So I woke up one night last week at 03.50 hrs and looked out my window to see this bright star glittering about and immediately thought that must be Orion. (No it ain’t ya stpeed geeza! That star is Sirius, and am reeli serious!) Sure enuf it was as I followed a line diagonal up to the three stars of the Orion’s belt to secure its place. Hell’s Bells that’s a bright star ringing in th’sky up there!
It’d be nice to have an image of the Orion constellation and overlay a rainbow joining the four stars in that conjunction, but I won’t do that as I don’t have time. Do I?
a Sirius rainbow
Sirius bows over orion
Well am glad I do cos it’s beautiful. Imagine seeing that at night.
One morning, the 27th, I awoked a year older again (I keep making up new years, they must be made up, no writer could invent so good). And then it just got better. Met my mate Dave at Paul’s café in the shadow of St Pauls then we walked along the no longer swaying bridge to the Tate. Modern. My day was made up when we were almost alone in the Wifredo Lam exhibition cos everyone who knew nuttin were actually Queueing to go see Georgia O’Keefe who, good as she was was no where near so good as Wifredo! I’ve loved his work for years now and never had a chance to see enough of it. He is amongst ma favourite artists, ever. And I learned a lot. Especially about how he took on ‘Modernist Eurocentricity’ although it’s a little unfair to say he out-Picassoed Pablo when after all is said and done it was Picasso who admired his work and gave him a leg up into the Eurocentric world.
Finally, mu little robin friend sang me Ippy ‘Appi Boithdae Boy!
He just flew in, Clickerty Clix,
Then started to sing ‘Ippy ‘Appi Boithdae Boy!’
And i got some loverli buks fer ma bday too. I got the Lam tate catalog from a friend (?), A Child Of Books by Sam Winstone & Oliver Jeffers off ma Big Lad and ‘On the threshold of performing & Visual Arts’ off ma wee lassie Mad Jess. I got a much better mouse, one of those new fangled upright tings so i can stop any repetative strain on ma knuckles. My friends Mike & Pat have come back and are delivering newspaper sport reports again for me to see how the great Burnley Boys held man U to a scintillating 0-0 draw! Nobody seems to have noticed how Burnley are quietly building a reputation for stemming the big boys; Arsene’s lot only scored a handballed offside goal in th’94th minute. they beat the Pool, the toffees yet sadly slipped up against the swans in the last minutes and the tigers got a draw in the 94th min!
and my stats have just gone over the 12K visits mark
They said it when I was about to leave college in Exeter where I had developed various formats of Appleheadman/Apulhed (I actually invented the character in Bournemouth) and he’d become a bit of a cult figure in the local student population thru the graphic-strip I did in Reflex, the student newspaper in Exeter. The they said it when I self-published my buk (short-named or ‘sub-titled’) Apul-One* in 1975 when not many were selfpublishing with its personal-phonetic spellin when not many were doing shortened spellins. To be ‘famous’ didn’t serve much attraction to me even then. I wasn’t striving for fame, apart from the potential freedom it might bring with an alleviation of my financial needs and maybe some call for my work. As we all knew then cos the beatles told us so, money can’t buy you love, and I had lots of that, even if I didn’t always reciprocate fully nor appreciate it. Indeed I had a built in mechanism to flee from it at all suspicions that it was looming about. It took decades for me to learn how to accept praise and appreciation even tho I werked so hard to gain it. One of the tings I love about PA is they clap you when you finish. Maybe that’s cos they’re glad the thing is done? Only jokin. I think.
* I been working on the follow up, The Shrewd Idiot for forty years and it should be ready to launch sometime soon!
Sometimes some folks says I sometimes writes well sometimes and that sometime soon enough I may make it big as a writer. Well I cannot await sometime to happen. I did wait sometime. I started writing sometime ago (1969). It’s taken some time to get this bad. I guess I got sometime left, or right, write. But I not got some ting to prove cos I done all that some time back.
So, I went up to London twice this week. First time was on a mission to see the last day of Auerbach at Tate Britain who I believe to be the best painter in the world, by far. I was not disappointed.
A young Auerbach in the 1960s infront of my friend DD’s favourite image, “He should have retired then!”
I saw this great couple o folks there and aksed if I can use their image in ma blog and they say ok dokay
This couple of artists find a perfect setting to share their thoughts.
There was so much to do I had to wend ma way back again on the Wednesday to go see the exhibition preview at Marsden Woo gallery where they had some beautiful readings to give the launch a real whumpf.
“An evening of performance, poetry and text works curated and lead by SJ Fowler in response to our current show, Alida Sayer’s Lexicon,
Alida’s metals are elemental statements.
took place last night at Marsden Woo Gallery. It was a fantastic event, with new work by diverse and talented poets being seen and heard for the first time. Many thanks to all involved!”
I also visited the Rebecca Horn section in Tate Modern because I had seen those wonderful feather head-dresses she did and wanted to find out more. RH was and is one of the world’s great performance artists. Her work hinges, literally sometimes, around the ‘props’ she manufactures. I learned a lot looking at them, very inspiring.
As I was searching the net for stuff about RH I happened upon some incredible work by Helen Chadwick which in terms of old style virtues in art blew RH into a feathered hat. HC was a very earl exponent of woman in art and I love what I found.
On Friday night I went to the launch of Colchester firstsite’s new Warhol show which was peppered with females making great stuff. Camille Walala has done some wonderful abstract images on a wall which I never even dreamed of filling and made it look great.
Hattie Stewart, ex-student at Sheepen Road college has a wonderfull show wherein her work, which takes inspiration from the likes of Disney, Keith Haring and Rick Griffin’s walking eyes, really lights up the gallery. http://hattiestewart.com/
And finally there was little Georgie who did these wonderful spirals in the mock ‘Factory’ which firstsite has set up for folks to do prints in during the Warhol show.
Young Georgie has inherited her mum’s ability in art
Aside- David Bailey: “Visually, Picasso was definitely the most important person in my life. When I discovered him I realised there were no rules. I didn’t go to art school, I didn’t even know what art school was, but the teachers who taught drawing always said, ‘Oh, you can’t put a line around things,’ and I thought, ‘Well, Picasso does, stained glass windows do, so I don’t see your point.’ Obviously, they were wrong.” I didn’t go to art skewel eether David.
In 1969 I wrote this poem in the back of an open lorry which had just picked up two sixteen year old hitch hiking Welsh newly-weds and a nineteen year old me.
They offered to buy me breakfast in the transport Café cos I only had a penny left which I had been given by the girl Gwennie in Under Milk Wood (not)
Yesterday I wrote another poem on the train this time
Not much has changed
Except my age, my experience, my prospects
I am still writing drawing photographing
As I move thru the days and years
Hoping one day to get thru
Maybe to you or
Some others
Then I popped into Tate and saw the wonderful works of Sonia Delauney displayed. And entered the Offprint art publishing fair at Tate which was great altho I only did about 6 tables of the 140.
I met some lovely folk. I met Richard Embray’s colleague at the Fourcorners table where I meant to buy their book of Paolozzi archive stuff but I never got back to buy it cos my ‘egs were laching’. I spoke with Krystine (?) at Argo Books and bought Kirstine Roepstorff’s beautiful ‘book’ Horizons of the Moving Mind which is composed of a folder, like my Inside this earthen vessel, with nine ‘repective pamphlets’ tucked inside a bit like b s johnson’s The Unfortunates. I am all into these odd arrangements in artisbuks cos I don’t like the norm. Ditto do some good books, http://shop.dittopress.co.uk/products/god-listens-to-slayer-sanna-charles-pre-order I loved their use of little inserts.
Then I met Aaron at Morel books http://morelbooks.com/Bookshop.html we got on fine and when I said I am re-working my 1970’s buk, the shrewd idiot he said yes send me some of the pages as it grows, so I shall as am getting very excited as the book develops. I am using the original hand-writings and the typewritten type as my ‘fonts’ and the words become the pictures. And the pictures will overlay the werds. I can’t ‘see’ the finished work but that ‘chance’ elememt is very exciting in the mix. He has a couple of Blake (Wm) plates and prints from them and also some work with Patti Smith who I luckily saw do her intimate readings of hers and Blake’s poems etc at the Blake Society do a couple of years ago. I like the way Aaron obviously likes the use of overlays on words and that’s the way my New Shrewd Idiot is moving, with my 70’s sketches and photos in front of the werdz and also I can scrawl over them with my hand-written and calligraphic ‘marks’ of today.
I managed to speak with Colette about my work and asked to be considered as an exhibitor at the next event, altho I’ll be a small teeny weeny fish in a BIG pond if I get a table. She introduced me to her partner who selects the table holders and both of them said they like my little buk Inside This Great Jug. And by the way last week the Saison Poetry Library has accepted a copy too.
I am pleased to say I shall be doing ma ting at the forthcoming Book fair at the Baltic in July, so I must learn the words and get dancing again. No rest for the wicked. Am also intent to make a new little buk about the creation of my big pic, Venus Stairs.
The activities of Pete Kennedy, Performance Artist Bloke, Book Creator & retired artist.
apulhed tingling 