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 ......