...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....................

.....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.

...LETS DANCE.............

.....Flick Colby died this week in New York , age 65..............

......... as female cultural icons from the 60's and early 70's go , maybe she wasn't up there with Edie Sedgewick , Suzie Rotolo , Anita Pallenberg , Nico or whoever , and most people wouldn't even recognise her picture........she sure as hell though meant an awful lot to males in the UK of a certain generation, me included . Dancer and choreographer, she co-founded Pan's People , the dance troupe on TOTP and gave most of us a reason to be sitting in front of the television on a Thursday night. Amateur night by todays standards they might have been , but in those far off days.........short skirts and high-heeled boots, what's not to like ?.......and we all had our favorite...................

Flick , Ruth , Dee-Dee , Louise , Babs , Cherie .............ask any male over fifty what those names mean...........pin-up girls for a generation.....................

Lets dance...................................

......................and something else from the late 60's finally resolved itself this week ; being an avid reader of AD magazine  ( Architectural  Design ) which could be fairly radical then as far as the profession was concerned , I can still remember a  particular issue from that time where , sandwiched in amongst articles on Archigram and SuperStudio, was a short three verse poem , unattributed  , that has stayed in my head ever since.......................

" All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace................" , and I never knew who by...............

Now, thanks to the current tv programmes running under the same title , I have found the author - the late Richard Brautigan........................

" I like to think ( and

  the sooner the better ! )

  of a cybernetic meadow

  where mammals and computers

  live together in mutually

  programming harmony

  like pure water

  touching clear sky.

  I like to think

        ( right now, please ! )

  of a cybernetic forest

  filled with pines and electronics 

  where deer stroll peacefully

  past computers

  as if they were flowers

  with spinning blossoms.

  I like to think

         ( it has to be ! )

  of a cybernetic ecology

  where we are free of our labours

  and joined back to nature,

  returned to our mammal

  brothers and sisters ,

  and all watched over

  by machines of loving grace . "

Flick Colby , Richard Brautigan - things seemed so much more innocent way back then.

..........let's dance.....................

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

Architecture - architectural spaces - in films have always interested me , from the dystopian future visions of Alphaville and Blade Runner via the wonderful madness of ' Schenectady, New York ' - the sheer conceit of building a full scale 1:1 replica of New York ( shades of Luis Borges )  - to the more arcane mysteries of space in Cube and Fermat's Room .

  The all pervasive use of CGI has now rendered the nightmarish vision of even full cityscapes peeling back and dissolving commonplace - viz Inception - but personally I prefer the more more surreal visions of space as viewed in such films as ' Last Year in Marienbad ' , when you suddenly realise that the never-ending panorama of adjacent endless corridors illustrated as the camera pans across the interiors can't possibly exist physically together as shown in the film.....and ' The Cabinet of Dr Caligari ' is still one of the best examples of German Expressionism , where the distorted perspective perfectly matches the distorted view of reality as portrayed  in the film.

Do film spaces exist in real time, do directors consider the flow of space from an architectural , theatrical , psychological perspective ?

...And then I came across this book....... 'The Wrong House : The Architecture Of Alfred Hitchcock ' by Steve Jacobs........

Published in conjunction with the exhibition ' The Wrong House ' in Antwerp in 2007 , also curated by Steve Jacobs , the book analyses Hitchcock's films in terms of the sets and how these re-inforce the theme of the film.

Architectural reconstructions of alternative spaces are reasonably common occurances with regard to the analysis and understanding of paintings ; the interiors of Vermeer , the ' Flagellation ' by Piero della Francesca , both with single fixed points of view , lend themselves readily to a reconstruction to establish the point of view of the spectator . Rembrandt's ' Night Watch ' and Massacio's ' Holy Trinity ' , amongst others, have been subject to further discussion and conjecture with regard to the spacial dynamics of the paintings , and the relationship between the viewer and the painted space , particularly with regard to Massacio's fresco and the suggestion of a barrel-vaulted space existing in real time. This book however is the first time that I have come across cinematic spaces analysed in such a fashion.

Hitchcock took great pains to establish real time spaces in which to set his films , and the book establishes the sets as of fundamental importance in creating and underpining the themes. The set for ' Rear Window ' was at that time the largest indoor set ever built at Paramount and was constructed - over six weeks - to solid architectural principles in that fire escapes , drainage systems etc were all workable . The set for ' Phsycho ' re-inforces the schizoid nature of the film , the solid logical contemporary  layout of the motel acting as counterpoint to the gothic unknown  spaces of the Bates house looming over it - apollonian v. dionysian .

I think what fascinates me here is the idea that ' architecture ' , the creation of buildings and by definition a series of internal spaces , doesn't necessarily have to exist purely in ' built ' form , and that some of the more creative and thought-provoking concepts exist away from a formaly constructed state .

Anyway , an absorbing book that certainly enhances the viewing of Hitchcock's films.

.....SITTING ON TOP OF THE WORLD...........

........Back in January I posted a blog mentioning a book , ' Maisons Closes Parisiennes ' ,  recording the history and layouts of some of the more exotic establishments to appear on the streets of Paris during the last hundred years or so....little did I realise that our own royal family played no small part in at least one of these houses ,  Le Chabanais......

La Chabanais was a ' maison de tolerance ' opened in 1878 , a luxury brothel financed by some of the richest business men in France and adored by the then Prince of Wales , Prince of Hedonism , Prince Albert - ' Bertie ' to his many ladies and admirers . So enamoured was he of the establishment that he reserved a private room and choose the decor himself , including a copper bathtub that could be filled with champagne. He didn't stop there , though.......

This exotic creation in velvet and gold laquer was Bertie's ' Love Seat ' , designed by him so that two or three people - including one portly Englishman - could have simultaneous oral sex.

The top ' floor ' of the seat consisted of a stool with handgrips and stirrups , so that Person One could sit up there with their legs splayed. Below this were footrests that allowed Person Two to stand or squat in front of the occupant of the top floor. At ground level was a long divan where person Three could lie down with their face just below the genital region of Person two..........it must have taken a fair few design meetings to get those positions JUST right......................

......and given that in 1880 ' Bertie ' was heir apparent to the British Empire in all its' glory , I suppose that when he was in position up on the top of the seat he really was sitting on top of the world.

  



...GIVE PEACE A CHANCE.....

It's Sunday , May 8th , and in the UK conversation probably doesn't stretch much further than discussing the afternoon's punch-up as ManUtd and Chelsea fight it out for the Premiership title.....

.....Fortunately we are out in France , walking through quiet villages in the Bearn  and out here it's VE day ,  commemorating the end of hostilities in Europe as the Second World War comes to a close . The war memorials are dressed , the services held in the local church and then maybe a local communal lunch on trestle tables out on a side street. Spending time in France you come to understand that there is a totally different memory of the conflict to that of the UK - whilst the UK suffered the bombing raids , France suffered under occupation for the best part of four and a half years, and the collective folk memory is quite different . The war museum at Les Invalides in Paris is essentially the record and experiences  of the Resistance and a country living under enemy rule. The experience touched everyone and is not forgotten - today is a day for remembering out here.

.........and back in the UK , the football - who is going to win ?  Don't know, don't care........sometimes its really not that important .

.....THERE'S SOMETHIN' HAPPENIN' HERE...........

......What it is ain't exactly clear..........well , the last posting I made was on the Steampunk phenomena and a club I liked in downtown LA , plus a mention for John Coulthart whose blog I follow ......

......and lo and behold his latest blog previews the publication of The Steampunk Bible , out this May from all good bookshops...........sounds interesting...............and check out his blog at www.johncoulthart.com/feuilleton            

........must be something in the air................