SEASIDE SISTERS SOUVENIR SHOP, CLERKENWELL



Last night, my amiable friend Mr 'Craft Gives Me The Horn' Ginger and I headed to Clerkenwell creative hub Craft Central's pop up event, the Seaside Sisters Souvenir Shop. Exhibiting and selling an enticing array of kitsch, seaside-inspired vintage homewares and paper goods, the ground floor space overflowed with feminine retro charm, delicious home made baked goods and an extensive collection of nautical knick knacks.   

Including the charming and authentic seaside photographs above, the exhibition also featured tacky snow domes from various seaside ports, tea towels and other kitchenalia with retro nautical graphics. Customised handmade bunting, pretty cuddly toys and other cute, original gifts produced by the Seaside Sisters themselves were also for sale at the event.

The girls produce smart, iconic products reflecting an idiosyncratic, peculiarly British take on the seaside reflected in this great seaside rock cushion pictured above. The event attracted a lively crowd of creative eccentrics, dividing their time between checking out the fantastic wares for sale in the show and admiring the balmy late summer evening setting sun over Craft Central's warehouse rooftop towards St Pauls and Clerkenwell's Victorian buildings below. Read more about the Seaside Sisters collective and purchase their crafty wares here.

MATTHEW ROSE'S PARISIAN BOHEMIA

One of my artistic inspirations of 2010 was collage artist Matthew Rose, after seeing his October solo show at the Orange Dot gallery in Bloomsbury. Back in April of this year, Matthew was lovely enough to allow me to visit his studio in the faded bohemian district of Montparnasse on Paris' rive gauche. Ascending the grand staircase in Matthew's modernist apartment building, I was greeted by the amiable American artist and shown around his top floor studio/apartment - its warm, timber interiors punctuated by the endless stacks of cuttings, materials and messy paraphernalia characteristic of the collage artist.    

It was a real honour to finally meet Matthew in the flesh and have an opportunity to discuss his work, much of which had been featured on his various online presences including his sales blog here. Some of my favourite pieces included the the witty, tactile text-based works pictured below, each one featuring a clever satirical spin on a well known song lyric or little known artistic movement alike.  

Matthew utilises a range of imagery in his work, recontextualising innocent looking, vintage-inspired aesthetics (in predominantly pastel hues) to create nonsensical, amusing and often disembodied comic book style collages. His pieces evokes an almost feminine, retro Americana...a feeling of a more innocent time of soda pop, diners and juke box jiving. Combine this with the inevitable European influence years of Parisian residency has injected into his work and you have the makings of a very interesting body of work.   



This great poster below advertises Matthew's imminent Paris exhibition featuring his latest work and is available to download free from his blog here.

GOODBYE CRUEL WORLD : THE DEATH OF AMY WINEHOUSE

I never thought I would see the day I would receive two incredible texts arriving within 30 seconds of each other informing me of Amy's death. I mean, yes, I knew she was a caner obviously out of control on various substances and/or mental illness. But somehow, some way I always seemed to dismiss the whole sordid spectacle as a gutter press beat up or some anonymous tool uploading videos online purely to then vent abuse about her skankiness. We've all been shitfaced in our time and half the stories I read just seemed like rock n roll behaviour exemplified - 'high spirits' mixed with money, fame, celeb friends, a crazy personality and a newspaper-selling, car crash image. It just seemed to reflect what 'the kids' of contemporary London got up to and characterised what Camden, in particular is like.

Amy's membership to the 27 Club is obviously extremely regrettable and her loss means far more to me than any of that notorious club's other illustrious members. Cobain may have been closer to my generation, but he was American, male and (worst of all) grunge. Couldn't really get any more removed from my own personal experience. Amy, on the other hand, wove images (both lyrically and musically) utterly infused with the emotion, drama, chaos and sassiness of what it feels like to be young, female and fucked up. Laura Barton posted an insightful take on Winehouse's lyrical legacy on the Guardian's music blog yesterday, an excerpt of which I've included below. She touches on all the reasons why Winehouse was such a powerful performer and resonated in particular, with so many women. Read the full post here. 

Pop music had often cast women as sweet, bright creatures, but Winehouse's lyrics revealed something mulchier, messier. Here was a woman who refused to conform – not in the eccentric mad woman in the attic mould of Kate Bush or Björk, but a woman who chose to live a little wild, follow her heart and sing of the simple stew of being female. Her songs were filled with broad talk, cussing, drink and drugs and dicks, songs that could hinge on one magnificent, unladylike question: "What kind of fuckery is this?"

She sang openly of female desire – not the squawky, shrill sexuality of Sex and the City and Ann Summers, but something truer, more physical, more serious. She sang about the ache of the body, the need for emotion, the distracting allure of a man's shoulders, shirt, underwear. "When he comes to me, I drip for him tonight," she sang on I Wake Up Alone. "Drowned in me, we bathe under blue light."
She frequently gave her songs a familiar, almost domestic setting, a world of kitchen floors, chips and pitta, Tanqueray and Stella. "I'm in the tub, you on the seat," she sang on You Know I'm No Good. "Lick your lips as I soak my feet/ Then you notice likkle carpet burn/ My stomach drops and my guts churn." It was a verse that started off like a Degas painting, naked and intimate and warmly erotic, but swiftly dissembled into something sad and messy and ruined.And this, too, was key to Winehouse's lyrics – she gave you an image and then quickly swiped it away, a honeyed love scene soon dissolved into wretchedness; over the course of an album it gave the impression of a life of instability, lived from one ramshackle lurch to the next.
But there were constants – namely addiction and passion, the flaming five-storey fire of love she always returned to in Love Is a Losing Game, the ferocious, proprietorial female strength of Some Unholy War, the mind fogged by drugs and love and desire. In Back to Black's great tangle of pride and neediness we found a melding of the two: "You love blow and I love puff," she sang. "And life is like a pipe/ And I'm a tiny penny rolling up the walls inside."
The other constant presence was of self-recrimination and remorse. In her lyrics Winehouse seemed to show how she screwed things up – how she should never have played the "game" of love in the first place, of "teasing" her self-esteem, and of "this regret I got accustomed to". In Tears Dry on Their Own she gives herself a stern talking-to: "I cannot play myself again, I should be my own best friend," she warns. "Not fuck myself in the head with stupid men."

All images in this post taken outside Amy's house in Camden Square, North London, two days after her death. Amy Winehouse 1983-2011.

ART OR ARSE?

...Answers on a postcard please...bit of a random post showing some of the posties I either sold at my show a few months back...all pics of which disappeared down the back alleys of Hammersmith when I lost my camera...or gave away to thankless London media wankers (not naming any names, Yentob) in futile networking attempts at White Cube openings...sigh...c'est la vie!!

Poorer Than You (c) 2011

Smell Me Finger (c) 2011

Women In Love (c) 2011

The Idiot (c) 2011

GUERILLA MANBAGGING III

The West London massive flying the man-bag flag loud and proud, summer 2011...young or old, gay or straight, media wanker or chavtastic benefit scrounger...Top Man - you have a lot to answer for!! 

LAZING ON A SUNNY AFTERNOON

Theres something ethereal, almost mystical about the beautiful areas surrounding North London's Hampstead Heath. Even notorious party hag Kate Moss' recent relocation into the neighbourhood can't manage to ruin the tone and I take every opportunity I can to visit my Highgate Village massive. Living in a wonderful two-storey apartment full of period features and old money ambience, said friends spend most evenings sinking cider at local watering holes the Flask or the Hollybush after lazy, sun-drenched afternoons swimming a few laps of the Highgate ponds. The below pics detail their lovely, leafy bolthole...along with some architectural and gastronomic delicacies from the hood...

BACK TO BLACK

Well peeps, its been a long, tres difficile road but I'm finally back from the abyss...

Image courtesy of Google

UN FUNK BLEU DANS LE NOIR

In a bit of a blue funk last week after losing my camera...alas, there'll be no posts from the post-industrial grime of Stoke-on-Trent's amazing potteries, Warwick Castle, my collage exhibition in Bethnal Green or the annual Oxford/Cambridge Thames boat race...for shame. Harrumph and fiddlesticks and a big eff off to the turnip who trousered it around the mean streets of Hammersmith on their way to see The Boat Race.

Reflecting my black temperament, I'm posting more luddite fone pics from Antony McCall's show at the Ambika P3 gallery on London's Marylebone Street. This huge space - the old construction workshop of the University of London's engineering department - was pitch black, punctuated by three shards of white light projected from the (what seemed like) storeys-high ceiling. These simple projected shapes moved gradually on the ground, creating stark, triangular forms, made visible by regular pumps from the smoke machine. Difficult to photograph and even more difficult to describe...I'll just say the work created an eerie, almost religious feeling, visitors compelled to lounge about on the floor, gazes transfixed toward heaven, like a warehouse rave for adults minus the krazy glowstix and dreaded lockjaw comedown.

After, my date and I maintained the blacker than black vibe with a visit to Dans Le Noir, the Clerkenwell restaurant staffed by blind waiters where diners eat in a completely dark room. The height of pretentious London gastronomy-wank you cry? Never fear, dear readers, the concept actually aims to allow diners some empathetic insight into the blind persons' experience and proved to be, in fact, rather an emotional ride. Being immediately disoriented the moment we were led into the dining room, hands on shoulders by our lovely Australian waiter Carl, its amazing the sense of vulnerability and helplessness that descends as you gingerly hobble along, banging knees against chairs and cracking elbows against walls as you desperately try to make sense of the strange surroundings. Very rapidly I learnt to listen hard to Carl's soothing voice and trust his direction. Eventually a sort of confidence emerged as I adapted to the pitch black room and started to enjoy the cacophony of surrounding conversation and delicious smells. A strange sense of liberation came with the realisation you are no longer subject to 'the other's gaze and can indulge in complete gluttony under cover of total anonymity - a must for all you builimics out there. Your menu remains a mystery until after the meal - heightening diners' dependence on the other senses to decipher exactly what the devil you're munching on. Its inevitable your grubby mits get deployed whats more - five consecutive forkfulls of peas and air do not a three course meal make.

Read more on the the Dans Le Noir website here.

OLD SCHOOL TECHNOLOGY

Its amazing really, how easy it is to create some interesting imagery even using the most basic, crappy old  mobile phone - no iphone apps or Photoshop, just pure and simple old-school luddite technology. These ones were taken around 11pm on my walk home after seeing the excellent film Inside Job. I now know a lot more about leverages, Reganomics and why Alan Greenspan's a knob...which I must admit is extremely exciting.