Second Coat

Back from meetings at the Uni and as a counter to a rather grey, drizzly day - more work on the painting:

> with the pink, egg white containing surround almost dry, I applied a red strawberry/salt layer all over, so that the margins were covered and the liquid began to pool in the centre, which was my intention (so that larger crystals will form there).

> currently uncertain as to what the difference will be to those areas underpinned by the printer paper sheet as opposed to the bare canvas but it may be that the vermillion colour is held more fast.

> hard to photograph the painting under neon light (I began work on it around 8pm) so I have provided a couple of images. You can see from these the beginning of compositional features.

> prepared a mix of salt/strawberry tops containing foliage as a separate liquid, but haven't used it as yet.


As always, look forward to seeing what happens next - I'm one of those odd people that finds watching paint dry fascinating.

'I'm painting, I'm painting again'

As the song says*


Just for the hell of it rapidly assembled a painting:

> glued an A4 sheet of printer paper to the right-hand side of a square canvas. Placed canvas flat and face up on my kitchen table, wooden supports and newspaper underneath.

> took half of the strawberry/salt mix I prepared a couple of days ago and whisked it with three egg whites to produce a pink froth (idea I've had for a while - want to see if the egg-white gives a more viscous, therefore more crystal-encouraging medium). Mixture was pinker than I had anticipated. The fried egg yolk sandwiches were delicious.

> applied pink froth to the edges of the canvas (see photos).

> will revisit tonight.



* 'Artists Only' by Talking Heads

'I'm painting, I'm painting again.
I'm painting, I'm painting again.
I'm cleaning, I'm cleaning again.
I'm cleaning, I'm cleaning my brain...'

New Shelves

I'm resurfacing again after being ill with CFS for a while so the world is beginning to take on colour again and my desire to be creative returns.

I posted my Field Report pages last Saturday (20th March) and have emailed Carla Cryptic to resume the threads of our collaboration on a PMusic Single. Also have plans over the Easter break to write up the text for some invited Consembles (more of this later). Have been working on an artist website for my colleague and friend Sarah Bennett - making me consider the possibilities of Chameleon Lectra in this direction (I must update my own site!). So much to think about. Ideas and plans pile up like the excess books that are strewn across the convenient resting places of my flat.

I've been thinking about putting up some new shelves.

One More Day - for John Dankworth

I was saddened to hear, this Sunday, of the death of John Dankworth. I met him and his wife Cleo Laine in 1980, while Cleo was recording tracks at Essex Studios for an album which became One More Day (with music by Daryl Runswick - one of her rarest). I was the 'tape op' (trainee recording engineer) on these sessions and both John and Cleo made a big impression on me.

My first encounter with Mr. D was when he entered the studio control room and Cleo said: 'John we need an A'. He spontaneously sang and held the note and ran all the way to the studio, only to find that on pressing the appropriate piano key he was a microtone out - just enough to be excruciatingly funny (it could well have been the piano).

Tribute

Walk Into January (Mythogeography 2010)

Photo: '20/FLOWERPOT LANE' (I added the 10)

Note:
'Phil Smith, a senior research associate in Theatre & Performance, is opening up his research work to other members of the university (academic, research, technical and professional).

Phil's background is in theatre-making, as a writer and dramaturg, specialising in recent years in performance inspired by walking. For his most present research he is carrying out a series of walks, experimenting with the use of ‘inner maps’ (simple mental disciplines with a spatial aspect) and monitoring their possible applications for exploratory walking, and what disruptive or reparative qualities they have for walkers.

While some of the walks will be solo, Phil is now inviting any interested member of the university staff to join him for one of his ‘Inner Map Walks’.'

And so as per the above Phil invited me to walk with him around St. Thomas in Exeter UK. There were a few false starts (as there often are with someone who suffers from CFS - Solvitur Ambulando?) but we finally met on Monday 11th Jan in the newly-minted year of 2010. It was cold. In fact when we first met, by the railway arches, we began by looking at the melted water running behind the ice - a sort of covered waterfall - on the brickwork.

Phil declared the theme of our unguided tour to be 'texture' and we used this as a point of focus 'case we rambled too far. We walked around many subjects - the inappropriate use of rarefied terms in science esp. geology and medicine; councils' neglect of the visual landscape; the poetry and politics of using local materials; the variety of front gardens; our various forms of previous employment and the cheapest shop for beer in Exeter. We talked around the behind streets of St Thomas in parallel to Cowick Street and found churches, surprising curved brickwork, a closed community and the variety of front gardens.

We concluded our journey in suitably surreal fashion with a cup of tea and some eats in Crafty Cakes, a hybrid café/cake decorating shop in Cowick Street which led, perhaps inevitably, to discussions of wedding ceremonies we had attended before branching out into talking about writing, music and performance.

I think Phil would find Rochester fascinating so we parted with another sideways walk as a possibility...


recommended:

Counter-tourism at www.mythogeography.com

Walk walk walk: an archaeology of the familiar and the forgotten

walkwalkwalk: Stories from the Exeter Archive

2010 - A Music Odyssey

Thinking in tens:
a new decade
ten years in which to make beautiful music

and write that novel