Strawberry September

I've always had a thing about strawberries. One of my earliest memories is looking for wild strawberries with my father in Swanscombe woods (the wild ones have a beautiful concentrated flavour).

Taste
I was shocked when a girl in my infants' class said she disliked them. I think this was the moment when I began to understand that people are not the same, that we are separate entities with diverse tastes. However, this really upset me when I was six - how could anyone not like strawberries?


Thief
In my early twenties I worked for the Post Office as a counter clerk (mainly to raise funds for my music projects). As experiences go it was rather a dull one but I do remember being struck, one day, by an issue of stamps based on William Morris's 'Strawberry Thief'. I took this inspiration home with me and ended up writing a piece for Four Point Paint with the eponymous title. We performed this piece, along with three others, at a small gig in Southampton and for each piece we also created a visual image which we suspended above us. I did a reinvented Strawberry Thief illustration in gouache, incorporating some biographical elements.


Terrain
I've been painting with strawberries as a continuation with my work with fruit (see previous entry 'Brush') and it has been a very interesting challenge. Unlike raspberries, the colour tends to remain uniform - vermillion when wet and a darker red (crimson) when dry. The flatness of the colour heightens the role of texture in a monochrome painting. The use of strawberries, following on from the raspberries, (see entry below) has also made me reflect on the symbolic and metaphoric potential of this activity with fruit and accordingly has opened up several areas for exploration (including narrative, provenance and chemistry).


above: 'Strawberry Echoes' September 2008

Paint/Consemble

After returning from a much needed and appreciated two week break in Rochester, Kent, my creative life has been invigorated and focussed on painting and the Consemble project. College is in recess for the summer and apart from some admin, thesis supervision and webwork, I have some breathing space in which to develop my practice.

The above image is of the underpainting for a raspberry/salt crystal canvas I'm currently working on; this is one of a planned series which will also include strawberries and, possibly, citrus fruits. In fact the reference to strawberries and the aesthetics of this work are reminding me of the time I worked woth William Morris's image 'Strawberry Thief' which generated both a re-worked watercolour and music for the gtr duo 4 point paint.

It feels very good to be painting again after being away from it for too long (mainly because of my music projects). I'm re-remembering all those small but essential techniques through which to generate the most effective work. I have a few other plans - one for a canvas utilising circular paints from a reworked children's painting kit and one for a canvas incorporating a gramophone record (and this should help me pick up the thread of my thinking from 'Works Of Friction' last year).


I'm also having a drive to publicise Consemble and get some more sounds submitted before the August 31st deadline - if you'd like to listen or take part please do: www.chameleonlectra.co.uk/Consemble.html

Had a very good day last Tuesday when I had three people respond with some excellent work: two submissions for 'the idea of voice' (currently the most populous Consemble with 42 sons) and one for 'Snapshot' which is taking on a rather pastoral feel. Prior to this artist Jockel Liess contributed to 'Dusk' and I'm hoping more people will be in contact soon after my sending emails to hertz lion, the Sonic Arts Network, generative.net (indirectly) and others this week. In fact Sunday will also be a Consemble email day (as well as a paint drying day).

Now where's that pear cider?...

Cathedrals of Hiss/New Online Studio

It's Bank Holiday Monday and a good time to blog. I've had a recent period of unwellness and been somewhat detoured from working on Inlets' Daughter but have found myself engaged on two different projects...

1
I was recently sifting through some old cassettes of music I had recorded over the past 25 years or so with the vague idea of digitising some of them to place on my new website (see 2). One of them stood out from the rest for a couple of reasons: it was uncharacteristically very badly recorded*, with lots of hissss but it also stayed with me, wanting to play it again and again.



This cassette was labelled '4 Point Paint' which was an improvised gtr duo I formed with Robin Watts in Southampton in the early '80s. The name comes from the fact that we commissioned to be made (from a local electronics firm) a signal splitter which allowed us to output our guitars to four seperate amps. Across some of these connections we placed effects pedals (phasers, flangers etc.) so that we created a kind of surround sound - when such things were uncommon.



It would be true to say that we never really developed the system or even played live as much as we might but this was a colourful time when Robin and I were in several bands and had other commitments.

We played a handful of venues including (from memory):
inside:
• Southampton University Concourse,
• Southampton Civic Centre
• The Deannery Annexe, Southampton (twice, I think),
outside:
• City Centre, Above Bar, Southampton (near the art gallery),
• A field with some cows (Robin also had a spare car battery which we used to power our outdoor ‘gigs’).

It would be fair to say that we left the musical world (even the musical world of Southamption) relatively untroubled - perhaps with exception of the cows - but we definitely had something. Our playing was underpinned by a rapport developed from our repeated improvising together, and our style was under the influence of systems music, enabling us to move into combining and offsetting patterns of notes one moment and then veering off into new areas the next.

As I have described, most of our band time was spent improvising together and from these improvisations we would develop frameworks for music to play at our live performances. The rediscovered cassette contained four such improvisations.

...And so at first I digitised the 4 Point Paint tracks with the intention of removing as much of the hiss as I could without spoiling the sound of the guitars. As I worked with the tracks however, taking them into Logic Audio to mix hissed and unhissed versions together and gnashing my teeth and cursing at the whole idea of hiss a great deal - I gradually began to see that hiss was perhaps not my enemy and that I should embrace hiss and even use it as my guide ;o) (which means I realised I could gently reinvent the tracks, with subtle reverbs and new additions here and there and use the hiss as a guiding aesthetic). I then became interested in not just documenting the past but using it to produce new material.

From there it was a short step to designing a CD cover and preparing to release a VERY limited edition (of 2 only) of '4 Point Paint'.

The main revelation however, has been that I can view my past recordings as ingredients for new work - so more of this later.

* This was an era in which I veered between working in recording studios and double-tracking cassettes on my warhorse of a Hi Fi.

2
I've also sporadically been trying out some design and content ideas for paulramsay.co.uk which will work as a kind of 'online artist's studio' (and I'm busy trying to define that term) in parallel with the Chameleon Lectra site.



more entries on the above soon