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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…]

Berlin Altered Postcards

Melanie from London wrote on 7th October to say she had a copy of Berlin Altered Postcards, edition number 101 out of 150, and asked if I could tell her anything more about it.

An artist’s book

The work dates from 1989 when I had a studio in Berlin.

It is a set of painted-on picture-postcards of the city, a type of intervention I call “dubbed photographs”. The technique mixes painting with the base photograph to make two co-existing yet very different pictures. The new painting appropriates and attaches itself, mirage-like, to the original photograph. When we flip between seeing one and then the other image, we turn from reading the photographic reality to using the visual language of modern art to get what the painting is about. [Read more…]

Pop Jackson’s Bollock

Aldous and Lorraine DurgelohHere be snaps of m’Berlin performance,
“Pop Jackson’s Bollock”
Took your advice to heart
(not to be boring…..)
You’ll see
I found a handy help-mate and muso to play along.

Tho’ t’was touch & go whether I would or no
made me anxious
couldn’t say as much because it had to be fun, where free-spirits roam etc., [Read more…]

Chamarel

Christian
Christian

Chamarel is a village high in hills in the S.W. of Mauritius.  From there, in places, you can look down onto The Indian Ocean.  It’s a village up in the clouds.  Here’s a portrait of Christian, the town’s artist.  He created the look as you drive into the village – his distinctive style of sign writing is on all the restaurants and shops along the main road.  My friend, Martin Ursell made lots of beautiful drawings of them while we were there, in particular, several of the pineapple & sugar cane juice stand just down from the Village Hall.

Philosopher’s Beard

The way the Bachelard-Book(front-cover)world appears…, to Gaston Bachelard everything ordinary has an extraordinary something.

Years ago, back in the day of the independent book shop, while browsing in one (opposite, what was then, the Czechoslovakian embassy) I came across The Poetics of Space.  The paperback English translation had been recently published by Beacon Press. I’d never heard of it.

I bought the book for its title (after the standard test: – open a page at random, begin reading anywhere, see if I want to keep going.., try same a few more times – if all good – buy).  Eventually, one or two studios later, I got around to opening it (again).

Whatever prompted me to start reading Bachelard’s book, I must have been primed and ready because it changed me – the Poetics of Space gave me, quite simply and dramatically, a new view of the world, other ways to perceive things, tools to open up my thinking.

It’s written in plain, clear and direct language.  Which doesn’t mean it’s good for a quick read.  He gives you so much to chew on.  It’s so packed with ideas it can take me an age to get through a page.  Often a few lines of simple prose contain so much for me to ponder – setting off trains of thought which might play out for days! [Read more…]