HOW TO DISAPPEAR COMPLETELY

About 20 years ago I made some large paintings for the Radiohead albums Kid A + Amnesiac. They will be exhibited at Christie’s alongside digital work and drawings made at the same time.

Here I am talking to Matt Everitt on the radio about it, at 1hr 43mins 06secs: embarrassing radio interview

Even more embarrassingly, here I am talking on video: video interview

First Open: Post-War and Contemporary Art. Free to view 9th – 15th October at Christie’s, King Street in Mayfair in London

Hotels and a Swimming Pool
Trade Center
Get Out Before Saturday
Residential Nemesis
Minos Wall I
Hole
26th September 2021

Ness – a new(ish) book

Hello. Ages ago I wrote on here somewhere about a project that I’d started with Robert Macfarlane when we wandered the strange landscape of Orford Ness, a long shingle spit of longshore drift on the coast of Suffolk, in eastern England. We decided to make a book; he would write the words and I’d draw the pictures. I began working with sea-coal, mud and clay to make the pictures, working on the beach of an East Anglian estuary. The pictures were big and messy. When I started to figure out how to actually make the book that I realised I would have to start again; my original plan had been to photograph these chaotic, smeared and scratched drawings, work on the photos by adding other elements digitally and then print the pictures lithographically before adding gilded copper. This would have been quite nice, but when I costed it all it would have meant that the book, when it was eventually a thing would have been a very expensive object. So I had to think again. Which meant I had to start again.

My new plan was that the entire book – text and pictures – would be printed letterpress at Richard Lawrence’s workshop in Oxford; so the pictures would have to be converted into etched magnesium plates, meaning black and white, no grey, which in turn meant that I would have to work in pen and ink. Meanwhile Robert’s writing was approaching completion and it was unlike anything he had written before. I spent the summer in an isolated hut along the coast from Orford Ness with pens and paper and drew the pictures. Such as the one above.

Eventually all of the many strands that had to be found in order to make a book from scratch were woven together, a plan was formulated and a number of beautiful books – 525, in fact, for reasons I can’t quite recall – were printed, bound, jacketed and despatched to a phalanx of readers. Great, hey? But no. Not great. It transpired that in a moment of haste and inattention the books had been printed with the pages in the wrong order. The feelings of the creators of the book cannot be described here as language is insufficient to do so.

And so the process was repeated. Never mind, never mind. All this happened nearly a year ago now.

Another edition, a ‘popular’, ‘mass-market’ edition was proposed by the proper publisher Hamish Hamilton, which is an imprint of Penguin. There were no mistakes with the page order this time. That edition was not limited to 525 copies (sorry, I still can’t remember why it was that number – possibly something to do with the latitude of Orford Ness?) and is available from all good bookshops and also Amazon.

27th November 2019

Watermarks et al

Hello! Like a frequently absent and probably delinquent acquaintance, I have been ‘away’ from the business end of this elderly website for several months, and now that I’m back I’m certainly not about to explain my lengthy disappearance.

At the time of writing (8th October 2018) I have what I’ve called a ‘capsule exhibition’ at Whistleblower Gallery in Brighton. Comprising 10 drawings and 4 paintings made during the recording of Radiohead’s latest LP as well as 4 paintings which are part of my ongoing Language of the Walls project, everything is pretty much monochrome, except one painting entitled Skulk.

skulk

These paintings were all made outdoors in the early winter in rural Oxfordshire, and appear to me to have a very different mood to the ones made in early autumn in the south of France. They were made in exactly the same way using the same techniques and materials, so I have to conclude that it was the very different weather conditions that were responsible for the changed atmosphere of the paintings. It’s the same for what I’ve called drawings (they are on paper, rather than canvas) because 9 of them were made in Provence and just one in England, and it’s very different to the French ones. This one’s called Fractured Strata, and it’s one of the drawings made in France:

fractured strata

Whereas, this one, called Poisoned Acres, is the English one:

poisoned acres

The other part of this compact exhibition is the paintings from the Language of the Walls, which I’ve written about on this website previously. There are four of these paintings on display, called Solitude, Trickster, Deceiver and Incline.

If you’re interested, in the area or are in Brighton with nothing better to do, the Whistleblower Gallery is at 14 St. John’s Road, BN3 2FB, Brighton and Hove, or you can telephone the gallery on +44 (0)1273 734 295

The exhibition runs until 4th November 2018.

8th October 2018

Invalid Response, again

gridWell, as I said last time on my frequently updated stupid blog I have an exhibition coming along soonish. And here are some fragments of twenty of the prints that will be on show. Of course if I was clever and web-savvy and stuff like that then you would be able to click on each of them to see the whole thing. But I’m not and therefore you cannot. So yes. Invalid Response is what the exhibition is called and it runs from the 7th until the 24th of June in the year of 2018.

I’m currently hard at work on several projects which I am very foolishly doing at the same time. Three of them are books and the fourth is something else. And I will explain about them here in this very place when the time is right, and when I’m not worrying about them quite as much as I am now.

20th May 2018

INVALID RESPONSE

invalid squareAs is evident from the picture just above these words I am having an exhibition quite soon, in the city of London, the capital of the islands of Britain. It’s a show of twenty-seven screen prints, and some of them are now extremely rare. There’s a print that I thought I had none left of at all, called Fuck It, which I made in 2007 in a fit of hatred of those inspirational posters like that one that says something like ‘Go placidly amid the noise and haste…’ It’s kind of pretty with roses twined around the letters.

2007_Fuck_ItHappy days. At around the same time I made another print that said Nothing Will Ever Get Better which was unfortunately completely prophetic and came utterly true. I may be going about this art thing the wrong way. Perhaps I should do a print that’s more cheerful, with fluffy bunnies and and uplifting message. Anyway, I’m getting a bit off topic.

offtopicSorry about that. So, yes, I’ve got a show coming up, it’s at Jealous Gallery in Shoreditch.

16th May 2018

The Language of the Wall

Hello. I’ve started on a series of small paintings called The Language of the Wall, a title I have nicked from the photographer whose work inspired the series; Brassaï. Brassaï was born Gyula Halász in 1899 in Romania and moved to Paris in 1924. He photographed both the rich and the poor, from slum to opera house, but the pictures he took that interested me were those he took of Parisian graffiti.

In 1956 the Museum of Modern Art in New York held a show called ‘Language of the Wall’, an exhibition of around 120 of Brassaï’s graffiti photographs; pictures of faces, symbols, figures, words and so on scratched into the stonework of the buildings of Paris. I was in Paris a year ago and there was an exhibition of these photographs at the Pompidou Centre, but I had just seen an exhibition of Magritte’s paintings there followed by an exhibition of Cy Twombly’s paintings and I was so sick of it all that I had to leave very quickly and find a bar and smoke cigarettes angrily. So I missed the Brassaï show which, I’m sure, would have pissed all over Magritte and Twombly.

Anyway, I did see some posters advertising the show and when I got on to a computer I looked up Brassaï and the photographs of graffiti. They are really, really great, kind of timeless in that they could have been made any time at all. And you get a sense of how long they took to carve. Here’s an example.

brassai

See what I mean? That’s dedication to your craft, I’d say. No sneaking around with buckets of wheat paste for flypostering or mucking about with stencils and spraycans. This must have taken a while. I very much like the idea of a time when scratching or carving your name into a wall could take hours. I’ve seen some graffiti that’s written in letters with serifs, more like something you might see on a gravestone than a twenty-first century tag. Although I do like tags too.

My first idea was to get hold of a load of stone and take it to my studio and start from there, but I found that stone was hard to find and the stuff I did find had been quarried by machine and had no character at all. What I was after was a battered, worn out and re-used look, scratched over repeatedly, both accidentally and deliberately. So I improvised. The first pictures I made were for the covers of a couple of books that Faber Music put out, one of Radiohead’s music for guitars powered by electricity and one for guitars powered by acousticality. They looked like this, once they had writing put on them:

fabersI wanted the pictures to look like sections of an old wall that had been dirtied by soot, muddied, cleaned, dirtied again, accidentally gouged, graffitied over, had the graffiti scratched over, gaffitied again, and so on. I’m working pretty small, on canvases that are 18″ by 14″, although I might make some bigger pictures soonish. So far I’ve made five of these pictures. Here’s the most recent:

IMG_2698I don’t know how many I’ll make or what they’ll look like. So far I’ve been using the easy-to-draw creatures I’ve used on lots of Radiohead artwork because that’s what graffiti usually is – easy to draw (the kind that I’m trying to emulate, anyway).

Anyway, these pictures will be exhibited when I’ve made enough of them. Somewhere in the UK.

 

 

5th March 2018

How’s the pain?

hows_the_pain

A little while ago I did a cover for a book by one of my favourite dead French writers, Pascal Garnier. In a fit of nostalgia for the days when I used to compose English Literature essays very late at night with a bottle of Thunderbird I also wrote an introduction for the book.

Pascal Garnier is a very fine writer (or was, strictly speaking) and utterly under-appreciated by the non-French reading world. Gallic Books, the publishers of How’s The Pain? as well as a clutch of Garnier’s other titles, have done a fine job in translating his sardonic prose into English.

Anyway, if you’re interested you can buy one of only 750 copies right HERE.

18th February 2018

Fleet Street Apocalypse Redux

fleet_street

There are some forgotten and/or overlooked prints of Fleet Street Apocalypse for sale at the very place where they were printed, ten years ago. St Bride’s Printing Library is the vendor and all proceeds go to them. Click HERE to go and have a look.

By the way, when they describe it as a ‘facsimile’ they just mean that it’s a print, made directly from the giant linocut that I carved. Maybe facsimile is some archaic printing term that means just that. I dunno.

11th February 2018

We must catch up some time

Well hello. It’s been a while, has it not? I’ve been away from my venerable website for ages. Funnily enough I was attempting to remember what I’ve been doing with my life by accessing the pages of My Stupid Blog on the Archive bit of slowlydownward.com, and I realised that I used to write on here quite often, almost like it was a diary or a journal. Unfortunately the part of my past I was trying to recall predated the existence of My Stupid Blog so it was kind of a waste of time. But not entirely! because it made me feel all guilty and stuff about not writing on here much these days.

Anyway, rather than be all organised I thought I’d try to write this as a sort of stream-of-consciousness monologue like what I learned about in English Literature many years ago. It was quite the thing for Modernist writers, if I’m remembering right. So. What’s been happening?

On the eastern coast of England I met up with Robert Macfarlane again, to talk about a project that’s been about two years in the thinking-about so far. It’s called Ness and it will be a book, with him doing the words and me doing the pictures. It will be a slender volume, along the lines of Holloway but utterly different. It will be deeply strange, I think. Here is a picture of Orford Ness, where the book had its genesis.

orfordnessIf you wanted to visit the place you have to go to East Anglia and then through a big forest to a little village where you then have to get on a little ferry to the Ness. Most of Orford Ness is now administered by the National Trust, whose website can be found here. That’s where I nicked this photo from too. Due to Dr Macfarlane’s extensive contacts and winning manner we were able to get into various structures and places forbidden to the hoi polloi. Which was nice. And also hopefully useful for our Ness book.

I’ve sort of started my part of it by using sea-charcoal and mud and sea-chalk all scrounged from the coastline to make textures on large pieces of paper. At the moment I think that the book will consist of letterpress type text pages and giclée/screen printed/gilded artwork pages, in a hardback book that we will make nearly 500 of. But all of that could easily be subject to enormous change. Or, shall we say, to longshore drift


 

In other news I’ve started work on a new and stupidly ambitious series of linocuts. It’s like some sort of addiction. I’d rather be doing that right now, rather than writing this. So it will be a series of sixty four linocuts, telling a kind of story. It will be produced as a pocket sized paperback like those of Penguin books. And it will in fact be a Penguin book. It’s as yet untitled and I’ve done so pitifully few of the sixty four intricately detailed linocuts that I really shouldn’t be telling you, dear imagined reader, about it at all. But oh well. The damage is done now, isn’t it? I’ve probably jinxed it.


 

What else? Well, too much, if you ask me. I’ve just gone and looked at my list, which is stuck up on the kitchen wall. It’s a long list.

Firstly, over the summer I guest-edited a magazine. I’ve never guest-edited anything before, but then I’d never art-directed anything before all that business with the film about nuclear weapons and that turned out pretty much okay. So, right, the magazine is called Monster Children (don’t ask) and it will be out very soon. In it I have gone on at length about all kinds of things. It seems to be a magazine that’s normally about skateboarding and stuff like that, but I just went on about obscure French writers and long-deceased Italian engravers. The kids will fucking hate it, but I don’t care.

They are doing a boxed edition too which will have all kinds of fancy-assed things in it; like a 7″ record of holloway recordings and a little sketch book thing and a whole bunch of stuff that I’ve forgotten. It probably says on their website. Anyway, here’s a photo of it which the owner Campbell sent to me. It looks like he used his bed as a background.

monstrousI guess the black book with the grinning bear on it is the sketchbook. The other thing is definitely the magazine. So, yeah, right, Monster Children! They are having a launch party for it (who knew that you had launch parties for magazines? Not me!) next Wednesday in London. I imagine that there will be further information on the social media. Go seek, if you can be arsed.


whitechapel BROADMEAD POSTER

And so next there is the continuing, deathless existence of Broadmead -The Movie. Attentive persons may recall that some time ago (fifteen months ago?) I and several other idiots ‘organised’ a Festival of Apathy in the delightfully quaint and olde-worlde city of Bristol in Merrie England. This was partly a response to the fact that there appear to be an increasing number of festivals for just about anything – guitars, books, eating, home-decorating, and we thought it would be, y’know, kind of fun to have a festival of sort of just not being bothered. And myself and my old comrade Mat Consume went on to think it would be, y’know, kind of fun to make a really boring movie about the most boring part of Bristol. So we did. Then we got John Matthias and Jay Auborn to compose a score for it, which the did in an exquisitely beautiful manner.

And on the 19th October, 2017, it will be screened at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in the east end of London town. Amazing, hey? Who’d a fuckin thought it?

More details here, fans of tedium!


Well, that’s all we have time for today. But I’ll try to update this a bit more often…

 

 

25th September 2017

paintings from a moon shaped pool

Hello there. I’ve just been sent these photographs of my exhibition at the Bonnefantenmuseum in Maastricht. The show is until the 3rd September. Photos by Paul Cox.

_DSC4019 _DSC4020 _DSC4021 _DSC4022 _DSC4023 _DSC4026 _DSC4027 _DSC4028 _DSC4030 _DSC4031 _DSC4032 _DSC4034 _DSC4035I’ve been over there in Maastricht for the last few days, signing an edition of prints made from the linocut that I did in my spare time whilst painting the inside of the cupola, a subject I may have droned on about interminably in the past. It was the first time I got to see what the exhibition of the Moon Pool paintings looked like, and I was very pleasantly surprised. Everything looks great and it’s quite hard to believe that at times during their making I was thinking that I’d better find myself a proper job.

Anyway, hey ho. What’s next?

 

24th July 2017