Autumn exhibitions and events

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My painting cont'd II

Probing into the unmapped territories beyond the edges of the initial panel was exciting. The first move with each panel was to create a field of inconclusive marks without reference to its neighbour; a space for the partially resolved shapes to reach out into and conquer, as in a territorial game. The main guiding systems were already present in Panel I, a dialogue of dark and light and a conversation between large calligraphic forms and the intricate ornamentation of which they were made and which they inhabited. My own tendency to over-clarify the boundaries would have to be fought - i.e. gritting my teeth to relax. The more general question of how large this work would be remained open.

tbc

The Ghost Library at Elsinore (cont.) [Something is rotten in the State of Denmark]

Emerging from the Panton Street Odeon after seeing The Seventh Seal again (I see it once every fifty years). I realise that I now have something in common with the knight (the amazing Max Von Sydow) and his squire (Gunnar Bjornstrand) - I will fail to reach the same destination ... since they are bound for Elsinore.

And I am emerging also from an exchange of messages between my Peckham studio and the very castle in which the story of the Gloomy Dane is set. The author of the official guide to Hamlet's home contacted me a year ago having heard of my work the Ghost Library (which came down this week from the walls of the Royal Academy). His enquiry sounded friendly and was accompanied by a copy of the interesting guidebook: he intimated that Elsinore might welcome a showing of my work when it was done; a cherished idea optimistically announced as a probability earlier in the blog.

What in fact ensued was the most frustratingly tedious correpondence I've ever entered into. Not only were my sometimes light-hearted exegeses of the work (was it Mao or Lenin who said you can't make a Hamlet without cracking jokes?) crushed by page after numbing page of wilfully obtuse pedantry, but it transpired that my correspondent lacked the authority to accept the work and moreover would not support any plan to show it in the castle at all.

C Loopseend at 57talfourd.com

For a limited period a small number of the edition of the C Loopseend multiple can be purchased at a special price from 57.talfourd.com

Banana

Meanwhile I have promises to keep. One is to make an image of a banana as a campaign contribution in support of Turps Banana an excellent quarterly in which painters write about painting...a non-flashy forum that is not, like so many art journals, a pimple of matter on a mound of promotional hype or a few bits of critical prose that serve to keep the adverts apart.

I told its co-editor Marcus Harvey that I'd only met one banana, the disgraced former President of Zimbabwe. I have, it so happens, a poor record in meeting world leaders. Disgrace is a common factor, since my roster includes Saddam Hussein, Robert Mugabe and Tony Blair. If Hillary Clinton gets elected you have been warned.

For some reason some kind of skipping rhyme came into my head to accompany Canaan Banana . I felt the need also to rescue my lovely Olivetti portable from too many years of neglect. How pleasurably physical is the bangy act of typewriting and how fine the font looks after acres of computerface.

C LOOPSEEND

Meanwhile Embassy Signs Ltd. of Bellenden Road have, after some adjustments I made to the prototype, produced, in laminated plastic with perspex slide, a handsome multiple of my favourite device. I can't do better than quote my original description from 1965.

A shop that I pass regularly on the way to the studio had a small red and white plastic sign saying C LOOPSEEND. Since the shop sold yams and sweet potatoes I assumed that this was the name of the proprietor; the double vowels suggested Dutch however and I was puzzled each time I passed it.

Having seen this name for about a year and having thought it odd but probably liable to rational explanation, I suddenly came across its double in a second-hand shop in Ipswich in 1965. I was about to ask the shopkeeper whether he was any relative of his namesake in Camberwell when I noticed, in the back of the shop, many piles of similar nameplates, each bearing the inscription C LOOPSEEND.

For some reason I made no enquiry in the Ipswich shop but asked instead at the Camberwell grocers.

'Is this the name of the shop or a brand of banana or what?' and received the reply:

'No, it's broken, mate. There should be a sort of panel thing what goes over the top covering the letters so as you can sort of slide it along like, to make it say open or closed.'

I had failed over a long period to connect this sign with either its combined and opposing messages, or with the hundreds of complete examples I had seen in almost all the shop doorways in England.

My delight in the discovery has in no way diminished since I first introduced it into a painting (A Little Art History) shown in my first one man show. Indeed it has taken on new resonance as it reflects aspects of philosophy, science and politics that I have encountered thereafter. I'm certain that uncertainty has no more eloquent emblem.

C Loopseend, plastic and perspex, h15cm x w39.5cm x d2cm 2007.

[This piece, in a limited edition of 40, will soon be available to purchase at 57talfourd.com]

My painting, continued

The germ of my painting had been lying around the studio floor for two or three years, a left-over panel half used for a portrait sketch. I had idly taken it up from time to time, improvising on it with colour mixed up for a working day gone by (artists are great recylers). Shapes emerged and were cancelled out. Eventually some of these shifting clouds resisted change until the whole panel, though not resolved, drew to a halt. It hinted however at possible extension, looking now like a unit extracted from a larger work. I got Andy to make a panel of the same size (24.5cm x 30cm) and then watched the work spread, as if with relief, into the offered territory. Its shapes now suggested a yet bigger field in which some kind of calligraphic abstraction might... and yes, suddenly the dread tingle, the warning signal of the artistic imperative, the other side of whose alluring coin is inevitably long, lone sessions of excited anxiety. I ordered another panel...

I'm painting a picture.

Not, you might think, a surprising or original thing for an artist to be doing. But it is a long time since such a proportion of each working week has been spent on a single painting.

'Meanwhile' is a word I use all too often here to draw attention to the projects that interest me and are still in progress, some since the sixties and early seventies. In addition there is almost always a portrait on the go, for portraiture, especially in leaner times, has been my financial life-support system.

I do not yet know what size it will be or how long this painting will take, nor do I have a title for it or can exactly say what it is about. I shall refer to it (in occasional progress reports) as 'my picture', the ever present 'meanwhile' of my current working life. Here is a detail. More to come.

Crumbling news...

Another photographer, Heini Schneebeli, virtuoso imager of artefacts, is in the studio office at the moment taking pictures of Akan goldweights from my almost embarrassingly large collection. These miniature bronzes (often referred to as Ashanti weights), each an unique lost-wax casting, reveal a whole civilisation in miniature. They show every aspect of human activity from copulation to music making (as in the trumpeters above) and the animal world in all its variety. The abstract weights make a comprehensive inventory of ornament. We are making a book to be published by that guardian angel of almost all my printed work, Hansjörg Mayer, who on our first meeting (in a Corsham pub over forty years ago) announced himself my publisher.

Traders using goldweights 19th C. Photographs: Heini Schneebeli 2007.

Not another book

CRUMBLING NEWS: a small announcement of a curiosity to come, made topical by my just having painted (if only to postempt another design offered by the publisher) its title page.

For quite a few years now a little South London enterprise has been brewing in which the haunting still-life tableaux of photographer Bruce Rae have provoked appropriately atmospheric poems by Terry Jones. These texts in turn have been worked over (as one might say) by me to provide a further twist of reflection.

Publication now threatens - probably towards the end of the year in a limited edition...
Watch this space.

Art in America

The current June/July issue of Art in America features TP's extensive article on Hogarth.

A Humument: I'll go on

A Humument, page 33, 2007.

A brief birthday calculation tells me I must get moving again with A Humument. The goal is to revise, edition by edition, the first working of the text as it appears in the first 1980 trade edition (which is itself substantially a reprint of the Tetrad Press limited edition of 1973). With bursts of activity as each edition approaches I have replaced over half the pages with new versions. 163 pages remain to be reworked. Since I announced my intentions in 1980, I have averaged only seven or so pages a year. At that sluggish rate I would have to live to the extremely unlikely age of ninety three with a steady hand and my wits about me to complete the task, so I must get a move on.

All this but a prelude to showing the first page done in my seventies, revisiting the first page of all which started the work in 1966. Here is that early version, appropriately retaining some of the original drawing, seen through a burnt hole in a newly extracted page.

Twenty five years ago Bill Packer, reviewing a show of mine, characterised my attitude to my work saying I was like Little Jack Horner. It upset me at the time but I now see it as a fair observation. It is in that spirit of self congratulation I produce this present plum to show pleasure in demonstrating how great lines of the future (here from Beckett's Worstward Ho) lie latent in Mallock. For the connection with my own work see the lithographic portrait of Samuel Beckett.

A Humument page 33, 1966.

To Varian aka Silver from Tom aka Tom

Although in the first ten years or so of work on A Humument I relied merely on stumbling across names and particularities I eventually got Andy to make, in a little index book, a handwritten concordance; monkish work in those pre-computer days.

It has stood the test of constant use though physically it is now even more battered and ageweary than its user.

But suddenly as an extremely welcome 70th birthday present I have a finely bound, smartly printed, book version thanks to the kind thoughts and diligence of John Pull and the indefatigable Patrick Wildgust.

Thus I've been able when thinking of commemoration, celebration or topical reference to look up a key word like 'seventy'. However I still rely mainly on serendipity, having chanced on 'ted heath' ("who is Ted Heath, mummy?") and 'bush' in my aleatoric trawl. It has offered me no 'blair' of course and (not for that reason alone) I'm glad to see the back of him. Welcome twelve-times-cited Brown!

To anon & Mike C

To anon & Mike C
Feel free to talk on this blog however critically (or opaquely).
Re the Summer Exhibition I hung rooms I & II & can't answer for anything else. I don't really like to comment on another artist's work unless I am really excited by it as I am with the whopping Kiefer in Gallery III.
Lots to report but I've been more than a little fêted for the amazing achievement of reaching the age of seventy on May 24th or, according to my mother, May 25th, a date which Birthdays of the Famous tells me I share with Cilla Black & Dante Alighieri, in that order.

Summer Exhibition Update

TP's works this year are congregated in Gallery 2. No coincidence since this was one of the rooms he was responsible for hanging. As mentioned they feature The Library at Elsinore and the pair of Periwinkle weeks. Also Superjew, a collage from American comics. The three prints are together in the left hand corner of the adjacent print room. The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition is open from Monday 11th June until 19th August.

Superjew, comic collage, h43.5cm x w35cm, 2007

Forthcoming exhibitions and events

The Tom Phillips Dante Archive is featured both in the Bodleian Library's 2007 summer exhibition, Italy's Three Crowns: Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio and the accompanying publication of the same name. The exhibition will be open from 19 June to 31 October in the Exhibition Room, Old Schools Quadrangle, Catte Street, Oxford. Admission is free.

Another Dante exhibition opens in August 2007 at Dove Cottage in Grasmere, entitled Dante Rediscovered: Blake to Rodin. Though largely confined to the 18th and 19th centuries it will show two works by TP; a portrait drawing and a copy of the Talfourd Press Dante edition. The exhibition will also include works by Blake, Fuseli, Rossetti and Byron and Shelley manuscripts.

Recent prints by TP appear in an exhibition of work by Royal Academicians at the 108 Gallery in Harrogate 23rd June to 14th July 2007.

This year TP has designed the cover of the Garsington Opera programme and a limited number TP's prints will be available for sale at the box office tent during the Garsington Opera Season from the 9th June to the 9th July 2007

Works by TP will appear in Eye-Music: Klee, Kandinsky and all that Jazz, an exhibition about music in art at Pallant House 30 June - 16 September 2007

TP will be speaking at the British Library on Monday 24th September 2007 on the subject of Wagner and Popular Art. This is the first event in a special season at the British Library accompanying the Ring Cycle at the Royal Opera House.

An exhibition of new works by Tom Phillips will open at Flowers New York in the autumn.

The Library at Elsinore II

Here is an illicit sneak preview of The Library at Elsinore as it appears in Gallery II of the Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition. The mock bookcase contains real books overpainted in grey with titles borrowed from Hamlet in black. These are titles of actual books by actual authors in order of the apprearance of their words in the play. There must of course be more no doubt being borrowed as I write but these are all that my research has turned up. Most are (rightly I presume) obscure but others are by known writers from Lloyd George to Graham Greene with, most recently, Alan Bennett's Single Spies (Simon Callow suggested, he claims, this brilliant choice of title).

There is in fact a real library at the real castle of Elsinore. Its curator has shown an interest in exhibiting this phantom work.

Shandy Hall is in prospect and who knows but that the Folger may live up to its name and follow suit.

The Library at Elsinore

The Library at Elsinore (Fragment), 2006.

Shakespeare on a visit to the castle at Elsinore is to have an audience with the King. He is set to wait in its ample library for the summons into the royal presence. He finds himself alone there except for two rather overdressed courtiers who seem already to have been waiting for some time. He idly scans the shelves and takes down a book whose nicely ambiguous title, A Show of Violence, intrigues him. Its contents, however, seem of little interest. Replacing it he notices that the subsequent books on the shelf all have titles equally suggestive of emotion, escapade and death. So is it also on the shelves below. As if in a dream the titles conjure up, one after another, a sequence of speeches and events in a play.
As he reaches for the last book on the fifth shelf, Casual Slaughter, the door of the library opens. The courtiers look hopefully up but it is Shakespeare that the steward invites to follow him.
After his audience with the King, Shakespeare is returned to the library to await the coachman. He eagerly makes for the same shelves only to find that they contain a dull series of tracts and biblical commentaries...
Some such scenario or dumb show is the conceit behind a long planned installation, The Library at Elsinore, whose bookcase Andy has just finished constructing. I have been loading its shelves with the books I have prepared over the last few months and which have been lying in rows and piles around the studio.
Last year at the Ashmolean Museum I showed a maquette of a single shelf which contained all the titles (of actual books) that derive from Hamlet's speech, To be or not to be.....
Now the whole play is covered and next week as one of the hangers of the Summer Exhibition at the RA I hope to find a nice corner for it.

Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2007

Periwinkle Diaries I & II will be shown as a pair in this year's RA Summer Show (11th June - 19th August) together with five other new works including the installation The Library at Elsinore and new prints; South London Dreaming, The Autumn Arrested and a new Humument print.

South London Dreaming, Silkscreen ed 25, 65cm x 74.5cm, 2007.

In Israel, Epson and silkscreen ed 100, 34cm x 30cm, 2005.


The Autumn Arrested, Epson & Silkscreen, ed 25. 2007, 81cm x 81cm

Periwinkle Diary IV

Next year if eyes and hand allow I'll try again if only to relearn the artist's first lesson, so well and so long ago laid down in Plato's theory of forms. The classic periwinkle flower is an amazing construction. Designed (if one may still use that word without prejudice) like a ship's propellor: it is full of energy yet with only wilting and withering in prospect, full of movement but with nowhere to go.

Friday/Diary title, 5" x 5" 2007.

Periwinkle Diary III

I should explain here that these flower drawings, although I have eagerly chosen to do them, are not really what I am doing. They are, as I think of them, what I am doing before what I am really doing. And what is that? What I am really doing is what I do instead of what I am not doing. And what is that? What I am not doing and really should be doing, and presume myself to be failing to do (either through ignorance of what it is, or lack of courage to embark on it) is what Henry James calls the real, right thing. It is that which should be done, or tried for, before there is an end of doing altogether.

This is not some riff of sophistry but an attempt to verbalise those churnings of daily doubt which I have known all my working life; ever since I entered the garden of forking paths presented to the artist by the twentieth century. Somewhere half formulated has been an idea, itself a guarantee of failure, of making that garden not of forking but rather of converging paths.

Mentioning Henry James reminds me that one of the things I really am doing is drawing (for wire sculpture) the quotation from James that I made a pastel version of last year. 'We work in the dark. We do what we can. We give what we have. The rest is the madness of art.' Perhaps as I allow myself to think, albeit briefly, and only from time to time, it might be a real, right thing.

Wednesday/Thursday 2007, 5" x 5"

Periwinkle Diary II

There are three sites where periwinkles grow in Talfourd Road (including those planted by Megan in my own front garden). The most richly coloured variety occurs in the garden of Anne and Trevor Dannatt (Trevor is the other Royal Academician in the street) but theirs have been less profuse this year than last. I pick the day's victim on the way back from getting the newspaper [hardly dawn-gathered then, are they? - Ed] in order not to walk both up and down the road waving a flower like Bunthorne in 'Patience'.

Monday/Tuesday 2007, 5" x 5"

A Periwinkle Diary I

In May last year I drew a different peckham-picked dawn-gathered periwinkle flower each morning for a week, framing the small drawings together as A Periwinkle Diary. When this came back unwanted from a Jerwood Drawing Show (which usually welcomes my work) I viewed its return [according to my vows] as negative endorsement; a call to carry on. This year the first periwinkles appeared in March and now are in full spate, so I must start anew....




Periwinkle Diary 2006

Saturday/Sunday (2007), each 5" x 5"

[to be continued...]

A message from Bill Hurrell

No sooner than Part 2 of Miami Dice is put up than TP receives a message from his friend in Saskatchewan, Bill Hurrell.
"Another coincidence in our long history. I've only just moved from Indian Head to nearby Wolseley, a pleasant little town famous for its swinging bridge. I'm enjoying the blog but it might be helpful to point out to folk outside Britain that Wolseley and Austin (whose great library in Texas coincidentally collects your books) are both names of defunct British automobiles and that there indeed was a small 7hp car when we were kids marketed as the 'Baby Austin'. I shall, tomorrow I hope, be the first to toast the amazing Sackners with an Austin in Wolseley..."

Miami Dice I (continued)

So I stand on a staircase in front of a window. Behind me buzzards, and the occasional lazy pelican, glide by on the rise of cushioning thermals and glare into our sky-high humanarium. What do they make of the bronzed throng and the walls crowded with pictures? Many of the latter I recognise as mine, one or two almost forgotten, some I would not now know how to do, most made for love alone,
a few to impress
but I digress
I start to tell how I arrived at the cocktail scheme and how I wanted it to be about Mallarmé the founder of concrete poetry and first god of the Sackner Archive and to use his poem Un Coup de Dès whose first lines I have translated (for the spots in Miami Dice)

A throw of dice
will never do
away with chance

which by permutation produces a concrete flourish of ambiguity:-

Away with chance!
---
A throw of dice
will never do!
---
A throw of dice
will never do
away with chance.

Yet Mallarmé did not yield a quaffable clue which was a pity since the disposition of words on the page of his seminal poem was the liberating model for my own texts in a humument. It would also have suited the cocktail to be called 'aleator' (from the latin for 'thrower of dice', pronounced as in 'See you later, aleator'). But it was not to be, so I turned to the next in the French succession, Wilhelm Albert Apollinaris Kostrowitzky, and struck if not gold then liquid amber . It was under this, his real name, that Guillaume Apollinaire was drafted into the army. His comrades in arms found the name Kostrowitzky a bit of a mouthful so called him 'Cointreau-whisky'.
Jeremy King considered this combination mixed in equal parts a novel but viable recipe for a classic cocktail, to which would be added a dash of the poet's third given name, the mineral water Apollinaris.
Thus I had a cocktail but had to end my shaky oration with a stirring toast to the Sackners in a conceptual drink neither titled nor poured.
The evening continued ever more convivially with the arrival of Sara Sackner the filmmaker, and John Pull the eminence grise of my website.
Now the guests depart as they do in American events, like guilty creatures upon a fearful summons. The party's nuclear group finds its floridian way (ie without seeming to touch a sidewalk or encountering the open air) to a cosy corner of a cavernous restaurant, eating again. Then somehow Ruth, Marvin and myself are reteleported to the penthouse.
I seek a smoke and head for the balcony imagining a calm moment of solitude in the balmy night, savouring the view over the city. I open a door and walk into a wall, a solid rush of suicide-assisting air which if I hold my cigarette aloft smokes it for me faster than I could myself. Another round to the Sackners in their war against the weed.

Oh Those Reds... Acrylic on canvas, 1969-1973

Instead I sit in the kitchen with a cup of coffee facing an old picture of mine, the best of the catalogue of colours I made over thirty years ago with intervals determined by coin tossing. It is a special (and infrequent) pleasure to enjoy a picture one made long before hiding as it does within its stripes such mixed memories.

Mall Pavement, 2004, oil on board.

I recently revived this procedure when designing a pavement in Bellenden Road which runs along the fronts of the shops (in appropriate tribute to the ubiquitous barcodes). I echoed this in a little painting (now proudly using a minted coin of my own design, one of only 18,000,000 copies) of a projected mall flooring in black and white marble with a granite border in dollar-green.
But it is time for bed. I make for my alloted room, fearful of its ceiling composed entirely of mirrors. This was installed by the previous tenant, a famous fancy dancer, and has no doubt witnessed many a steamy and athletic pas de deux on the enormous bed below. Certainly it has never looked down on so drab a sight as the lone ageing artist turning the unarousing pages
of the TLS
but I digress
I did indeed find the name of the cocktail some weeks later when reading about Apollinaire in Richardson's splendid life of Picasso: how the poet first met the artist in Austin's Hotel in which seedy establishment I stayed for a month in 1955 on a travel scholarship, reading the works of Henry Miller while remaining unaware as only youth can be that the frequent feet upon the stairs were those of clients visiting prostitutes. It is still there in the rue d'Amsterdam though now considerably smarter and more respectable. The fact that it was also at the premises of a Mr Austin in Peckham that I bought the original copy of A Human Document in 1966 (unaware in this case that I would still be working on the book more than forty years later) clinched the matter. Austin's Furniture Repository has now gone the way of such emporia (replaced by Austin's Buildings, a more profitable property speculation). If a restaurant can be called the Wolseley then a cocktail can surely be called an Austin. One day perhaps I'll have an Austin at the Wolseley. Not my sort of drink really, so perhaps a Baby Austin will do.

Miami Dice I

Miami Dice (one of a pair), after Mallarmé. 12.5cm cube, 2003.

A quick trip from Princeton in November to see my friends and supporters for over thirty years, Ruth and Marvin Sackner. Boldly they moved (and well) as their fiftieth wedding anniversary approached, from Miami Beach to the penthouse of an apartment block in Miami itself. Great deflectors of attention, their celebration of both events is disguised as a party in my honour.

Miami and Party are synonymous for me since I've never visited the Sackners but that I was soon steered to some lavish gathering, the most opulent of which was to mark the blessing by a rabbi of a new jetty for the hosts' yacht. Was it at that themed evening (Welcome Aboard said the invitation which took the form of a T shirt) that a professional mermaid swam round and round a giant illuminated pool? and was it there that I watched the immolation of a million dollars in an endless firework display and was the sole witness, all other necks by then having returned to steaks like bibles and hat-high mounds of caviare, of its final showpiece, the sparkling portraits of host and hostess hovering expensively in the air with the coruscating, if enigmatic, inscription WE - WE - COME - YO - - ABOAR - ! and was it also there that a flotilla of imported gondolas ferried us beneath the stars across a small lagoon from entrée to dessert? Or was that the party we reached over many a bridge and small islet and sinister checkpoint to a gilded hall, loudly echoing with popping corks, where two executives stood with a tiny tape-recorder that eventually issued the message, "this is Baby Johnson saying Hi and welcome to my birthday party. I'm sorry I can't join you; I have a slight cold; but you all have a wonderful time now", after which the corks resumed their popping, a band struck up and all the guests started dancing glumly in their glittering gowns
and evening dress.
but I digress
for the Sackners are victims rather than purveyors of social ostentation. Their soirée was warmly austere, though the gay caterer (much praised by all and his card taken by many) had arranged the excellently chaste food with artistic precision as if feng shui dictated the alignment of asparagus spears, or some severe aesthetic one might call bauhaus baroque governed the relative location, on a dish, of ghostly chanterelles
and dark green cress
but I digress
suffice to say that all was perfect: but the moment arrives when I must make a speech, instructed by Ruth and Marvin not to talk about them but of myself. I have to ignore this injunction since what I say will contain my anniversary gift.
Somehow a work of mine would not have been right; their walls are already lined, their shelves heaving with them (as you can imagine if you check the Sackner Archive). I have instead devised a cocktail with the help of my friend, that prince of restaurateurs, Jeremy King who knows a thing or two about such matters and, moreover, knows that I know nothing.
I shall explain...

[to be continued]

TP on R3 Nightwaves

TP will feature on BBC Radio 3 Nightwaves on Wednesday 14th March at 9.45 to 10.30pm discussing the Unknown Monet exhibition opening at the Royal Academy.

Royal Academy link for more information on the exhibition.

Hand held

Two things seen together on my kitchen table both recently acquired give me as much pleasure and provoke as much thought as anything I've ever owned. They are united in many ways being roughly the same size and designed for holding in the hand. Indeed their tactile aspects are equally satisfying: each gives an instant feel of inviting rightness and in each the thumb finds itself in an instinctive position of control.

Both are exemplars of the aesthetic principle of high modernism that perfection of function equals beauty of form. What separates them however is the distance between their moments of manufacture, a space of half a million years.

The iPod represents the future as imagined in my past, from the forties when I read of Dick Tracy's wrist radio and the fifties when I voyaged in space with Dan Dare.

The flint multi purpose tool (axe/knife/saw) from Tchad, whitened by millenia of wind and sand takes me on an opposite flight of the imagination to when it was held and used by a hairier hand than mine.

A third object on my table catches my eye and picking it up I find that my thumb reaches the controlling button at exactly the same point as the thumbgroove of the axe. Although the phone, patinated by a few years of studio use, is not so elegant as the axe, their length is, uncannily, exactly the same.

All quiet on the blogging front...

at the moment. artist engaged in meeting deadlines, some small like writing a review of hogarth exhibition for art in america and some large like finishing the designs for westminster abbey: a memorial to the fallen in recent follies of war... though don't mention the war is still the watchword since this is a conflict memorial, a project which since first embarked on many months ago has had its up and downs, delays and disputes, revisions and rerevisions during which time another few dozen poor sods have met their end in distant and desert places. Tacitus still has the last word on such ventures: - when they have created a wasteland they call it peace.

Confessions of a trichophile

The long and the short of it is
that even my visits to the barber
are trimmed according to demands of work.
One aesthetic battles with another
under the occam's razor of art.

And so to George's in the Peckham Road
which I first patronised in 1962
(a qualifier then for student rates)
there to be shorn by George (the son of George,
himself a son of that eponymous George
who served me long ago).
He now snips off
a pensioner's percentage from the bill.

Scissorwork done, the mirror is flashed
the gown whisked off.
Then George who knows the ritual
sweeps up my shearings lock by lock
and (to the surprise of other customers)
wraps them in yesterday’s Sun.

Clutching my red top reliquary
I hurry to the studio
where on a dedicated table
crowded with bowls and jars
a dark receptacle
(courtesy of Tesco’s microwave meals)
awaits replenishment;
material for morning toil to come.

So on this normal morning
my Gandhi hour begins the working day
a time for tweezers and rumination
sorting out one by one
the white hairs from the black.

I long ago discovered
that though my hair would be described as grey
there's no grey hair to sort.
Nature the pointillist
makes an optic mix
changing the proportion with the years
(I'm running 60/40 now:
black hair still in the lead).

I'd wear my hair short
if I had the choice
but art that shapes my ends
delays delilah-time.

And all this to what purpose?
Why tennis balls and skulls?

A postcard stapled to my studio wall
shows Titian's Allegory of Prudence
[so loosely painted with such enviable ease];
a man of middle years
flanked by a younger self and self grown old
plus emblematic animals and moral text.

Also in the studio
casts of skulls
variously covered in paint, mud,
orange peel, or fragments of a humument.














Humument Skull, 1986.

Now three such skulls
entirely clad in my own hair
one black one white
and one in salt and pepper mix
will stand (when I have finished them)
for Titian's heads.

Instead of his symbolic beasts
I seek a metaphor
that might less gravely mark
the frittered past.
Macbeth is on my mind and Eliot
with coffee spoons and
all our yesterdays
and summers gone whose sunlit tournaments
(together with the Oval Test)
have measured out my life.

...., and all our wimbledons
have lighted fools the way to dusty death.

Enough of hair... but wait
I'll also have a hat before I'm through
If I can use my hoard for making felt
to fashion a fedora [beuys will be beuys]:
recycled life to adorn its place of birth.