One of my favourite bits of being a Primary teacher is receiving art from the children in my class, undertaken and given spontaneously in a moment of smiles and simplicity. Unrestrained and golden. It's impossible to be unhappy when you get pictures like this.
It is a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects, and indeed the sundry contemplation of my travels, which, by often rumination, wraps me in a most humorous sadness.
A Czech author and illustrator, Petr Horacek's work has similarities to Eric Carle in his layering of colourful hand-painted images. Click here to explore more of his beautiful work.
One of the beauties of Primary school teaching is being able to trial ideas and experiment with the curriculum to catch the children's enthusiasm. Ok, and to do stuff that the teacher enjoys. After my Banksy-related posts on here, I showed my class images of his work and they asked to take it further by trying some stencil wall art themselves. Amazingly, the Head teacher gave us a wall in school as our blank canvas, and the children have spent the last four weeks designing, cutting, sticking and spraying their stencil images. Banksy would be proud.
Roaring Dark The wind...trailing with it the frosty scent of forests and the cold intoxication of the sea. In a million holes and corners it refreshed a man like a flagon, and astonished him like a blow. Blew out a candle by which a boy read Treasure Island, and wrapped him in the roaring dark. But everywhere it bore drama into undramatic lives.
GK Chesterton
Imponderable The children are gone. The holiday is over. Outside it is Fall. Inside it is so quiet that the silence seems inclined to talk to itself. They will not recover the summer of seventy-seven again, even though they become, in turn, their own children.
I sit in my sixty odd years and wonder how often before in this old house a man has sat thinking of what is now, and what was. But can it serve a serious purpose to ponder upon the imponderable? There, there beyond a fall glimmers the long-lost garden
That garden where we, too, as in a spell stared eye into dazed eye and did not see that suddenly the holy day was over, the flashing lifeguard, the worm in the tree, the glittering of the bright sword as it fell, and the gate closing for all time to be.
These beautiful images are by the Scottish painter Peter Doig. An article in the Guardian a few months ago by Adrian Searle described his work as "introspective...a world on the verge of disintegration." Doig's paintings are made up of multiple layers, an agglomeration of touches with their blips and fuzziness. Drifiting boats and canoes, "a faded and indeterminate irridescence, a sort of receding memory of place and colour." When he was young, Doig moved with his family to Trinidad, and later to Canada. This geography is often reflected in his work: trees and reflections, the swamp, water and ice, veiled sunlight and falling snow, brushwood and mangrove. Often based on photographs, his paintings convey a sense of stillness in a moving world, a dreaminess that is fully real but indefinable.
Yesterday Girl
I remember her face (I think) and a summer evening standing on the shore watching the Mersey turning in its sleep and the seagulls crying sliding down the sky like kids on banisters while we wrote I love you in the sweaty summer sand with sticks and skipped across rocks and both held hands to keep from falling out of love
Guardian and Observer readers will feel a happy chime in their hearts when they read the name of Laura Barton, a feature writer who often pops up in 'Film & Music' on a Friday. Unceasingly a revealer of the lovely, her articles stand out for their unmistakable grasp of what matters. Here are two extracts from recent articles that have made me smile lots:
Trusting the darkness (30.11.07) "There is something lawless and liberating about listening to music in the dark. It swells the sound, of course, frees the listener of visual distractions while taking away the walls and the structures and leaving a sort of wilderness."
Hail, hail, rock 'n' roll (28.3.07) It was the middle of a heatwave, and so, even at night, you could sit bare-legged on the porch-stoop eating peaches and honey and sipping wine. And we sat there a long while, talking and drinking and listening to the music of the street - to the shouts in the night and the chatter of the bugs and the bursts of distant car radios and, from somewhere up above, the sound of Django Reinhardt playing I'll See You in My Dreams. That evening in July seemed to me a time of perfect, ripened happiness. And whenever I think of it now, it seems wound up in the song I was playing a lot, and that drifted out of the open window and up into the warm Oregon air: Andrew Bird's Yawny at the Apocalypse...They are rare, those songs that conjure that bird-like ascending happiness, that feeling of winging wildly across the white...It offers not a giddy, tumbling happiness, but that glorious feeling that rises up after rain, a serene kind of happiness that is also somehow in possession of a peculiar near-sadness
Following on from the "hopeful street art" post, it would be wrong not to blog about Banksy, the enigmatic English graffiti artist. Despite building a reputation out of rather darkly anarchistic, politically provocative street art, there is another side to Banksy's works that I love. In so many of the stencilled images there is warmth, fantastic humour and humanism. It's also the way that you have to hunt for his work across London and beyond that's compelling, as locations are so random and temporal. Shying away from revealing who he really is, the 'mystery of Banksy' adds to the codebreaking aspect of finding and enjoying his work. Click here to see many more of Banksy's works, with directions and status updates. Happy hunting!
Geese over Wandsworth
High above stop signs and street grumblings They go, in clear formation. Honking. Forwards and focussed, Workmen in the road stop their drilling, Necks raised skywards. A window cleaner gazes beyond The top rung of his ladder, As the arrow in flight points towards Meaning.
Blue Field A flood as the day releases and the whole snow world is neither wet nor deep, but primary. Colour so inherent, it does not fall but rises from my skin, the snow, the trees, the road. This blue isn't built or grown. It has no tissue, nothing to touch or taste or bring to mind a memory, no iris or artery, no gentian, aconite or anemone, no slate, plum, oil-spill or gun, no titanium or turquoise, no mercury or magnesium, no phosphorus , sapphire or silver foil, no duck egg or milk jug, no chambray, denim or navy, no indigo, octopus ink, no ink, no element. The blue moment, sininen hetki in a language that claims no relation but greets in passing picture blue, cyan. Ultraviolet twilight, higher than the heaven of swimming or flying - no splash. A time without clouded objects, in which you might become the glass you swallowed through cold. Light draws back behind the rim of the eye as it closes. I keep my distance, as things turn blue through stillness and distance, as everything blue is distant.
A beautifully simple idea turned into a masterpiece of grassroots art. Around 1000 people simultaneously freezing into human statues of self-chosen creative poses in Trafalgar Square on the 16th February for 5 minutes. Inspired by the works of the group Improv Everywhere, word was spread about the 'secret' gathering using Facebook. Bewildered tourists galore.
This large double canvas was recently painted by my class at school. We used Pollock's action "drip" technique, rolling marbles covered in paint, firing colours from a water-pistol and swirling paint directly from the bottle. The class called it 5A/08. Click to see it in detail.
And I remember A small corner of a little village A peaceful house flooded with sunlight Moss-covered walls of red brick And a garden with lemon trees in flower.
I posted this photo onto the blog last year, without knowing anything about the context of the image. I can't remember how I stumbled upon it in the crazy world of cyberspace; perhaps I was searching for images of guitar strumming blissfulness. If it wasn't under that title, this picture should be. Bright light against white walls, two guitars, two pavement-content people, a floppy hat. Happy music.
The photo comes from the webpage of a lovely Cardiff lass called Ellie. I emailed her to ask for the backstory, and this is the tale she told:
"The pic you borrowed is probably my favourite ever. It shows my mum and dad in 1979 in Ireland. I was born not long after. They'd only met in England a few months earlier and fled Britain when Thatcher was elected to live an itinerant lifestyle in the Irish countryside. They literally owned a guitar each, a change of clothes, a kettle and a rustbucket of a van, but the relaxed warmth of this picture shows the kind of liberation possessing next to nothing can bring...my mum and dad still play together in lots of different bands and love each other just as much as when this picture was taken. My mum still has the guitar she's playing there, though my dad's fell by the wayside somewhere. I look at this picture and it reminds me of what is important in life, and how blessed I am to be a member of my family."
"I'm always amazed people don't notice the moon"
Danny Danziger
Heirloom My father said It's always good weather In bed.
I don't mean the postcard flamenco of castanets, fans, whirling flowerry dresses and an "all-inclusive dinner & show." It's not a case of musical snobbery, just a recognition that this element of flamenco has masked years of authentic artistry. The heart of flamenco is not a tourist dance but a song, a poem, an emotion. You don't have to go to a cellar bar in Andalucia to experience it, but it's a step in the right direction. Dark, devilish, raw; the Spanish word for it is duende, an abstract definition meaning the spirit of demonic despair, the painful struggle for authenticity, a surge of emotion and expression towards the genuine. Federico García Lorca, the Spanish flamenco poet, described it as such: "It's not a question of skill, but of a style that's truly alive: meaning, it's in the veins: meaning, it's of the most ancient culture of immediate creation."
Flamenco is made up of torque (flamenco guitar), cante (singing) and baile (dancing). Improvising on rhythms through over fifty styles, blending African microtones on top of a driving compás (metre) which is so fundamental to flamenco. The backbone consists of the guitarist's beats, the hand clapping, striking of tables with knuckles, beating a stick on the floor, finger clicks and cries. The complexity of this compás is what I find so alluring, as I try to follow the twelve-beat rhythms and impossibly perfect offbeat syncopation. Moorish, not Spanish in truth, these black sounds from a place that you can't quite define search for the duende, the genuine, the infinitely sad longing for happiness and life.
I miss the darkroom. Developing - printing - fixing. The art teacher at secondary school gave up a few of his lunchtimes to show me the basics: how to feed the 35mm film onto a reel in total blackness, how to mix chemicals in the film tank, how to dry the film without marks. And then came the infinite variable world of learning how to print - settings on the enlarger, exposure length, grades of paper, type of developer, whether you could skip a PE lesson after lunch to remain in the darkroom, in the darkness, in that low-light subterranean oasis of quiet creativity. Rocking the trays like babies to sleep, the broken radio in the corner crackling lullabies. Hanging the prints out to dry on a line like laundry, in a cupboard with no weather. Mixing chemicals like ingredients for a dinner that had to be timed to perfection. Sulfurous smells, clock watching, tweeking, cropping, waiting, and then...emerging clarity in the trays, a recognisable image appearing in the red-light gloom, a coming together of those infinite variables into one crisp print. Black and white.
