My latest booklet: Back To Earth / My Trumpet, Miles Davis and The Art Rut

Back To Earth...back to reality? Heaven forbid, reality being so...(insert appropriate text according to outlook).

24 pages of art so relatively slim by my usual standards but as you know, it's all about the quality, not the width. And it's full of quality visualisations from the typewriter - it is! I'm blowing my own trumpet because no-one else is going to, are they? Or are they? Perhaps out there in the online universe someone is, at this very moment, blowing my trumpet for me. Heh-heh. I tried blowing an actual trumpet once. You can imagine how painful it sounded. I've nothing but admiration for anyone...no, not just anyone, anyone who blows a trumpet in a style I enjoy. Like Miles Davis, of course, but you know what he did, he started playing fast and smart Be-Bop in the commonly recognised hip style of the day, but never one to rest on his laurels, two decades later he could be heard yelping, squealing and barping (not a real word, is it?) along with his cutting edge crew of musos moulded to his own sound/vision. 

Dare I say (yes I do) that I have an affinity with Miles Davis with respect to my typewriting? Pretentious? Perhaps, but I thought it, now I'm committing it to the screen. I mean, like him, I'm always looking for new ways to say something with my visual poetry. I'm not saying one should always 'make it new', just that I like to move on and around themes, ideas, methods. I revisit some, expand others, test new ones and so on. We all know the Art Rut. An artist hits on a style then does it over and over again. I don't care. Carry on. It's not always to the detriment of the work. It creates a familiar style and as with, say, Warhol prints, if you like that style, it's good.

I suspect people like the familiar. Yes, in the sense of finding the avant-garde difficult, but also familiarity with an artists's style because it's instantly recognisable therefore somehow comforting...reassuring. The problem with an artist varying what they do is that the viewer, liking one style, may not like another and therefore gets grumpy, disappointed. Oh well...

All that said, I've been told I have a recognisable style. I can't second guess how others view all my work. I was, however, just a little disappointed, thinking 'Oh no, I'm predictable!' I can't tell when I'm making all those marks on all that paper...I don't get an overview, just something like one when, as happened recently, a collector visited and I had to go through the boxes, choosing a selection. Then I look back and sometimes think 'Damn, that was a good one!' If a piece really strikes me as great, I might think 'I should do more like that'. Sometimes I try but, you know what? You can't go back. In my case, perhaps the typewriter used broke forever and has been chucked away. But more...profoundly(?), it seems to be impossible to actually do it again because I've changed, somehow. 

Anyway, here's my latest booklet, inspired by science-fiction, all quotes coming from old sci-fi mags. If you'd like a copy, it costs £10 and is in the shop. 

TTFN!

Dieter Roth On Oppressive Paintings / The Democracy of Art On Paper / Drawing

Little Tentative Recipe, Dieter Roth, 1968

'The bigger and heavier the stuff is, the more oppressing it is. I want to have paper to work on that is light, you can throw it away. The idea that you give a big painting of a huge size and heavy canvas and everything, you can give on a little piece of paper in one book (...) Books are cheap and people can throw them away. You don't oppress people too much.'
                             - Dieter Roth, quoted in In Numbers: Serial Publications by Artists Since 1955

I bet you didn't know that recipients of big paintings are another oppressed group to add to the list. But they are! Poor things. What can we do to help them? Perhaps we could offer to visit them and relieve them of those paintings. I would gladly do it if I had room to store them (having established if they're worth loads of money).

Joking aside, oh how I agree with Dieter Roth. But I would, wouldn't I, as someone whose preferred medium is paper and having produced a few books/magazines in my time. We know Roth the rebel, trasher of Fine Art rules, prolific scribbler, book-maker, print-maker etc. It makes sense that he would embrace paper over canvas. Despite token efforts (like recognising a disregarded minority and appearing to care) galleries do display works on paper but nearly always in the broader context, ie with paintings which, naturally, are promoted as the more 'serious' work. Whether drawn or printed on, paper is the poor relation.

Being relatively poor myself, paper is perfect. Because I live in a small flat, there's simply no room to store canvases, should I feel inclined to use them, which I don't. As for books, as Roth points out, they are cheap (though his certainly aren't today on the current market). Books are democratic and can be bought by anyone, assuming they're not elite Artist's books made by 'names'. 

Yes, so pity the oppressed. Also vilify those painters who oppress them! let's get a twitter mob going, hunting out painters who have oppressed other by foisting their big paintings on them. 

Turned Out Nice Again, RTomens, 2020

Drew this this morning. The sun was shining. The pen played up. No matter!

A Song of the City: Haunting Nest - J. Hackson

To live in a city is to live in a community of people who are strangers to each other.

You have to act on hints and fancies, for they are all that the mobile and cellular

nature of city life will allow you. You expose yourself in, and are exposed to by others,

fragments, isolated signals, bare disconnected gestures, jungle cries and whispers

that resist all your attempts to unravel their meaning, their consistency.

                                                              - Soft City, Jonathan Raban

J. Hackson spent a few months listening to 'the tune of the town' (Luton) and has assembled snippets of what he heard into a fascinating kaleidoscope of voices, the resulting booklet being something like a cross between Mark E. Smith's lyrics and William Burroughs cut-ups. 

'A bout of clap would even have its refrain I defy myself not to hear some tune in this he can't eat it cold he says he can't eat it if it's cold   get a taxi home I've got a tenner'. 

Highly recommended for those who love the poetry of the streets. Available here.

Booklet: Rearrange Yesterday

I rearranged yesterday in booklet form. I mastered the past and made it new. The old newspapers, found in the Kentish Town Oxfam shop, entranced me...their textures...folds...creases and, of course, the news they carried. But I had no time for reading the articles. Instead, there was an idea to explore so I set about choosing parts, some random, some with obvious potential. I collaged, cut up text, enlarged images etc until I felt I could do no more. The potential in the pages was endless but I know from experience to go with the flow of a project, keep going until exhausted (not having exhausted every idea). What I chose and why is a matter for the subjective 'I'. The idea was not to linger on one page for too long in an attempt to make it a stand-alone piece of art but to create a compendium of images, the whole being greater, perhaps, than the individual pages.  

It was made primarily for my own pleasure, but since it was going to the printers anyway I had a few more copies done in case anyone wanted to buy one. Here are the details. The price includes P&P.

14.8cm square
80 pages
Full Colour
Signed

Prices

UK £14.00 GBP Overseas £16.00 GBP

For Sale: Pleasure Before Business - A5 Booklet

I've had a booklet made of drawings done over a couple of months. A few feature collaged images. I drew them all on pages torn from old paperbacks. 26 images in total. Click the button according to where you live. 

Pleasure Before Business

A5

28 pages
130 gsm silk finish

Limited Edition

Signed

£8 plus p&p

UK

Worldwide