Before everyone disappeared off indoors, when I was teaching real people rather than computer screens – back in 2019 – I was feeling proud enough of my students’ work to want to show it off to the rest of the school so we put up this display of paintings in time for the first week of term to welcome people back with a splash of colour packed, as marketing people might say, with vital energy. A year ago now – it seems an age away – although your time at college has always been like that, imagined in advance and viewed in retrospect. Facing three years, the prospect stretches ahead an infinately long way, by graduation the years’ve compressed into no distance at all, so much so you hardly know where they went.
Exhibition in Cologne
There is something touchingly special to be told that you are one of the family, a kind of heart warming, humbling honour. When Trixi Mecky called to ask me to send over some black and white work for an exhibition, I admit that I didn’t quite get its significance. Until I got to see the invitation.
Pop Jackson Pollock …er, No
Perhaps you’d like to see this short film of a performance I did with my pal, Lorraine, in Berlin – we painted 5 x 5 metre picture in front of an audience as part Urban Art Week. The video compresses the half hour we took to make it happen into 1 minute 45 seconds.
It shows the two of us going through various procedures, processes and strategies – chance, tradition, disruption, and in the end, the power of imagination – to turn the painting of a picture into a theatrical event.
So to Berlin – an evening in September when it is dark by 7 o’clock, when it was okay to stand next to each other – for a collaboration between painters, Lorraine Durgeloh and myself, and musician, Markus Krispel, on saxophone, taking part in Pop Jackson’s Bollock
Memory
My good friend and colleague, Martin Ursell, is altogether a much better person at keeping in touch with people. He heard from Joanna, a graduate student of ours 
from a few years ago, that my presence on social media had increased DRAMATICALLY. Which made us both laugh. It’s only funny if you know I don’t look at computers, or I didn’t until this contemporary version of the plague, Covid-19, came along.
When Lockdown was introduced I opened the cupboard where the computer hibernates, blew the dust off its cover and brought it blinking into day. [Read more…]
Poupette
Marcel is a big-hearted, wonderful man; a tug-boat captain, hotelier and “daddy” to an equally brave little dog, Poupette, a Rev Jack Russell run over by a hit and run driver, her back legs ruined but never her spirit she dreams, between barking at strangers (me), of who knows what when she tucks her head under her blanket in her basket by the reception desk of The Hotel Rubens. Perhaps she dreams of the days crossing the Southern States of The USA, balanced on the fuel tank of Marcel’s Harley Davidson motorcycle, her paws on the handlebars, the wind in her ears, her nose catching the scents of the road.
- 1
- 2
- 3
- …
- 10
- Next Page »