9 years ago I was exhibiting at a private art gallery space. Brixton East, in Brixton. I was part of the hanging team and was lucky enough to be in the building before the artists delivered their work. The gallery was in a sympathetically restored furniture factory. For a blissful half hour it was just me and a young Hugo enjoying the texture of the old building.
All my favourite urban textures and contrasts were there, but also quirky placements of contemporary things.
And gentle reminders of the former use of the space. A poker-work chair seat pattern.
Borrowed light into a dark space.
Soon enough the space was full of the chatter of artists and later the art lovers poured in.
My painting in the gold spotlight. Momentarily I can say a proud moment. A fab moment in one of my favourite buildings.
But only a couple of years later I exhibited in the same space. I was not in the hanging team. A classic contemporary artist joke occurred. My abstract art was hung upside down, the curator could not be persuaded to rehang it. Ordinarily I would not be too precious. Art being in the eye of the beholder and all that. But on this occasion, my art was painted on a door, the exhibition was about homelessness. The door handle would have been at knee level. A whole new level of artyfarty bollocks would have needed to be written to make that right. The art gods were not with me this second time in the building. One of my unframed pieces was stolen by a gallery/shoplifter. Everything is forgivable in a building that I love.
I am not normally someone that has frequent lottery winning fantasies but when the owner put this gorgeous space up for sale I would have done anything to be able to buy it. A lottery win would have been my only chance. But something lovely has happened. The building has been renamed and is now a beautiful wedding venue.
Without pondering today I would never have researched and discovered that one of my favourite buildings has had a happy ending of its own. Without me winning the lottery. Something new to follow on Instagram. In a perfect @theoldmortuary world 100 Barrington would serve coffee and cake when not doing weddings, and in that imaginary world, a somewhat older Hugo would slouch under a chair and watch the world go by.
This weekend has brought me a rich archive of Facebook time hop memories. Some of them were serendipitous. Yesterday we met some London friends at a country park and walked miles in mud and bright sunlight. 11 years ago they had sent us this message.
Their family now has two dogs but everything else is as it was, we laughed all day. Below is baby Hugo and baby Monty on the same day.
Another doggy memory features a baby Lola and our friend Steph.
Every picture tells a story, and the story of early 2016 is not one for an upbeat sunny blog. But there is so much love in and around this photo and we all needed it.
February wouldn’t be February if art wasn’t starting to wake up for the year.
The point of this Sunday ponder is to just enjoy these moments. Social Media isn’t for everyone but this weekend I have really enjoyed the reminiscences delivered to my phone over the last two days. The one below was a chilly family outing to Oxford Street. The gorgeous piece of Street Art perked us right up on a rainy day.
Maybe the take away from these February memories is that there is always so much to look forward to with ten months of possibilities to anticipate. Just like a tree waiting to grow leaves in the sunshine.
A little extra from yesterday. An accidental dam in floodwater.
This time next week we will all be waking up in March. If January was all about recharging and recovering from the pleasures of the Festive Season it also brought some unexpectedly lovely sunny days. Bright shafts of sunlight kick-started early Spring Cleaning and redecorating during February.
No bad thing as February has been relentlessly wet and drear. Global warming in the far south-west of Britain reveals itself damply. Growing up in the Cold War years (1947-1985) nobody talked much about the climate until they did.
As a lover of words it seems interesting that almost with a flick of a switch the media swapped one temperature based threat with another.
I first heard the term ‘ Global Warming’ in about 1984 just as the ‘Cold war’ was limping to a conclusion of sorts. My ponder today is a really naive one. Does the world not take Global Warming seriously because the word warming is one that suggests comfort and cosiness.
Which leads me to today’s random question/prompt.
What advice would you give to your teenage self?
I took far too much advice as a teenager, so overburdening my younger self with more unsolicited advice might be unwelcome. But here I go.
Nobody gets it all right, all of the time. But getting things wrong is often the more interesting path but not the most comfortable.
Study Global Warming.
Plum Beautiful lipstick, Levi’s and Doc Martin boots will still be with you when you are sixty.
Life changed and took me along with it. My favourite drinks are time specific. The first caffeinated cup of tea of the day followed swiftly by the first black coffee. Since Covid stole or altered almost all of my sense of taste and smell, my favourite drinks are the ones with many layers of flavour. I am at my flavoursome best in the morning.
After midday I only drink modified water really. This is not a hardship. A whole new world of fruit tea is out there for me to explore. Sadly they are mostly just a few moments of flavour before they just become hot water. Mostly I just drink hot water.
Barszcz, clear Polish Borscht, served in a cup on Christmas Eve was a revelation. Exactly the mix of flavours I need to kick my tastebuds into afternoon action.
By the evening there is no point trying to kick the tastebuds, they are tucked up in bed long before I am. Alcohol has more or less abandoned me.
And this is the point when a prompted blog finds the true path to a ponder. Humans, or at least the ones I mix with are gorgeous hospitable people. They want me and my taste buds to have a good time. Only asking for a cup of hot water or a non-alcoholic drink upsets the balance of hospitality and generosity for most people. I realise now the struggle that it must be to be a non-drinker, by choice or need.
I’m not entirely sure where this blog is going today. After a morning of rather dull admin I gave myself a little break and did some test printing and gave some new watercolours a bit of a run out as a reward for tasks achieved. A little digital tweaking and I created this header post. Big thanks to everyone who responded so positively to yesterday’s blog, I love feedback, you all make my pondering a positive experience.
I suppose yesterday’s blog was loosely about books and today’s mild ponder is also about a book, one that I have not read.
A quote from this book was shared with my book group and I felt that I disagreed with the writer to some degree.
It didn’t exactly keep me up all night but now I am going to have to read the book and see why the author felt the need to take such a cavalier attitude to her past. It is my safe past experiences that give me the confidence to press on into the cloud, as she puts it, of the future. Like many people not everything in my past was fabulous, but all past experience is useful. I suppose what shocks me is that she considers past experience to be ‘ dead’. It is unalterable, but surely it is as alive and vivid as I allow it to be.
And this is exactly why I have a book pile problem. This quote will piss me off until I have read the whole book. Pondering. Is it ever possible to turn it off?
Visiting a famous author’s home, when I hadn’t read one of her books for more than 40 years, felt a lot like attending a lecture without doing my homework. In my defence this was always a reconnaissance visit, to get the measure of the place before we brought other people here. In between times I will read some Agatha Christie and watch some film and T.V adaptations.
There are other stories attached to Greenway that I can recount without feeling hopelessly under-researched. The house is on the river Dart almost opposite Dartmouth. The estate was once the home of Sir Walter Raleigh the man who brought tobacco and the smoking habit, from his travels in America in the 16th century. Sir Walter was taking a crafty puff down by his boatshed, when it is said a servant thought he was on fire and pushed him into the river. He would have been gazing out at the Anchor Stone/Point, a rocky outcrop in the middle of the river that is never fully submerged.
In medieval times women, who were accused of being gossips or fornicators, were rowed out to the rock and left there for a full circuit of tide changes, to give them time to think about their misdeeds. I must presume the rowers were men, who of course, are never known to gossip or fornicate.
Fornication takes me rather neatly to the last non- Agatha story that I picked up.
During WW2 the U.S Coastguard service were stationed at Greenways which had been requisitioned by the British Government during the war. U.S personnel were there to prepare for the D Day Landings.
Flotilla #10 had a talented artist Lt Marshall Lee in it’s midst. He painted a mural depicting the deployments of Flotilla #10 during the U.S involvement during the later parts of WW2.
Beautifully rendered paintings of the locations where they had been stationed.
Leading up, we must assume, to some traditional R and R.
Never fully fleshed out it seems. Which makes me ask a question.
Did Lt Marshall Lee not survive the D Day landings to finish his masterpiece. Or did the carnal or other delights of Dartmouth put him off his brush strokes. I really hope it was the latter and that his earthly delights were not dragged off to the anchor rock for punishment.
Hats and an early mobile phone at Greenway
P.S This is why I love to blog, just a little digging found me this lovely nugget of information. Do read it.
Marshall Lincoln Lee was born February 12, 1921 in Brooklyn, NY. His father, Jack Lee, was born 1887 in Russia and came to America in 1895. His mother, Ruth Lee, was born in 1897 in NYC of Polish ancestry. His parents married in 1916 and had two children. His older sister Doris Lee was born in 1918. They lived at 350 Fort Washington Avenue in the Washington Heights section of uppermost Manhattan. His father owned and operated an automobile garage.
As the family grew prosperous they moved to 117 Glover Avenue in Yonkers. NY, a suburb just north of the Bronx.
On November 16, 1929 his father died at the age of forty-three. His mother supported the family by working as a stenographer at a newspaper.
He had a natural talent for drawing and became interested in a career as a commercial artist while working in the newspaper pressroom during summer vacations.
IN June of 1936 he graduated from Yonkers High School.
In September of 1936 he began to attend the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. He studied illustration with Nicholas Reilly and H. Winfield Scott. Two of his fellow classmates were Sam Savitts and Attilio Sinagra. During his senior year he was elected Class Vice president.
In June of 1939 he graduated from Pratt. He moved to 50 Commerce Street in Lower Manhattan and began to work as a free-lance commercial artist.
His illustrations appeared in Red Mask Detective Stories, Five Novels Monthly, Clues Detective Stories, The Lone Eagle, The Avenger, Jungle Stories, Two-Complete Detective Books, Ten Detective Aces, Baseball Stories, and Action Stories.
During WWII he enlisted in the U. S. Coast Guard Reserve. Several other artists also served in this branch of the military during WWII, such as Herman Vestal, Rafael Astarita, John Falter, and Frederick Blakeslee, as well as the pulp magazine publisher Harry Steeger.
He was promoted to Lieutenant and was made Commanding Officer of the U.S.S. LCI(L)-96, which stands for Landing Craft, Infantry (Large). His ship participated in the North African occupation in Tunisia and afterwards landed troops at Salerno during the invasion of Sicily.
In January 1944 they were stationed in England in preparation for D-Day. Many large British manor homes were requisitioned by the military for the duration, and he was among several officers billeted at the country estate of Agatha Christie near the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth. Lt. M. Lincoln Lee painted a decorative mural in the library, which served as a recreation room. His mural depicted the worldwide exploits of his ship, the U.S.S. LCI(L)-96. When the famous mystery author finally returned the Admiralty apologized for the mural and offered to paint it over, but Agatha Christie said, “No, it’s a piece of history. I would like to keep it.” She spent nearly every summer at the home for the rest of her life.
On June 6, 1944 the U.S.S. LCI(L)-96 participated in the Normandy Invasion at Utah Beach. After D-Day he became Harbor Master at the Port of Cherbourg, and then went to SHAEF HQ in Frankfurt-am-Main.
After his honorable discharge in 1946 he became the U.S. Director of Inter-Allied Cultural Relations in Europe.
In 1948 he returned to New York City and resumed his career in publishing. He became an award-winning book designer. He lived at 219 East 69th Street in the affluent Upper East Side of Manhattan.
By 1952 he was a college professor teaching book design at New York University.
In 1965 Doubleday published his reference work, Bookmaking – Editing, Designing, and Production, which became a standard textbook on the subject.
In the 1970s he became Vice President of Harry N. Abrams Art Books Inc. He moved to 25 Church Street in Schuylerville, NY.
In 2000 the U.K. National Trust restored Agatha Christie’s manor house, including the library mural of the U.S.S. LCI(L)-96 by Lt. Lee. British art conservators contacted the artist for consultation and The Daily Mail reported, “he was extremely delighted to learn his mural had survived over the years and been preserved, so it will be there for future generations to see.”
Marshall Lee died at the age of eighty-nine on April 21, 2010 in Schuylersviller, NY.
Fascinating that he was known as a pulp artist. For many years Agatha Christies books were reproduced using such cheap materials that their manufacture would have been included in the genre Pulp Fiction. I hope they met.
The best gifts to receive are the ones that take you on a journey. To single out one gift as the best I have ever received would be madness. Gifts are such diverse items. A kind word is a gift, as is a small portion of chocolate or a shoulder squeeze or a cup of tea. To stimulate today’s blog I have chosen a recent gift. A book from one friend’s pile to mine. The joy of a random book.
Share one of the best gifts you’ve ever received.
As all things have for the last few weeks, Saturday started with DIY. The flip side of a recently gifted book showed this image of a woman doing DIY.
Not just any woman dabbling her paintbrush. The world’s best selling author of all time, Agatha Christie. Her old home is less than an hour from us. We have the book so why not go and inspect her brushwork?
The longer I live in Devon the more I realise that the world moves in strange circuits. Particularly for the rich and famous.
Our journey started ordinarily enough at a cafe/coffee shop.
The Almond Thief
The Almond Thief in a building that was once the home of Sir Francis Drake.
Greenway, the home of Agatha Christie. The Greenway Estate was formerly the home of the Gilbert family. Sir Walter Raleigh,the first importer of Tobacco to Europe,was a Gilbert and when this land needed landscaping his chum, Sir Francis Drake,from the Almond Thief Cafe, just happened to have captured a Spanish ship with 166 crew who became prisoners of war who were then gifted to Sir Walter Raleigh’s uncle as ground workers. And that, it seems, is exactly how 16th Century Devon worked. Which completes the coffee shop circle. Back to the book.
Exploring anywhere in February rain is a challenge but we did appreciate all the Spaniards hard work. The grounds were fabulous and the artificially created viewpoints gave hints of gorgeousness but for us just monochrome hints.
10,000 steps in the rain did not give us much time for the house and we had to do it in split shifts for outdoor dog care. But it was amazing, so many stories to tell. But this is a blog about a gift which took me on a journey, as all good gifts should. Plenty of time to natter about Agatha and her lovely house next week.
I loved her lobster plate.
EBay tells me I could have one for £420. Another journey. One I am unlikely to complete.
Mid-February Friday, feels a little bit of a becalmed space. I am eager for Spring to show its face with some certainty, but not wishing to wish time away. The heavy rain of the last few days has been a dampener in many ways. On a positive note I took a whole bag of stuff to a charity shop and only bought two items home, a 100% cotton jumper to do an upholstery repair and a charming 1930’s tea set to hold my earrings in one definitive area.
Both items were reduced in the sale. The tea set was £5 and the jumper £4. The upholstery job took exactly one woman hour. The earring gathering may take a little longer.
Earring gathering has become essential, we have a toddling grandchild whose eyes and fingers alight on small things in the wrong place with astonishing accuracy.
More than half way through February. Thank goodness, I am not a winter person!
My parents had stopped map making for me at my age. They both died at the age of 63 and had been terminally ill for some time so map making for their adult child had not been at the top of their to-do-lists for a couple of years before that. Their maps stopped .To use a nautical term, I have been on uncharted waters for some time. Cartography -on-the-go for me.
Anything that I’ve done beyond the age of 36 has had no inherited map, lovingly offered from anyone that shared my own gene pool. But life maps are everywhere. If it takes a village to raise a child then an adult child can look to the village for spare maps.
My how-to-be-an older adult maps are tatterdemalion-like. Made up as I go along with bits stolen from people I admire, books, the media. From time to time I look at large multi- generational families in awe, as they navigate life with shared wisdom. But if I love the way they do things I can copy and paste.*
How to be an older adult? I have no idea, I am a stranger here myself.
* sometimes when I copy and paste I have a slight sensation of something on my fingertip. Is that a little odd?
P.S Yesterday, while searching for some fabric I found a barrel of pure white feathers for sale. I know that some people like to think of the souls of loved ones when they see a pure white feather caught in a sudden breeze. I thought a barrel of them was magical. A tiny feather also usefully demonstrates the sensation I sometimes get when copy and pasting.
theoldmortuary.design 
