked , some I didn't like , but a fascinating programme.

....And then I came across the work of Paul Laffoley.

...Outsider ?....................the nearest work to this I suppose would be Tantric art , mechanical diagrams ?, architectural blueprints ? instruction manuals ?............or the drawings of A.T. Mann , whose work I have always admired , having come across them some thirty or forty years ago...............

......Outsider ?.....Visionary .?....... born 1940 , he started working in New York as an architect , wanting to design flying saucers and worked on the World Trade Centre towers , although he didn't become a registered architect until he was 50 .

When he was 52 , in preparation for major oral surgery , he was subjected to a routine cat-scan of his head, at which point a miniature metallic-like ' implant ' was discovered in his brain near the pineal gland . a local chapter of MUFON declared it to be a ' nanotechnological  laboratory ' capable of accelerating or retarding his brain activity. He came to believe that the implant was extraterrestrial in origin and the main motivation for his theories and ideas .................and interest in UFOs

Essentially two dimensional - no sense or need for perspective or any other artistic convention as they work to their own rules ..........and whilst in reproduction they look like magazine drawings , diagrams , the scale is misleading - they are not small.............

These are big canvases ,  " combining words and imagery to depict a spiritual architecture of explanation , tackling concepts like dimensionality , time travel through hacking relativity , connecting conceptual threads shared by philosophers through the millennia , and theories about the cosmic origins of mankind "......

Yesssss......................

Laffoley has evolved to viewing his work as an interactive  , physically engaging psychotronic device , similar to architectural monuments such as Stonehenge or the Cathedral of Notre dame and their spiritual order .

My drive out to the day job the following day now seemed rather flat and pointless...............I just find his work fascinating..............

The Outsiders are out there , doing their own thing .........you just have to look for them.............

...AH , BUT I WAS SO MUCH OLDER THEN ...........

........I'm younger than that , now...............

It's very odd , casually trawling through the internet as you do when you have a spare ten minutes or so , to come across - on the internet , there for everyone to see - a photograph of yourself taken some forty odd years or so ago and that you haven't seen since...............

I remember where they were taken - in the courtyard of Queen's College Chambers in the center of Birmingham , so these must have been taken around 1971 / 72 ..........my first job as a designer , working for John Hunt Associates..........John Hunt - tutor , mentor , hero , icon - or just an alpha male better at exploiting my talents than I was ....................

These second two - still working at JHA - were taken later , I guess around 73/74 , when we were working out of Bridge Street and were taken as a group shot for the Midland chapter of the SIAD as it then was , now the Chartered Society of Designers . I'm second from left on the second row , with John on my right . Sylvia is front left , Pauline rear left ......the others....... ?

Same group - I'm second left , flanked by John and Pauline.................Apart from Sylvia I don't remember the others , but then it was a long time ago............

It's very odd looking at this person - time seems to reverse , this person now some forty years or so in the past and seemingly so much older , so far away , some forty years older in time than where I am today .

I am indeed younger than that now........what could I tell him ? My daughter Charlotte's arrival was still a couple of years down the road...........

The photo's were taken by Peter who was a good friend at that time - I still have a couple of clay pieces that he made for an interior , pics to be posted on here in a week or so...........and his blog site is

www.north-fife.blogspot.com 

very worthwhile checking out as he is still taking those pics.

Thank you , Peter .

....ACROSS THE GREAT DIVIDE.......

.......In a week bookended by emotional appeals for humanitarian aid , both for the typhoon disaster and Children in Need here in the Uk , it's good to know that football at least has kept a sense of perspective..................

Roberto de Matteo was sacked by Chelsea some twelve months or so ago and - unable to agree a severance settlement with the club - has continued to draw his salary at the rate of £130,000 a week and will continue to do so until his contract expires next June. He has trousered some £7,000,000 to date whilst out of work and apparently is in no hurry to look for another job.

It's good to know that in this day and age of cut-throat hiring and firing , some clubs are still prepared to honour their contracts ......

....WORKINGMANS DEAD........

......but at least some of the remains have been recovered............

( Heavily ) influenced by the ' Doctors , Dissection and Resurrection Men ' exhibition that I had seen at the Museum of London , one of the final pieces produced  for my MA show was another in the Archive series , this time proposing that No 2 , Canal Street - the House of the Art Lover - had previously been an inner city hospital , complete with a mortuary room in the basement . This later idea arose from our introduction to Jordangate House in Macclesfield , the location of our installation for the Barnaby Festival , which had indeed seen time as a hospital for the mentally unwell and still had the laying out / mortuary slab in the basement......

..........this time the Cabinet of Curiosities came complete with samples taken from the recovered metal coffins , together with some rather fine death masks produced by my friend Dr Jan Lewis-Eccleston.........  the concept is still based around the idea of ' architectural notation as narrative form ' with the 1/50 plan in watercolour forming the visual centrepiece to the story..........

This piece might well be appearing in the Macclesfield Open art competition later this year

Every picture tells a story................