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...