I run into some interesting characters in my line of work, and after more than 50 years of interviewing, there is very little that surprises me.
But even I raised an eyebrow when I chatted to record-breaking micro artist David A Lindon, who creates works so small they can’t even be seen with the naked eye. They have to be viewed under specially designed magnifiers for public viewing.
The extraordinary lengths he goes to produce images and sculptures that can fit inside the eye of a needle are truly amazing, not to mention potentially life-threatening.
“I tend to paint late at night and shut all the doors and windows to reduce the chance of any vibration from passing traffic,” he told me. But his preparations go a lot further than that.
Working by hand under a specialist microscope also requires an incredibly steady hand. In order to achieve this the 56-year-old Bournemouth-based artist maintains a rigorous fitness regime and avoids alcohol, coffee and high-energy drinks.”
Micro artist David A. Lindon creates art that can fits into the eye of a needle
Giraffe in the eye of a needle by David A Lindon
He has even trained himself to slow his pulse rate down to a level where he can literally work between heartbeats. It’s a medically dangerous practice and he admits: “There have been a couple of times when my pulse has slowed so much that I’ve almost flaked out at the microscope.”
Fortunately, so far his extreme regime has paid off and he is now in the Guinness Book of Records for creating the world’s smallest ever handmade sculpture, a tiny Lego brick the size of a human white blood cell. The work was officially recognised last year, beating the previous record which had been held by fellow micro artist Dr Willard Wigan since 2017.
The bad news is that while the tiny scale of the work and its means of production and are undoubtedly impressive, the actual ‘art’ itself is pretty dreadful and unoriginal in terms of the content which is mainly copied from existing images.
Perhaps not surprisingly Lindon who originally trained as a small instruments mechanic with the Ministry of Defence and went on to work on components for equipment in tanks and aircraft says he didn’t particularly excel at art at school.
He only became interested in micro art because he saw a TV documentary on the subject and one day finding himself at a loose end decided to give it a go. Discovering he was rather good at the technical side of it he became competitive and driven to work on a smaller and smaller scale. His work now fetches big money and is much sought-after by the cognoscenti.
Now here is a new work celebrating the 70th anniversary of the Japanese Kodansha’s Nakayoshi magazine and its iconic anime character Sailor Moon.The piece took Lindon two months to make under the microscope using a hand-made micro-sized tool kit.
David A. Lindon’s celebration of the iconic anime character Sailor Moon
Speaking of the experience, he says: “I worked like a zombie, slowing down my heart so much that it will take months to recover. I now have to force my heart to speed up when I’m walking about in the day otherwise I fall over! Each evening I sat all through the night like an owl perched in front of my Nikon microscope. One thing I have noticed is that I’ve now developed extraordinary night vision and such an acute level of hearing that I can hear insects moving about outside my window at night.”
Ah yes, I hear you say.’It’ll be those bloody insects clomping around in their hobnail boots again!’
Being a generous soul, I’ll take his word for it. Mind you, he has apparently had some strange experiences while working in this way. It can clearly be a stressful experience and he’s faced a few disasters along the way too. For instance he says he is still haunted by memories of the night he found himself on his hands and knees desperately searching for Amy Winehouse who had vanished into the fibres of his carpet.
It might sound as though he was under the influence of hallucinogenics or having a breakdown but it was a little more routine than that. After spending weeks of painstakingly careful work on a micro portrait of the late singer, the almost completed artwork had been swept away by the faintest of air movements. No bigger than a speck of dust, the portrait proved impossible to find. “It was awful,” he told me. “It just suddenly vanished from under my microscope”. It was never found.
Gilson Lavis in his home art studio in Lincolnshire. March 2013 Photo by Hattie Miles
Words: Jeremy Miles Pictures: Hattie Miles
I was so sorry to hear that my friend Gilson Lavis, longtime drummer with both Jools Holland’s Rhythm and Blues Orchestra and Squeeze died last week at his home in Lincolnshire.
He was 74 and had been battling health issues for some time. Late last year, after a career that had lasted nearly 60 years, he announced his retirement, bowing out in style with one final concert with Jools Holland’s Rhythm and Blues Orchestra at the Royal Albert Hall.
He had played in the celebrated big band for more than three decades and had previously worked with Holland in Squeeze which he joined as a founding member in 1976.
But his career extended way back to the 1960s when, having turned professional when he was only 15-years old, he toured with visiting American acts including Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis and Dolly Parton and he took valuable experience to the young Squeeze line-up.
His impressive skills and intutive feel for music in all its forms soon gained him widespread respect from his bandmates and fellow musicians. But it wasn’t all plain sailing.
Gilson and Jeremy Miles. Photo: Hattie Miles
Gilson had his demons and in the Squeeze days struggled with heavy drinking that eventually saw him descend into alcoholism. Much as they loved him, his wild and erractic and often wild behviour proved too much for the band and he was sacked…twice!
Eventually he managed to get sober and despite a busy touring and recording schedule, devoted the rest of his life to being an ambassador for Alcoholics Anonymous and helping others struggling with drink and addiction.
He is probably best known today for his regular TV appearances on Later and the annual New Year Hootenanny with the Jools Holland R&B Orchestra. He was also the session drummer of choice or many top musicians.
A list of those he has played with is truly extraordinary and includes Eric Clapton, BB King, Ray Charles,Paul McCartney, Adele, Amy Winehouse, Ronnie Spector, Paul Weller, Elvis Costello, Dionne Warwck, Doctor John, Marc Almond, Graham Parker and many more.The list goes on
He could adapt seamlessly to any genre of music playing rock, pop, soul, jazz, folk reggae, R&B or anything else that was required with equal feel and precision.
Beyond music he was also a talented painter, creating striking monochrome portraits of many of the musicians he worked with or particularly admired. Initially he just made sketches with a biro back stage but as his skill developed he began to paint in what would become his signature style which is how I met him when he approached me to help promote his art.
Having been a longtime admirer of his drumming, I was delighted. My wife, photographer Hattie Miles and I met Gilson at his home, a converted farmhouse in the Lincolnshire countryside. After a photo session in his home painting studio we chatted over lunch and I wrote a series of interview and feature articles and even found him a gallery that was keen to exhibit his paintings.
The show at The Hatch Gallery in Christchurch was one of the first that he staged and helped turn what had been a small side-hustle into a significant professioinal practice .
Hatch Gallery boss Jo Dyton (left) with Gilson and his wife Nicky. Photo: Hattie Miles
Gilson was a lovely man, kind, considerate and excellent company with endless fascinating and often hilarious anecdotes about the rock and pop stars he had worked with. We got on well and our business arrangement soon became a friendship.
I will always have happy memories of spending time with him at art shows, backstage at concerts, in his painting studio and having lunch with him and his wife Nicky. We are going to miss him so much.
*****
And here’s a piece I wrote about how Gilson’s successful battle with alcohol addiction and drug abuse eventually led to him acquiring a new set of teeth and establishing a second career as painter. It was published in 2013.
Gilson Lavis in the art studio at his home in Lincolnshire in 2013. Photo: Hattie Miles
There was a great turnout for the opening night of the new exhibition of paintings by my good friend, drummer-turned-portrait-artist Gilson Lavis, at the weekend. Self-taught painter Gilson specialises in black and white acrylic studies of many of the famous musicians he plays with in the Jools Holland Rhythm and Blues Orchestra. Painted backstage, in hotel rooms and at his home studio, the works on show feature some great performers – Eric Clapton, Elvis Costello, B.B. King, Ray Charles, Dionne Warwick, Paul Weller, Doctor John, The Rolling Stones, the list goes on.
Many of the musicians he paints have become his friends. Others have exerted a profound influence on a career that dates back more than 40 years to his days before he finding fame with Squeeze when he played for everyone from Chuck Berry to variety artists like Tommy Cooper, Bruce Forsythe and Bob Monkhouse. The exhibition is called Portraits: Gilson Lavis in Black & White and is at the Hatch Gallery in Christchurch, Dorset, until Friday October 4. Find out more and find out why Gilson chose to stage the show in a small town Dorset venue in my piece below which was originally published in Dorset magazine 12 years ago.
Elvis Costello portrait by Gilson Lavis
He’s one of the best and most versatile drummers in the world. Whether it’s rock, blues, R&B, soul, jazz or big band boogie, Gilson Lavis plays like a dream. Yet, at the age of 62, Gilson has decided that it might be an idea to add another string to his bow. Something to fall back on in his old age when the constant touring and punishing effects of his nightly virtuoso drum solos become too much.
For the past few years he’s been quietly developing a second career as a portrait painter. His black and white acrylic studies focus on the musicians he has worked with or been inspired by. Many of the paintings have been snapped-up by their subjects. Others are on sale though his own personal website. Now Gilson is planning to officially launch his career as an artist with a late summer exhibition in Dorset. The show which opens at Hatch Gallery in Christchurch on September 6 and runs until October 4 will hopefully be the first of a series of shows around the country.
Eric Clapton portrait by Gilson Lavis
Christchurch – home to what is officially the oldest population in England and Wales. Town motto: ‘Where time is pleasant’ – might seem a strange choice of location for a musician who has graduated with honours from the wild-man school of rock. After all his hard-boozing, dope-fuelled antics back in the days when he was with Squeeze got him sacked not once but twice. Gilson, however has been sober for years and is happy to embrace the quiet life these days. He admits that he’s constantly on the road and doesn’t often get a chance to stop and take stock of the English countryside. Dorset is different. He knows the county well not only from the annual gigs he plays with Jools at the Bournemouth International Centre but also because his wife Nicky was born and brought up in Swanage and went to school at the old Boscombe Convent.
The pair met when Nicky was working as Jools Holland’s PA – their romance sparked by “flirting over the typewriter” she says. For the past 20 years home has been a beautiful old Lincolnshire farmhouse lovingly renovated by Gilson as part of his ongoing commitment to sobriety. But family holidays with Nicky have often been spent in Dorset watching their son (also Gilson and now a strapping 17-year-old) playing on Swanage beach. There are also the happy memories of performing summer concerts in the Larmer Tree Gardens. “I love Dorset, it’s a beautiful part of the world so it seems appropriate to launch my exhibition at Hatch Gallery. It’s absolutely perfect, a small independent gallery in a part of the country I love. What could be better?”
Taj Mahal portrait by Gilson Lavis
Amazingly Gilson is an entirely self-taught artist. He says he discovered that he could draw and paint purely by accident. In a curious twist of fate it was the legacy of his drink and drug addled past that provided the opportunity to discover this latent talent. “You very rarely see an alcoholic with a nice smile and I’m afraid my teeth were in a shocking state,” he explains. “Eventually about five years ago they became so painful and infected that I had to get them fixed.” Gilson flew to Budapest for dental treatment only to discover that the rather pleasant sounding flat that he had booked on-line was little more than a squat. There were long days to fill as his remaining teeth were extracted and he waited for implants. “It was horrible,” he recalls. “There was nothing in the place except a TV showing endless programmes in Hungarian and a radio station that played nothing but European and American pop.
“I was bored and fed up but then I found a pen and some paper and started to sketch. “I really enjoyed it and I couldn’t believe how good the results were. First I copied a picture that was on the wall – a kind of knight on horseback and then I found a photograph on my laptop of our tour manager Steve so I drew that too. It was incredible I had no idea I could draw so well. “At school I had a bit of a reputation for drawing ladies’ breasts in my exercise book. The other kids always thought they were really good but apart from that and trying to copy pictures from a few comics I never paid much attention to art. It certainly never occurred to me that I had any real artistic talent.”
Gilson with Hatch Gallery owner Jo Dyton Photo: Hattie Miles
When he got home Nicky and his Jools Holland bandmates were equally surprised and impressed by this hitherto untapped talent. “That was it,” says Gilson. “From that moment on I was sketching the band, the crew, in fact anyone who would stand still for five minutes. I suppose that went on for a couple of years and then someone suggested I try painting. I wasn’t sure. I remember thinking that was a big step. I mean painting, that’s proper art.” Once again Gilson surprised himself, graduating first to brush-pens and then acrylics.
He soon established a signature style with vibrant monochrome portraits. His subjects are drawn mainly from the many people he has worked with.
Paloma Faith portrait by Gilson Lavis
The day I visited his studio the walls were hung with recent paintings of Eric Clapton, Ronnie Wood, Van Morrison, Roland Gift, Paloma Faith, Amy Winehouse, Chris Rea, Andy Fairweather Low, Paul McCartney and many more. There were stories and anecdotes to go with each one. Just one of the reasons Gilson loves painting
Surveying the works and executing a few finishing touches to Eric Clapton, he told me: “Sketching and painting make me feel really focused. It’s a meditative process. I can lose myself in a painting and just for a while this head of mine, which normally spins like a washing machine, is still. It really is a wonderful thing.”
He gets particular pleasure from painting portraits of the musicians he has worked with. “I love painting faces. There’s a story in a face, real depths to explore. There’s youth in the smile, warmth in the eyes and experience in the wrinkles. There’s stuff going on! But for it to work I have to have known that person, however fleetingly. Give me a photograph of someone I don’t know or haven’t got a clue about and I have no interest in painting them at all.”
Gilson Lavis outside The Hatch Gallery in Christchurch .Photo: Hattie Miles
I have long been intrigued by the life and work of the remarkable American model, muse, photographer and ‘friend of the surrealists’ Lee Miller. I was delighted when I heard that Kate Winslet was making a movie about Miller’s life and in particular her pioneering work as a female war photographer. That film Lee, years in the making, was finally released in UK cinemas this weekend. These are my thoughts on the film and Lee Miller’s background and wider history – Jeremy Miles
Elizabeth ‘Lee’ Miller was a complicated and troubled woman who lived an extraordinary life, careering with chaos and style through some of the best and worst that the 20th century could throw at her.
Born in upstate New York in 1907, Lee’s comfortable childhood was traumatised when she was raped by a family acquaintance. She was just seven years old.
This terrible ‘shameful’ secret – her mother warned her that she should never speak of it – seemed to instil a desperate need to escape.
Poster for the film Lee whjch is currently on release in UK cinemas
Disruptive behaviour saw her expelled from school and as soon as she could this sharply intelligent, determined and beautiful young woman was off to establish a glamorous international life as a photographic model. Not an easy thing to achieve but from an early age Lee seemed to possess an intuitive ability to charm and talk her way past apparently insurmountable barriers. She soon found herself in Paris posing for the leading fashion magazines of the day. She became a favourite of the pioneering surrealist photographer and artist Man Ray and was soon not just his model but his muse, his lover, his assistant and collaborator.
Her own work as a photographer took her across Europe and North Africa and the Middle East shooting everything from fashion to travelogue and honing her already finely attuned surrealist eye.
But where to next? The outbreak of war in 1939 would change everything. Living in London with her soon to be new husband, the art historian Roland Penrose, Lee felt helpless to contribute to the war effort but was determined to try and photograph the action in occupied France.
Somehow she managed to persuade Vogue magazine to commission her as a war photographer. With the help of photographic colleague and friend David Scherman who worked for Life magazine, she also secured American military accreditation and putting herself at enormous risk became a war correspondent and that rarest of creatures, a woman photographer working on the front line, almost unheard of in the 1940s.
Andy Samberg as David Scherman and Kate Winslet as Lee Miller. Publcity shot for the film Lee.
She photographed under fire and bombardment amid the blood and gore of the French battlefields, taking unflinching shots of amputations and makeshift surgery in field hospitals, the piles of rotting bodies in the brutal disease-ridden hell hole that was the newly liberated death camp at Dachau.
She returned from war exhausted and horrified by the things she had seen but with a huge set of historic and truly iconic photographs. They included the famous portrait of Lee herself sitting defiantly in Hitler’s bath taken by David Scherman after the pair had talked their way into the Fuhrer’s Munich apartment on the day of his suicide.
Her stunning war images were eventually published with Lee’s own accompanying text in a spread in American Vogue. It shocked, informed and finally framed Miller in the public eye as a fearless photographer and campaigner who refused to be defined or indeed confined by her gender.
Sadly the punishing ordeals she had put herself through and the demons that raced through her troubled mind proved all too much.
Lee returned to the UK and finally settled with Penrose at Farley’s farmhouse in an idyllic corner of East Sussex. They often played host to their illustrious friends from the pre-war art world, people like Pablo Picasso, Max Ernst and Juan Miro. Lee took photographs and served lavish meals becoming a skilled gourmet cook.
But she found little peace. She was suffering from what would now be seen as classic symptoms of PTSD and was often moody, unpredictable, drinking heavily and prone to bouts of depression.
Her war experiences were, like the terrible childhood rape, packaged away and never spoken of and Lee became a largely forgotten figure to the outside world. To those who did remember her she was just someone who had once been a fashion model.
It wasn’t until after her death in 1977 that Lee and Roland’s son, Anthony Penrose, discovered a huge collection of her war photographs stashed in the attic. He has since worked tirelessly to preserve the astonishing archive she amassed over her long and varied working life to reinstate and preserve her artistic reputation.
Kate Winslet’s film Lee, which I saw yesterday, concentrates on the war years and is largely based on Penrose’s book The Lives of Lee Miller.
It has received mixed reviews with some critics, unfairly in my opinion, dismissing it as being superficial and failing to create a true characterisation of the enigmatic Lee Miller. But how could it? I suspect no one, not even her family and friends, got to know the real Lee.
I think Winslet does an excellent job telling an extraordinary story and delivers a powerful performance in the title role. Lee is beautifully filmed with painstaking reconstructions of several of her most striking photographs. There’s a stellar supporting cast too with particularly fine performances from Andy Samberg as David Scherman and Andrea Riseborough as the tirelessly supportive wartime Vogue editor Audrey Withers. Josh O’Connor meanwhile is perfect as Anthony Penrose and sets the context and scene in an imagined posthumous discussion with his ageing and alcoholic mother in the living room at Farleys
Winslet spent seven long years battling to get this film on screen working with director Ellen Kuras and to me the entire project exudes an appropriate sense of determination and commitment. Do go and see it if you possibly can.
Farleys House at Muddles Green. Photo: Jeremy Miles
If you want to know more about Lee Miller head for the East Sussex countryside and Farleys Farm. Lee and Roland moved there in 1949 and is still home to Anthony Penrose, the Lee Miller Archives and The Penrose Collection.
The House & Gallery and Garden are open every Thursday, Friday and Sunday (April – October) offering visitors the chance to take a tour of the house, relax in te garden and enjoy exhibitions in the gallery.
Farleys House & Gallery is at Muddles Green, Chiddingly, East Sussex, BN8 6HW. It’s just off the A22 between Uckfield and Hailsham and about a 20 minutes taxi journey from Lewes Station.
Cornelia Parker’s Folkestone Mermaid modelled by local mum Georgina Baker
By Jeremy Miles
I receved a message from my friend the Folkestone Mermaid today. I say ‘my friend’ but if truth be told we’ve never actually met. She just feels like a friend and as a stalwart champion of my old home town, seems to support all the right concerns for its future.
Georgina Baker, a Folkestone mum of two, was the model chosen by Cornelia Parker to fulfil a commission for the town’s second Arts Triennial back in 2011.
Cast in lifesize bronze but in Mermaid form she has now sat at the end of The Stade on a granite boulder beside the fishermen’s harbour wall keeping a watchful eye on the ever-changing seascape and out towards the horizon for the past 13 years.
Originally conceived as a reinterpretation of Copenhagen’s ‘Little Mermaid’ and inspired by HG Wells’ story of The Sea Lady and Hans Christian Anderson’s famous fairy tale, Parker decided that rather than a literal copy of the Copenhagen Mermaid she wanted to base the work on a real person.
She invited local residents to apply and Baker was chosen from a shortlist of six. It was a good choice. Not only has the Folkestone Mermaid become a noted feature of the town loved by residents and visitors alike, but Georgina Baker has taken her duties extremely seriously. She now sees herself as a kind of custodian of the history, heritage and traditions of Folkestone and particularly the harbour area. Hence her message earlier today which regards the controversial development plans for massive blocks of residential flats extending along the seafront to the Harbour Arm.
In a Block the Blocks message she urges us to protest further over the size, design and location of the monstrous plan and encourages people to add more signatures to the petition that she started last year.
Many of us have already lodged complaints over the hideously inappropriate size, design and location of the project and Georgina’s message alerted us to a new planning application seeking imminent approval of existing details. I did not take much persuading.
These flats which have already been described as looking like something out of the Flintstones are simply wrong. To build them on the harbour site would visually destroy the character of the area and swamp it with a wholly over-intensive influx of residents. It would drive business away from the town centre and clog the seafront with traffic. It would look horrible and be a disaster.
As someone who was born and brought up in Folkestone and into a well-known family with local links dating back more than 200 years, this is important to me. Even though I haven’t lived there for nearly four decades, I worked in the town, got married there and had ancestors in the fishing community who helped man the local lifeboat and others who were customs officers and even possible smugglers. I have continued to visit Folkestone regularly. I care deeply for it and think that most of the developments that have seen it evolve into one of the most popular seaside locations on the south coast have been wonderful but these flats are a step too far and risk undoing all the good that has been achieved so far.
WriterJeremy Miles photographed in Barbara Hepworth’s garden in St Ives. Picture: Hattie Miles
Walking through Barbara Hepworth’s strange and wonderful sub-tropical garden in St Ives it’s hard to imagine that it was once little more than a working space where the sculptor created some of the most radical works of the 20th century.
The lush exotic plants and swaying palms that provide such a magical setting for her powerful and instantly recognisable sculptures seem to have been there for ever. They delight the tens of thousands of visitors who each year seek out Trewyn Studio, her old home, long preserved as The Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden.
It’s easy to assume that it was this garden as much as the discreet facility offered by the studio’s town-centre location that drew Hepworth here in 1949. After all she’s inextricably linked with the place. She lived, worked and eventually died at Trewyn. Her death at the age of 72 was caused by a fire believed to have been started by a dropped cigarette. It sealed her association with this house. To this day her studio remains frozen in time exactly as she left it. The date of her death – May 20th, 1975 – is still on the wall calendar.
In fact her initial interest in Trewyn was purely in finding a suitable space to work. She had just separated from her second husband the painter Ben Nicholson and had been invited to produce two major commissions for the forthcoming Festival of Britain. Trewyn was the perfect answer.
Hepworth’s Studio at Trewyn. Photo: Hattie Miles
Hepworth had enjoyed a growing reputation among the artistic elite in London but the birth of triplets – Simon, Rachel and Sarah – and the outbreak of World War II had temporarily derailed a glittering career.
As German bombs threatened to rain down on the capital she and Nicholson decided to move their family to the relative safety of Cornwall.
Living in Carbis Bay they soon became central to what would become St Ives’ golden era as an artist’s colony. It wasn’t always easy. Nicholson could be autocratic and controlling and Hepworth, not the easiest person herself, was forced to put domestic chores before art.
The breakdown of the marriage and the move to Trewyn gave her the freedom to fight her way back into the public eye. With international success came the opportunity to re-model her working environment and in the mid-1950s Hepworth set about transforming the blank canvas that was the Trewyn garden. Over the next few years it slowly turned into what author Miranda Phillips, an authority on the garden, describes as “almost a showroom for potential buyers and people who might commission her.”
To achieve this Hepworth took advice from her good friend the modernist composer Priaulx Ranier and also Will Arnold-Forster who had established a marvellous garden at Eagles Nest, the house high above Zennor that would later become the home of the artist Patrick Heron. Arnold-Forster was a well-travelled retired Colonel who had written the influential 1948 book Shrubs for Milder Counties. Ranier meanwhile possessed an encyclopaedic knowledge of plants both from her native South Africa and across the New World. Hepworth could count on extraordinarily informed advice to help plant a garden that would perfectly combine the beauty of natural forms with the strange power of her stone and bronze sculptures.
Hepworth’s garden. Photo: Hattie Miles
A wonderful mixture of the traditional and exotic gradually took form as the garden was landscaped and planted with fan palms, bamboo, honeysuckle magnolia, eucalyptus, Japanese anemones and roses. Rockeries were built, paths laid and an old pond rescued and given new life. The result combined with Hepworth’s sculptures was a mesmerising display of colour and form that continues to evolve to this day.
Miranda Phillips worked with the Tate and Hepworth Museum for many years. She is the author of Barbara Hepworth Sculpture Garden (Tate Publishing). Written with former Tate curator Chris Stephenson, the book was developed from a popular guide she had put together after being constantly quizzed about the plants in the garden by visitors to the museum.
It follows the plants at Trewyn through the seasons, examining their relationship with Hepworth’s sculptures. “People are constantly fascinated by the garden,” she told me. “Hepworth certainly used it to impress potential buyers but the sculptures she sited here were very much her own favourites. Phillips believes that Hepworth used the garden – “with its spiky primeval forms and the ancient nature of some of her sculptures” – as a source of inspiration. “Placing her works in this setting with the interplay of light,shadow and movement allowed her to see how different sorts of light and even dry and wet conditions would work on the sculptures. I’m sure it influenced her art.”
On a bigger scale the rugged and ancient Cornish landscape was her inspiration too. Hepworth had originally fallen in love with large sweeping vistas as a child in Yorkshire. In Cornwall she was able to rediscover the feel for weathered rock, lichen and windswept heathland that had been hardwired into her infant soul. Trees twisted by the wind and storm lashed beaches provided a wealth of material.
Despite her great achievements – internationally feted as an artist and made a Dame of the British Empire in 1965 – Hepworth did not have an easy life. Her work was physically tough and she also endured two divorces, the death of an adult child ( her eldest son Paul died in an air crash in Singapore in 1954) and terrible health problems. By the end of her life she had received treatment for throat cancer, was almost crippled by a fractured hip and her hands were full of arthritis. She was also heavily dependent on pain killers and drinking heavily.
“I think she ran on nervous energy, drove herself terribly hard and wasn’t particularly interested in physical comfort,” says Phillips. “Beyond her work she didn’t have much time left for living.”
The general assumption is that the fire that caused her death was an inferno, the final ghastly chapter in an increasingly miserable existence. Phillips sees it slightly differently. “There was actually very little fire. It caught some plastic.” She believes Hepworth was probably already asleep and succumbed to fumes. “To be honest life wasn’t getting any more pleasant. She was already in great pain and she wasn’t going to get better. In those circumstances, to die in the place that you love surrounded by the things that you love is no bad thing.”
*Visit the Barbara Hepworth Museum & Sculpture Garden at Barnoon Hill, St Ives, Cornwall TR26 1AD www.tate.org.uk/stivesThe book Barbara Hepworth Sculpture Garden by Miranda Phillips & Chris Stephens was first published in 2002 and reprinted last year.
A rare combination of prodigious talent, intuitive understanding and carefully honed skill made equestrian artist Lucy Kemp-Welch one of the finest painters of her generation.
Sadly, although her star did indeed shine brightly for many years, history was not on her side. Born into a well-to-do Bournemouth family in 1869, she lived through an era marked by war and burgeoning modernity. It was a world dominated by men. Making an impact as a female artist was far from easy. Socially and politically the cards were stacked against her.
She found fame while still in her 20s and exhibited her first painting, Gypsy Horse Drovers, at the prestigious Royal Academy in London when she was just 26 years old. But it was two years later when her huge painting Colt Hunting in the New Forest was exhibited at the RA’s 1897 Summer Exhibition that the name Lucy Kemp-Welch really started to get noticed by the art establishment,. Stunned by its size, power and detail, critics predicted great things for this extraordinary young woman.
Kemp-Welch would hang many more notable paintings at the RA over the coming decades and also enjoyed a certain level of celebrity as the illustrator of the 1915 edition of Anna Sewell’s best-selling novel Black Beauty.
One of Lucy’s Black Beauty illustrations
However, suggestions that she was on course to become the first woman since the mid-18th century to be officially admitted as a Royal Academician never came to fruition and by the time of her death in the late 1950s the name of Lucy Kemp-Welch was being sidelined.
Thankfully much has been done in recent years to restore her reputation as one of the towering if largely forgotten artistic talents of the 20th century and now a major retrospective is being staged at the Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum in Bournemouth.
It could not be a more appropriate location because it not only brings the work of Kemp-Welch back to the town of her birth but also the one-time home of art collector and philanthropist Merton Russell-Cotes who was one of her early supporters.
This wide-ranging and impressive exhibition, In Her Own Voice: The Art of Lucy Kemp-Welch (1869–1958) will be in Bournemouth until mid-October and then moves to the National Horse Racing Museum in Newmarket until January 2024. It is curated by art historian, David Boyd Haycock and focuses on key works and moments in Kemp-Welch’s long and illustrious career.
It explores the early influence of her life on the south coast and childhood trips to the New Forest, her unstinting commitment to her art and the teaching of the eccentric but brilliant German-born Hubert von Herkomer whose art school she attended in Bushey, Hertfordshire. She admired the school so much that when Herkomer retired in 1906 she took it over becoming the first woman to run a British art school for both male and female students.
Herkomer had believed that for Kemp-Welch to capture the real essence of the horses she painted she should spend weeks studying the animals close-up in the woods and fields of the English countryside. She responded with great enthusiasm establishing the lifelong work practices that would produce some truly stunning paintings. Among them was location painting where she would capture scenes of timber hauling or hunting using massive mobile canvases in weather-proof boxes.
Lucy Kemp-Welch working en plein air
As the name of this exhibition suggests, it is the paintings that really do the talking. The sheer power and majesty of works like Burnt Out Fires, showing three working horses returning home across stubble-burnt fields or the struggle and urgency captured in The Call with horses straining to drag a lifeboat into a furious foaming sea are breathtaking.
Throughout the show, Kemp-Welch’s mastery of colour, light and energy and her deep understanding of everything equine from sinew and muscle to the behavioural quirks of the horses she paunted is displayed again and again.
There were many intriguing twists and turns in her life and career. For several years she would spend each summer following the famous Sanger’s circus around the country and painting their horses. Solidly respectable and widely admired she was nonetheless distinctly unconventional.
Though she was, as David Boyd Haycock has noted, neither a suffragette nor a feminist, Kemp-Welch was clearly not prepared to be restricted by her gender. During the First World War she volunteered to go to the front as an official war artist but had to be satisfied with painting the British Army’s training exercises on Salisbury Plain instead.
The war work, including some recruitment posters, is a minor diversion and of scant importance besides the quality of her major paintings. Viewed from a contemporary perspective, it seems rather distasteful, drumming up cannon fodder for the carnage of the First World War although at the time Kemp-Welch would have simply seen it as doing her bit for King and country. It also helps put her life and career into some kind of historical context that goes at least some way to explaining why she faded from the public eye.
Britain in the 20th century was oppressively patriarchal. Battered by two world wars and a major recession, it was an age driven by the need to rebuild. Engineering and industry were prime and even the working beasts of Kemp-Welch’s world were being rapidly replaced by a variety of horseless carriages.
By the time she reached her final years, her work was simply out of step with the times. Perhaps that point is driven home by the fact that the landmark event on the London art scene in the year that she died was a big Jackson Pollock show. Thankfully we now have an art world where the modernist and traditional can be studied, admired and enjoyed with equal intellectual rigour.
There is much to think about at this Lucy Kemp-Welch exhibition. I guess you will leave the show not only impressed by her astounding paintings but also newly aware of what an extraordinary individual she was.
Foam Horses by Lucy Kemp-Welch
*In Her Own Voice: The Art of Lucy Kemp-Welch (1869–1958) ran at the Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum in Bournemouth earlier this year and is currently at the National Horse Racing Museum in Newmarket until 25th February 2024
Anyone of a certain age who grew up in the countryside, particular in a beautiful county like Dorset will have memories of playing among fields and trees surrounded by the wonder of plants and wildlife.
When the Oxford Junior Dictionary decided to drop a series of ‘nature words’ from its pages arguing that they were no longer relevant to childhood there was not surprisingly an outcry.
In a bid to get the dictionary to reconsider its position, a campaign was launched by writers including such literary giants as Margaret Atwood and Andrew Motion.
Consigned to the lexicographical dustbin were words like acorn, adder, bluebell, dandelion, and catkin. There were many others. In came broadband, blog, chat-room, celebrity and voicemail. It seemed like an attack on the very tradition of healthy outdoor play. Some felt it was actively encouraging solitary indoor childhoods.
No one was more appalled than the writer, poet and academic Robert Macfarlane. A life-long nature lover and activist, he teamed up with artist and illustrator Jackie Morris to produce The Lost Words, a celebration of the names of plants, birds and animals that were deemed no longer worthy of inclusion in the Junior Dictionary.
When it was first published in 2017 the book became a near-instant bestseller and has now been translated into several languages, and adapted for film, drama, dance, radio, classical music and folk song.
It even inspired a grassroots movement to put a copy in every primary school in England, Wales and Scotland with Dorset campaigners at the forefront of local funding and distribution.
A touring Lost Words exhibition organised by Compton Verney, with Hamish Hamilton and Penguin Books visited venues nationwide including the Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum here in Bournemouth.
Suitable for all ages, it featured 20 acrostic “spell-poems” alongside the 50 watercolour and gold-leaf paintings that were used to create the original book. It combined Robert Macfarlane’s poetic words and Jackie Morris’s artwork in a show that harnessed the power of nature and love of language. It celebrated the magic of the natural world and reclaimed those words that, at the stroke of an editor’s pen, were ditched as irrelevancies.
Robert Macfarlane
I took the opportunity to talk to the authors about their passionate campaign to save these vital connections to the natural world. This is what I wrote. It originally appeared in an article published in Dorset magazine last year.
It seems the protests to the Oxford Junior Dictionary fell on deaf ears. “I’m afraid the dictionary’s response was ‘It’s none of your business. It’s our editorial decision,’ says Jackie. “We thought we can make a book that will reverse this.”
They hadn’t realised that no sooner had the book been published than the project would begin to take on a life of its own. “Not in my wildest dreams could I have foreseen what the book would become, admits Robert. “It’s as though Jackie and I just planted an acorn and up rushed a wild-wood. It has become a movement that has been taken on by other people and institutions. It’s not really ours anymore. It’s been used in schools all over the British Isles and even featured in a prom concert at the Albert Hall. None of it could have been foreseen.”
He stresses that he doesn’t regard the loss of so many evocative words as the fault of the dictionary. “It is culture or society’s fault. This separation of our lives and our imaginations from everyday nature has become very pronounced.”
It is, he believes, a symptom of the “ecological chaos and precarity” we are living through. “If we are going to get out of this we need to begin at the beginning. We have to grow our way out of it by learning the names of the creatures and plants we share our everyday lives with and then teach them to the children.”
Robert and Jackie both speak with delight about the effect their stories, images, spells and poems, can have on young hearts and minds.
“Kids hunger for the utterly beautiful stuff that is right on the doorstep,” says Jackie. “They love getting muddy and watching insects and birds. We are giving them a tool with which they can re-wild their parents.”
She argues that children are naturally visually literate and understand the words and pictures in The Lost Words in an intuitive way.
“Adults can take five, six or seven readings to realise what is going on. Kids get it right away. They understand the value of natural beauty before they learn about money but then everything goes belly up.”
Jackie describes herself as “an anarchist and anti-capitalist”. I venture that it must be a little awkward when the cheques roll in. Jackie laughs: “You know what? It’s lovely being able to give it away. It’s a question of knowing when you’ve got enough and when to share rather than hoard.”
Jackie Morris
She’s 61 and feels lucky to have found success relatively late in life. She says that 40 years of working as a freelance artist and illustrator has given her valuable life experience.
“It has equipped me with the nous to stand my ground and not be pigeon-holed by anyone. I raised two kids as a single mother using only my brush and pen. I always had to worry about how to pay the bills until The Lost Words. Now it looks after me, bless it.”
Robert comes from a rather different background. He is a 47-year-old multi-award-winning writer, a Fellow of Emmanuel Colledge, Cambridge, and widely known for his books on nature and landscape.
The Wall Street Journal has described him as “the great nature writer and nature poet of this generation” and in 2018 he co-edited, with Chris Packham and Patrick Barkham, A People’s Manifesto For Wildlife, arguing for urgent and large-scale change in Britain’s relationship with nature. Ten thousand people marched on Whitehall to deliver it to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.
“Access to nature is a political issue. It’s an economic issue and that is why the book has become associated in many cases with activism and protest,” he says.
“We want to bring childhood and the natural world back together again. Children are naturals with nature. They are wondernauts. They make up their own names and make up their own stories. Every day we receive photographs and videos of children working with the book in their schools or home education settings and it is lovely to see the creativity that has been drummed out of much of schooling by successive governments sneaking back in.”
Siamese Boatman: Photograph from 1865/66 negative by John Thomson.Wellcome Collection, London.
By Jeremy Miles
It is wonderful to see the remarkable work of pioneering Victorian photojournalist and travel photographer John Thomson back on the walls at Bournemouth’s Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum.
A new exhibition Siam: Through the Lens of John Thomson (1865-1866) openedat the clifftop museum last week and will run until April next year. It features a powerful and insightful collection of images captured in Siam and Cambodia nearly 160 years ago.
In a series of extraordinary photographs curated from the renowned archive of glass negatives at the Wellcome Collection in London, the exhibition offers a unique glimpse of life in 19th-century Southeast Asia. The images are of particular interest partly because they reveal a glimpse of living history but also because of their sheer quality produced at a time when such achievements must have seemed close to impossible.
Gallery-goers first saw Thomson’s groundbreaking work at the Russell-Cotes five years ago when the museum staged an exhibition of photographs he had taken in China during his mid 19th century travels.
Both shows are the result of this resourceful and talented Scotsman’s grasp of the possibilities offered by the practice of photography at a time when it was still in its infancy. Thomson had quickly become a master of the art and with finely honed technical, creative and social skills he managed to gain entry to what to the British public at the time was an unseen world.
Angkor Wat: Photograph by John Thomson from 1865/66 negative.Wellcome Collection, London
His eagle-eyed attention to detail produced exquisite studies of the people, their costumes, architecture, customs, rituals and traditions. He even received special permission to visit Cambodia’s Angkor Wat (then under Siam’s control), becoming the first person to photograph its famous ruins. Ironically his Siamese hosts are said to have considered him quite mad to want to photograph a bunch of broken old temples.
His photographs reveal never before recorded details of far-off societies captured in images of extraordinary detail and breathtaking definition. They contain a wealth of anthropological and historical information.
To get his pictures Thomson had to make long, arduous journeys involving weeks of planning and negotiations and the transportation of heavy and cumbersome cameras, tanks of toxic chemicals and a huge portable darkroom.
Looking at the prints on show at the Russell-Cotes it is clear that his charismatic and engaging personality helped open the door to some very special areas of Siamese society, even the Royal Household of the legendary monarch Rama V – King Mongkut. Yup that was him immortalised in the musical The King and I, though it’s probably best you don’t mention this in polite Thai society.
The country’s authorities took great exception to what they felt was a less than respectful portrayal of their ruler by the actor Yul Brynner in the 1956 film and it was promptly banned in Thailand, remaining officially blacklisted to this day.
Of course, present-day Thailand ( it changed its name from Siam in the 1930s) is a long-time favourite destination on the British tourist trail and as such the subject of literally millions of point-and-shoot smartphone shots.
Scrolling through your Instagram feed, it is worth remembering that to achieve so much more, Thomson travelled more than 5,000 miles loaded up with his massive camera and bulky glass-plates that then had to be coated with wet collodion emulsion before an exposure – often of several seconds or more – could be made. It was a far from simple process.
King Mongkut. Photograph by John Thomson from 1865/66 negative.Wellcome Collection, London.
Perhaps the most astonishing thing about these photographs though is the simple fact that they survived. In old age and suffering from frail health, Thomson was desperate to find a home for his archive. He contacted the pharmaceutical tycoon Sir Henry Wellcome and offered to sell him his collection of 700 or so plates. Negotiations were still underway when in 1921 at the age of 84 Thomson died of a heart attack. Fortunately the Wellcome Library still took possession of the collection which was contained in three crates and, probably more by luck than judgement, stored them in conditions that just happened to suit the fragile negatives.
In 1980 the crates were re-opened and test prints were made. After 60 years they were a little battered and scratched but essentially in surprisingly good condition. When finally digitised and printed as large, high-quality images for exhibition many of the scratches, marks and scuffs were left untouched. The effect is both atmospheric and strangely enhancing giving Thomson’s photographs a unique sense of time and place and an undeniable stamp of authenticity.
*Siam: Through the Lens of John Thomson (1865-1866) is at Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum in Bournemouth until April 2024. More information at www.russellcotes.com
All Photographs from 1865-1866 negatives by John Thomson. Wellcome Collection, London.
Shot Sage Blue Marilyn soldfor a record breaking $295 million
By Jeremy Miles
When, one day in the autumn of 1964, New York oddball, trickster and sometime photographer Dorothy Podber turned up at The Factory, Andy Warhol’s studio in midtown Manhattan, no one seemed very surprised.
After all 32-year-old Podber, a friend of Warhol’s house photographer Billy Name, seemed to fit right in with the Factory crowd.
She was certainly weird enough. She hung out with the ‘mole people’, the homeless activists who lived in the disused subway tunnels and sewers beneath the city. Of course, that didn’t faze Andy Warhol. Crazy creatives were good for business. The more the merrier.
What happened next however changed the course of art history and is still having repercussions nearly 60 years later. Podber, dressed to the nines and accompanied by her dog, Carmen Miranda, spotted a stack of recently completed Marilyn Monroe paintings of varying colours leaning against the studio wall.
Indicating her camera, she politely asked Warhol if she could shoot them. He agreed and, carefully putting on a pair of gloves, she reached into her bag, pulled out a small revolver and fired straight into the stack hitting Marilyn bang between the eyes.
A horrified Warhol watched as she walked out of studio and inspected the damage. He quickly let it be known that Podber woud not be welcome at The Factory again. Four of his five Marilyns had been in that pile. One red, one orange and two blue. They would become known as The Shot Marilyns and, with their bizarre provenance, gradually spiralled in price.
So it was that earlier this month Shot Sage Blue Marilyn was auctioned by Christie’s in New York and sold for $195 million, the highest price ever paid at auction for a work by an American artist. The purchaser was international art dealer Larry Gagosian, thought to have been buying on behalf of an as yet unnamed purchaser.
At the time of Podber’s impromptu attack, which she later claimed was a Happening, a work of performance art, Warhol’s star was beginning to the rise – his Campbells Soup cans had already brought him major publicity – but his Marilyn Monroe paintings had yet to acquire their iconic status. He had decided to produce them after the shock of Monroe’s apparent suicide in 1962 provided him with a one-stop cocktail of his favourite subjects – scandal, death and glamour. He based the image on a publicity shot of the actress used for the 1953 film Niagara.
Had he sold them at the time they would have fetched no more than a few hundred dollars. He may even have given them away. Three years later, in 1967, prices were rising and the soon to become famous and very rich art collector Peter Brandt paid $5,000 dollars for the other Shot Blue Marilyn. He was just 20-years-old at the time and it was the start of a multi-million dollar collection of art.
Warhol’s reputation was on the up and prices were rising at astonishing speed. Although he was undoubtedly a shrewd operator, quite how much Andy Warhol managed to manipulate his own artistic destiny is unclear. There has been inevitable speculation that he knew that Podber was going to shoot the paintings and perhaps even paid her to do so. I think not. No one could have predicted the eventual outcome and if Warhol had merely wanted to generate publicity, a bullet through just one painting would have done the trick.
I think the biggest mistake people make when hearing that a painting has sold for nearly $200 million is to imagine that it really must be of unsurpassed quality. ‘A Mona Lisa for the 21st Century’ screamed one headline.
Sadly at this level, art sales have more to do with the prestige of a small circle of obscenely wealthy dealers and collectors who almost certainly care more about the saleability of work than its actual quality.
At times of stock market volatility, the top-end of the art world provides a lucrative refuge for a certain type of investor by keeping the prices ludicrously high. It’s got little to do with art though.
Just one part of GIANT – the new 15,000 square foot gallery in the centre of Bournemouth
It is no coincidence that the opening exhibition at Bournemouth’s huge new contemporary art gallery is called Big Medicine. The town centre is ailing and badly needs a shot in its metaphorical arm.
The 15,000 square foot privately-funded gallery, called appropriately enough GIANT, covers the entirety of the second floor of the old Debenham’s building in The Square. It is part of a much needed plan to inject some life, creativity and culture back into the badly run-down shopping centre.
Big Medicine, which opened last night, does the job admirably. Curated by Bournemouth artist Stuart Semple, the exhibition and the GIANT gallery space is part of the first phase of a project that will see the old building reborn as Bobby’s which was for many years a much-loved and historic retail landmark in the town
One of Jake and Dinos Chapman’s suicide vests
The free show features the work of major international artists like Jake and Dinos Chapman, Jim Lambie, Gavin Turk, Gary Card, Nicky Carvell, Paola Ciarska, Eva Cremers, Chad Person, Anthony Rodinone and Paul Trefry.
Not only are the works truly thought-provoking, like the Chapman brothers suicide vests cast in bronze and sometimes loaded with art materials but the whole exhibition is world-class. How wonderful that it has been brought to Bournemouth a town that has so much going for it but in recent years has been branded “a cultural desert”.
Meanwhile the GIANT gallery also has a dedicated Project Space which is featuring Why We Shout – the Art of Protest. Curated by Lee Cavaliere, director of VOMA, the world’s first virtual museum in association with Greenpeace, it examines ways in which contemporary artists respond and contribute to protest and activism.
With works by Banksy, US feminist Martha Rosler, Turner-Prize winner Jeremy Deller, Hong Kong activist-artist Kacey Wong, trans photographer Bex Wade and others it covers climate change, environmental struggles, the illegal rave scene of the 90s, LGBTQ + issues and much more.
Two huge Harris Hawks outside sculptor Geoffrey Dashwood’s Hampshire home
Here’s another one I did earlier. Well several years back actually. Probably around 2012. It was written for the now long-gone Compass Magazine and offered an intriguing insight into the curious world of New Forest sculptor Geoffrey Dashwood. Thought it was worth revisiting.
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By Jeremy Miles
Internationally renowned wildlife sculptor Geoffrey Dashwood is an anomaly in an art world full of pretensions and psycho-babble. His works – stunning sculptures of birds – sell across the world, often for tens of thousands of pounds, yet he would rather have teeth pulled than have to play the gallery game. He prefers to work remotely at his home deep in the Hampshire countryside outside Ringwood. Perched on the edge of an escarpment with views for 30 miles across Hampshire and Dorset, it’s an otherworldly place.
Surrounded by monumental bronze sculptures – a one-and-half ton,12 foot tall Peregrine falcon dominates the entrance – the Dashwood home is a marvel to behold. As you walk across the lawn there are are two huge Harris hawks, a barn owl, a tern, a great crested grebe and a frog. A massive Mandarin drake sits on a plinth in the middle of a pond: “We built the pond for the sculpture rather than the other way around,” says the 66-year-old artist matter-of-factly.
Nestling amidst ancient forest, the natural setting of this house is astonishing too. He points to a huge gnarled old oak which is believed to be 700 years old. “Incredible to think that that was an acorn in about 1300,” he says.
The site is even believed to have been used for beacons warning of the approach of the Spanish Armada. Dashwood has lived there with his wife Val and three sons Leo, Max and James for 17 years. He says he really can’t imagine being anywhere else.
Despite his international reputation and prices that range from £2,000 to £250,000, he eschews most private views and even tries to avoid discussing works with potential buyers. “I’m a rebellious old sod,”he told me as we looked around the huge studio and home gallery that he has built in a barn just yards from his front door. Sucking on a liquorice paper roll-up and swearing like a proverbial trooper, he warmed to his theme. “I don’t do commissions because to be honest I am too awkward and bloody-minded. They all too often end in tears because the person commissioning the piece and the artist have a different idea about the end result. So it’s very, very simple. I just do exactly what I want to do and then offer the work for sale.”
Chippy and uncompromising he may be but Geoffrey Dashwood’s prickly exterior clearly masks a sensitive soul who deeply cares that his work is an honest response to the natural world that he loves. Hampshire born and bred, he has a rare affinity with the New Forest and in his youth worked there as a keeper. Although he won a scholarship to art school in Southampton when he was just 15-years-old, he dropped out within weeks. “I hated it,” he says. The Forestry Commission provided the only job he could hang onto. “Basically I‘m absolutely unemployable,” he explains.
Doing artwork for forestry brochures provided some personal satisfaction. He seized the moment and left to go freelance. Amazingly Dashwood didn’t turn to sculpture until he was in his mid 30s. He modelled a tiny English partridge and loved the whole process. With a £5,000 loan from the kind of bank manager that doesn’t exist anymore he made a series of bronze castings and touted his work around upmarket outlets in London – Harrods, Aspreys, Garrards and the galleries of Cork Street.
Thinking about it now he says he’s amazed that he had the nerve to walk into such elitist emporiums and demand to see the bronze buyer. Somehow it paid off. He was on his way. Initially he concentrated on miniatures but then moved on to life-size and monumental sculptures. The one-man shows and international reputation soon followed.
He has successfully experimented with abstracting the fine detail of the birds down to studies of pure sculptural form. He has also explored the effects that can be achieved with multi-coloured patinas. He recalls eyebrows being raised when he asked at the foundry that he used what would happen if he splattered a mixture of all three commonly used chemicals – liver sulphate, ferric nitrate and cupric nitrate – on his bronzes.
“They were horrified. They said ‘You can’t do that’ and I just said ‘Oh yeah, and where’s the book that says I can’t?’ We went ahead and it was brilliant. It’s incredible that no one had ever done that before, but that’s the conservatism of the art world for you.”
He knows he’s been lucky, gaining a rare reputation and enjoying success despite a stubborn refusal to bend to the whims of either clients or art professionals.
“I’ve had a very self-indulgent life,” says Dashwood. “The extraordinary thing is that logically choosing to do this kind of sculpture should have involved a compromise between what I want to do and what the market price demands. I discovered that the more self-indulgent I became the more the market would rise to it.”
I’m sitting in a suburban garden in Bournemouth talking to the man who created the Grange Hill flying sausage. The banger, which appeared in the comic book style title credits of the long- running TV school drama, has followed artist and illustrator Bob Cosford for more than 40 years.
He shrugs: “That title sequence will without a doubt be what I’m remembered for,” he tells me. And here we have the fundamental artist’s dilemma. Create anything that really captures the public’s imagination and it will stick. To this day you can buy a Grange Hill sausage mug, poster, even a t-shirt. But it was creating this iconic title sequences that set Bob on his professional path.
Joining the BBC straight from Art College in the early 1970s, Bob was soon on a path that would bring him a shed-load of awards and critical acclaim. He was nominated for a BAFTA, worked on TV dramas like Dennis Potter’s Pennies From Heaven and a raft of popular television series in the 1980s that included Nanny starring Wendy Craig, Bird of Prey with Richard Griffith, and Angels which was dubbed the Z-Cars of nursing.
He worked as a graphic designer and spent many years around Camden and Soho as a creative director for film and TV and ad agencies. It’s an impressive CV but that famous ‘flying sausage’ invariably comes up again and again. Bob is philosophical and recently told fan site Grange Hill Gold that he’s not only proud of the sausage but very flattered that his work has been so well received. “I’ve never actually seen an episode of Grange Hill,” he confesses to me. “The titles were for the first series ever made and the programme went out at 4.50pm, so I would have either been working or down the pub at that time.”
We went back to the old home town for the 60th birthday party of a young friend at the weekend. There were lots of reminders of why I love Folkestone. I was born and brought up in the town, went to school there, met and married Hattie there and cut my journalistic teeth on the local newspaper. Though we’ve returned many times since we haven’t actually lived in Folkestone for more than 30 years. It is full of good memories though, particularly of the local arts scene. Inevitably I suppose most of the writers, artists, musicians and actors I used to know have moved on but great to find the old place still full of character and artistic energy. Continue reading “A town transformed by art”
Folkestone, Sunday 11th November, 2018: An amazing day. We woke early in a hotel built on the old brickfields and headed for the sands. Found what was probably the last parking space in town and made our way in pouring rain to joinDanny Boyle and lots of other people on the beach to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Armistice that marked the the end of the terrible conflict that was the First World War.
Migrant Mother the photograph of itinerant pea-picker Florence Thompson and her children taken in California in 1936 that catapulted Dorothea Lange to international fame
A couple of weeks ago I found myself at London’s Barbican viewing The Politics of Seeing – an exhibition of superb and often troubling photographs by pioneering American photographer Dorothea Lange.
Across the gallery, admiring Lange’s iconic studies of Oklahoma dustbowl migrants in California in the 1930s, was a man who I was fairly convinced was Manfred Mann and Blues Band guitarist Tom McGuinness. I wasn’t sure though and short of wandering over and asking, I couldn’t figure out a way of finding out. Continue reading “Dorothea’s dustbowl migrants and Tom McGuinness on Arthur ‘Big Boy’ Crudup”
A Dorset Landscape by Leslie Moffat Ward (1930) All images: Russell-Cotes Gallery & Museum
By Jeremy Miles
When Victorian art collector Sir Merton Russell-Cotes bequeathed his lavish cliff-top home, East Cliff Hall, and its huge collection of paintings and sculptures to the people of Bournemouth he created an intriguing problem. He was a fearfully hard act to follow. The collection that he and his wife Annie had spent decades acquiring was idiosyncratic and wide-ranging. Magnificent paintings shared wall space with those that were considered minor and mediocre, but somehow it all worked. It was a collection that reflected Sir Merton’s flamboyant style and generosity of spirit.
Arthur Bradbury’s 1935 painting Pamela
But it also highlighted the fact that he had been a man of his age, born into the era of Empire. By the time of his death in 1921 the contemporary art world had moved on. Post First World War sensibilities were open to radical change and though public taste, as ever, lagged a few years behind the artistic vanguard, eventually the inevitable happened and Victorian art fell seriously out of fashion.
However Bournemouth was sitting on what was effectively a priceless time-capsule and the Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum collection is now recognised as one of the finest complete Victorian collections in the world. That it is housed in its original home is a major bonus. Unfortunately none of this helped answer the problem of how to add to and develop the collection. The answer is found in Meeting Modernism: 20th Century Art in the Russell-Cotes Collection which runs at the museum’s galleries until 24th April.
Tate Britain’s magnificent Barbara Hepworth retrospective Sculpture for a Modern World ends this weekend. If you haven’t seen it, drop everything and make a beeline for Milbank. You won’t regret it.
Not only does this show explore and celebrate Hepworth’s extraordinarily powerful work but also her position as one of Britain’s greatest artists. A leading figure of the international modern art movement of the 1930s, Hepworth would become recognised internationally as one of the most successful sculptors in the world during the 1950s and 1960s.
It was 120 years ago that the talented but relatively unknown young artist Alphonse Mucha was catapulted to international fame after a chance encounter in a Paris print shop found him designing a poster for superstar actress Sarah Bernhardt.
Such was the power of his work publicising her new play Gismonda that the public clamoured for copies. As soon as the image appeared on the streets of the French capital on New year’s day 1895 people were cutting them from hoardings and bribing bill-posters to hand them over. Bernhardt, at the height of her fame, immediately signed Mucha to a six year contract.
Tourists at the Louvre in Paris (not) looking at the Mona Lisa. Photograph by Hattie Miles, August 2015
A never-ending tide of humanity in t-shirts, trainers and cagouls surges ever onwards, sweeping up the grand steps of The Louvre – the one-time Parisian Royal Palace that is now one of the largest and most famous art museums in the world. These tourists –just a few thousand of the 10 million people who visit here each year – are heading for the first floor of the Denon wing, home to an exquisite collection of French and Italian paintings. They are intent on finding La Gioconda, Leonardo da Vinci’s early 16th century masterpiece universally known as the Mona Lisa. It’s not difficult. It’s sign-posted every few metres.
Mona Lisa smiles for the cameras
As they draw close they prime their phones, iPads and cameras as a team of security guards usher them into a cordoned-off, makeshift pen. Finally in front of the relatively diminutive painting – a portrait in oils on wood-panel measuring just 30 by 21 inches and protected by bullet-proof glass – they strain to get a clear enough sight-line. Many turn their backs on this painting that once hung in Napoleon’s bed chamber to take selfies of themselves, grinning faces with the enigmatic Mona Lisa playing second fiddle in the distant background. Few appear to have any opinion about the painting. They simply have to have it on their hand-held devicebefore returning home. They don’t really look at the Mona Lisa at all, just view the image on the screen of their phone. They don’t discuss it either or even consider buying a postcard.Continue reading “Mona Lisa and mad snappers”
Celebrations as London’s 2015 Pride march makes its way along Oxford Street
It’s a little ironic. Just weeks after David Hockney lamented the vanishing bohemian spirit of his youth and complained that gay men have become boring and conservative here I am trying to get across Oxford Street to catch the final day of his exhibition. What’s stopping me is a rainbow-coloured tide of marching, dancing, chanting, strutting, pouting humanity. Gay, lesbian, bi and transsexual. Men and women. They are out and proud and doing their bit to give London 2015 its biggest Pride march yet.
Me outside the RA Hopper show. Photograph by Hattie Miles
After a four month run at the Royal Academy an utterly intriguing exhibition of photographs by the late American actor, film director and artist Dennis Hopper closed at the weekend. It was called The Lost Album and featured more than 400 original prints of photographs taken by Hopper between 1961 and 1967. These images had last been seen at his first major exhibition at the Fort Worth Art Centre in Texas in 1970. They were rediscovered, packed away in a series of old boxes, after his death from cancer in 2010.
My Bed by Tracey Emin a big attraction at the Saatchi Gallery’s latest YBA show
By Jeremy Miles
THE gang’s all there. Mad Tracey Emin from Margate with her trashed bed, dodgy Damien Hirst from Leeds with his dismembered animals … Then there’s Marcus Harvey’s portrait of Moors Murderer Myra Hindley constructed from the handprints of children and Marc Quinn’s sculptural self-portrait made out of several litres of his own frozen blood. It’s hard to imagine how much of a furore these not-so-young British artists have managed to cause with these and other radical works over recent years. Their art has been attacked, vandalised and the subject of acres of vitriolic newsprint.
In the case of Quinn’s blood-head it was even allegedly melted. Not by an act of vandalism but by a hapless workman who turned the refrigeration off while working on Nigella Lawson’s kitchen. Then there was that cleaner who binned a pile of old cigarette ends, half-empty wine glasses and other assorted “rubbish” only to learn that it was very expensive work of conceptual art by Damien Hirst. My how the tabloids lapped that one up. They hadn’t had such a good laugh since dear old Carl Andre flogged his pile of bricks to the Tate just over the river.
Now of course the YBAs are part of the London tourist trail and these works are among the star exhibits in Charles Saatchi’s remarkable new gallery housed in the old committee rooms, corridors, offices and library at County Hall. And how great they look set against the sober and rather stuffy backdrop of this fine Edwardian building with its parquet flooring and ambience of faded grandeur.
Putting aside the astonishing turn of fate that means that Saatchi – Margaret Thatcher’s ad man -– has now taken control of a big lump of the former GLC citadel of her arch enemy “Red ” Ken Livingston, what has been created is a great gallery. There’s something a bit unreal about it too. The original offices remain seemingly untouched, their original mantel-pieces, fireplaces and clocks, (all set at different times, I noted), looking just as though the pen-pushers have left for the weekend and the furniture has been moved out for someone to slap a new coat of emulsion on the wall. What if one of their ghosts returned, wandering along from Waterloo Station to discovered that their office, where budgets were once adjusted and memos written in triplicate, was now home to Chris Ofili’s portrait of the Virgin Mary complete with elephant dung, or a Damien Hirst pharmacy poster offering pie and chips in 100 milligramme capsules? It’s a wonderful thought and one that gives an intriguing insight into the curious nature of changing times, places and values.
The works on show at County Hall are not of course the fevered creations of unhinged lunatics that certain elements in the popular Press would have us believe. They are, like it or not, the product of some of the most creative minds in Britain today and a vital and important part of the on-going debate that says that art should question and challenge rather than just sit in a frame and look pretty.Certainly this gallery with its prime position on the banks of the River Thames right next to the London Eye is attracting tens of thousands of visitors.
It is also one of the three stop-off points for the new Tate to Tate Ferry. This service, a godsend for art lovers, is a flash 220-seat river bus decorated with Damien Hirst spots, which shuttles passengers between Tate Britain at Millbank and Tate Modern at Bankside calling in at County Hall on the way. The journey which lasts just 18 minutes takes in one of the best cityscapes in the world and is also a great way of travelling between the Westminster/Millbank area and The City. A £4.50 ticket allows you up to three return journeys.
At the moment the Tate Britain is of particular interest those au fait with the local art scene as it is host to the first full-scale international art museum show by Bournemouth trained photographer and 1999 Turner Prize winner Wolfgang Tillmans. German-born Tillmans, who studied at the Bournemouth and Poole College of Art and Design and returned there last year to receive an honorary degree is an extraordinary artist, obsessively exploring everything from the magnificent to the mundane.
This massive show, taking up seven rooms at the Tate Modern, is called If One Thing Matters, Everything Matters. It’s a point that is rammed home as room after room displays images that range from socks rolled up on a sofa to pieces of orange skin, a bunch of keys, clubbers, sexual encounters, Concorde, the Halle Bop comet and some intriguing experimentations with photographic dyes. Some are just prints stuck to the gallery wall with pieces of tape, others hang from bulldog clips. In a world where we are bombarded by millions of visual images, it’s intriguing to encounter someone who finally understands their mind-numbing normalcy. And to put a show like this in the Tate Britain is every bit as radical as the display offered by Saatchi’s not-so-bad boys and girls across the water.
* Wolfgang Tillmans’ If One Thing Matters, Everything Matters is at Tate Britain until September 14. Call 020 7887 8888. For information about The Saatchi Gallery at County Hall call 0207823 2363. For information on how to get there and where to stay visit (website)visitlondon.com
