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.