"I was wondering how I could include the Eastern Gardens in the foreground (long since bull-dozered) when I came up with a Hockney sculpture park.
I had created a town planner with vision. Three months before its creator’s birth a preemptive celebration of the Barnsley boy’s genius is installed at very little expense by his persistance.
What a gent. And he didn’t even exist."
Before the war, my dad’s generation played on Ryde beach.
My Auntie Elizabeth, Uncle Colin, and their mate George Gribble who became a Spitfire ace.
My late mother in law, Barbara, was also part of that gang and she said she saw the Hindenburg glide overhead one evening. I was struck by the vision of this shining airborne giant over quaint Victorian Ryde, whose pier is being illuminated by a sunset as a steam train leaves for Ventnor, a resort to this day, relatively unhurt by the ravages of thoughtless profit.
I’ve made it a May evening in 1937:
The huge Deco dreamship is the length of an ocean liner and is on its last journey to Lakehurst where it will crash and burn in seconds thanks to its lethally unstable contents.
The insane sunset is a bit of a plot spoiler.
I was thinking about the woman, the pun-enabling Lorraine, and how she could be best represented, when in a moment of pure joy and coincidence I found my muse. Gloria Swanson, as part of an incredibly well painted surreal collage from 1929 called The Sea. The artist is a short-lived genius called Koga Harue. What convinced me was this figure pointing to an airship. Result.
I was wondering how I could include the Eastern Gardens in the foreground (long since bull-dozered) when I came up with a Hockney sculpture park.
I had created a town planner with vision. Three months before its creator’s birth a preemptive celebration of the Barnsley boy’s genius is installed at very little expense by his persistance.
What a gent. And he didn’t even exist.
"He’s had one last Gauloise, and steps through the gate under a waxing gibbous moon. Going home to his Empire of Light."
]]>I started this as 2022 got going. Chloe, my daughter, had given me the biography, Magritte: A Life by Alex Danchev.
I was already familiar with this genius and ever since an art school trip to see a retrospective at the Hayward in 1969. I was too much in love with the splashy painters (you know the sort of thing: Rauschenberg and general modern pop stuff) to be seduced by his style, but I couldn't ignore the paintings, the stillness, the confidence, the understatement.
This was absolutely right way to execute these surreal fantasies. I was too young to appreciate anything so subtle. But, of course, I realised a lot later that you can't achieve anything if you produce an idea that disguises itself with lots of arty marks. This was careful, undramatic painting, revealing these disturbing images as clearly and precisely as possible.
I wanted to do a tribute. The more I thought about the coincidences that began to reveal themselves (Beatle Paul, Apple, August 1967) then I felt I ought to give it a go. I didn't know at the time that Sotheby's were auctioning an Empire Of Light painting, to which mine makes reference.
Anyway:
August 1967. I’m a working as a waiter at a hotel and I haven’t heard the Sergeant Pepper track A Day In The Life, but coming from the radio of a Triumph TR3 comes this ecstatic tune, the bit that rises like a chaotic wave to reveal the “woke up, got out of bed…” interlude.
Unmistakably Beatle Paul and unmistakably the song I was waiting for.
A snapshot of memory that expanded the more time I gave it to develop: the car had a metal plate on the dash which said it raced at Le Mans in 1958.
The gate of Westfield Park with its legend, ‘Qui Si Sana’ (‘Here One Heals’) and the stag which sits on top of what we thought was a coffin.
Magritte died on the Fifteenth of August. His style is reflected in the mad but tight topiary behind the walls contrasting with the splashy technique outside.
Beatle Paul was a Magritte fan and I think was inspired to name Apple Records after one of his trademark symbols.
A few confetti hearts are rising from the car and are sticking like ivy to the walls of this old Victorian Spa.
He’s had one last Gauloise, and steps through the gate under a waxing gibbous moon.
Going home to his Empire of Light.
Lala, third from left, with her mates in Italy, 1958.
Lala, my mum’s mum, Winifred, who lived in Newport on the Isle of Wight.
We lived with her and Ernest, my grandfather, from when I was six for a couple of years.
She was probably the loveliest person I ever knew and I think of her a lot.
She was from Darlington, and was a nurse. She was one of six girls and a boy.
My mum Rita, was funny and intelligent, not so given over to sentimental stuff and probably a bit frustrated at having 3 children and one on the way (Dudu) when we got there. Halbery House, a paradise of trees and a real railway line.
But Lala was a glorious, kind and generous soul. I christened her Eyelye, because one of the songs she used to sing as a lullaby was ‘I li-li- Like You Very Much’ made popular by a fruit-headressed singer called Carmen Miranda. This got changed to Lala by Shar or Nigel pretty quickly.
I inherited and passed down ‘Lulla Lulla Lulla Lulla Bye Bye (Do You Want The Stars To Play With?) to sing to Chloë and Phoebe. I feel a bit weepy just thinking of it. Also she sang “Lullabye of Broadway”, and others. All beautiful tunes that have stayed with me. ‘Bye Bye Blackbird’ and ‘Daisy Daisy (give me your answer do, I’m half crazy oh for the love of you.)’
In the morning she’d treat us to ‘I Could Have Danced All Night’. Mum would be making breakfast and getting me ready for school. She probably thought she could do without a constant cabaret, but honestly the memory of her is so indelible. All those songs are late arrivals but welcome additions to my DNA.
I don’t think she ever told us off. She was so sweet, so genuine, and probably slightly eccentric, but when one of her sisters came for tea (Blanche, or Eve, or Cecilia, or her brother Lou and their husbands and wife) they would sit in the front room and drink tea and laugh and chat for hours.
Us kids always had the left over sandwiches, which we didn’t look forward to much because they stank of tobacco. And they were probably filled with fish paste, a hideous sandwich filler made by Shippams which was truly disgusting.
She was a great cook, and passed down her rich Northern cooking to our Mum, who could carve beef you could read the paper through. And the gravy. It was the best ever. Really.
She was so sentimental, but even at my tender years she’d tell me what she was reading. They were usually biographies whereas my mum loved whodunnits.
She’d recite poetry: Thomas Hood’s I Remember (I remember the house where I was born.) was a favourite, along with lots of Tennyson…
Her husband Ernest was bedridden with a dodgy heart. He was quite frail and not so evenly good natured as Lala, but he was apparently a really good teacher, and when I met my lifelong friend Pete Matthews when I was 16, his dad told me he was the best teacher he ever had.
She was a heavy smoker though, and she died in her early 70s ( not before having had a great trip to Venice and sending us all postcards, she was so thoughtful).
I think death was on her mind when she recited some Tennyson in our kitchen at Portsmouth when I was a teenager:
‘Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea…’
I said it sounded as though she’d be having a last drink before she’d set off.
She laughed and said she’d never thought of that, and that I’d cheered her up and would always think of it when the lines occurred.
That was typical.
I never met a more gracious, optimistic person and I treasure her memory.
“If you’re worried and can’t get to sleep J dear, just roll all your worries up like a ball of cotton wool and throw them away.”
Lovely Lala.
]]>Some anniversaries are unforgettable, indeed the 6th of February to a Manchester United supporter of a certain age would always be a date as memorable as one’s own birthday, but fused with those dismal images of the stricken Elizabethan airliner and the accompanying pictorial roll call of the victims.
The 9/11 disaster, without the Americanised mnemonic would be probably be recalled as another iconic image, rather than a particular day, that signified abysmal loss.
An anniversary whose date won’t mean much, but whose picture certainly will, involves another aircraft. This time it’s a Boeing 707 that, as far as we know, goes on to fly many more trouble-free miles as a transatlantic clipper. Just over forty-seven years ago Flight 101 lands at New York and on board are a British rock 'n'roll band. They are photographed descending those Pan-Am steps whose blue confident logo was irretrievably and fatally stamped on the hellish images from Lockerbie in 1988. To a wage-earning musician in America in those days, from lounge jazz trios, doo-wop groups to bourbon-laced crooners, it was a day that would profoundly affect their collective futures.
America, the home of jazz and rock and roll, had managed, by its sheer wealth of material, talent and entrepreneurial chutzpah, to turn entertainment into an industry.
Literally owning the copyright on post-war popular culture, they had successfully exported the experience of a rich, limitless, American life. A style of living that had such potency for the young inhabitants of drab, bombed-out Britain.
America had spawned Rock 'n' Roll; they had given us Elvis, Buddy Holly, Little Richard, Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis. We had, er, Lonnie ‘Putting On The Agony’ Donegan, Joe Brown, Adam Faith and, of course dear Cliff…
How secure those American performers must have felt. Singing their real American Rock 'n' Roll in their real American voices. Would anyone have bought a Marty (Kim’s Dad) Wilde record in Manhattan? It’s doubtful that his face was ever shown on American television or his music ever played. Why would it be? Those Brits; how sweet, they must have thought.
How sweet indeed, until 7th February in 1964, when 3,000 fans greet the American Clipper Flight 101 from London delivering The Beatles to America.
To anybody who was a young teenager the image is unforgettable – John in his leather cap, the band bemused, embarrassed, even – but the date is a statistic that means little compared to the incredible figures that chart their fortunes after clearing Immigration.
They had broken the gates of the citadel, and within a week had changed Rock 'n' Roll for all time.
Full Stilton
2020 50x50cm
Done pre-lockdown, but specifically for an exhibition (postponed) at the fantastic delicatessen and cheese library that is Compton McCrae. I thought a cheese on its own looked a bit bland, so I scaled it up a bit.
I haven’t finished this yet, but I love the path going up to the house, so maybe there can be a few more details to hint at the route towards this New Forest fondue party: lights in hedges illuminating different shrubs and suburban exotica. How could you not feel as though you were about to enjoy a night of special magic after you arrive a bit late, even with those forest roads threatening to terminate the recently replaced springs in your old but classy Audi.
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Up And Away (PS I Love You)
2020 50x50cm
Nearly finished. I wrote to a mate about this as I was thinking about it: “I’ve started working on another lockdown painting. I’m trying to make them personal; real and imagined little waypoints in a life that you have to magnify in order to make the images a bit more surprising than usual. I remember a few years back seeing a couple of 80-somethings at a scruffy marina in the middle of the Isle of Wight, both drinking pints of Fosters and doing rollups. They were talking quietly, but intently.
Nearby was the rusting wreck of a beautiful paddle steamer that used to work the Solent, did some time at Dunkirk, then minesweeping in the war, then became a cheesy night club and, as faltering finances dictate, an abandoned hulk.
I asked one of them what he did and he said he was a retired sign writer. I shook his hand, I was quite overjoyed to meet someone who had that skill. I said what a shame it was a dying trade in the Age Of Perspex, and he said they liked coming to this place to be near this beautiful vessel.
“When beauty was a necessity”, he said, and after letting that sink in, I asked him is that what engaged them in their intense conversation. He said no, not all. “We were trying to decide on the best Miles Davis rhythm section.”
So I’ve imagined the power of their nostalgia weaving enough rope to save this beautiful ship which like their art was designed to look beautiful.
That’s what designers did.
Why not create beauty?
Why do anything else?
"Sometimes somebody will want to be included as part of a an existing print; to take their place amongst the original inhabitants..."
]]>Piazza del Popolo
87 X 45 cm
I started making these prints years ago as a project that celebrated notable landmarks, where the locations became the backdrop to the people wandering around in the foreground.
Occasionally I produce images that are commissioned from scratch. They’ll consist of, say, a favourite family holiday destination; friends and memories, pets and ancestors. I’ll be sent jpegs scanned from dusty albums and cut them out, colour them up, and instead of being buried in a dark dresser drawer, I’ll place them lovingly in a distant dreamland where they’ll have the time of their lives once more, and forever.
Sometimes somebody will want to be included as part of a an existing print; to take their place amongst the original inhabitants, which is what they would have been doing anyway. Sara, a friend, has given me permission to show how it’s done. They do make striking images; and since they’re personal, they are strictly one-offs.
I’ll be happy to quote on a price for a print with friends and family, pets and heroes.
]]>When I was seven, the only art I knew was comic art.
The information conveyed with the least amount of time spent on shading, but a lot of time devoted to the important bits. Like the story. My comic history included The Topper, The Beezer (I wasn’t allowed The Beano, probably not broadsheet enough, I suppose) one day I found myself staring in disbelief at Dan Dare and Digby (“Suffering sputniks, Dig!…”) driving Anastasia full tilt towards some hellish planet that needed a bit of firm policing.
I can still remember the whole back page being devoted to something boring like the life of Winston Churchill or Montgomery, but the drawing was unbelievable, it was Frank Bellamy, the One True Master, wielding the steady pen, and drawing with such flair and drama that I can still remember where I was and the details. (The guns at Alamein preparing for the barrage,and a speech bubble that just said ‘Blimey’). It was at the convent in East Cowes in 1957; what made the drawing extra tasty was the day before Sister Katarina had come down hard on naughty Henry Thornton who had used this new word as an experiment in style. She smacked him twice on his face and told him never to say it again. Blimey Oh Reilly! I wonder if Jesus knew he was married to such violent, unhappy women. Maybe he should have given them more attention.
I didn’t pursue the comic art thing; there were too many good people. What inspires can also be a bit over-awesome.
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Ray Gun magazine came out in 1992 and I was a fan from the start, or the get-go.
The founder was Marvin Scott Jarrett, someone who attracted my attention on Instagram recently; he was being interviewed about the launch of his book celebrating nearly ten years of the magazine’s existence. To look at the pages again is an unbelievable feast; I’m still struck by the dramatic beauty and the mystery of the text/picture alchemy.
You either like music or you don’t, but there are degrees of liking, and I would bet that Ray Gun converted more idle listeners into die-hard fans of Eliot Smith, Henry Rollins the Flaming Lips to name but a few. For one important reason: to feel included in this hipper-than-hip crowd, to learn to decipher the bent letterforms, and also to relish the throwaway quality photograph of a figure on stage, in shorts, his back turned towards us.
Unforgettable.
This is a bold enterprise; one untainted by the quicksand logic of marketing functionaries. This would have been incomprehensible to the ‘make it bigger, brighter and bolder’ brigade, but you need someone with vision to allow writers and photographers to enjoy themselves and the art directors to do their job; in other words turn it into art. Thanks, Marvin.
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This print got into the 2011 Royal Academy Summer Show.
I didn’t fancy its chances much; was it too obvious, too nostalgic? Anyway it made it to Room 1 – the print room – high up and out of the way so you could marvel at Tracey’s calligraphy and Humphrey Ocean’s little dog etching, but just visible enough to make out the subject.
This is one of my first memories brought to life. They’re gone forever now, the giant, heavy ships built with a billion rivets and stuffed with the posh pamperatti of the day, ploughing the Atlantic between the wars. Cruise liners today aren’t the same; they aren’t built to take a sea; the Queens and the Normandie were over-specified in every way; they were solid sea-going hotels where half the crew would labour by firelight below the waterline to keep those huge propellers churning at full speed for three thousand miles of deep water.
Living as we did, very near the sea, we took them for granted, and though their time was nearly up, you still saw a lot of very grand traffic. My Dad once told me that when he was a kid he heard that the Mauretania came through the Solent a tad too briskly after winning the Blue Riband, and just before powering down to take the corner into Southampton Water, she created so much wash that Cowes got flooded. News like that does tend to stoke a ten-year-old’s imagination! They had so much mystique, these quiet leviathans, and maybe none more than the Queen Mary; for some reason the most popular liner of them all, even though not as chic a Deco fun palace as the Normandie, or as new as the Queen Elizabeth; she saw service as a troopship during the war. Painted grey and crammed with thousands of GIs, she swept to-and-fro across the pond with almost brutal impunity. There’s no way a U Boat can snare anything, even a small city when it’s travelling at 40 miles an hour.
Some time in 1953 or 4, I was sitting with my mother on a bus looking down at the vast empty beach of Ryde. When the tide’s out there’s a good half mile of sand; I could see a tiny figure at the water’s edge who was probably digging for bait but I didn’t understand what Mum and her friends were saying. I was about 3 years old and what I found disturbing was the sight of this huge red-funnelled ship, luminous in the thundery light, going so close to this oblivious, industrious figure – bending, digging and probably smoking…
I’ve given Ryde Pier the luxury of a couple of paddle steamers as they shuttle between Ryde and Southsea laden with trippers and luggage, augmenting the diesel ferries by a healthy and quite an aesthetic margin. Gouts of smoke show a fresh load of coal’s been shovelled into the boiler as the paddles serrate the green channel, getting briskly underway to give the passengers a close up of a looming national treasure.I used to wonder at the life on board the liners, the people and their wealth; trying to fathom their infinite happiness at being where they were, being who they were…
I think somewhere on board, lighting a cigarette with the last black coffee of the day cooling on the teak rail, squinting at the shore, is a very famous Hollywood actor, coming back after an absence so long he feels apprehensive and tense, not only from too many piano bar martinis, but at the thought of setting foot ashore in England once again, the place of his birth.
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Work in progress inspired by my mate Jonathan, whose vision of Bob’s latest was of a battered red sofa.
I plonked him on James Joyce’s body ( Bono said he played guitar like him) and put him some sort of sound stage which will be covered in song titles. He’s still a genius. An unbelievable genius. and it might just be that his best work lies ahead.
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