So, the merry month of May came and graced us with her pole-dancing antics. The sun played peek-a-boo. And the calendar continued it’s countdown.
This month marked the run up to the long-awaited Leigh Art Trail - the first time I’d shown actual artwork I’d put some real soul into to a real live audience in eons.
But before me and my SEVEN collective cohorts revealed our creative sketchbooks this stuff happened...
“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?”
In 2017 - “...museums make no sense and are gone in a week …”
Danny Wallace... is a Man is a column in Shortlist magazine - one of them giveaways they do at train stations - and it always makes me chuckle. This month a visit to a pop-up museum, of dairy products no less, caused Mr Wallace to muse on the modern ‘museum’:
'Pop-up’ does not say eternal cultural significance...
he writes.
Hundreds of plastic bananas hang from the ceiling, as joyless zombies plod around, tapping blankly at their phones.
I don’t think I’m in a museum at all. I think I’m in some kind of Instagram alchemy laboratory.
He continues:
… [A]ll I can see see is little gummy bears stuck on the walls and the disembodied head of a statue …
And...
Why is that there? And are gummy bears dairy?
Charles the III - on the Beeb
I’ve worked in a museum or two, including the Imperial War Museum, London, where I once answered the phone to the late Tim Pigott-Smith - who plays Charles in this Shakespeare-inspired play. “Tim Pigg-ott?-Who?” I said. Charming.
I couldn’t identify members of Dad’s Army in the flesh either - sorry Bill Pertwee.
Speaking of identity there’s oft been a rumour that the Prince, when or if, he ever attains the throne will change his name. The first two King Charleseses were executed and deposed in that order.
What would Shakespeare make of that? Well, a Charles not-by-any-other-name would spark a constitutional crisis this play supposes.
Witchy Writer Syd Moore - did a talk at the Forum
While at the other end of the social spectrum: Syd Moore’s new novel series wonders about the witchy women of Essex’s murky past and their connection to the present day Essex Girl.
Because Witchfinder General Matthew Hopkins - he of Vincent Price Hammer Horror fame - oversaw the killing of more witches in Essex than any other English county. Whether Essex was home to more marginalised people - the disfigured, disabled, old women with no legal voice - than other counties is unclear.
But Syd believes that witchy prejudice is definitely haunting the present in the form of the often derisory Essex Girl epithet.
On Being - a podcast with big questions
I also stumbled across On Being and Krista Tippett - the podcast’s effusive and eloquent host - and fell head first into a rabbit hole of ideas and discussions.
On Being opens up the animating questions at the center of human life: What does it mean to be human, and how do we want to live? We explore these questions in their richness and complexity in 21st-century lives and endeavors. We pursue wisdom and moral imagination as much as knowledge; we esteem nuance and poetry as much as fact.
Assemblage Drawings - SEVEN do some tracing
And, so it was the last ‘official’ SEVEN workshop. Each artist had taken a turn to lead the group in an idea-generating technique we’d enjoyed from our original Creative Journal course.
We approached Assemblage Drawing like this: tracing random images from magazines, before layering them one upon the other. The abstract image was then coloured or / and collaged, as desired.
Like most other things, assemblage ain’t nothing new. Apparently those Cubists began it and the Dadaists and Surrealists ran with it - post-WWI the world was also post-sense so randomising everyday objects seemed to, well, make sense. Can it do the same for a post-truth world? The answer is...