C'est pas mon truc . . .

It's not my thing.

One of the more 'bof' - Gallic shrug - reactions to my exposition of paintings. I also had a comment yesterday that they should be more colourful. This is odd as most people have walked in and started back at the colourfulness of everything. Maybe it was time to get an eye test? or perhaps he shared the vision of the average dog - a rather grey spectrum according to the last research I read about this subject.

                                                              two not very colourful paintings

The vernissage (private view) went very well; lots of people, masterly improv music from Mark and Jérôme, wine from NOZ - I have blogged about Noz before - bizarre shop full of everything from dog chews to pants to baked beans to . . . wine, and often amazingly good wine; and since all my work is about recycling materials it seemed fitting to buy abandoned wine. And I sold enough paintings to make the whole event worthwhile. 

                                 Another fairly colourless painting underway in the gallery

Jérôme and Mark

So, two more days of sitting in that marvellous space wondering if the next person will be non-plussed or delighted by the work. I've had some fascinating visitors and some in depth conversations about environmental issues, recycled everything, my personal art process, and many questions about how long a painting takes - always challenging to answer.

I'd like to say thanks here to several people who made the event happen and happen in such a great way.

Mark - my partner in life and art, and jointly useless person at selling anything. He's been brilliant in all ways, and without him I certainly wouldn't have the art book we made before the expo.

Pierre, Hazel and Louise who were so generous with their time, and muscles, moving quantities of furniture and paintings into the space. we couldn't have done it without you!

And thanks to the Mairie of Saumur for letting us use this beautiful old chapel. What a space!

Sifting the past

 Well, down to the last couple of rooms in this moving house process. In our case a very large process after nearly fourteen years in the same abode, and we have taken on much of Mark's parents' and my mothers stuff. I say stuff, most of it consists of wonderful books and cherished bits of furniture - un-throwable. I've gone through my manuscripts (last post), Mark is attempting to discard old compostions, vinyl, harboured but unused instruments, etc, and slowly we are getting there. I think...

Amongst my material 'purgings' have been many paintings; some sold, some given to friends; pictures I made during a phase of painting on huge panels of wood about a decade ago (mostly). I wish at the time I'd made them on panels about two thirds smaller - I might have sold a few more... however there's only a few left, one or two reserved by potential buyers, and a few I'll take with us as a reminder of that era.

Made for an exhibition on the theme, The French Revolution

Today Is Disorganised 

Carcassonne airport principle runway

Slice of the Earth

Yesterday, I recalled a series of photos from a few years back as I was wrapping my stuffed crocodile, a top hat and  ship in a bottle; an extraordinary record of the planets inhabitants and their worldly possessions, or rather some of them - a record of everyone would presumably take about a thousand years and fill 40 billion books, or thereabouts...

The images are from a book titled Material World: Family Portraits by Peter Menzel. Below are two good comparisons - sadly I couldn't load up better quality - and one of our dog Gala narrowly missing packing up a greyhound-size box. (Not really...)

The past uncovered

And only because the garage flooded.
Mark went in there yesterday to get his bike out and came back hurriedly, face pale: 'catastrophe!' It was as unfortunately a lot of his music stuff was in there and is now fairly saturated. The other things that got part-submerged were folders of artwork - nothing valuable monetarily just artworks from ours and child's respective pasts.
Staring at my own sodden photographs, drawings and paintings I was seized with the urge to bin it all, so I did, holding back on a few things for . . . what? Nostalgia? we never look any of the folders' contents. Maybe it's just a certain security in knowing our pasts are there should we ever need physical reminders.
Mark's still going through his stuff and the purge-frenzy is not happening; most of it is laid out in front of the fire slowly crinkling into parchments from the 70s and 80s. Ezra's (son) art from age of four or so are more difficult to bin even though most of the pictures have leached into strange unintentional renditions of the aurora borealis. I've kept quite a lot especially the ones with surreal titles such as:
'very special piano and some chocolate,' a landscape with a tiny lawnmower, ' and 'a bus stop and people waiting at a bus stop and an acorn cup.'
Other casualties of the flood were all my documentation of the Wirksworth festival back in the early 90s; something I was very involved in for several years. Again, do I need all this anyway? Ezra won't want it when we've shuffled off this beleaguered planet. I've dried a few mementos and the rest of it's gone to the dump, the images of the actual event still fresh in my mind.
Possibly the best thing to do is document some of it, put it on a blog and make it into a book - which I did do with the last ten year's worth of life-recording. Yes, think I'll do that.
So, a few pictures.



Some of the rescued stuff before investigation



Drying. From the left: one of Mark's from Secondary school, one of my Beasti paintings  (Alfi Beastie's, Don't Eat That' book) something me and Ezra did when he was titchy, and another Ezra painting.

                        

                          A pencil drawing I did on art foundation. No idea who it was.



A later Ezra work - about fourteen?



A cartoon of our Geography teacher for secondary school rag. I can't recall his name now.

Colour

Walking into my friend's house yesterday was like entering a glorious multi-layered painting. Sadly, I didn't have my good camera with me but even the small one half together with duct tape managed to catch some of the shades and nuances of her chosen colour pallets. Much has been added and changed since my last visit a few years ago.

Her abode is an incredible, and almost edible, spectrum of opal greens, blues and lilacs, on the walls, fireplaces, doors, and contained in the hundreds of beautiful paintings and sketches, and works in progress. I found myself wondering how many shades of blue, green, mauve and occasionally bursts of bright orange and red could be counted within the houses's walls. Hundreds, thousands? It's not really something I've really thought about before despite having studied colour, to a certain extent, during my art college years.

When I returned to my brother's house this afternoon, I found he and my son were engaged in 'making a computer' - as you do . . . I asked what the thing was on the table that looked like a spool of 35mm film and he said it was an LED strip which could display about 16.6 million different colours. Still trying to digest this fact . . .
Here are a selection of the 16.6 million displayed in my friend's house.

continuing voyage . . .

Another in my train window series.