Monday, December 30, 2013

Bitter Tales - a collection of short stories


Exclusively on Amazon. US readers here Bitter Tales UK readers here Bitter Tales
Also Canada and India 

One reviewer said:
I love the authors writing style here. The sentences have a certain poetry to them and they read like silk. The descriptors that he uses fit the picture in my head so perfectly. His style of writing combined with his ability to describe pictures allows me to read this story so smoothly that I can see a movie instead of the words.  
Adam B at The Enchanted Conversation  

Wednesday, July 24, 2013

Back in the Life Room

It's been far too long since I did any life drawing. This was done at Benedict's class at the Lord Palmerston. 

See also Life Class

Update: The pun was unintentional.

Tuesday, July 2, 2013

Wednesday, June 19, 2013

Lost Mermaid

Walking down the street yesterday evening I found myself eye to eye with this. She was gone this morning.

Saturday, May 4, 2013

Jimi Hendrix's Electric Ladyland - the naked truth

Jimi Hendrix takes a bite at the sleeve of the British version of Electric Ladyland in his London flat in early 1969. The playful gesture reflects his true feelings - he disliked it and was frustrated that his own ideas had been overlooked. The previous autumn, while on tour in the States, he had sent a visual of his own design back to Track Records, his London label.
Kit Lambert, co-owner of Track, ignored Jimi's wishes and pursued this characteristically outrageous cover. It must be said that a photograph and design are splendid, whatever Jimi's feelings. The design was the work of David King, art editor of the London Sunday Times' colour magazine supplement. King's vivid yet disciplined graphic imagination, and eye for images which could be both shocking and hauntingly beautiful had established a style of magazine design which was much imitated and has in many ways yet to be bested. King carried his talent for stirring up guilt and desire simultaneously in the eye of the beholder onto the sleeve of Electric Ladyland. Almost half a century later, when images of naked women are commonplace in mainstream media, and in endless supply via the internet, this picture still has the power to burrow into the pysche. The photograph was taken by David Montgomery and the women were recruited from the street, outside Montgomery's studio in Edith Grove, the shabby end of London's Chelsea, where all sorts of interesting things happen.

Addenda: My account of Jimi Hendrix's life and times in pyschedelic London is available here Jimi Hendrix: London (MusicPlace) on amazon.com and here on amazon co.uk. Jimi Hendrix: London (Musicplace) (Musicplace Series)
I would very much like to interview any of the women who posed for the photograph. If you can help please leave a message in the comments.

Monday, March 4, 2013

William Francis Dixon - St Mark

A detail from an aisle window in St Mary, Brookfield parish Church in North London: St Mark by William Francis Dixon. Mark is now the only surviving Evangelist in a four light window; the other three were destroyed by a bomb blast during WWII. The tracery glass, which includes a head of John The Baptist, also remains undamaged
W. F. Dixon was born in 1848 and began his career as an artist with Clayton and Bell. He had his own stained  glass business, with a succession of partners, by the mid 1870s. In the 1890s he moved to Munich to work for Mayer and Co. and died there in 1928.
The window is dedicated to the memory of Mary Cocksedge and was given by her son Walter.

Friday, February 8, 2013

Still life with Blender

These solid looking objects have no existence outside my imagination and the binary digits of the .png file. We live in astonishing times, and we barely notice.

Wednesday, February 6, 2013

Chess at the homeless shelter


Two guests play chess together at the homeless shelter I help to co-ordinate.
More on chess and volunteering for the C4ws Homelss project here.

Friday, January 4, 2013

Walking In Darkness - Sensory Deprivation

Niewidzialna Wystawa in Polish, which translates as the The Invisible Exhibition, is currently a big attraction in Warsaw. The report I've just read says the idea originated in Hungary a few years ago, but I recognise it as identical to an exhibition held in London, beneath the South Bank arts centre in the mid-1990s. 
The exhibition is in complete darkness and consists of a guided tour for a small group of people through a series of mocked up everyday environments led by a blind person. At the time it was in London, I was deeply into experiments in sensory deprivation, so I went along eagerly. The experience was a..., well the expression which immediately sprang to my mind was eye-opener, which is inappropriate because the object of the exhibition is to give insight (oh dear another visually led word) into the lives of the blind. So revelation is the better word.