This month spring came a-hide-and-seeking. Blossoms bloomed. Bird egg blue skies beckoned. But, for me, March really started with a talk at the V&A on comic collecting by an old friend with a huge passion.
Passions - and frustrations - rose further still as I dabbled in Hedda Gabler. Did I learn anything? For sure, and that’s important, right? Because lifelong learning is a gift. A gift my sister, and many others celebrated at a lively Open University graduation.
While our SEVEN sketchbook collective looked to old books and random words as a creative source - a technique employed and much explored by artist Tom Phillips in A Humument, a lifelong art project with many an unexpected lesson for the creative spirit…
“Why don’t you cover a big cork bulletin board in bright pink felt, banded with bamboo, and pin with coloured thumb-tacks all your various enthusiasms as your life varies from week to week?”
Hedda Gabler - Ibsen done Ivo van Hove-style (via NT Live)
Curl-lipped actress Ruth Wilson was Hedda - the sometime hair-burning, gun-toting daughter-of-a-general just married to a nice but dull-as-a-medieval-whatchamecallit husband. The set: a blank canvas loft apartment bejewelled by buckets of flowers. A blinded window cast a noir-ish shadow. Defining Hedda’s femme fatalistic bored to destruction housewife hell bent on slow motion self destruction - think: Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity, say.
Lifelong Learning in Action at the Barbican - brass band included
My triple-sonned sister last year completed a masters in her ‘spare time’ with the OU. The subject: 3-D printing and the automotove sector - what else!? Fast forward to a Friday in March + we’re at the Barbican listening to dot-com guru and OU Chancellor Martha Lane Fox champion lifelong learning. And, watching a kaleidoscopic array of people: women, men, black, white, young, old, disabled, dreadlocked, distracted, pregnant, and everything in between, celebrate their achievements. Joyful and inspiring.
Confessions of a Comic Collector - what can comics do for you?
Growing up in apartheid South Africa of the 40s and 50s Ian Rakoff - editor on The Prisoner series and to director Lindsay Anderson - found comics questioned some of the social issues he was witnessing - particularly racism and sexism. A self-confessed ‘addict’ he amassed a collection now housed at the V&A: where his blog tells comic collecting tales, thread through with film-making memories and personal anecdotes across swinging London, the US and beyond.
Future Park - are we leaving a legacy of future dust?
So, SEVEN gave a 3 Minute Wonder talk at Future Park - a “…networking and information sharing evening for practicing artists, working in all disciplines…”. But we also listened to and met with resident artist Maria Arceo, a Spanish artist with a Velázquez-esque fan, who told terrifying tales of plastic pollution in the Thames, and beyond, her associated art projects and the everlasting legacy we may be leaving future generations…
SEVEN Does Threads of Thought & Rediscovers A Humument
This month the SEVEN collective dabbled in threads of thought which led us back to Tom Phillips’s altered novel - “…1892 Victorian obscurity A Human Document by WH Mallock…”. Think: chance-experiments-meets-medieval-manuscript. Of this lifelong transformation, revision and development Phillips says:
“I discovered in the process some new words above: ‘... as years went on you began to fail better,’ featuring a much loved phrase of Beckett which did not exist until seventeen years after my initial version. Serendipity is the best collaborator.”
Crazy Copy - Hollywood Album 1954
Ever the bibliophile (and shopaholic) my dad bought me a vintage movie annual filled with camp images of Hollywood stars - some still burning bright - Grace Kelly, Audrey Hepburn, Cary Grant - others relegated to the black hole of the collective movie-going consciousness’s cutting room floor - Keefe Braselle or Corinne Calvet, anyone? Nope, me neither. But what really made my day was the crazy stories - and captions:
“Joseph Cotten who delights in clowns, his garden, this work”
Or...
“Wild for Adventure By Rory Calhoun”
A copywriter’s dream…
A Woman Looks For Answers in the Ashes of Post War Berlin - Phoenix
Out of the ashes of post war Berlin comes a Jewish woman re-born. A slightly disfigured face renders her a shadow of her former self - a singer, it seems, part of a duo with a piano-playing husband, who may or may not have given her up to the Nazis. Now a lowly nightclub scrubber, however, he wants her estate. And the appearance of a woman with a hint of his wife about her generates a plan. Roger Ebert calls Phoenix an:
“[A]llegory for the stories that people and nations recount to themselves in order to go on surviving.”
But it’s the ending, which sees the duo reunited as their performance seemingly comes full circle with the heartbreakingly achingly moving rendition of Speak Low which really haunts you:
“Love is a spark, lost in the dark too soon...”