River Ritual

Not strictly about Parson Cross except the artist I am collaborating with on this project is Eddy Dreadnought who has a studio next to ours in SOAR on P.X.

Eddy (and me a little bit) have made a film entitled River Ritual. It is about the Rover Don in Neepsend, the area I grew up in from 0-11 before I moved to P.X. The film is inspired by my memory of a student death in an annual rag week boat race down the Don. Nobody but me remembers it. None of my family nor the internet.

It is a beautiful poetic film. We intend to put it on YouTube next Friday, so link to follow... We showed it and I spoke at a symposium at York University last Friday entitled Social Water. It was a triumph!

many dilemmas

Class - betraying my class background by 'being an artist and intellectual'.
Art - responding to 'problems' that I first began to address in the last 70's at art college and making work in 2013!
Art - painting and sculpture versus 'conceptual' work.
Performance - is it my first love? More than painting? Painting as performance.
Engaged art - I love spending time with people I have met - but I really want and need to be in my studio painting OR making performance.
Existence - feeling not really there or here.
This list being so self indulgent.

Just get on with it!

The Lowry at Salford Quays

And here is the proof. Elaine was inspired by seeing Lowry's work and admitted that she hadn't been attracted to him before.

Laurence Stephen Lowry

Yesterday I took Elaine Tomlinson from Foxhill to The Lowry yesterday in Salford Quays. Lowry is the most unfashionable artist I know of and it seems that it was always thus. I don't like his matchstick men paintings but I had seen some earlier work that I liked. I really enjoyed the exhibition at The Lowry. It showed some great early drawings and paintings and some great seascapes and some wonderful late work. He was such a loner, very much his own man and never seemed to flinch from that path. A fascinating, lonely character who painted and painted, even though he didn't know why he was doing it. He really was someone who endlessly pondered upon the meaningless of existence.
We had a great time - Elaine didn't know anything about his work (apart from matchstick men) before we set off and she loved it as did my partner Helen.

The portrait above is of a woman called Anne - it seems that she may not have existed but Lowry painted her throughout his life. He did the above one in the 70's when his matchstick period was raging and the art establishment were shocked. I like the work and personality of this non-hero.
A miserable bastard though!

Photographic acknowledgment

The photographs on the last two posts were taken by Ansgar Allen, my colleague at the School of Education at Sheffield University and a very good friend. Ansgar was on the tour but we don't seem him in the photographs as he was taking them!

More pictures from yesterday's tour

Pictures from yesterday's tour

My Parson Cross Tour

Well, a strange one this morning, the morning of the tour. The tour sold out very quickly and Art Sheffield set up a reserve list of up to 5 people, if the people who had booked didn't turn up on the day. Seven people had booked.This morning, three people turned up, two of whom were my friends. The other person had been on the reserve list, so five people didn't turn up! I was amazed and very disappointed. The tour went really well and I think the three people enjoyed it. But, what happened?
I prepared a lot for the tour and spent £100 on a mini-bus. I could have taken the three people that came in my car! Bugger!