bittersweet

The Sunday Times Style 5th Sep 2010 top photo by Rankin bottom photo by Chris Moore.

For more years than I care to mention I have had a fascination with Isabella Blow style icon, muse to milliner Philip Treacy and the wonder who was responsible for seeking out the wonder that was, and still is in the legacy he has left Alexander Mc Queen.
I liked her for many reasons but one in particular she was a keen advocate for wearing red lipstick which at times was rather haphazardly put on like myself. Which is why I love the photo of her above, if the only way to put it on is a bit hit and miss go for a whole block of lipstick right across your mush.
She was like this wonderful eccentric character who was ever an inspiration when I was doing my fashion degree in the early 90s she was always pinned up on my inspiration board as a constant source of wonderment. She was friends with some of the people you could only just have dreamt of meeting like Warhol and another constant source of inspiration for me John-Michael Basquait. It was only on Sunday morning that I got a small insight into the life of the image behind the photos. Hers is a bittersweet story of a mythical creature of the fashion world, editor of the times style magazine & American Vogue and her immense suffering living with bipolar disorder. That in the end was to lead her to try and take her life many times and eventually succeed.
I have first hand experience of living with my brother who lives and manages his bi-polar and many of the artists that I work with at a project I set up that supports artists living and surviving with mental health issues. I have experience of those highs that make individuals think they can take on the world with energy levels so high , so focused working for days and nights with no sleep on paintings, designs, sculpture with little regard to anything else that is happening in the world. Everybody is unique and individual and manages their illness in different ways, but inevitably after the highs their comes the low, the crash where you sometimes hold on by a finger tip because the now and the future is to painful to consider being part of. Then when the crash arrives there is the decision as to whether you want to manage your illness with medication and therapy or not. Everybody makes different choices, some decide on medication which they feels stabilizes them and they want that balance, others decide not to because it numbs their creativity and stops them thinking clearly. What can we define as clearly? One person's clear can be another persons mud. What I think I am trying to say is that everybody has choices about how they live their lives. It's just always so desperately sad when we loose a character of the world like Isabella Blow as the world will be a little less richer for them no longer being part of it.
The new book about Isabella Blow
Blow by Blow: the story of Isabella Blow by Detmar Blow & Tom Sykes.

Close the book on mental health discrimination www.time-to-change.org.uk/

favourite combinations

Colour belongs to our being; maybe each of us has his own
Le Corbusier
Colour touches us in every little way throughout our lives whether it's the big decisions like what colour to paint a room or subconscious decisions about which colour toothbrush we choose. Colour surrounds us they transform themselves with the ever changing light, and it is the element of creating which inspires me most as an artist.
Colour is such a huge part of our very existence that sometimes I think we take it for granted, but then in a cloudy grey sky a rainbow appears and everybody stares at the wonder, it might be the fields of rape seed oil in it's eye hurting yellow, or the beautiful blue of the king fisher darting across the river. It shows that colour has the power to make us all stop and stare.
I can remember the day very clearly when I saw colour in a very different way, and it was the start of something very important in my world. I was in my Gran's dark garage sitting on an old milk crate looking at the painting's of Graham Sutherland, the vivid, pinks, yellows and green' s jumped out of the book these colours had been captured from the wonderful light found in the South of France and Pembrokshire. My eyes were opened and I have never looked back. I still have this battered old book and it is still a constant source of inspiration and reassurance.
I have re-occurring colours within my work that time and time again I try to change, but these certain colour combinations always feel right. I love muted chalky violets, pinks, whites, pistachio green and pink, saffron orange and turquoise, brown and pinks.

running around in circles

Think of the wonderful circles in which our whole being moves and from which we cannot escape no matter how we try. The circler circles in these circles.
E.T.A. Hoffmann

How much of our lives do we spend running around in circles, trying to mix in the right circles, I think the wrong ones are always far more fun.
Just finished a new series of cushion entitled "running around in circles".
Now thinking about anything but circles.
Why don't we run around in squares?

http://www.patchworkbutterfly.folksy.com

Mr Hopkins

sheep drawing by me
Mynach falls
Mountain road to Aberystwyth it's so beautiful

Sheep+waterfalls+mountains+much rain = Wales

Just returned from a really lovely adventure to West Wales a pilgrimage really to re kindle a connection to where I was born and lived at the beginning of my life. I have had a real longing to return to Wales for so long, it is often in my dreams.
So we chucked stuff in the car, a tent, wine glasses, wine, drawing materials, camera, books, Elle decoration and of course the obligatory red lipstick. I am a very happy and good camper as long as there is a pub near who make lovely food. The pub was brilliant real Welsh Wales, a group of men sat round the bar nattering in there beautiful welsh accents every evening. I love Welsh accents they are real storytelling voices, they have a wonderful depth to them gentle and slow. There was a very interesting man who caught my ears attention, how different the conversations are to our local pub. They talked of shearing sheep, fixing tractors, forestry commissions new rules and of course all the other chit chat, but it is amazing how the landscapes we live in effect our everyday conversations, because people's whole lives are governed by where they are. The landscapes there are big, rural and at times difficult to negotiate. Well as this man I now know as Mr Hopkins was going out for a smoke, "I said he had the most wonderful voice and he should be a storyteller". He said " I am. We are all storytellers. I have a very famous cousin who tells stories. Think Silence of the lambs." Well that was me hooked for the rest of the evening. I practised my welsh he shared welsh poems in his mother tongue and the evening grew late.
Whilst there I walked and saw such beautiful landscapes that they just make you want to stop and stare. I drew lots and filled sketch books full of mono prints, ink drawings and ideas for some new paintings. I drew what must be a flock of sheep, I have found you have to be careful drawing sheep, one wrong mark with a pencil and you have an odd looking polar bear.
Lots of inspiration means lots of new work in my head. Now all I need is time and to remember not to forget how those landscapes make you feel when your there and in them.
Just off for a nice Chianti.

Peculiar times

It has been a very peculiar two weeks in reality but when I was looking back through the images saved on my camera it just looked even more peculiar. If somebody found the camera, I can't help feeling that they may feel slightly bemused, bewildered and think what the hell!!!
And then an explanation and all should become clearer. Clear as mud.

a) 3rd prize for flower arrangement in a tea cup at local flower show (equivalent of vicar of Dibley style show)
b) cat on mouse patrol he sits there for at least 18 hours a day at the moment
c) beginning of instillation for shop window by Spike decapitated dolls and taken apart sewing machines littering our work room floor. We are just hoping that he has used the old sewing machines!!!!! Mine is missing.
d) Nephews trying to catch their shadows in the nets.

Communication

Out with the old in with the new, my old phone is the source of much hilarity from my friends and family. This week it died. I went to the phone shop and said to the guy serving "I need a new phone and he said "What is your current phone?" I showed him. He very politely said with a smirk that "I needed a new phone 5 years ago". We both really laughed. How rude! So for the next week I am cutting edge but all that know me say that 5 years time I will still have the same phone, battered with war wounds. The up side is that nobody ever wanted to steal my old phone.
How communication has changed.
Do you ever have those days where you momentarily loose your faith in humanity. I did yesterday. How can one man be so unkind to his fellow beings and how a small details can be blown up into catastrophic problems, through mis -communication. It is so horrible to see this happen to people you care for. We only have to watch Big Brother to see how easily it happens. Since leaving University I have always been self employed so I never had the what seems like to me the horror of being employed. I am fortunate in that I get to work in lots of wonderful places, meet incredible people, work hard and the most importantly not get involved in staff politics. Awful destructive places are staff rooms in any shape or form.

I work as an artist with incredibly vulnerable people who live and survive mental health issues, battling their addictions or who are in prison. These people are by far the most interesting people I have met, they communicate their fears, joys and life through their creative practise. So why is it that staff working in these places are so destructive to one another. We are working in the care industry so in some places. Where is the care?
We have never had more ways to communicate in the work place but it seems to be happening less face to face. This is a huge problem as texts and e-mail come without facial expressions, body language and or tone.
We all need to listen more and harder to what people are trying to tell us. Sometimes they can't so we need to really look rather than just see and listen rather than just hear.
Rant over. On the way home my faith was restored by a little note on my car saying "Thank you for the art materials, I sold my painting and I have money for food for the next week." John lives on the streets and is trying to sort his stuff out.

When art and food blur

Painted using acrylic and mint sauce

I have known the artist Clemens Steigleder now for 5 years, and I just want the rest of the world to have a sneaky peek of his work. I just love it. I love watching his brain tick, the way he uses any materials he can get his hands on, I love most his vision and his innovative thinking.
Every inch of his soul is dripping in creativity.
He is a health and safety nightmare so that makes two of us. We have concoctions in our cupboard that are in line with George and his marvellous medicine by Roald Dahl. He paints using food a lot. You can be forgiven for thinking that you have entered a kitchen cupboard full of mustard, tomato sauce, whitebait, pigs trotters, favourite of the moment seems to be mint sauce. I think he has no sense of smell, because there have been times where the wiff could kill you especially when he was growing garlic in the cd player and when some of the whitebait fell down the back of the racking for a few weeks.
We once went to Hungerford to meet a group of artists on the way we passed the market Clem spied some pigs ears that were being sold on the pet stall. He bought them shoved them in his bag and we went on our merry way. We went to the artist's house to meet up with the others and out of nowhere this dog came bounding from nowhere and wouldn't leave us alone. He was practically sitting on Clem's lap and then started to wrestle with his bag. It was only then that we remembered the pig's ears. The dog had one the other is now safely fastened on a painting.
Clem is an amazing human being with an interesting and quirky take on the world, one foot firmly on the ground the other floating up to the heavens. Is that possible?
He is a true artist in every sense of the word he lives, sleeps and breathes it.
Clem's weaknesses he can kill a laptop dead in 30 seconds.

http://www.csteigleder.blogspot.com/