The Month in Mood Board - new ways of seeing, art, happiness & being you

In lieu of going on an actual holiday this August I got a change of view by attempting to look at some of the things I thought I knew by looking anew...

“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?”

— Diana Vreeland

Questioning our ways of seeing...

Someone first brought John Berger to my attention with the still-in-print book to his ‘eye-opening’ 70s TV series on art and how we look at it. It happens to be on YouTube. And so I watched it. And it percolated. Until I was compelled to revisit it this month. Maybe Berger was in the ether - last year he turned 90 and this year he died.

As one obituary read:

“With the series spanning topics including the role of the critic, the way art is constructed for our ‘gazes’, how it depicts women and possessions, and even the way that advertising works, it remains deeply relevant today.”

Check out this Dazed & Confused magazine piece by Emma Hope Allwood where Berger’s contemporary relevance is highlighted via the Three Graces meets the Victoria’s Secret Angels.

#AugustBreak2017 - bursting my bubble

Speaking of honing the old attention muscles I took part in another of Susannah Conway’s photo challenges.  There’s been a lot of talk of bubbles recently. Media bubbles. Housing bubbles. The London bubble. So, it’s always good to have a go at bursting your own self-imposed bubble. It’s amazing what you see once you remove the blinkers with the help of an unexpected prompt.

For more see: Susannah Conway here

The Italian film that inspired the French New Wave...

Journey to Italy: a middle-aged, middle class couple teeter on the edge of marital breakdown amongst ancient ruins and a steamy, volcanic landscape in Roberto Rossellini’s film. For the most part we follow a lonely and childless Ingrid Bergman following shouty male tour guides or peering at prams. While her husband - George Sanders - drowns his sorrows on Capri.

But no man (or woman) is an island. Things will be faced - holiday or no. And, so a trip to Pompeii to watch the subterranean imprint of a couple, caught up in the ancient eruption, filled with plaster, excavated and presented, like a giant chocolate, with the words: "They found death together – united," only serves to emphasise the gaping hole in the present day relationship...

Because it's Never Not a Lovely Moon

As Journey to Italy all too painfully illustrates if there’s one person you can never getaway from it’s yourself. Then, when we realise we’ve maybe managed to lose sight of ourselves, we’re driven find ourselves again.

Well, Caroline McHugh reckons being yourself IS the path. Not the other way around. Remember the ‘you are enough’ mantra taught by motivational speaker and hypnotherapist Marisa Peer? And, McHugh builds on this, writing:

“Your only job while you’re here, on this planet is to be good at being you as they (your role models and whoever you look up to) are good at being them.”

A beautifully illustrated book for grown-ups who need the courage to be who they are.

A reading challenge...

Personally I think the power of the negative affirmation is underrated. Heaven knows no fury like a goal scorned by a significant person - be it lover, teacher, parent. A finely worded: “You’ll never do X, Y, Z!”delivered at the right time can do wonders for the motivation.

My friend’s reading challenge is a case in point. The goal: one book a week (52 books a year). His ex said it would be more like, er, 10. It wound up being 80!

From actually reading books he thought he ought to read to discovering books he never thought to read the challenge - which he’s shared on social media - has proved satisfying, stimulating and soothing in, well, challenging times.

A little shop of colours in London

“With colour one obtains an energy that seems to stem from witchcraft.”

Artist Henri Matisse once said.

Which is perhaps why L Cornelissen & Son, the Harry Potter-esque art shop, a stone’s throw from the British Museum, is so spellbinding. Too awestruck to step inside a recent Radio 4 show did if for me, revealing a Dickensian interior stacked with:

“Jars of pigment [which] ‘glint like jewels in the semi-dark’ (as Derek Jarman put it), full of vibrant powders with mysterious names and long, strange histories - Lapis Lazuli, Rose Madder, Naples Yellow, Potters Pink, Egyptian Blue, Caput Mortuum.”

Pure [pigment] magic.

A guide to how art can make you happy

“Why is art magical? How does it make you happy?”

Bridget Watson Payne asks.

Which is definitely why her slimline volume - How Art Can Make You Happy - is proudly bound in limoncello yellow. Eye-catching, effortless and energising it’s a perfect summer read:

“This little guide makes it easy to add art to your life - with tips on how to go to blockbuster shows (or not), how to talk about art at cocktail parties, how to look at art without leaving the comfort of your sofa, and how to let art wake you up to the world around you.”

The Month in Mood Board - soaking up culture, dirty laundry & granny shoes

So, school’s almost out for summer. We’re over half way through the year. And it’s time to take a breather and survey what we’ve sown so far this year. Is 2017 going to be a bumper harvest!? We’ll see.

But, while I mulled that over, I saw, watched, listened to, and wondered about these things ...

“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?”

— Diana Vreeland

A ballet inspired by Virginia Woolf’s words is on TV

ROH Resident (not evil) Choreographer Wayne McGregor says Woolf:

“… loved dance and music. She wanted to write as if she were writing music and choreographing dance.”

Woolf Works is a triptych inspired by three landmark works: Mrs Dalloway, Orlando, The Waves. Interwoven with elements of Woolf’s life and words, via letters, essays, diaries.

We voyage through relationships, then and now, with ghostly gossamer-clad ballerinas - and a nymphette sporting a glittering helmet of Marcel-waved hair.

Through three centuries of leotard-smooth androgyny. Punctuated by Elizabethan gender-bending bodices and bloomers - some in a 24 carat-bright, bold gold.

To the inevitable stream (well ocean) of consciousness where Woolf’s last words and abstract-clad dancers intermingle with the relentless waves.

Hokusai at the British Museum

Speaking of Waves THE The Great Wave was the pivotal piece at a BM exhibition. And it turns out there are three little fishing boats in it - some old chap in the snaking exhibition viewing queue pointed that out.

What’s more it’s actually about Mount Fuji. One of a 30-something series, in fact. While tsunamis may symbolise the awe-inspiring power of nature to the west in Japan Mount Fuji and its almighty immortality was their touchstone.

And, it was Hokusai’s prolific career and quest for artistic longevity explored here. He believed things could only get better: at 100 or 110 who knew what wonders he could produce?!

Which is a rather refreshing way to go about things. I don’t know about you but when I hadn’t published a book by age 9 like Jayne Fisher, author of The Garden Gang series, I thought I was all washed up...

Raining? Footsteps in the Fog might cheer you up...

There is nothing better, in my opinion, than a rainy afternoon with a black & white movie. Especially one like Footsteps in the Fog (1955) starring Stewart Granger - dashing or rakish are usually his epithets -  and his wife Jean - the glowering, glowing Estella from David Lean’s Great Expectations - Simmons.

Footsteps is what many online reviewers call a ‘florid Edwardian thriller’ by which they mean - OTT on the drama and frills and fog I guess. He’s a murderous master of the house (is there a term for a black widower?) with marriage to an heiress on his mind.

She’s a maid determined to claw her way up the Edwardian household career ladder by way of a bit of blackmail. And, thus it winds up the best-laid plans of mice and men can be undermined by a maid and a rat...

Kathleen Turner talked femme fatales - huskily

Speaking of wily women Miss Turner - who shot to fame in Body Heat and did a turn as Jessica “I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way” Rabbit - talked Femme Fatales on R4.

The archetype of the femme fatale has inhabited the collective imagination since we’ve had an imagination. Lust and ambition incarnate, her story is a neon-lit warning: this is what happens when girls go off society’s prescriptive rails.

And in post-WWII American dreamers wanted to be feeling: upbeat, sunny, hopeful, says one interviewee. The poster girl: Doris Day. The antithesis to 40s film noir and its shadowy, ‘hopelessly pessimistic’ femme fatales.

Of course, this black and white thinking, where women is concerned, is fairytale-esque. It suited the 40s narrative. Now, women’s stories are more complex. Enter: David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. What critic Roger Ebert calls:

“[A] surrealist dreamscape in the form of a Hollywood film noir.”

Starring a perky blonde ingenue (Betty) and a mysterious brunette (Rita) who start the film as clear cut archetypes, but end in confusion:

“Rita (an amnesiac who lifted the name from a “Gilda” poster) wonders if she’s really Diane Selwyn, a name from a waitress’ name tag.”

Femme fatale classics: Double Indemnity, Gilda, The Postman Always Rings Twice.

Twenty One (not that one) opens in Southend

The Forum’s Focal Point Gallery (FPG) opened a “...new cultural venue on Southend’s famous seafront” this month. Twenty One is to be an “alternative venue for healthy food, art and events”.

The launch exhibition 100% Southend features over 110 artworks - 2 from the SEVEN collective - on which FPG says:

“100% Southend is a continuation of FPG’s 2014 project, which explored categorisations of how people engage with culture. The exhibition will use the traditional page format of A4 to bring together a diverse range of 2D works from both established and emerging artists across the SS postcodes to launch Twenty One as a venue for the town’s cultural community.
”

Vogue’s outgoing Fash. Ed got real

“Fashion can chew you up and spit you out,”

Lucinda Chambers told Vestoj (the “platform for critical thinking on fashion”).

Anyone who’s seen Zoolander or Ab Fab or The Devil Wears Prada knows that, right?

Fashion’s built on stories - unlikely adventures featuring toweringly successful (and hanger-thin) people posture in fantasy fashion - spun and proffered like a gloved princess hand, never to be soiled.

And Lucinda - Vogue employee for over thirty years - was ‘mucking’ hers up according to a friend by airing her dirty laundry (i.e. that she was fired).

“You’re not allowed to fail in fashion – especially in this age of social media, when everything is about leading a successful, amazing life. … But why can’t we celebrate failure? After all, it helps us grow and develop...”

she said.

“If you want good results, you have to support people,”

She went on, deploring how today’s business of fashion is making designers work ever faster and in greater quantities. Expecting golden eggs, but winding up, more often than not, with an unappetising scramble.

“But fashion is an alchemy...”

she says of the subtle and unquantifiable nature of imagination made manifest.  An alchemy she believes should be both aspirational AND useful. Watch Lucinda’s space.

Finding comfort (and getting curious) in granny shoes

Thinking of form and function I’ve been having trouble with shoes.

I used to wear those ballet slippers favoured by patron saint of effortless elegance Audrey Hepburn. Until I got shin splints. Later I hurt my foot. And finding shoes which didn’t aggravate became my mission impossible.

Turns out even the most apparently benign designs can bite the foot that fills them. Yep, where shoes are concerned it’s got personal.

In the sweltering heat of early summer I desperately eBayed ‘comfort shoes’.  And wound up with an orthopaedic pair of sandals.  The kind you see in specialist shop windows. You know, the ones with the zip up tartan slippers.

To me they combine retro appeal with wearability. In short: I can do my 10,000 plus steps a day, retain a sense of my personal aesthetic, and my body lives to tell the tale. Why, I have to ask, are so many shoes just NOT made for walking?

The Month in Mood Board - creative adventures, being enough & Margaret Rutherford

Midsummer came to a hot head with the Leigh Art Trail - where I exhibited some of my artwork along with the SEVEN Collective.

This was promptly followed by a mini break, in the protective darkness of the living room, featuring Some Like It Hot and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof - aptly enough...

“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?”

— Diana Vreeland

Some Like It Hot - or how to avoid the heat

For those who don’t know…

Dressed as women to escape the mob Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis soon see how the other half live.

They hot foot it to Florida with a girl-band featuring “Jell-O on springs” ukulele player Sugar Kane - aka Marilyn Monroe shimmying in some eye-popping dresses.

Lemmon is soon pinched, then picked up, by a serial marry-er millionaire.  While Curtis is courted by a bull-headed bellboy who looks all of twelve and sees ‘no’ as a challenge.

"That's the way I like 'em, big and sassy," 

he says. Agghh...

The funniest woman [not] alive?

Eccentric and dotty are words oft used to describe actress Margaret Rutherford. An original national treasure famed for playing ‘older spinster aunt’ types even Time magazine called her the “funniest woman alive”.

To me her on-screen self acceptance and quick wit makes her irresistible. As Miss Marple in Murder, She Said she deals deftly with misogynistic comments from young and old alike:

Alexander (a teenaged boy):

"You know, it isn't just that you don't look like Jayne Mansfield. You're not *my* idea of a maid, either."

Miss Marple:

"Well, quite honestly, I don't think *you're* everybody's idea of a boy."

This month she turned up on TPTV in The Smallest Show on Earth (also featuring Peter Sellers). I’m not sure that film made the best of her though - try Blithe Spirit or The Importance of Being Earnest for a glimpse of her greatness.

Choose your own adventure

Adventures conjure up Indiana Jones style quests. Or man-size discomfort in far flung places.  But Morwhenna Woolcock (aka the Creative Adventurer) writing in July’s Psychologies magazine, says:

“Adventure is everywhere - if you know where to look for it.”

The trick, she found, was to make “the adventure wrap around my life.” This year she’s visiting one British island a month. She also went off on a 21 day pilgrimage following in the footsteps of her namesake saint.

All this is food for thought:

“Start by following the crumbs of curiosity and see where they lead you,”

she says.

In fact anyone who’s been Alain de Bottoned (or is just really well read) will know that Xavier de Maistre tailored his adventures to fit within the confines of his bedroom - because, well, he was literally confined there (duelling apparently). So, really there’s no excuse.

And, even more helpfully Morwhenna gives us some creative prompts to get us looking at everyday things through the eye goggles of adventure. Why not step into nature and create a sound map for starters? The whats, whys and whatyoumecallits can be found on the Psychologies website.

SEVEN did Leigh Art Trail

Our starting point: the sea. Our destination creative adventure. (There seems to be a theme here…).

This June saw the SEVEN Collective’s first creative journal exhibition at the twentieth Leigh Art Trail.  LAT sees selected local artists - and some out of area guests - apply to show their work in participating shops and businesses.

Situated in Planet Leasing visiting Trailers were invited to get interactive with our creative journals, consider using the creative prompts we used for themselves, and even dabble in our community sketchbook.

‘Stage fright’ and blazing sun aside (I must have vampire ancestry) it wound up being a real pleasure to meet interested people and talk creativity.

See what people said in the #LAT2017 piece I wrote on the SEVEN website here.

Marisa Peer says: you're enough

“In my 25 years as a therapist, I’ve discovered that the root of so many modern problems — hoarding, excessive drinking, compulsive shopping, and overeating — come right back to a need to fill the inner emptiness of not feeling “enough” with external things. The more you tell yourself you are enough, the more you’ll believe it. It sounds so utterly simple—and it is—and all you need is the commitment to do it and the belief that it will work.”

Watch Marisa in her talk The Biggest Disease Affecting Humanity: “I’m Not Enough" here.