(With apologies to Thomas Hardy.)
I do apologise to readers of this blog for the disruption to the service over the past couple of weeks. I have been experiencing problems with the software, and these have prevented me from getting access to my own blog. The causes of this were completely mysterious, but it does look as if we might have solved the problem. (Well …. I say “We”, but my part in this process has been an uninterrupted slide into mystification!) Now that I am back you might welcome a few words of update.
The exhibitions of my work at the Bingley Arts Centre and Bradford Cathedral are both up and running, and I delivered my planned talk in the latter venue, and that went well. Since then I have been back on a couple of occasions in order to show visitors the exhibition and I am very pleased with the appearance of it. On the 11th. November (the centenary of the end of the Great War) there will be a major commemorative event in the Cathedral, and it is pretty certain that no exhibition of my work will ever have been seen by so many people. (Sadly, I will not be able to be there: see below.)
During this interlude I was approached by a student on a media technology course at the University, who wanted to make a short film about my work as an assessment project. It was great fun, as well as being very flattering. Three young women turned up at the studio with an incredible array of kit, and filmed a long interview with me. Later I took one of them to the Cathedral to film the display there. I am intrigued by the possible result of all this. There have promised to send me a copy when the editing is done.
In the pause between major ideas I started to play with the possibility of painting a complex and semi-abstract image based on the ancient idea of the “four elements” (earth, air, fire and water.) Having put together quite a lot of reference material, spent a lot of time planning the image meticulously and sketching various possibilities, I threw myself into the job, and was fairly pleased by the way things were going. Then my wife came in to look at the semi-finished result, and remarked that it looked like stuff I was doing twenty years ago, and that surely I have moved on a long way since then. Oh dear! She was right, although the finished product is not bad. The biggest problem is that I chose the wrong paper on which to work, and ended up by fighting against it for a lot of the time, so that in places the result does look rather over-worked. It is pinned up on the studio wall, but I’m not sure I will ever exhibit it. I’m afraid that art is rather like that.
The big news, I suppose, is that tomorrow morning we head off for a holiday together. We will be taking a cruise around the island of Sicily, calling in at various archaeological and artistic destinations of significance. One of the big attractions for me is that one of the accompanying lecturers will be Andrew Graham Dixon, who (at least in this country) is quite a well-known critic and broadcaster on art matters. We will be away for eleven days. I have hopes that I will have access to the internet, even if only intermittently, so with any luck I ought to be able to keep you in touch. I’m also going to take some art materials with me, and it is my hope that I will have plenty of time for some sketching.
Well: I suppose I ought to get on with the packing!
PS: Last night’s life-drawing class was certainly a first in two respects. We were expected to work with rather crude, home-made bamboo pens …. and the model was wearing nipple rings.