WRECK THIS FEAR
For her birthday some months back my daughter was given a book called ‘Wreck this Journal’ by one of her school friends. She didn’t seem all that interested and I never even got a chance to look at it until, together with another friend, she stumbled across it today. It’s a book with mainly...
PETER DOIG FEVER
My first contact with Peter Doig’s painting was a picture of Pond Life (1993) in Modern Painters magazine not that long after it was created. I was strangely attracted to the wintery feel of the naïve image and its scratchy surface. The way it mimics the marks made by ice skates on the frozen...
WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?!
I’m beginning a new project inspired by The Ebb Tide, a short novel that Robert Louis Stevenson wrote together with his stepson Lloyd Osbourne in his late years. Yesterday I received a bunch of books I had ordered for my research including a biography of Stevenson by Claire Harman. As you do with biographical books...
THAT GUY IN THE BIG LEBOWSKI!
Lots of people think country music is crap. In a way they might be right but more often than not I think they’re letting the music be overshadowed by the kind of people they think listen to it, their politics, image… A few weeks back I met up with a friend to eat...
OLD STONES
On my Sunday run this morning making a second attempt at an incursion into the mountainsides of Sierra Nevada – Spain not California – trying to reach the village of Monachil, where I would meet up with my family who were waiting there for me with dry clothes and coffee. Most of the...
WISH YOU WERE HERE
I would spend hours looking through the faded biscuit tin full of family photographs that was kept in the bottom draw of an old writing desk in all the houses I lived in as a child. I clearly remember the feel of those rainy days I spent staring through black and white pictures...
HENDRIX’S LAST BASEMENT
Maybe Hendrix died in a basement, I don’t know. This basement is covered in vomit – Isn’t that what the paint splashes on the floor are? – as a reminder of the cause of his death and a warning of what could happen to any of us if we chose his lifestyle. The...
THE BIRTHDAY PARTY
A Studio With a View is a year old today! I’ve never been very good with birthday parties, save Harold Pinter’s extraordinary play and Nick Cave’s gothic rock band. I’ve had an excellent time writing about art and books and music and other things I like to waste my time with, and would...
JACKSON POLLOCK’S AMERICAN SAGA
I had just put the car in reverse to back out of my brother’s drive when I saw my niece, who we had just dropped off, running back towards us with something in her hand… Daddy says this is for you she panted as she put through the window an old book about...
IT’S THE RISK, STUPID
I was obediently standing in the queue with my groceries in the little red basket and staring into space as one does, when some familiar squeaky sounds coming from the sound system caught my attention. I tuned in… Of course! It’s Mick Jagger singing that ridiculous ‘discoish’ song from years ago! The long...
MUSICAL DICTATORSHIP
On January 26, 1936, Joseph Stalin, who had decided to take an interest in Soviet opera, attended a performance of Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow. The composer was instructed to attend, which he did in a state of utter panic, and two days later the...
FLAMENCO FROM THE OTHER SIDE
Yesterday I had the chance to go to an outdoor concert by guitarist Daniel Casares in the Andalusian town of Estepona. Casares is the flamenco musician and composer I created a painting performance for some months back which went on stage in the French city of Sens (I wrote about it here and...
All schools should be art schools.
