THE STRANGE BEAUTY OF SNOWLIGHT

Out of my window at dusk on Sunday.

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VISITORS AND A PUPPET SELF

It was my great pleasure to welcome Beth/cassandra and Jonathan to my home on several occasions during their séjour in London and a few of us UK blogger friends, including Dick/patteran pages, met for lunch at a pub in my neighbourhood on Sept.28th. Here are a few photos of that occasion, not including the camera-shy and the camera-phobic.

Beth and Jonathan chez moi.

Dick Jones chez moi.

At the pub.

You must visit Beth's blog to get the full flavour of London seen through her eyes. Jonathan's photos will also, I hope, appear on his site at some stage - it doesn't seem to be online at the moment. 

Enthralled by the clive hicks-jenkins maquettes and by his idea of having an online exhibition of some made by blogger friends, inspired by his example, I decided to try my hand at articulating paper figures. What emerged was a creature who is an amalgam of Natalie and Augustine, somewhat flattering both of them. I haven't got the hang of making smooth joints between the articulated parts yet so it's very rough but I like it anyway. I love the possibility of making Naugustine move and am considering doing some video animation experiments with her.

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RAIN AND REMBRANDT

Outside and inside the National Gallery a couple of days ago.

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TOO MANY WORDS

Not writing about the riots because thousands of words are being written and spoken about the situation and I don't have anything useful to add. Those who have said the most useful things are not politicians or pundits but people whose actions are better than words, people like Camila Batmanghelidh. Or like the man in the street who had served time in jail and told a reporter that instead of wasting money and time to lock young mayhem-makers in jail for a few months, they should be put to work clearing up the mess and making amends to the communities, and individuals they have damaged. And though I'm certainly not a Daily Telegraph reader, this article also hit some nails squarely on the head. 

I had no intention of making a word-painting and the image below evolved like this: first I covered a large sheet of paper with splashy abstract shapes of the gestural kind. Then I decided to do a splashy self-portrait over the top. Then I painted over it with a grid of heavy white brushstrokes. Then I wanted some abstract shapes to fill each rectangle of the grid. Then I saw that letters made the best shapes. Then the words emerged. 

Greenyellowbluered    Acrylic and ink on paper

 

The next picture is not relevant to anything and I regret falling into the cat-blogging trap once more but Pushkine (she is female) dropped in again and is just too photogenic to resist. 

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ABSTRACTING

Still not used to my new camera, tried it out at Borough Market near London Bridge, on my way to the Miro exhibition at Tate Modern. More on that later.

Which do you prefer: the photo of the 'real' scene, or the abstract digital painting I did based on this photo? Does detail matter when conveying one's impression of something seen?

 
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OUR DAVE IN LONDON

 The Via Negativa is a road well-travelled, at least in Dave Bonta's cyber-corner of it, even if in the real world it is hidden in Plummers Hollow, a Pennsylvania mountain woodland richly populated by a great variety of animal, vegetable and mineral wildlife, every specimen of which our Dave knows personally, addresses by proper name, and often photographs, films or writes poems about. I say our Dave because he's a friend among good friends, first encountered in the blogosphere, then in New York in 2007, then last week right here at home. Here he is looking at the cyclops-eye of my camcorder while we talk - a rambling conversation which he recorded and which will eventually appear on Via Negativa as a podcast.

It takes a very good reason to lure this hermit-ish poet/ philosopher/ naturalist away from his porch in the woods and the excellent reasons which brought Dave to the UK for two weeks were a book, a reading and an exhibition. The exhibition: Clive Hicks-Jenkins' 60th birthday retrospective at the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth, beautifully documented on Clive's Artlog. The book: The Book of Ystwyth for which Dave contributed poems; and the reading of his poems, along with the other poets, as part of the festivities around this prestigious event. You can see more about all this on Via Negativa including links to other bloggers who have written about it. 

I enjoyed Dave's visit so much, savouring the peaceful attentiveness he gives to everything, a rare quality that I can learn from. The attention I give to the world is often agitated by ego-driven judgements and coloured by emotions - not the best way to use one's perceptive faculties.

 
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EYJAFJALLAJÖKULL

Unless you live on Mars, and even then, you can't have missed seeing this intriguingly complicated word all over the news in the past few days. Apparently its correct pronunciation is something like AYA FYATIA JO KUTLL but I prefer looking at the word and trying out the many ways it could be enunciated. You can see some videos of the actual sound and fury behind that name here.  What I find both hypnotically fascinating and frightening is the way the volcano is slowly pushing a thick, smelly amorphous body out of its crater, shooting lethal glassy particles of shattered rock high up into the stratosphere like some gigantic cosmic fart. 

It's been sunny over here in the past few days, but there's a gritty greyish cast over the blue sky, as if it was overlaid with one of those finely dotted screens used in printing half-tone reproductions. I may be chicken but I'm reluctant to go out at all - I'd rather be chicken than having my lungs coated in Eyjafjallajökull's sinister effluvia, even though the experts are saying 'Don't Worry' as usual. 

The reason for my latest absence from blogging has not been The Ash Cloud but the very welcome presence of my 11 year-old grand-nephew who stayed with me for the past week while his father attended a medical congress in London. But The Cloud did seriously affect their departure back to Rome, with all flights cancelled and every other method of transport fully booked. They managed to catch the Eurostar to Paris, stayed overnight, then found that the current French rail strike, plus the vast number of people whose flights were cancelled meant that it was impossible to buy tickets. Someone advised them to get on a train to Milan without tickets and just hope for the best. That's what they did, along with hundreds of other people who had the same idea, fighting to climb on board. They sat on their luggage in an airless corridor, carriages bursting with exhausted and irritable passengers, stayed overnight in Milan then got another train to Rome, and home at last. No doubt their odyssey was easier than that of innumerable people with far more complicated journeys.

Makes you think about how easily all our habits and certainties can be overturned in the blink of an eye, not only with man-made disasters such as war, but with nature's own unpredictable, and predictable, mischief. 

Okay, this is not realistic. I tried to give the ash cloud a sort of intestinal look. I drew it with an amazing online sketching app called Harmony that the brilliant Walt, alias Crackskull Bob, has been brilliantly playing with. Beware! You'll be tempted to spend hours, days, weeks, months, fooling around with the options this clever software gives you.

MY SUGAR-COATED STREET

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A FUTURIST-ISH DAY AT

Yesterday I walked from London Bridge Station and joined the hungry crowds milling around the market in Green Dragon Court overflowing with delectable Jamaican, Turkish, French, Spanish, Italian, Greek, German, English delicacies then along Bankside in the warm sunshine, past the Globe Theatre and down to Taste Modern where surprisingly no one at all was queuing for tickets to the Futurism exhibition. Ended up making my own humble Futurist-ish speedy little movie which you can see below. The soundtrack is mine, made up from loops in Garage Band.

The Futurists themselves did not impress me, apart from their typography, Balla and a few others who were more Cubist than Futurist. So much more attractive when reproduced in coffee-table-size art books, the actual Futurist paintings are mostly dull and formulaic, never achieving the grandiose aims of the infamous Futurist Manifesto of 1909. Leaving aside the manifesto's glorification of war and militarism, its vilification of all art, literature, women and pasta, the paintings completely fail to convey the Futurists' declared exhilaration about modern life. What's the big deal about breaking shapes up into kaleidoscopic jigsaws? Hardly breathtaking or revolutionary. Even Severini's huge Dance of the 'Pan-Pan' at the Monico left me indifferent. Yes, it's clever and pretty and looks like an advert. I'm hard to please, sorry.


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THE G20 SUMMIT

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ILLUSTRATION, INSPIRATION AND CHILDREN AT THE BRITISH LIBRARY

On Monday a wonderful event at which I arrived late and so only caught glimpses on video and still camera. I don't know the name of the story teller at the start but he held his young audience enthralled and their rapt faces were a wonder to behold. The man drawing inside the big frame in the movie is illustrator David Roberts, one of many who alternated during the day to fill the space in their characteristic style and sign their books for hugely appreciative small readers (Bruce Ingman and Joel Stewart are seen in the still photos). The kids were busy drawing too, stretched out on the floor or perched on steps, and the whole building was buzzing with creativity and enthusiasm.

How lucky these kids are to have access to so much live inspiration and stimulation early in life. What with the proliferation of computer games, gadgets and gimmicks, listening to a real live person telling a story and watching a real live artist making lines come to life before your eyes is a thrill too often forgotten.

My movie clip can be seen at Blaugustine and on blip.tv

The Burial of Mickey Mouse: still Part 21 (All about T)

I'd never met anyone like T before. He was a cockney lad and proud of it, sometimes playing up the nasal twang for effect even though he could do 'proper' English when he wanted to. He had been asked by the BBC to record a series of radio broadcasts about his working-class London boyhood because he described it with such humour and authenticity. The broadcasts were made before I knew him but I was given a tape of some of them and have chosen an extract to share. In case you have trouble understanding the cockney pronunciation, think Michael Caine and you'll get it. The talk starts after a short silence.

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Autobiography continues

The Burial of Mickey Mouse: Part 21

London, November. Autum leaves on the ground and I'm back to the single life with all its possibilities and all its fears. I have no money, I'm confused, sad, curious, excited. I gravitate towards Hampstead since I have a few friends there and I find a cheap bed-sitter in the neighbourhood of Swiss Cottage. Coin-meter for electricity, small gas fire to huddle in front of, shared bathroom down the hall. Here's an extract from my diary:

I wake up in a new room. Faded sepia wallpaper stained with strangers' stains, greasy cooking fingers, hair inexplicably stuck to the wall, remnants of strangers' lives hiding in bottom drawers, blonde hairpins, strangers' dust to be swept out and replaced by my dust. An English room, London room, Hampstead room, silent as the grave, grey birds perched on grey branches against the grey sky, melancholy with an un-modern sadness, a monochrome sadness, a romantic, barrel-organ kind of sound. And me, Natalie, in this room, far from my origins, gone the Paraguayan sun, the Mediterranean sun, the American assurance and all my busy kin-folk, gone the man that was my husband - was I ever married? Gone my childish games with God, building blocks for temples, all gone. Only myself and the room and my clock-ticking brain still caught in its routine convolutions, performing its trained seal tricks over and over again, slowing down now, aware that the audience is no longer watching.
I wish I could be swept by a monsoon wind, released from my hold on the everyday, taken over by vastness, by rage - not somebody else's, my own. Great white expanses of canvas upon which to imprison my vision now, not the next day but now, forget words rooms places faces upstairs downstairs receipts lists plans landladies jobs groceries clocks shampoo lipstick mirrors kisses heels clicking down the street the past the future the whole kitchen sink of it, overturn the table and really get going, crack the whip and watch the thundering hooves come charging in at my command and line themselves up for my brush.

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