The Old Chapel

We moved into the Old Chapel (called so as there is a newer Methodist Chapel on the High Street) in the latter part of the 1980's.  At that time we were four in number (though number five in the family was to arrive not long after the move).  We acquired it through sheer luck...a casual conversation of my wife's with the owner at the time ...who revealed that she wished for an artist to take it on.  She thought I might know one who would like it!  It was, in retrospect a fairly crazy undertaking as the condition of the building was fairly horrific.  Over the years we kind of learned to live with it though we did do some remedial work to alleviate the most trying aspects.  What it did provide was a marvellous open space, pretty much untouched architecturally, that has made over the years a wonderful studio and ad hoc living space...as nowadays the rabbits Barry & Chloe now live in the space behind the canvases in the picture above...

End of an Era?

Back in Verpiana.  The house around the corner with the window and it's random accretions of items to cover it up as the car headlights pass across has been removed and replaced with a double glazed unit.  Behind this is a proper blind.  I guess there's been a change of ownership and a 'modernisation' that seems all too familiar in contemporary rural Italy.  So I suspect there will be no more 'Wentworth' style ad hoc assemblages.  Though I swear I didn't put the bottle of water there!

Harrington Mill

We took a space each (my wife Sarah & I) at Harrington Mill Studios following a chance introduction by our friend David Ainley to Jackie Berridge.  She and her husband Jem were still building the partition walls when we visited back in 2007 but we immediately saw the potential for them as a great space for us to expand our working practice as artists.  A year or so in and I moved down the complex to a larger space and here's a shot of our Open Studio event from later in that year.

Another Downspout

Of recent months I've been preoccupied with other activities, exhibitions, book projects, family affairs and so on...but the other morning I had to park a fair distance from my studio - in an industrial part of Long Eaton and spotted this one...ruptured as I passed by...

Laundry Daze

I worked several summers at Kneels Laundry in Exeter as a youngster - I guess I was 16 or 17 the first year and did three in a row. It was pretty hard work, we started early, had short lunch breaks and finished around 4pm. I bought a copy of the Who's 'Tommy' album with the first couple weeks wages. The first year I was put into the ground floor folding over pillowcases and putting them through the drier rollers - pretty soul destroying labour being both repetitive and in the noisy humid environment. I very nearly got the sack once as I put a 'tiger in your tank' Shell sticker through the machine "to see what would happen". The belt began to tear away from its metal strips and all the pillowcases emerged with the tiger imprinted on them! I was lucky that the foreman (a nice young lad I recall) took pity on me, got an engineer to fix the belt and whisked the printed on cases back round the system.

In the second year I got lucky and was transferred upstairs...here we sorted the incoming laundry and fed it down the chutes to the hothouse below. Upstairs there were fewer of us, the windows were open and the atmosphere altogether nicer. Our single drawback was that the incoming could be fairly disgusting - we kept a stick handy for opening those baskets(fortunately fairly few) with contents that included a liberal dosage of rotting foodstuffs and maggots! On the other hand once everything was in and through the chutes we got a few minutes or more occasionally before clocking off for the day. Here is another of the washers (the top guys on the factory floor) checking with 'us upstairs' that everything is through for the day.

Why Laundry Daze? Well another very occasional task (for volunteers only) was going into the enormous dry cleaning drums to scrub them down...a few hours inside of which gave one a really rosy view of the world...

The Window Block - Last Week...

Exactly what it says on the tin... I especially love the introduction of 'bas-relief'!

Getting Into The Art Business

I can't remember what I saw the first time I walked into Birmingham's contemporary art gallery, the Ikon, in early September 1974. It wasn't the show that's shown above I'm pretty sure of that. Located then in the Shopping Centre built over the rail station it was quite an intimidating place - you entered through glass doors into a long narrow space that seemingly was uninhabited (it was only at the far end that there was an assistant/invigilator) and if there was any signage to indicate that it was free and accessible I don;t recall it.

Nonetheless that first time was truly intoxicating - I'd visited Museums and Art Galleries before (as a student plenty of times to the local museum and on trips to London oodles of commercial spaces as well as the Tate etc.) but other than the small Exe Gallery in Exeter (attached to the art school) I knew nothing of the (then) developing network of Arts Council funded contemporary venues across the UK of which Ikon was one of the most prominent.

But I was hooked...from then on I went regularly throughout my time as a post graduate student at the Art School, in the year I spent as a Cheltenham Fellow and the year after when I was ostensibly studying for my PGCE (but really spending most of my time in my studio painting). So much so that eventually (stints of casual jobs and dole intervening) as I was known to the staff by then I was encouraged to apply for one of three JCP (Job Creation Programme funded by Government) opportunities on offer. I jumped at the chance to get my foot in the door.