46 Beardy

Before the pandemic, around 2015 maybe, a lumber yard across the road from Edinburgh College of Art closed down. A terrible loss, possibly inspired by the constant rediscovery that painting was hard, and making videos on the phone didn’t need wooden stretchers for canvas. A hipster barber shop took its place. A fantastic memory I have from that time is of walking home in the darkening November evening to see illuminated and framed in the window the perfect surreal image of four barbers with beards giving four identical beardies haircuts. Charles Dickens would have stirred. 

There is a lot of stuff in a beard…

Romance https://www.moma.org/collection/works/46634

Religion https://www.huffpost.com/entry/religious-beards_n_5947438

Music (terrible) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmFnarFSj_U

Sexuality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beard_(companion)#:~:text=Beard%20is%20an%20American%20slang,to%20conceal%20one's%20sexual%20orientation

In summer of 1991 I was in Moscow waiting to leave on a series of visits with the Soviet Union of Artists to various parts of the now crumbling CCCP. Suddenly Mikhail Gorbachev went missing, and tanks were rumbling in through the streets towards the White House, where Boris Yeltsin was making a stand (the other White House and the other Boris). Bit scary. The only thing on TV was the Bolshoi Swan Lake. I think the idea was that it would placate the masses. It was interesting that after that particular coup, polls of favourite ballets made the Bolshoi Swan Lake the least popular.

Anyway, to mark the event I shaved my beard off, and made an artwork. I’m not quite sure why I did this, but it had a startling effect on Anne-Marie Creamer who was sharing the trip with Catriona and I, and didn’t recognise the stranger suddenly appearing in the flat at such a worrying moment. 

I still have the beard, and it is still black. Hurrah!

47 Landskip

As you might see in this blog, there is quite a focus on how landscape fits into art and history.

The Barbizon school (see 44 Portal) starring Daub one and Daub two

WG Sebald The Rings of Saturn + Patience (see 11 Lazy)

Simon Schama Landscape and Memory (skip to the second chapter)

The very excellent catalogue for Tate Liverpool Radical Landscapes show, and https://www.bossmorris.com/

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2022/may/11/life-on-the-edge-land-loss-on-englands-east-coast-a-photo-essay?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Strange horizons  _/﹋\__/﹋\__/﹋\_> > < Peakfinder >

 

And remember, even although one of the attractions of working with landscape (and not actors) is that it will usually let you get on with it and not talk back, things can still get out of hand… https://vimeo.com/134753389

☘

Below are two interpretations of Nephin Mountain in Ireland. My grandmother told me tales of how she and her friends as small children took food up that hill to the men who were hiding out there during the War of Independence.

The Quiet Hill ~ notebook https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXxu5Qttr2s

This was (very) loosely based on John Wayne/Maureen O’Hara film The Quiet Man (1952). After being told I was Irish by Ancestry DNA, I visited the old country, the hill, the graves, the set... what a business model! We arrived in Cong, where it was filmed, at the same time as a coachload of American tourists and couldn’t resist the opportunity to appear in a short re-enactment. Me as the vicar and Catriona as the vicar’s wife. Sadly, no Oscars.

48 Small

Instead of finding your audience, why not just make them? Make ‘em look.

The dollhouse has two dominant motifs: wealth and nostalgia. It presents a myriad of perfect objects that are, as signifiers, often af­fordable, whereas the signified is not. Consider the miniature Orkney Island chairs that can be found in the china cupboards of many Island homes. The full-size chairs, handmade of local straw, were once a major furnishing of the peasant house, but because their manufacture is so labour-intensive and because their mode of production has be­come so esoteric, only the very wealthy can now afford them. Hence the descendants of the peasants who once owned such pieces can afford only the miniature, or "toy," version. Use value is transformed into display value here. Even the most basic use of the toy object-to be "played with" is not often found in the world of the dollhouse. The dollhouse is consumed by the eye. On Longing - Susan Stewart

https://teach.alimomeni.net/2012spring2/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/On-longing-Stewart-1984.pdf

But what are they looking at? 

https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O1316194/place-village-installation-rachel-whiteread/

https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/454396/pavilion-of-turkey-presents-once-upon-a-time-by-fsun-onur-at-the-venice-biennale/

https://www.editions-memo.fr/livre/le-coeur-de-pic/

https://news.artnet.com/art-world/mini-gallery-show-1955434

49 Perfect

After art school, in London, all the artists I knew had a part-time job. It was a relief to see there was no shame in it. I spent quite a few years working for a community arts project Freeform in Hackney, producing and eventually helping design large scale murals around the city and further. My colleagues were highly skilled. Paint on the murals was one layer thick - there was no messing around. My first task was to paint a plant. It could be anything that fitted the space allowed. So I painted the one I knew best, a cheeseplant.

My boss was horrified. I could hear snickers from the back. I thought I had painted it rather well, thinly, and with flourish. But it was pretty much the dead monstera from my student flat. They wanted perfect Disney. Not the cloud of unknowing. That was a lesson.

There are some images here that concern themselves with utopias, inside and out… https://porty.net/blindwells/homes2.html

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/oct/07/shedloads-of-colour-how-a-move-away-from-grey-buildings-could-help-farmers-mental-health?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-woman-who-invented-forensics-training-with-doll-houses

50 Arcadia

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcadia_(play)

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2022/sep/14/turf-wars-the-artists-who-want-to-mow-down-the-menace-of-lawns?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

In 10 - Burial I talk about artist John Wolseley digging up half his painting out of the Australian soil and placing it next to the other half from his portfolio a year later. My experiment only lasted 8 months. The dreich East Lothian weather being less of a preservative than the Outback.