theoldmortuary has been a blog for about five years. It has evolved into an almost daily event. Pondering on the things that are inspired by my daily life. Often mundane, sometimes repetitive I swerve from hyperlocal activity to big and small thoughts without blinking an eye. I am an artist and writer. My hometown is Plymouth in South West England, part of me will always be connected to London and another part loves to travel.
Not exactly sunrise to sunset, but not far off. The curating and hanging teams for the Spring Exhibition, including me, worked hard all day to hang all the 2d and 3d work submitted for the Spring Exhibition. 12,000 steps on a hard concrete floor are enough to make your feet shout for a break, but that was not an option. All the works were hung and the space beautifully tidied up by the time the doors opened for the Private View. Then the owners of the same exhausted feet made sure that our guests had drinks in their hands and delicious canapes in their mouths. Lovely conversations were had and sales negotiated. Gilly our treasurer had her hands full with Pimms and payments all happening at once. All in all a good day was had.
Setting up a group art exhibition is exhausting but the thrill of unpacking other peoples creativity is an enormous treat. The other great pleasure is meeting and talking with the artists as they arrive, weighed down by their precious creations.
After the last two days of setting up and installing we have a week now of being open to the public and plenty of time to chat. Anyone local to Gunnislake or the Tamar Valley, we would love to see you, there will always be a warm welcome.
The mackerel are gathering, this can only mean one thing.
An art exhibition is about to be constructed over the next couple of days. As usual I am not quite ready.
Deconstructed Daffodil 1Deconstructed Daffodil 2
Another artist had delivered her work to my house last Saturday all beautifully wrapped and bagged up. My work, in comparison, was all over the place. I also need other essentials like cable ties and S hooks to enable the construction of the boards,that hold all the artwork, and give the Artists plenty of space to show off their work.
Lester Longwool goes to DevonLester Longwool goes to Cornwall
It is always a surprise scrabbling around in my studio. Things that are put away unfinished come to the surface like this abstract of Silver Birches that needed just a dusting of silver to be finished.
Silver Birch Plantation
This next one needed framing and he looks magnificent finished off with a frame. It is a cheeky picture of the return of Nightlife to The Barbican. He is also finished with High Gloss Resin which makes the image almost impossible to photograph.
Nightlife Returns
Just one last picture to share from my contribution to the group show.
Nearly There Trees
I had lost this original for several years before finding it a couple of weeks ago in the final tidy up and reorganisation of the studio. Reproductions of it always sell well but the original had hidden itself away. As things turned out I am so glad I spent some time with it yesterday mounting and wrapping it ready for sale. The Nearly There Trees are a landmark close to the A30 on the Devon and Cornwall Border. Their proper title is Cookworthy Knapp. They are symbolic and significant to all who love Cornwall. Below is a link that explains more about the Trees.
Yesterday evening I learned that an artist friend, who lived in Spain, had died earlier in the week. She was born just across the water from where I live now on the Mount Edgecombe Estate. The Nearly There Trees are hugely significant because she chose to return to Cornwall for her last months. Artists are funny folk who mostly work in isolation, but when we flock together we shed and share ideas . My lovely friend and I met at the Arts University Plymouth. She introduced me to Elvis, I’m not sure what I gave her. She and I often pondered the subjects of these blogs, I am so glad she made it home.
Todays blog is a little late due to holiday travel. Not mine, for certain, as I am still without a passport. But it did give me the chance to share one of my favourite holiday photographs. This morning I dropped some friends to the airport for their holidays and by coincidence several friends and family are travelling to Europe for weddings this weekend which makes my whatsapp notifications bright with happy holiday images.
All of my adult life I have taken foreign travel for granted. Covid and now an inept passport office have kept my feet very firmly on United Kingdom soil for nearly three years. This has made me appreciate the similarities and pleasures of Britain that I previously would, perhaps, have not even noticed. After the drive to the airport this morning I went to Sutton Harbour area to have new tyres fitted. I heard a sound that would be well known to anyone who has spent time in the Mediterranean . A handbell being rung from the window of a white van carrying food items. Today was not freshly caught fish or locally grown vegetables but the humble pasty!
So, I am a little envious of my nearest and dearest sampling foreign sights and sounds. The minute a passport lands in my hands, foreign adventures will be planned. But today I walked past scenic lobster pots with a baguette under my arm, only the weather proved to me that I was not, currently, somewhere more exotic.
Our garden designing , or now to be accurate yarden design, is nearly all copied or modified from things we have seen on the TV coverage of the Chelsea Flower Show. This year’s event started being broadcast yesterday. Some years we are lucky enough to visit in person. This year is a watch it on TV year. By coincidence we visited a garden centre yesterday that was primped and made perfect, ready to welcome all the inspired amateur gardeners who will visit hoping to create something magical on their own plot.
At first I thought this pairing of a silk scarf and flower was a serendipitous occurrence of lost property and garden pots. But the silk scarf and others I discovered later were deliberately and whimsically placed. I’m not sure our robust city yard has the chutzpah to be adorned by floaty scarves.
We were at the garden centre on a double mission. To replace a couple of casualties from the move and to avoid very heavy Cornish rain. We had also spent some time at an EcoLodge over the weekend and were freshly charged with sustainable ideas.
We like the idea of extending gardens with the use of garden mirrors. Our London garden had a series of arches leading to infinity at the boundary. In reality we had painted an old concrete garage black and stuck arched mirrors between the concrete supports. Within a couple of years the garage had disappeared beneath foliage and all that could be seen were three enchanted paths leading, who knows where, which were actually just reflections of our small urban plot. Since then garden mirrors have become a bigger thing with bigger prices, but like a bee to honey I am still attracted to them. Then I was struck with a thunderbolt of an idea. When we bought this house we inherited a large, very heavy mirror that has been propped up in our hallway ever since we took it off the wall. Advertising it locally at a very cheap price or offering to give it away has not shifted it at all. In part because it is cumbersome and heavy. Checking out garden mirrors at the garden centre I realised they were not as well constructed as the one we were trying to give away. As soon as we were home a space was cleared and the big beast was moved into the yard. Not what I would have chosen exactly, but the thrill of repurposing something that had been previously unwanted feels satisfying and we can design around it to make it look like it was always part of the grand plan.
The recycling gods must really have been with us yesterday. The evening walk on our local beach delivered up another piece of yard hardware.
While the dogs were scampering we found an old metal grid all caught up with seaweed that had been washed up onto the beach. Not too much of a clean up, and some curious looks as we walked home, it was soon installed as a support for our tomatoes.
This should be the high flying version of a blog. Over this last weekend Zip Wire Flying should have happened at the Eden Project but Covid afflicted one of our friends and the group activity has been postponed. Instead a weekend in coastal towns and on the High Sea has filled our days and indeed led to this late blog, colour and not location is the flavour of this late blog. Sunday Cornwall thought it was in Greece. We stayed in the village of Golant just two miles up the river from our family favourite Fowey, more of that later in the week. Fowey River Class Dinghies created the first kick of colour.
We had over an hour to wait for the ferry to Mevagissy but being at the turning buoy kept us entertained and the sunshine was very welcome on our faces.
The slipway for the Fowey to Mevagissy Ferry couldn’t have been more Greek.
The ride was a little more lively than the average ferry.
We landed in yet more Hellenic vistas.
Meva harbour also joined in the colour project.
Two days with virtually no signal and no wifi does not a daily blog make. Normal service will resume tomorrow.
I expected a morning of birdsong and sunshine today. We are overlooking a valley not too far from home, with a very poor signal and no wifi. Somewhere, in this blanket of fog, there is the Fowey River.
Fog is funny stuff, often depicted as malevolent it alters the way we think. During the pandemic ‘brain fog’ was one of the long term negative symptoms that people described. We all understood that feeling, even if we had never experienced it. Fog is universally a weather phenomenon that no one has a good word for. No positive spin exists for fog.
Photographers only love it as it is leaving the area. So far, today, we are not yet at the point of fog appreciation.
Yesterday my early morning dog walk sent me down a Google rabbit hole. The picture above is from one of the emergency on -call rooms at St Bartholomews Hospital in London. St Pauls Cathedral and St Bartholomews Hospital have always been a big part of my life. I realised, yesterday, that there is another St Pauls in my life now.
This St Pauls is the early morning sniffing zone of Hugo and Lola. At the very least they must sniff across the forecourt once or twice a day. Yesterday the trail around the church was very enticing for them, and having nothing better to do I allowed them to make the most of the good sniffs. It occured to me that I have no idea how Churches or any other religious institutions get their names. St Pauls is remarkably common.
Not all St Pauls are created equal.
So while the dogs sniffed round rusty pipes, I googled. It seems that as this is a subject of faith rather than science the whole naming thing can be quite arbitrary. Arbitrary suits me very well in fact.
Gladioli and Sunburst Lichen in St Pauls Church Yard
Am I drawn to know more about St Paul, no not particularly, I’m sure he was a worthy and wonderful chap since so many places, both great and small are named after him, but my nature is always to search out the less populist things in life . The saints in the shadows perhaps, the ones at the bottom of the class or on the reserve list. To return briefly to the City of London there are two churches, St Bartholomew The Great and St Bartholomew the less. Surely the lesser Bart, as he would have been known to his chums, would have been the more interesting.
Pondering such things can bite you on the bum though. While I was pondering the lives of the saints and the places named after them, the dogs found their own interesting topic. Urban fox poo. Jerked out of my unusual ponderings I was alert enough to save myself from a morning of dog bathing. I wondered, briefly, which Saint I should thank for that.
Reflecting on St Paul and other Saints. Link below for an interesting lift ride.
A quick skim of some of the photographs of this week suggests a little bit of an accidental theme. I often re edit old photographs so my weeks output is not always chronological. This old picture of the rope bridge at the Eden Project is in this weeks archive because my daughter bought a print by another artist, which made me wonder what I could do with my own image. So on a theme of interesting journeys not to far from home I can bring you stairs at the museum I work at.
Two accidental early morning walks on the Barbican gave some more whimsical journey images.
The image above camouflages the image below. They all suggest time travel or indeed travel to a different time.
All four of these images have a lot of steps involved even if they are not seen. My final image is the fuel for travel.
Cardamom Cakes, a gustatory journey to unusual flavours, fuel for all the steps on an unplanned walk.
Blue, blue, electric blue. The words that stick in my head from David Bowie singing Sound and Vision.
After nearly a year of living very close to the sea, I have a huge colour palate in my head that is the colour of the sea, I also have a lot of sounds and visions. I’m in the early stages of a commission that will reflect how the sea changes. I am taking a mixed media approach to the early work.
The Atlantic in my little patch of Devon can be many different colours, not always blue and sometimes quite grotty.
The sounds also change depending on the tides and the weather and the shapes in my bigger abstract try to show the sounds by shape and the interfaces between two different colours.
This is a big old piece of paper for a water colour. I have no idea quite how this project is going to play out, but for now, just charting blue/ greens is very relaxing.
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