Places

During the 1980's I worked as an arts administrator for East Midlands Arts, the then independent Arts agency for that region, and now the sub-regional office of the Arts Council England. When I joined, the regional arts associations were in their ascendancy, by the time I left, ten years later, they were being emaciated preparatory to being turned back into regional offices. I guess I was lucky to be part of a network that was expanding and developing for much of the time I was involved in it. For most of the time we were able to determine our own priorities and policies and pretty much our own way of implementing them. One of the best bits of the job was the instruction to 'get out there and find out what's going on'. I took this up with alacrity and covered many many miles over the years seeking out art and artists and discovering many of the region's nooks and crannies over the decade. This picture was taken down in the cellars of Rufford Abbey.

The Window Block - In The Eighties

I featured the blocked window on the passageway to Sue's in Italy in an earlier post - here is (what I believe to be) my first ever photograph of it taken back in the late 80's. The endlessly inventive ways in which the opening is patched up is a treat. It puts me in mind of the artist Richard Wentworth and his 'Making Do And Getting By'.

The Beauty in Rubbish

From a very early age I have always found quite a bit of beauty in rubbish. I was around 12 when we were having our end terrace wall rebuilt (it was in imminent danger of collapsing!) and had just acquired usage rights to my father's SLR. After the builder's had finished one afternoon I was struck by the symmetry in this small anonymous pile of rubbish.

Diamond City

A recent conflagration overtook the waste bin outside Diamond City...luckily their downspout survived the raging flames...

More on the Downspout!

Of recent weeks I have been in Italy at our good friend's house. One day in an amazingly hard and protracted storm I noticed the downspout on the terrace - I'm pretty sure that - in over twenty years of visiting the place - I'd never photographed it before. But it makes a fine addition to my collection. Though I waited for the sun to return first...

Papers Made - Papers Printed

In the early 90's I was working partly in Sheffield. I was privileged to be running Yorkshire ArtSpace where I met some terrifically interesting and talented people. One amongst many was a chap called Piers. His background was quite exotic and he was really into the digital revolution at a time when very few of us had much idea about it. In particular Piers was into digital image manipulation and had the very latest kit. Nowadays we all have stuff thats a deal more sophisticated but back then it was like he had access to alchemy! I'd been experimenting with it in a very clumsy way but Piers helped me enormously.

One idea I was working on tied together a series of purely abstract paintings with a notion of my grandfather producing paper that could have been the very paper on which I worked. I was fascinated by the fact that he had spent his working life in a paper mill in Hele, near Bradninch in Devon making papers whilst I spent a part of my life seeking out suitable papers to make pictures with.

I found a picture, probably taken in the late 40's or 50's, of my maternal grandfather, Wilfred Daniells, pulling a sheet from a paper press and liked the idea that I could be observing this process. Piers helped me by taking a series of images where we adjusted the light and tonality to make it appear that I, in my mid forties, might have been looking over his shoulder. The final product, a four foot by three foot print, of the above with the text Papers Made, Papers Printed was combined with the six framed paintings on paper and exhibited in an exhibition of staff work (by this time I was working at the University of Derby as Assistant Dean of Art & Design) in 1994 0r 5.

Another Country - Another Downspout!

I'm rather a fortunate individual, especially nowadays. The combination of time to spare, cheap flights and proximity to a regional airport mean I can, and do, often travel abroad. I'm also lucky to have friends who will put me up, or put up with me uncomplainingly. So recently I found myself in the delightful village of Caunes in the Minervois near Carcassonne in France. The village is a maze of small streets and alleys and - yes - here's a rather elegant downspout in one such location.

Oops...repeating myself!!

I just realised this is, more or less, a repeat post! Thank goodness no-one is reading this...

The Studio On Gas Street

Just after I'd finished my residency at Cheltenham my friend and I found ourselves invited to set up a studio in the upper floors of a hardware shop on Broad Street in Birmingham. Another ex student had found it and he took the third floor whilst we had the second. It was damp, fairly dark and full of pigeon shit but it was an exciting opportunity nonetheless. Once we'd cleaned the windows it was a lot lighter and the beauty of the Gas Street Basin was revealed to us. At the time (around 1975) the basin was still a quiet, hidden community of people part of a network of canals that were neglected and, apart from the residents, unloved by the vast majority of people in the city. Back then nobody much ventured up and down the canal banks other than a few hardy souls and the occasional ne'er do well. But we always felt it was a magical place that could be such an asset to the city if only somebody cared...

Nowadays our studio is a fancy Indian restaurant and the Basin is part of the huge regeneration scheme that makes dear old Brum a proper international city...is it any better...be careful what you wish for I guess...

At the Bottom of our Garden..

I have lived in the same home for well over twenty years now and at the bottom of our garden is another running diagonally across it and beyond which there was waste ground and a Rec until the plot was sold for building. Now the garden behind us is locked into a small triangle of space making it even more mysterious than it was before. It's owned by an old lady who is quite extraordinary in character - most of the time she appears to be completely gaga - though she lives alone and goes about her business quite purposefully so one wonders exactly what the balance of her mind is. And her business, for a good deal of the year is pottering around her land and making 'interventions'. This illustrates one of those - one of the less peculiar and unusual. Why and what she thinks she is doing you can but hazard a guess at...

Sculptural Possibilities of the Downspout

Something that has always fascinated me is the sculptural qualities of a damn good downspout. I was fortunate to take a trip to Russia in 1991 and found myself in deep joy in the Kremlin where a particularly fine crop of such objects could be found. Even more propitiously the consequences of Glasnost and Perestroika meant that such behaviour was less of interest to the guards than might have been the case a few years earlier. This one caught my eye as having an especially generous spout that would, one imagines, distribute a damn fine gush of rainwater about the surrounding area in a deluge. Of course I took pictures of the minarets and the mausoleum as well but I was moved by the downspouts the most...

Another City - Another Door

Here's another example of a delightful doorway this one from the most delightful and romantic city on the planet, Venice. It never disappoints even on those occasions (that I try to avoid) when it's the height of summer, hot and crowded. In those circumstances you really only need wander off into the lesser regarded districts to get away from the tourist trail - which is where this was taken.

Happy Days

It's a cliche but your student days are some of the happiest of your life. The certainties of youth, the arrogance, that belief does make for a heady brew. In the studio at Falmouth School of Art it sometimes felt like the making of art was intoxicating and invincible. Some time later (perhaps when I was a post graduate in Birmingham?) I acquired a Barnett Newman catalogue on the frontispiece of which I wrote a short extract from him "Studio Is Sanctuary". At the least that feeling never leaves you...

Prize Winner - eventually...

I'm just turned seventeen and I read in the local paper of an art competition run by the City Council with several categories for various age groups up to 18. I decide to enter the five that I'm eligible for. I make the pictures on paper and badger my Dad to cut me five pieces of hardboard to fit them and he then finds some cheap passepartout paper that I stick around the edges in lieu of proper frames. I was young, my father knew nothing about art competitions and we were fairly poor!

On the required Saturday morning, on the way into town with my friends (a regular Saturday jaunt), I drop off the work at the location that the showing and judging will take place that lunchtime. As we go in I see several large posh cars pull up outside disgorging youngsters who are certainly not the kind of oinks that me and my mates are with large beautifully and expensively framed pictures under their arms. My own work looks, to me at least, small and shabby. We slink off and go about our usual business in the city generally making a nuisance of ourselves!

Late in the afternoon we go back to the venue, there's only a few people left clearing up and putting stuff away...the event is well and truly over with prizes awarded and pictures collected. I find somebody and ask for my work - the certificates start tumbling out with the work - there is confusion as the organisers suggest my pieces are by two different people - brothers they'd assumed! - and it transpires that - after all - its the work and not the supports that attracted attention.

They seem a tad irritated - I suspect simply that I hadn't been there to scoop up my prizes at the allotted time - but being seventeen and irredeemably working class with all that inverse snobbery I decide they just didn't like the fact that I'd won the lot in the over 16 section!

It was an experience that sealed my fate - I had to be an artist - there was nothing else at which I'd ever excelled - and the die was cast.

Doors

Always loved old doorways - I guess most painters have. This one, I think, comes from the delightful walled city of Lucca in Northern Tuscany. Why the arrow? What does it signify? And why the really gorgeous painted band? after all the arrow could have been simply painted in white... But overall its a terrific example of what I always call the 'abstract vernacular' and I've been taking pictures of it pretty much since the first time I picked up a camera in my early teens.

My classroom at Queensbridge high school in Moseley, Birmingham in the mid 1970's I guess. I never thought I'd be a teacher and never really wanted to be one either. But having left art school and struggling along it was, in those days, an easy option. At this point I hadn't even taken the Post Graduate Certificate of Education (PGCE) so I pretty much made it up as I went along. I don't think I was a terrific teacher of art but neither was I a bad one! Queensbridge was a great school with good committed staff and smashing kids and I was given opportunities to join in the theatre production (designing the poster and programme and helping with the sets) and other activities but I never saw it as much more than a stop gap whilst I sought other ways of getting by.

The Window Block

I've been visiting my friend's property in Italy for over twenty years now. As you leave the small yard where the building is you drive out past this small wall with an even smaller window in it. I guess the beams of the passing vehicles (quite a few people park in the yard) got to be a nuisance. So its been boarded up over the years with a variety of materials to hand - one of the pleasures every time you visit is seeing what the latest configuration is.

(Hopefully) the last great clearance

Last summer (09) the rats arrived... as part of the project to defeat them we decided on a full and final clearance of the cellar. There was allsorts down there and here it is awaiting 'the man with the van' outside the front door. It hasn't cleared the rats yet - they are hanging in there making their way in and out up a mysterious pipe that ends abruptly in a rubble strewn part of the cellar that has never been touched - so maybe not the end of the clearance yet?

View from A Room

After I completed my Higher Diploma in Art at Birmingham Art School in 1974 I took a studio space in the deserted rooms above a hardware store on Broad Street. After we (my friend and fellow student at Brum and at Falmouth) cleared the pigeon shit we set to work cleaning the windows revealing the ramshackle beauty of the Gas Street basin.

Back then the canals were just about to be rediscovered but for a year or two the whole area was still a pretty much abandoned territory with a few moored boats and their owners around the basin and the rest of the network simply a place nobody other than winos and druggies - and the occasional ex- art student ever frequented.

This is the gable end of the terrace in Regent Street, Exeter and is the outer wall of the property that my parents bought in around 1960. It was taken a few years later when they realised that it needed a complete rebuild. Henry was the builder, or it may have been his brother - either way the brother was a terrific worker and did all the work whilst the one who took the job was fairly useless and often making excuses for why it wasn't progressing as it should. As far as I recall no one other than me ever really used that passageway though it had access to several properties on the other side from our garden..it came to be seen by me as part of my tiny psycho geographic territory - a little piece of the world over which I had dominion.