Author: admin

The festival where I have been taking painting and art supplies for the last couple of years has, like most of the good bits of 2020, been cancelled. But instead there is an online event running tomorrow (29th August), through which I am attempting to do some fundraising. For more details, see this page on my site: https://www.outside-line.uk/home-made-towersey-2020/ or this one on theirs: https://www.towerseyfestival.com/project/festival-traders/.

I’m looking forward to it – and, having seen the weather forecast for this weekend, am quite glad not to be spending it in a tent.

Lots of people around here have dogs, and they like to walk them down beside the canal. It’s nice down there; trees screen out the housing estates and logistic warehouses and it seems like we still live in the countryside.

There are big red bins along the paths for dog poop. I don’t know how often they are emptied but they always stink in the summer. They offer reassurance that you haven’t lost your sense of smell, at least.

Because some dog owners are idiots, and because some dogs like to sneak off somewhere private, there is also a fair amount of poop which doesn’t make it to the bins. For some reason which escapes me, it’s someone’s actual job to wander along the footpaths in search of these rogue dumps, and to spraypaint a ring around them. Maybe it’s one of those half-assed psychological interventions that policy makers are so keen on now, a blue ring of shame (LOOK! WHO LEFT THIS? WAS IT YOU?), maybe the council can’t afford to pay enough for someone to actually pick the stuff up.

The bottom of the barrel, though, are the people (and we can’t blame the dogs here) who gather the dogshit into plastic bags, tie them neatly and then leave them on the paths, or tie them to the branches of trees, like the very worst Christmas ever. It’s hard to think of any kind of pollution that’s improved by the addition of single-use plastic.

There have been better ideas. A couple of years ago the news channels gave over their silly segment to a man called Brian Harper who had made a bio waste convertor that powers a lamp. It’s a bit clunky, but it was a prototype; and it obviously works. Everyone in this clip agrees it’s a great idea, though they are mostly smirking while they do.

Other projects, like this one that Kevin McLeod visited (in 2013!) are able to work at scale, so why isn’t it just something that happens everywhere? Why does some poor sod’s job still consist of trudging around with the spraypaint? What, as Kevin says, is wrong with us?

By now I live in a different timezone to the rest of the house. I get up early to walk before I sign in to work, when it’s cool and quiet and less people are about. Quite often I walk past a field with some horses in, and stop by the gate to say hello. Once in a while one or other of them will wander over and stand with me a while, and that’s nice. I like horses’ company, when they aren’t trying to bite me.

When I’ve finished work, I skulk around upstairs out of the way, or run errands. Sometimes around four I fall asleep. My own work I can barely be bothered with, and so notes are started and abandoned, pictures unsorted and untaken; all creative activity pared down to making myself sit on the floor for half an hour and literally do cutting and sticking , or even just laying out pieces of paper in aimless patterns.

Today I have worked on a painting for the first time in a couple of weeks, although I sulked the whole time and ended up spending a long while using a small amount of paint to very little effect. As painting sessions go, it was largely symbolic. I suspect this bout of writing maybe something similar.

Sybil Andrews, born in rural Suffolk in 1898, was a painter and printmaker – chiefly of linocuts – for sixty-odd years of her life. She was also, courtesy of an absconding father, a perennial lack of money and two world wars: a welder; a teacher; a boat-builder and woodworker; a secretary and an immigrant. Having enduring the slow and painful reconstruction of civilian life after the first world war in England, she wasn’t inclined to do it again after the second. She moved to a remote part of Vancouver when she was fifty, and was homesick for the rest of her life, although she never returned to England.

In the 30s she had been a star pupil of the linocut pioneer Claude Flight at the experimental Grosvenor School of Art (as well as having a higher proportion of female students than the more traditional schools could stomach, the School enthusiastically espoused modern art movements and a principle that art should be made and distributed cheaply, so that it was within the reach of everyday folk). Although the School arranged international exhibitions and shows, and Sibyl was involved with many of them, she seldom earned much money from her work, but it was commended by contemporary critics. Her collaboration with Cyril Power on a public commission was presented under the name Andrew Power, to spare the commissioning board the trauma of employing a woman.

After World War 2, with the School building and much of the work of many of its members destroyed in the Blitz, and Modernism of the type it represented falling out of favour with the art market, the Grosvenor School disbanded. It must have seemed as if there was little point in carrying on. But to Andrews it was the work that mattered, and she continued to make and teach art and music from her home on the outskirts of a rural logging town for the rest of her life. When the work of the school members came back into fashion more than thirty years later, she seemed to take as little notice of success in her eighties as she had hardship in her fifties.

She was by all accounts an energetic and unconventional teacher, primarily concerned with teaching her pupils to work with the subjects and materials they had to hand, and to find the techniques and mediums that enabled them to ‘find their own way’, even when it was very different to her own. When she finally began to make some money from her art, she supported some of them financially, and when she died her estate was divided between supporting art and her church.

Like the work of many of Flight’s pupils, her linocuts show a fascination with rhythm and movement, and the influences of Futurism and graphic design. Sport and agriculture provided her with subjects for much of her best work (I really like her prints of ploughing scenes, like Leaf or Wings), which is bright, dynamic, meticulously designed and – despite being rubbished in 1945 as ‘old fashioned’ – enduringly modern.

Courtesy of a five-pound box colour sold in supermarkets, and a mid-life crisis, I have awesome hair. It’s not so much the cut – which before yesterday’s exasperated hacking session in front of the bathroom mirror was a regular pixie, and is now mostly shortish (sorry, Tina. Miss you.) – but the fact of it being navy blue.

I love it. I mean, it’s terribly bad for my hair, all that ammonia and peroxide. It’s not something I can keep up long term without the risk of going bald. The dye smells disgusting and makes a horrible mess. And it is just hair: it won’t make me better-looking or healthier or anything useful. But it cheers me up, this evidence of my ability to bend the laws of the universe in the tiniest way, just because I want to.

It has made me kind of conspicuous, though. Quite probably it was naive of me not to realise that this would be the case, but I had got used to being invisible. Overnight I stood out like a sore thumb, and strangers would stare and point and comment. People who come up to me at work, or in the shops or the street have always been complimentary (that’s how I know it’s awesome), and small children love to point out this oddity as they go by, often to the embarrassment of their handlers. I bet there are at least as many people who think it is a stupid thing to do, but so far they haven’t felt the need to tell me so.

At the start of lockdown, with all the urgency over shortages and homeworking, cancelled exams, sick and vulnerable friends, and terrible news everywhere (not to mention being stuck inside the house for twenty-three hours a day), it seemed ridiculously trivial to even think about hair dye. But after eight or nine weeks of scowling glumly in the mirror, I coloured it anyway, and immediately felt better. Not a huge amount -there is still more than enough bad news to go around, after all – but enough to make it worth doing. Whatever gets you through the night, like Lennon said.