12 Hermits

In the 1760s, the bigger houses might have had an ornamental hermit installed out back in a grotto, used like a proto computer, searching for answers from the cosmos to be presented at dinner parties. Wealthy people are just too busy to do this themselves. There is a hermit's house not far from here in Dalkeith Country Park. You can paste 55.904513,-3.072481 into Google Maps, but he's not there any more. The fashion didn’t last that long, research shows a chequered history, although they did at least seem to have a sense of humour. 

A contemporary equivalent might be The Artists Studio. There is a show soon at the Whitechapel Gallery in London about this. I am looking forward to it. I’ve ordered the book. I imagine Francis Bacon’s studio will figure. This is currently recreated to perfection in the Hugh Lane Gallery Dublin. We have Eduardo Paolozzi’s version of this in the Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh, but it doesn’t quite have the peep show into the artist's head we want. 

Our extended brains (mobile phones) can be enlarged in a studio. Is our interior decoration a reflection of our minds? Lofts in NYC were coveted for their industrial edge. The fashion continues in the UK with organisations like ACME and WASPS. I have rented from both in the past. Eventually the large mechanical spaces are always sub-let into more human traditions with rugs and chintz.

https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/500916/short-lived-british-fashion-ornamental-hermits

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/mar/22/the-stranger-in-the-woods-by-michael-finkel-review

13 Sales

Q: Why are artists poor?

A: https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/id/92339cef-c1e9-41fe-ade8-8dc95a67b948/340245.pdf

In the 19 century, before Netflix, the painter John Martin made enormous panoramic landscape paintings that toured the town halls of Britain and charged a penny entrance. They have tiny little people in them, probably (partly) to emphasise how small we are in the cosmos. Another artist in Kirkcaldy Art Gallery, Sir William MacTaggart, painted large expressive seascapes, and put little figures in them. Both these artists will have incorporated humans into these scenes for greater sale potential. They look silly now.

Soviet émigrés Komar & Melamid tried to find out exactly what people want for their walls… https://awp.diaart.org/km/index.html

That was an old project, they stopped working together in 2003. With that done, tastes are now set forever, repeating, cyclical, mirroring into infinity, classic pouts on Instagram, graveyard poets, postmodernism which is modernism, cute, I just really like it, and they’ve got one. 

Free work is not valued by the person who has commissioned it, they should be eternally grateful but never are. Money is a sign of value and respect, even if it is a small amount. By working for free, you perpetuate a culture in which creative work goes unpaid - Oliver Jeffers

There is no must in art because art is free - Wassily Kandinsky 

Same but different, different but same, something for the wall.

https://www.porty.net/windle/2020-in-the-house.pdf

Ghastly Good Taste https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oD4ZPANU8DA&t=2s

How about a frame?

14 War

There is a link to ‘Six Men’ by David McKee in 7 Fireworks. Published in 1972 it is a very circular storybook about war. They need to republish it.

"Once upon a time six men search for and finally find a land where they can settle down and grow rich. But they fear thieves, so they hire six strong guards. When no robbers arrive, the men worry that paying the guards is a waste of money. So they put them to work capturing a neighbouring farm. Enjoying the power, they add soldiers and capture more land. Some, who escape their expansion, work and live happily together across the river, but still worry about the six belligerent men. So in case of attack, they take turns being both farmers and soldiers. Unfortunately one day the bored soldiers on both sides of the river shoot at a passing duck. The anxious armies, fearing they are attacked, gather and a mighty battle begins. In the end, only six men on either side are left. And so they set off in opposite directions, beginning again the search for a place to live and work in peace. ..."

I have it in mind to put some of my luminous targets in the old radar installation building beside RAF Macmerry.

Google Maps 55.94906772449463, -2.881995063893326

I think it might be interesting… although I wouldn’t want to start anything…

Sortie https://youtu.be/VT1-Q1AEt90

Bunkers https://youtu.be/XjesOah2gCw

15 Time

Things look different up close and far away. Stars, relationships, singing. After my father passed away, lots of accumulated family possessions were lost. Time-based things… holiday super-8s, tape recordings… sad that this stuff so inherent of life and memory were not prized more. Something from this archive was an old vinyl record cut in a carnival record-your-voice booth in the 1930s, of my grandfather singing ‘So Mary Marry Me’ to my grandmother Mary. He was a terrible singer, but the sound was so full of pathos, scratches and fluff, that this powerful evocation of lost time and love was remarkable and self-evident to the teen-age me. It inspired me to make a disc of Catriona telling stories to our son Luke when he was a baby. I wonder if any of the family will be listening to it in 100 years?

We are moved by deja-vus in all media. Music - Charles Ives Central Park in the Dark. Literature - David Mitchell Cloud Atlas (not the movie). Film - William Kentridge thinking about all the other things he has to do that day, and how it affects the work. 

I was born in 1958, and am alert to it when I see it written down. The oldest satellite still circling the earth was launched in 1958. This naturally worries me. 

Fingers crossed for Vanguard 1 https://www.porty.net/st-kilda/mullach.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_artificial_satellites_and_space_probes

I have a book, published in 1958 ‘A Dictionary of Abstract Painting’. The poor quality printing and thumbnail images make the work look quaint, like a stamp album, which completely loses any sense of importance and vitality the work originally held. I am drawn to the images still. 

Francis Bacon never saw the Velasquez popes, he painted his versions from magazines.

Here is an image of the dictionary, opened at the page Hilma af Klint should be. The rather beautiful 10 Kensitas cigarette card bookmark came inside when I bought it in the charity shop. Another deja-vu.

Apologies, I seem to have strayed into oblongs. Easily done.

William Kentridge https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G11wOmxoJ6U

Page one https://porty.net/windle/images/Page-1.jpg