Times Past: Time's Passed

The River Nene at Wadenhoe, Northamptonshire

It was great to hear from an old friend this week, even though he had to tell me the sad news about another friend's death. It got me thinking about things as I put a few words together in reply. It became a sort of statement about my life as it is at the moment. This is what I wrote back to him.

Hi Vince.
Great to hear from you, even if you were the bearer of sad news. Poor Dave, it was no age to go. Was it the big C? I don't know about you, but I've recently become much more aware of how little time our generation has got left - the future no longer stretches into infinity. I often read obituaries of men who I've always thought of as my generation. Blowing away like leaves on a windy day.
I lost my own Mum earlier this year. She lived with me for the past ten years or more since my Dad died, and as she drifted into her nineties became more incapacitated, immobile as well as virtually blind. Because of having to care for her, I shed more and more of my teaching work until this year I've only been teaching two mornings a week. I couldn't bear to give it up completely. If I did, I don't think it it would be long before I joined the two Daves. Quite honestly, teaching and keeping up with what the new generation is doing is the only thing that keeps me focussed on life. (The extra bit of spending money is nice too!)
Anyway, on a more cheerful note, I wonder what did become of Shirley Lee. I find it hard to imagine she's still around. She must be a very old lady if she is. I often think back to those days and often regret that we let life move us on. I often say to people that the years in Lancashire were the happiest years of my life. Perhaps it was because we were fresh from the RCA, green but full of confidence in what life was going to offer us. I often wonder about other people who crossed our path in Preston. I remember Roger Swanborough (who had also been behind us at the RCA), Sylvia Lees whose husband Peter had been at the RCA at the same time as us, and there was a nice girl Linda who taught fashion. I also have fond memories of Stan Hogg, who ran the printing trade courses. He must surely be dead by now. Lots of the students linger in the memory too because their quirky character. I've still got one or two photographs of that time that bring it all back.
It would be nice to make time to renew old friendships. You're clearly much better at it than me. Although I've loved friends dearly, I seem to spend my life with my head down, burrowing away without looking to right or left and abandoning everything I've left behind me. Not really a good trait, but I've learnt to live with it.

Times Past: A Snowy Day

Now that Spring is in full swing, it's easy to forget the snow we had in February. Here's a little reminder of a trip we made to meet up with Will and his family. Though they weren't in, we found them snugly settled in the lounge bar of the village pub. The snow had tempted them into making their own Arctic expedition. With snowfalls like this now so uncommon, even nine-year old Sol had never seen so much!

Naughty Fun? My very own barrel of monkeys.

Took in this homeless bunch, who look as though they've been living rough. They don't seem very house-trained and need a good wash and some clean clothes. Plastic surgery in some cases. (Greg the Bunny has some useful advice on cosmetic surgery) Still, they make me laugh and are good fun to have around. I'm sure we'll get along just fine.

A Trip to New Lanark

New Lanark. To someone who doesn't know about it, it's hardly a name to conjure with. Just another name signposted off the busy M74 linking Glasgow to Carlisle and the M6.

Not a bit of it, I knew it would be worth seeing. When I taught the contextual history of early photography, I used to show my students an engraving of New Lanark as it looked in 1816. We would then look at prints of industrial scenes of the mid-nineteenth century, sparking a lively discussion of the changes that took place in that extraordinary time. Changes that continue to resonate through the environmental issues we wrestle with today.

Edinburgh Art (3): Claire Barclay at the Fruitmarket Gallery

A visit to the Fruitmarket Gallery is worth making for the cafe alone, I was told. Award-winning coffee and irresistable home-made cakes. A great little bookshop too, specialising in hard-to-find art books and small-press books and zines. The Gallery's position nicely complements the City Art Centre, which is directly across the road in Market Street.

The current exhibition, running until 12th April, is by Scottish installation artist Claire Barclay. The piece in the photograph, which is called Subject to Habit, is fairly typical of her preoccupations. It mixes ready-made objects with specially designed, machine-made objects that seem oddly familiar but which defy absolute categorisation. For instance, the black gym mats in this piece trigger an association which determines how we read the other objects, which in turn are clearly not the objects our conditioned responses would lead us to think they should be. All the work in the show plays on the ambiguity of forms, carrying contradictory connotations such as malevolence and benevolence in an uneasy balance.

An informative video interview with the artist was looping in an upstairs room and the show was supported by a series of talks and a seminar. Edinburgh is indeed a lucky town.

Edinburgh Art (2): The City Art Centre

It's always a slightly frustrating pleasure to discover a great exhibition just before it closes. No time for a second look or sharing your discovery with friends. Visual Arts Scotland's 2009 Annual Open Exhibition at the City Art Centre was a luxurious warm wallow in the best contemporary art that Scotland has to offer. Sadly, this year's show closed after a six-week run on 19th March. Every 2 and 3-d medium (and style) seemed to be represented in more than 300 artworks displayed over two floors of this beautiful gallery.

I clearly wasn't the only one to fall in love with Kenneth Le Riche's large oil painting, The Conversation. This detail was used as the front cover design of the catalogue. To the left of this cropped image a shadowy male figure stands outside on a balcony, glimpsed through an open doorway. A well-deserved prizewinner.

Two floors down was the show that brought me here, drawn by my curiosity to see Bob Dylan's Drawn Blank series of paintings (also ended on 19th March). As the archetypical hero and spokesman of my generation as it grew into maturity, Dylan can still do no wrong. His 2006 album Modern Times is as hauntingly memorable as any of his earlier work. But with Dylan, there is always the hidden side where man and myth blur - and nothing is quite what it seems.


I have to say I quite like the work. Stylistically, it is fauve, with loose drawing and flat, vibrant colour. Echoes of Matisse or Dufy.The original drawings are said to have been made when Dylan was on the road and show a world in motion, of short stops and sidewalks, casual acquaintances and cafe tables. There is, in his subjects, none of the sensual intimacy of the original Fauves. Dylan's drawn line is much more fragmentary, angular and broken.

Key to interpreting the work, for me, is understanding that it is a composite of scanned drawings and painted modifications made more than a decade later. Like the mystery of the man himself, it is a subtle layering of reality and fiction.

Edinburgh Art (1): Calum Colvin at the Royal Scottish Academy

Natural Magic, on show until 5th April, is Calum Colvin's ideosyncratic tribute to Sir David Brewster, the eminent Victorian scientist/inventor whose researches into light and optics made an important contribution to the development of photography.

It's a fun, interactive show that needs you to press your nose against mirrors or look through coloured spectacles. An aesthetic Fun Factory for grownups. The catalogue is an elegant piece of affordable design, with a white-on-white cover and the handmade look of a brass screw post binding. As a bonus, there is a free stereoscopic viewer inserted in the back cover which is used to view the side-by-side stereoscopic illustrations.

London to Edinburgh by Train

The golden rule is always to sit on the right side of the train facing forwards, preferably in Coach B (the Quiet Coach). There you see most of what this wonderful journey has to offer as you speed through Northumberland and the Scottish Borders: Holy Island/Lindisfarne, the righthand sweep across the viaduct at Berwick-upon-Tweed and the wild romantic views of the North Sea, with its fishing boats and lonely ruins. To see all this and then to arrive at Waverley Station. Train journeys don't get any better than this!

Lindisfarne, seen from a train.

In Memoriam

Jocy Doreen Rita Pearson
(née Edlington)
30th September 1916 – 15th February 2009

How long will it take to come to terms with Mum's absence? Happy memories – here on holiday in 2004 with Florence in Villedieu-les-Poëles, Normandy, France. Happy days indeed.

One Day in Prague

At last I've finished putting together the video clips from our weekend break in Prague. A collage of some of the more memorable sights and sounds. So glad to have had the chance to go back to the city of dreams.

Braving the January Cold

On my day out in London, went to check out the Photographers' Gallery in its new location. It doesn't yet feel right, like a supermarket that's reorganised its layout. Ramillies Street is a drab cul de sac in a particularly sterile corner of Soho. A commercial desert tucked away behind the tacky facade of the retail Hell that is Oxford Street.

Well away from the bookish bustle of the Charing Cross Road and the crowds drifting between Leicester Square and Covent Garden. Well away from the cultural ambience of theatreland and the National Galleries. It takes an effort of will to leg it from familiar territory to somewhere with so few attractions, except perhaps for the HMV store on Oxford Street. The only compensation a chance to ramble through streets I knew so well in my student days, Wardour Street and the Berwick Street market. I might even start to become a customer again of Cowling and Wilcox in Broadwick Street.

I suppose it's character-building to have the comfort zone of your routines shaken up a bit by change, so I hope I will start to find my way to Ramillies Street when I'm in town. It's nice to see the cafe unchanged by the flit, and perhaps the gallery will rediscover its talent for putting on exhibitions of significance – ones that linger in the memory for years.

OK. SELF-TEST: Name some shows from long ago that I still remember.

• Danny Lyon (bikers)
• Koto Bolofo (fashion/portraits)
• Martin Parr (The Cost of Living(?) consumer culture)
• Historical photographs showing the construction of the Forth Rail Bridge

An odd selection, others would spring to mind on a different day.

Of the two shows on at present, I preferred the downstairs show, Soho Nights.
Far too small in scale to do its Brassai-like subject justice, it nevertheless gave a tantalising glimpse of the smoky bohemian glamour of London-noir. Anna Jay says some nice things about the show in her mondo a go-go blog.

The French Pub: Unofficial HQ of the Free French
From: Picture Post, 1941. Photographer: Kurt Hutton

Even in my student days (the seventies), the York Minster (AKA the French Pub) in Dean Street retained its glamour as a thrilling place for a student to go for a drink, carrying as it did the exotic ambience of dangerous and subversive worlds beyond our own provincial shores. And always the odd disreputable celebrity (of the George Melly type) spotted but studiously ignored in the smoky gloom. At least that's how I remember it!

Speaking of remembering, I must find time one of these days to go for a meal again at Jimmy's in Frith Street. Fiona took me there when we were students. She had been there for a meal with Adrian Henri, so it had a kind of kudos. It must be twenty years since I last ate there, but it's still very much alive and kicking according to a great review by NilliJoon.

Summer's end

Bright Autumn days are here! Crisp morning air. The grass be-jewelled with dew, spider-web curtains glittering in the hedges. Great news! The long range forecast gives us a week of settled weather for the farmers to get their harvests in. I noticed that some of the unwashed potatoes in the supermarket yesterday showed signs of Blight. Always suspicious, I wondered whether we're being softened up for the introduction of more expensive alternatives. Even Gardeners' World admitted that Blight had ruined their outdoor tomato crop.

The sky is noticeably empty of swallows. They have left us to go in search of warmer days and nights. Even the clothespegs on the line seem to be gathering together. Luckily they don't have as far to go in search of a warm dry home.