Mum's the word

 "Look at what the little buggers have done...!  They've shit all down the wall!"  Mum was looking out of the side door and up towards the roof.  A beautifully constructed nest under the eaves was adhered to the apex with mud; the housemartins were well and truly at home here.  How lucky we were to have them - again!  Another Summer of their chattering and swooping and the wonder of tiny chicks to come.  Another Summer of having to sprint down that section of outside passage to avoid an unwanted messy shampoo from above, poo being the operative word.  But Mum, did you really have to say that to my new boyfriend on one of his first visits here?!

That was my mum, though.  She didn't worry about stuff like a few swear words, bugger and shit being her favourites.  Sod and bloody too.  Nothing stronger.  But it had been like that since my last few years in primary school and for a long time I was highly embarrassed by it - my friends' mums never swore. However, I think it probably endeared her to the boyfriend.

Anyway, yes, that was my mum.  And I was thinking about her the other day when I was sorting out some old portfolios and in amongst some of my ancient artworks was a very small selection of hers, even more ancient, which I had kept since she died.  It's a sad irony that her death was the catalyst, and provided a rare opportunity, for me to risk a complete change of career into something artistic.  At 35 with no dependants, the bereavement was the reason for my epiphany and I was young enough to take that chance, old enough to weather a failure.  You could say that the stars aligned, but... Mum, the one I had to thank for so much, wasn't there to witness it.

She was such an artist herself, always encouraging me, even taking me along to her art classes when I was a small nipper, where I could casually observe Joan and Daphne and Gerry magicking up vases of begonias in watercolour while I drew made-up story characters, princesses, cats, children and houses on scrap paper in biro.  Elbows.  Elbows were problematic, I drew arms which curved around with no joint until Mum's tutor stepped away from his paying students and showed me the  trick - dare to draw a sharp angle!  What a difference - never forgotten.  Then Mum witnessed all my personal projects through the years but never got to see me make it my livelihood.  She would've been so chuffed.

Before I put them all away again in a new portfolio I took pics of some of her larger studies from the '60s and '70s and thought I'd put them on here as a way to help preserve them.  There were so many more and I wish I had them, but they're now long lost to time.  

Bugger!

Ono? Oh yes

The young woman opened her bag and took out an orange with an almost perfectly formed circle of peel missing.  The flesh beneath remained untouched, still encased in its pithy tissue.  The woman took one bite, not of the fruit, but of the peel only, pulling a small section away with her teeth and chewing it, swallowing it.  She then put the orange back in her bag.

It felt as if my afternoon of conceptual art had begun there and then, on the train to London, sitting next to this passenger with her penchant for orange peel.  (I've never seen anyone do that before, have you?)  Following that I was party to one half of a phone conversation in which the caller, seated opposite me, unashamedly declared her admiration for none other than the odious Nigel Farage.  She looked and sounded not unlike Waynetta Slob, and was excited to share her self-proclaimed brilliant and feasible idea that Farage and Starmer could collaborate and "run the country together, as they'd probably get on".  See what I mean - conceptual art, surely?!

But on to the real thing...  I was on that train to London earlier this week to meet my lovely cousin and we'd decided to visit the Yoko Ono exhibition, 'Music Of The Mind', at Tate Modern. 

I knew very little about Yoko Ono's art until now, having only really scratched the surface (the 'Cut Piece' film, the footage of  her and John's honeymoon 'Bed-In', and her vocal improvisations with the Plastic Ono Band) but came away with a mind full of her various playful, political, thought-provoking and dreamlike ideas.  There are lots of interactive elements to this exhibition too - some lovely ways for you to leave your own mark on it, literally (a favourite of mine being Shadow Piece, a white wall onto which a bright light casts your shadow, so you can draw around it with a nice chunk of graphite.  Now several months into the show, the wall is covered in a beautiful tangled mass of curving pencil lines, and it feels special to be one of its many contributors). Or you can hammer a nail into a wall - as long as you're prepared for the trade-off to be a hair from your head.  Why? I hear you ask - ah, so you can be a part of this...

PAINTING TO HAMMER A NAIL

Hammer a nail into a mirror, a piece of

glass, a canvas, wood or metal every

morning.  Also, pick up a hair that came

off when you combed in the morning and

tie it around the hammered nail. The

painting ends when the surface is covered

with nails.

1961 winter

Some might say it's a load of arty-farty bollocks, I know.  I may have done once too.  But when you enter this exhibition, if you keep your mind open, and then maybe stretch it open even further, you can just enjoy a chance to think in a different way for a while.  Yoko Ono's way.   I think this is perhaps no better exemplified than in her 'Instructions' pieces, like the one above.  Simply presented in both typewritten English and  tiny handwritten Japanese characters, to me these really sum up the Conceptual Art movement, where the concept itself is the art, rather than a realisation of it. It kind of messes with my head but - it feels good, like discovering a secret chamber somewhere deep in my mind, I'm sure I might find some treasures in there I didn't know I had.    I found these pieces inspiring, sometimes funny, often philosophical, and I'm sure I'm not alone in wanting to try a few out.  Maybe like this mischievous one? 

CONVERSATION PIECE

Bandage any part of your body.

If people ask about it, make a story

and tell.

If people do not ask about it, remind

them of it and keep telling.

Do not talk about anything else.

1962 summer

Or maybe not...

BLOOD PIECE

Use your blood to paint.

Keep painting until you faint (a)

Keep painting until you die (b)

1960 spring

There are many more moving, serious installations too.  A single gunshot hole in a piece of glass with an invitation to go to the other side and see through it needs no further explanation.  Everything here seemed to have an element of hope about it, though.  It was also great to see some lovely early photos, film, fascinating ephemera, music with various collaborators too (a John Cage piece did wonders for my tinnitus) and even - brace yourself - some 'actual' drawings too, in the form of Yoko's pleasingly delicate pen and ink images, which I really like (apologies for poor quality photos):

Yoko Ono was 91 this year and has been creating and performing for seven decades, how on earth do you cover everything?  I don't know, but I'm glad to have seen this comprehensive selection while she's still around, and a lot of it will stay in my mind for some time, which I wasn't necessarily expecting.  

See more at https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/yoko-ono/exhibition-guide

'Tis the season to be arty

Well, it wouldn't be Christmas around these parts without posting some slightly less than conventional Yuletide pictures!

Hoping to improve my concentration levels next year and be a bit more present on the blogs, I've been very neglectful....  In the meantime, here's wishing you a happy, peaceful festive time and thank you for everything.

Artist and designer Erté, 1920s

Fashion illustrator Rene Gruau, 1950s/60s

Marc Chagall, 1930

Andy Warhol

Edward Hopper, 1928

Picasso, 1959

Picasso

Norman Rockwell

Brian Wildsmith

Salvador Dali, 1968

Salvador Dali

x

Paintbox

I’m all excited and gooey, ooh!  

Fresh new paints!

There’s over £100 worth of them here, can you believe it?  But it was time I treated myself and I've been motivated by a particularly inspiring commission which is currently re-energising me too, at last.  I may write more about that later.  In the meantime, just look at these most delightful little half pans in their individual wrappers, they remind me of lovely old-fashioned sweets (I'm thinking fragrantly fruity chewy ones, or perhaps those hard ones with the sugary shards that almost slice through your tongue.)

They’re so perfect I don’t want to open them but at the same time, oh I crave, I need,  their contents.  Each one a different, exotic flavour.  I mean colour.  Whilst part of me wants to resist even touching them, I will gently pull away the wraparound paper label, then the cellophane, to reveal the glorious pigment itself, so neat in its little half pan box.  Pristine, its surface so smooth, it looks good enough to lick!  The cute miniature container with the name of the hue in the teeniest tiniest print (about 1mm high?) on the side is like a tiny dolls’ house cake tin.  A tiny dolls’ house cake tin with a psychedelic loaf in it. Delicious.  I think I’m a watercolour half pan fetishist.

So I love them: all shiny, new and unused, ready to be ritually unwrapped and lusted after, and then… well, things get wild.  It gets messy, uncontrolled, spontaneous.  I misbehave and mistreat them. My beautiful box set ends up looking like this.

Granted, this selection is at least ten years old.  These paints really do last.

  

Anyway, that’s my thing.  A fresh new paintbox.  What’s yours?  The perhaps unlikely, innocent thing that gives you a special hard-to-explain little thrill when you see it first in its pristine condition? A new book perhaps, oh the smell of the paper, the stiff cover yet to be folded, the spine yet to be bent?   Or a big bar of chocolate, tempting you with the sparkle of its smooth metallic foil wrap, almost too mesmerising to open?  Perhaps a toolbox? Or a pack of vacuum cleaner bags? (Getting silly now.)   Of course, records always did it for me too, big time.  The shiny vinyl and immaculate grooves, the unchartered B-side of a new single, when every purchase promised a voyage of discovery.  CDs don’t quite have it, although almost -  I can still get that flutter when first exploring a fold-out inner.  And notebooks still do it for me – notebooks and sketchbooks, their blank pages exciting and daunting in equal measure. Long may we enjoy such nuances!

Of course, there's only one song that I really should post now, and brilliant to see with a promo film too.

Pink Floyd: Paintbox

PS - Apologies for quietness around these parts lately too, just one of those things!

Abstract moment of the week #11

I was so tempted to call this post ‘Just Another Phallic Monday’… but that might have suggested it was going to be the start of a new series and I’m not sure if I could, erm, keep it up.  However I can’t resist mentioning this once because it's tickled me...

I had coffee with a friend the other day who is not long back from a fantastic trip to Bhutan.  I know very little about Bhutan, but it sounds like a fascinating, peaceful and unusual place. Talking to my friend is always an education when it comes to travel.  I enjoyed looking at his photos of the dramatic mountainous scenery, people in national costume, the beautiful wildlife, and then he explained how there was so much decorative art everywhere, intricate carvings and detailed embellishment in the architecture, etc.  – all the things you might perhaps expect from a remote kingdom deep in the Himalayas.

What I hadn't expected, though, was to hear about the proliferation of imagery of a particular fertility symbol which here in the West we tend only to see scrawled on public toilet walls and concrete underpasses by less accomplished artists before being hurriedly removed by the authorities….   In Bhutan, however, it is normal to have it painted with great skill and finesse on the outside of your house, without embarrassment or censure, to bring good luck and protection.

I have to say, I do rather like the way they embrace it!  But I don't think my local council would approve if I did the same.

An Anglo-Saxon education

I took myself off to a very rainy London the other week to meet a friend at the British Library, where we wandered around an eerily lit gallery to view some beautiful art, literature and treasures from 1300 years ago. 

There in the semi-darkness I half expected to bump into Lance and Andy from ‘Detectorists’, for there was indeed Anglo-Saxon gold on display...

Exquisitely shiny, tiny coins, brooches and intricate heavy-looking belt buckles almost glowed from behind their glass cases.  The exhibition was well-attended – with white hair and glasses the look of the day - but no-one spoke, or if they did it seemed only in hushed, reverential tones.   It felt terribly straight and subdued in there, but I was excited by what I saw to a degree I hadn’t expected, and found myself having to stifle little gasps of inappropriate enthusiasm.

What always gets me about the sort of artifacts on show here is when I can make that human connection.  When I think about the real person who wore that buckle and the fingers that looped the belt through its clasp – that kind of thing.  And, as an illustrator, I wanted to see the marks of the artist’s hand on the manuscripts, the strokes of ink and the characterful features, and imagine the creator’s mind at work,  just like mine.  I was more than rewarded by what I saw – astounded at the brightness of the inks in particular – I had no idea that the vivid oranges and greens so frequently used in the illuminations would shout out so much, not unlike the shades and strength of the felt tip pens I used as a kid.  Almost garish.  I’m convinced too that people had better eyesight 1000 years ago than we do now, and nimbler fingers too, for the minute scale of the details in the decorations was quite mind-blowing. 

In the dumbed-down world we live in I’d come to hate the way labels on products often refer to them in the first person.  I’m usually irked by a pack of carrots and its patronizing instruction to “keep me in the fridge!”, etc.  But after this exhibition I realised this is nothing new and it’s softened my attitude. The anthropomorphism of inanimate objects was very evident in Anglo-Saxon times – the books that introduced themselves:  “(Name) wrote me”, and the brooch which threatens any thief with an inscription: “May the Lord curse him who takes me from (owner)”, etc.  Books of riddles too, a huge literary genre 1000 years ago - more proof that really we’re still the same people at our core, and that’s what I want to believe.

Even an early version of a word search, with a palindrome...  

I love the figure at the base.  (British Library postcard)

Plus, I love books.  I love the physicality of books, the feel and look of them as objects, their construction and their role.  Huge books of manuscripts with metalwork bindings reflected their importance and I was amazed by the sheer outrageous size of a giant bible (the ‘Codex Amiatinus’), measuring 2ft long by 1ft wide and an incredible 1ft thick, weighing in at 75lb (over 5 stone for those like me who still think in Imperial). 

With my desire to relate to the illustrators involved in particular, I was really gratified to see a lovely 11^th Century book called ‘Marvels of The East’.  Written in Old English, it’s like a mythological travel guide, describing the weird and wonderful creatures that can be found in some faraway Eastern place, such as the “men who are born fifteen feet tall and ten feet broad.  They have big heads and ears like fans”.  I'm thinking Martin Clunes.  Nooo!

Or how about this:

"Lertices, a small creature with donkey’s ears, sheep’s wool and the feet of a bird."

 (British Library postcard)

Or this:

"The Blemmya, a man 8 feet tall and 8 feet wide with his head in his chest." 

(British Library postcard)

I lingered long over this image, studying those fingers wrapped around the frame in an imaginative graphic touch, the benign expression on that face and that lovely inky outline and, never mind those hundreds of years that have passed, at that moment I’m inside the artist’s head.  What a great commission that must have been!

The thing is, I was absolutely shit at History in school. Bored out of my mind I would concentrate on trying different handwriting styles and experiment with coloured inks as Miss Jones drearily dictated facts about Acts and... well, stuff I simply can't remember for that very reason.  It's the human relatability that makes it come alive for me and when that comes via two of my favourite subjects, art and language, as it did in this exhibition - I'm in.  And seeing that Anglo-Saxon gold, well, to paraphrase Lance, it's surely "... the closest you'll get to time travel".  Definitely worth a trip to a very rainy London.

'Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms: Art, Word, War' at the British Library, until 19 February 2019

Name that tune

A very quick lazy post today, but this clever and original music-related artwork really appeals.  As someone who thinks visually (often to my detriment), loves nature and who has difficulty remembering lyrics, I think I’d like every one of my favourite songs to be illustrated by graphic artist Katrina McHugh.

Take a look here.....

Lost for words - part two

“Once upon a time, words began to vanish from the language of children.  They disappeared so quietly that at first almost no-one noticed….”

So begins a beautiful book called ‘The Lost Words’, written by Robert MacFarlane and illustrated by Jackie Morris.

I treated myself to it, as a lover of language and nature and illustration – a large, heavy hardback, tinted liberally with gold, flooded with watercolour washes on some spreads and unafraid of the boldness of white space on others - a work of art in the truest sense.  Birds and letters of the alphabet flit and fly through its pages as the author casts magic spells to reinvoke the ‘lost words’ of the title.  What lost words are these?  Words like rapscallion and farthingale?  Erm, no - but tell you in a minute. 

Although categorised as a children’s book, it’s far more than that - not a story book but poetic and playful, written to be read aloud - like incantations.  But the story behind the book’s existence is also really worth telling.

Once upon a time (in 2007), the editors of the latest version of the Oxford Junior Dictionary faced a dilemma when they needed to find room for contemporary words like ‘analogue’, ‘broadband’ and ‘celebrity’, meaning that several others previously included would have to go.

I’ve no idea how I'd make decisions about which words to replace, and I realise it’d need a lot of thought, but I’d have difficulty culling any connected to nature, I know that.  The natural world is under threat from so many different corners and yet so vital to our well-being, I feel its vocabulary is at least one thing we can easily protect and ensure it stays alive in the minds of its future inheritors.

Still, unfortunately, several words I was really surprised about lost their place in the new edition.  Nature words, like these ones….

                                    Bluebell

                                                                                                  Magpie

                              Conker

                                                         Kingfisher

                                                                                  Blackberry

                                                  Starling

                                                                      Acorn
                                                                                              Newt

That's just a small example.  Maybe I'm being sentimental and old-fashioned, but I feel quite sad about this - I don't ever want a celebrity to have priority over a conker, in any form.

If you feel the same, at least know we’re not alone - when news of these changes came to light, there was quite an outcry.  (Read more here if you’re interested...)

And what better motivation could there be than that to create a sumptuous tribute to these newly 'lost' words, something thought-provoking and exquisite, both literally and visually, to be lingered over and treasured?  Indeed, the depth of feeling led to a collaboration between this hugely talented author and illustrator, and then to this remarkable book.   Not only that, but a proportion of the profits is also being donated to the Action For Conservation charity.  I guess that must be our happy ending.

Rod or Renoir? The cover art of the art cover, part 2. Includes snogging.

I had my first, proper tongues-included kiss to Rod Stewart’s ‘First Cut Is The Deepest’.  It was with an identical twin and it was awful. Not that those two things are connected.  But they were both slobbery.

It  was Spring 1977, I was thirteen, liberally doused in Charlie perfume and wearing a cheesecloth blouse in pale blue to match my eyeshadow, unaware that my little white padded bra beneath it was illuminated like a neon sign in the ultraviolet lights of the local disco.  The twins – who seemed really old, I mean they must’ve been about fifteen -  flirted clumsily with my friend and me and then when Rod’s ballad came on one of them grabbed me and the next thing I knew we were doing that weird, awkward, rotating thing they call a slow dance. Halfway through he asked me if I’d ever kissed anyone before.  I told him I hadn’t.  What followed was a lot of mangling of lips, teeth and tongues and some unpleasant exchanges of dribble.  I’m just glad I'd taken both my dental braces out earlier that night or there could've been some serious injury involving wire and tonsils.  But I was off the starting blocks.

So whenever I hear that track I’m there again, uncomfortable and naïve, French kissing a boy I didn’t fancy one iota but feeling strangely proud for trying it, even if it left me slightly traumatised and in need of water, a bit like taking part in a chili eating contest.  I’d been practising it on the back of my hand for months, after all, so it was about time I tried it on something that moved and, mainly due to her 'beef chunks in jelly' halitosis, the cat was not really an option.

What I didn’t know about that song at the time was that before being released as a double A side with ’I Don’t Want To Talk About It’ and reaching No. 1 in the singles chart, it had appeared on Rod’s 1976 album ‘A Night On The Town’.

What I also didn’t realise at that time because my familiarity with impressionists did not extend beyond Mike Yarwood, was that the sleeve art for ‘A Night On The Town’ was a pastiche of a famous piece of art from 100 years earlier: ‘Bal du Moulin de la Galette’ by Pierre-Auguste Renoir.  Just like identical twins (oh the connections keep coming!), they were superficially alike but not exactly the same.

Now which one do you prefer?

Renoir’s beautiful depiction of Parisians dancing and feasting on a Sunday afternoon, an Impressionist masterpiece full of life and joy, with its richness of colour and the incredible sense of light, dappled through the trees, almost flickering off the canvas, and all those shapes and forms fitting together so well, so organically?

Or the same scene as painted by Mike Bryan, so self-consciously copied that the lines and brush strokes look rigid, that lovely fluid quality that Renoir achieved is sadly missing, the softness of the faces hardened, the figures flat, the illuminated hues of a balmy afternoon now duller and more like a morning in February?

And its pièce de résistance - grinning out at us from underneath an ill-advised straw boater (I know he just wants to fit in with 19th century Paris but the mullet is a giveaway, he’d make a crap time-traveller) is Rod himself - looking more like a schoolgirl from St Trinians than a raspy-voiced ladies' man.  

I'm not saying that I could have painted a copy any better, I couldn't - just that, like Morris Dancing and incest, some things in life are best left untried.

It's a no-brainer as far as I’m concerned.

Still, it gives me an excuse to include a far superior version and great live performance of ‘First Cut Is The Deepest’ (written by Cat Stevens), sung by PP Arnold in 1967.  I do like this rendition and the good thing about it is that it helps me to disassociate the song from the snog.  Let's just say, the first kiss was not the deepest…

The cover art of the art cover

There’s a series of paintings by Magritte which I love: L’empire de Lumières (Empire of Light).   I love them because they’re impossible.

The sky tells you it’s daytime, but everything else shows it’s night.  At first it looks like some kind of twilight scene, but the sky is full of light and the light should go somewhere - it doesn't.  Instead the trees and ground are in darkness, the buildings illuminated only by a streetlamp.  Magritte’s art is full of the unexpected, of little visual tricks and playful combinations that don’t go together naturally.   I had no idea that I’d ever be saying the same thing about Jackson Browne.

But here it is – the cover art to Jackson’s album ‘Late For The Sky’.

Thanks to it being featured at  Rol’s very fine blog My Top Ten,  it was the first time I've taken notice of the sleeve which I must’ve flicked past in record shop racks many times before now.  But the picture is brilliantly inspired by the Magritte series, this time a photographic sky of vivid daytime blue with bright white clouds which could only be lit by strong sunshine so, like the painting,  everything else should be too - but no.  Clever, innit?  I still prefer Magritte, though. 

Anyway it got me thinking… about art and album covers and how there are others that also take their influence from well-known paintings.  One of them sprang to mind straight away.

Bow Wow Wow: 

See Jungle!  See Jungle! Go Join Your Gang Yeah.  City All Over! Go Ape Crazy!
1981

It's still controversial because we're aware that Annabella Lwin was only 15 at the time of the photo shoot.   When asked in later years if she realised how 'shocking' the image was she replied that she didn't and that the difficult part for her was really just the act of sitting there naked in the middle of nowhere on a cold early morning with her clothed male band mates. The original Manet painting had also been thought of as offensive (though for different reasons) and was rejected by the official art exhibition (the Salon) in France at the time of its creation in the 1860s.  It wasn't the nudity itself that was the problem (hardly unusual in art!) but something about the context. 

Edouard Manet:

Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe 1863

However this wasn't the first time a painting of nude women in the outdoors with clothed men had been exhibited in France so it seems a bit hypocritical.  Manet was influenced by this one on display in the Louvre, painted over 300 years earlier.

It's not known whether this is by Giorgione or Titian
Fiestra Campestre,  1510

At Bow Wow Wow's peak anyone buying their records was already familiar with seeing photos of Annabella without many clothes on, and I don't remember this cover seeming as outrageous in 1981 as it probably would be now, although it still ruffled feathers - just as Malcolm McLaren intended it to.  The publicity worked - the album quickly made it to No. 1 in the charts - but a less happy outcome of that cover was a rift it caused between Annabella and her mum.

But I know I readily accepted it - as art, I suppose - at the time of its release, when I was just 17 myself.  I might have done the same as Annabella at 15 and I doubt I'd have ever thought of it as anything dark, especially with band mates - more just embarrassing, but also rebellious.  Perhaps the fact that it was an obvious pastiche of a painting made all the difference?  Also I can't help thinking about how the photo shoot must have felt in real terms, all waiting around for the right light and getting the technical details in order whilst hoping your, erm, goose pimples don't show, a bit like life modelling with a broken fan heater.

I've been looking at other album covers inspired by famous paintings too so I've some lined up for future posts (oh, another series!)  As in the thoroughly enjoyable one over at Charity Chic Music where we get to weigh up a wide selection of cover versions with their originals (the outcome for Bob Dylan was victorious but we've yet find how it’s all going to pan out for Bruce Springsteen) I found myself wanting to rate which one I preferred.  Most of the time it's the original painting but I'd have to give my points to Bow Wow Wow for this one - the lushness of the setting and Annabella's typically defiant expression take me right back to this great song (which I can't embed because Blogger won't let me - censorship all over again? - so here's a youtube link)

Bow Wow Wow: Chihuahua

And here's that fantastic clip of Annabella sticking it to the extremely condescending BA Robertson.

"All froth and flounce..."?  What a dickhead.

The Artist

He reminded me of someone from a different era – like that early ‘70s art scene that permeated my childhood, the one with bearded men and batik throws.   It was as if he had been plucked from that setting and that time and placed in the present without having traversed the interim years.   Wild black hair, second-hand velvet jacket, the huge rubber plant in the flat, chipped stoneware bowls, Leonard Cohen and Frank Zappa on C90s.  Thirty years' worth or more of magazines, mostly already cut-up ready for use, on every available surface. The smell of paint mingling with the smell of mildew and recently baked herring.  And his art everywhere, on every wall and piled up on the floor: works in progress, finished pieces, huge canvasses, boxed constructions from reclaimed household objects, book-like collaged miniatures, pertinent words scrawled in inky black spidery script.  He taught me about the artists he loved and who inspired him - Kurt Schwitters and Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly and Duchamp – well, so much Art.  He always spelled Art with a capital A.  He said it with one too.  I'll be honest - he frustrated me at times, his life was messy, his choices often unwise, but friendship endured.

Well, it would have been his 58^th birthday today.  Sadly he was the second of two of my friends who died last year, and his death was most unexpected, so it still feels a little unreal.

But I don’t want this to be a sad post, there is enough misery in the world and I need to keep myself upbeat. 

Instead I’ll celebrate his birthday by sharing some of his work, now hanging on new walls in different homes.  Isn't this the lovely thing about Art? -  it lives on.

Travels in East Anglia

Yesterday I jumped on a train to visit a friend I haven't seen in ages.  The first part of the journey is on one with just two carriages. The second station it goes through is home to the East Anglian Railway Museum, so you never know what you're going to see on the track next to you when it stops there. I was very chuffed one time to see 'Captain Sensible' (in locomotive form...)

Nothing quite so memorable this trip but I take the opportunity to point my camera through three sets of windows as we pull up next to one of the exhibits.

And I like this logo.  You can't go wrong with a dragon red lion! (thanks, mondoagogo)

The view from the viaduct always thrills me; it's the height, you see – don't get many of them round here. It's about 80ft up and I love the way the houses below look like little models.

The train continues through the flat fields... the clouds give a real sense of distance. Gorgeous day, isn't it?

A few minutes later I'm on another train - four carriages this time.  We pass through Colchester.

What can I tell you about Colchester?  It's meant to be the oldest town in Britain, and in Roman times it was their capital here. It has a medieval castle, a zoo and a garrison and was also once home to Damon Albarn and Graham Coxon. Many many years ago I saw Joe Orton's play 'Loot' in Colchester - very good it was, too.

I take a few snaps as we make our way through more flat fields...

... and abandoned industrial areas.

My train journey finishes at Ipswich, where I walk across the bridge over the River Orwell towards the centre. I don't know this city at all and find its simple unfamiliarity oddly exciting.

What can I tell you about Ipswich? It's another one of England's oldest towns, home to the Tractor Boys (not a band but Ipswich Town Football Club).  Nik Kershaw once lived in Ipswich... as did a band I recall hearing on John Peel back in around 1980 I think, the Adicts:

Do you remember them and their Clockwork Orange look?

Anyway... I find my way to an old street and into a sweetly-scented gift shop, above which is a small art gallery, where my friend greets me. There's a sign at the bottom of the stairs warning that some of the work on show is not suitable for children...

I really enjoy looking at my friend's creations* and I'm so pleased to see them on display:

Then we walk down to the waterfront. It's a somewhat schizophrenic place; perhaps the same could be said about every city. The bright white yachts on the sparkling water are photogenic enough but other sights catch my eye more.

We have lunch in a quayside bar, watched over by this chap; I've no idea why he's there...

...and enjoy catching up on life over chips and a pint of Black Horse Stout from the local brewery, which the barmaid tempted us to try, because we'd asked for Guinness.  It tastes just like Guinness.

As the afternoon draws to  a close I decide to catch the bus home so I can enjoy a different journey and views from the top deck.  Parts of Ipswich's outskirts are grim.  In the distance I notice an end of terrace house with large words spray-painted across its grey wall 'KEEP AHHT! GUARD DOG'. The phonetic spelling makes me laugh but the thought of living next door has me shuddering. Then the bus swings out into open countryside again and I spend the next hour hanging onto the yellow rail as it lurches around the tight bends. I try to take some photos but not very successfully - this old barn looked more interesting from the other side.

I wish I could have captured the rotting exoskeleton of the old coach I noticed in someone's back garden, and the llamas too - we have lots of llama farms round here - but I wasn't quick enough, or steady enough, with my camera.  Never mind, I just love looking through the windows.

* for more info on the artist whose work I've shared here please email me