Self-Winding · A Sort of Progression

Stephen Stout. James on the Bridge.


Edgard Mazigi, the artist whose window painting featured here sent me a note recently about tonal values in painting. His suggestion that to squint at it gives a good idea of the value range of a coloured painting is giving me even deeper crowsfeet than I have already, I squint at everything now and find the resultant tone 'map' revealing. My art education was sadly lacking in such pieces of advice.

Thinking a lot about colour brought to mind another allied topic, artists who work in a single colour, or at least with a very limited palette. The squinting, of course, works very effectively here. I'm drawn to works in the blue range and have collected quite a few images. It might be interesting to put a few of them up and give the old windows a break for a bit. Stephen Stout is a young painter from West Oakland.

Once I used to dabble at drawing cartoons and got a few published in my professional journal, pretty tame stuff they were. That scribbling was enough to ensure real appreciation of the skilled performer. One of the most difficult things to do in cartooning is to make a point using drawing alone, with no reliance on a tag line.

Last Sunday's Newman drawing illustrates this well, spot-on, wittily illustrating its generic news item and doing it with a tenderness of line. The simple little black figure has attitude.


Absolute master of this technique is Larry , probably my all-time favourite, he can make me laugh out loud. He is known as a 'silent comedian' who uses a minimum of words; his power to amuse is in his ability affectionately to sum up human behaviour and expression, in a few pen strokes.


The impact of image alone is very powerful. I cut out and kept this Trog cartoon "Product of Portugal" in 1973 when the war in colonial Angola was at its height.
It is so simple an idea, to use Portugal's major export commodity as code for coffins; it makes an instantly recognizable, intensely focused, inference.


I did a series of cartoons to illustrate an article about promoting fiction in libraries. I put in a tag line of dialogue when I submitted it. The editor 'phoned me to say he had removed it.
"It's superfluous, Anna, the drawing alone says the same thing with more punch." In that instance it was OK, but I found in general that my drawing was not strong enough to carry my ideas. I had, usually, to rely on words to put them over.

A stall in Norwich market yesterday. He got his apostrophe right.
More photos at Flickr

While I'm being silly, I hope you have all signed up for World Jump Day. I mentioned it last year - but the date is getting nearer - for UK Southerners it's the 20 July at 11. 39: 13. I intend to do my bit.

Talking to a friend tonight I was alerted to a forthcoming major exhibition at a really stunning gallery, Compton Verney in Warwickshire. We visited there last year and were mightily impressed by the collection and the house. Van Gogh and Britain opens on March 31 until June. It takes an interesting slant on drawings and paintings acquired by early British collectors. One for the diary, I think.

Using one of my Flickr photographs, I just made this daft magazine cover over at fd's Flickr Toys. There are loads of ideas to play with - tools to make badges, mosaics, posters. I rather fancy creating a motivational message next, if I can think up something properly cheesy.

Because the finished images can be downloaded, it's a good place to knock out design ideas. It would be interesting to see what others make of it; please have a go at one of the formats and publish the result on your blog.

This week John has been decorating my bedroom, not before time, so everything from it has been piled around the house, the computer disassembled & put in the dining room, hence no blogging. It looks rather nifty - white with one wall painted in Coffee Liqueur, broken by light cream curtains, bedspread and dark rose cushions. The new carpet can't be fitted until Tuesday, so I have set up the computer in the kitchen tonight to read emails and write this.

One wonders what types dream up the names for paint colours, a degree of cultural depth seems to be called for - Pompeii Ash, Da Vinci Red, Quantum Blue, Fitzrovia Red. Or a talent for whimsy as found in Farrow and Balls' Elephant's Breath and Mouse's Back.

Talking colours, here the sky hangs grey day after day, the colour of dirty suds above the dark conifers. The gloom seems to mix in well with the bowl of dirty suds that is world and domestic news. Pandora's box spews horrors in Iraq, Africa starves, Iran blusters, Palestine/Israel festers, China pollutes. At home, our leader is redundant, incompetent, stitching patches from his ragbag of ideas over gaping holes in policy (see Parris today). The institutions are riddled with mistakes, the infrastructure creaking.

Our young make daisy chains and harm each other. Moneyed parents buy children a distant education in Indian academies, seeking vanished 'discipline and moral guidance'. We rear and export a steady supply of paedophiles, hooligans and terrorists; we rear and export living animals to a frightening, filthy end. The Press is more interested in tearing at current scandals than in reasoned analysis of important things.

I heard an Inuit woman talking of the effect of melting ice on her people; they are losing their hunting expertise, native skills of knowing where to tread, to fish. Now many are killed, falling through unexpected thin ice. We can leave nothing alone. We tinker with species, poke at the primitive, plunder the plentiful, pollute the pure, invade wild places, tidy the wilderness, we even send our mess into space.

I have always been an optimist with a real faith in humanity, but I begin to feel lost in the world that is shaping up. They say that miracle genetics means that the potential 'thousand year old man' has probably been born already. Poor sod.

The Visitor

"Last night I slumbered
High on the roofs
In remnants of old nests,
Dreaming of fishes.

But you were wakeful,
Restless, as the sea
Beat against the harbour wall,
Scattering shoals.

I wait at your window
High above the sleeping town,
Empty but for ghosts
Of priests and fishermen.

Come down to the early morning rain,
Watch me ride the wind
Above the jawbone of a whale
That swims no more.

Wet with spray, we'll celebrate
Our wonderment at storms.
Bring me some bread to break my fast,
For no fish will come today."

Whitby 2004
The best image I ever captured. The seagull came each morning to my window.

Eccentric heating arrangements at the wonderful church of St Martin at Thompson, Norfolk.

I had cause last year to watch the changeover in mood in a woman visitor suffering Bipolar Disorder. After sweeping us up in a frantic polka of beautiful creativity, she followed on with a total shut-down, hibernation in bed and house, loss of confidence; no trace of the previously charismatic creature remained.

I feel enormous sympathy with this condition. I know its dwarf sister, the mood swing. Mood is the wrong word, actually, in my manifestation which has less to do with depressive thought than with sudden, dramatic switches between physical polarities of inertia and extreme activity. The diagnostic erratic often featured in my school reports. Years on, retirement has emphasised the tendency, for without the spur of formal daily work, down-time becomes feasible.

Today I woke with an appetite to DO after a pretty inert couple of weeks of just getting by with life. Driving to Cambridge, cutting down dead reeds, building a bonfire, making an omelette, checking bank statements seemed not just possible, but desirable. Ironing piles vanished, phone calls and lists were made, the mower was delivered for service, I painted my toe nails.

I was raised among hard-working, self-disciplined women. They never failed to produce meat and two veg, dust their picture rails, be up and dressed by 7.30. My sort of frailty was unthinkable and would not have been dignified by a fancy name, it was simply idleness. Given that pedigree it is hard to find inactivity comfortable.

An article I came across about Tom Hodgkinson, author and editor of The Idler brought a little consolation. His manifesto runs like this: 'We celebrate freedom, fun and the fine art of doing nothing. We believe that idleness is unjustifiably criticised in modern society when it is, in fact, a vital component of a happy life.'

'Hodgkinson's epiphany came at the age of 23. Until then, he had berated himself daily for his laziness. He would resolve every day to get up at 8 o'clock and then be furious when he slept till 11. "Finally I'd get up in a sort of rage at myself. Then I'd run a bath and find it impossible to get out, and then it would be sort of lunchtime. And then I'd think "I've got to make these calls, I'm a freelance journalist. But I'll just have a nap first."'

One day he discovered that he was not alone; Dr Johnson had vowed in his diary every New Year to get out of bed at 8am instead of 2pm. He never managed it. "I began to see a link between idleness and creativity, because Johnson was enormously productive."

So maybe it's nothing to get bothered about. As long as the pendulum swings regularly to both extremes, wood will get hewn, water carried and I will get to write the odd paragraph for my blog.