Recent iPhone work

ALONG THE LINE

ABANDONED

WINTER WAS HARD

EVENSONG: MALVERN PRIORY

These have already been posted in my Flickrstream but I thought I'd share them here too. All were taken and processed on my iPhone 3GS which is the only camera I now use.

The Juliet Journals: Secrets Of Sixteen

Secrets Of Sixteen: Mixed Media Art Journal Page By Jules Capulet Aged 16

digital collage 12ins x 12ins

I am nearly 16

Secret thoughts within me

I really want to have a boyfriend and fall in love

But what if I loose him like Mum?

I'm really enjoying the process of creating journal pages whilst assuming another persona: an exercise in exploring the role of artist as actor. It is very like designing a costume but even more intense and involved, as when I'm working on a page, I not only have to inhabit the character but also attempt to express their creative language, leaving my own as far behind as I can whilst at the same time, using my personal artistic judgement and technical know-how to oversee the operation. Today I thought back to the time just before Christmas when I ran collage workshops with groups of sixteen year olds and this helped me to focus more clearly on how Jules might make her pages.

As I'm intending each page to have a companion containing extra journaling, I'm not crowding these first ones with too much text, just laying out themes.

Friday is a big day for Jules: her 16th birthday and she is planning her party. Over the weekend, she tweeted "I've been thinking about like...turning 16 and like...getting a bf and...you know..."Doing It"...Advice anyone?"

Jules's last journal page can be found HERE

The Juliet Journals: Stronger than Death

MY HATRED IS STRONGER THAN DEATH: MIXED MEDIA ART JOURNAL PAGE BY JULES CAPULET AGED 16

Digital collage 12ins x 12 ins

detail of journaling

Who do those bastards think they are?

I hate all Montagues

They killed my mother

Now they want to destroy my life

But I won't let them

I am a Capulet and I am stronger than that

Over at #suchtweet, the the air is ripe with hormonal activity: Jules is having a Sunday morning lie-in but the lads were out on the razz last night and are now nursing hang-overs. After some serious fisticuffs, Romeo went home with bleeding knuckles and, not for the first time, Murcuteio has woken up next to a young woman who's name he doesn't know or can't remember. Meanwhile, poor LaurenceFriar is fretting over what to do about the growing level of violence between the young people who frequent his Fair-Trade cafe. Personally, I think he should leave well alone and stick to making lentil burgers: there is no doubt that these children hate each other with an intensity and energy that only adolescence can muster and Laurence's Middle-Aged-Hippy aphorisms are falling on very deaf ears.

Lovely Jules has deep, unresolved emotional issues surrounding the death of her mother, ten years ago, and her vulnerability makes her an easy target for bullying at school. It probably also means that she's not going to be very good at choosing boyfriends. It's all too horribly predicable...

If you missed the first of Jules's journal pages (and have no idea what I'm writing about), you will find it HERE

The Juliet Journals

10 YEARS: MIXED MEDIA ART JOURNAL PAGE BY 16 YEAR OLD JULES CAPULET

digital Art Journal page 12ins x 12ins

For over twenty years, in what now seems like another lifetime, I designed sets and costumes for the theatre. During my last residency, I developed a bit of a reputation for work that was regarded locally as "avant garde", which actually just meant that I approached plays in unexpected and therefore potentially challenging ways (at least, to local theatre-goers). On one memorable occasion, a punter called our box office to enquire whether a forthcoming production of Macbeth would be "done properly". When the bemused ticket salesperson enquired how this might be defined, the response was "with people wearing tights". Our version of Macbeth (which, for reasons of traditional Theatre superstition, shall henceforth be referred to as "the Scottish Play" in order to avoid any chance of an iPhone-black-out as I blog) featured actors covered in gallons of fake blood and wearing very little else; a backcloth that could have been said to resemble the knife-mutilated private parts of a female body; and a fair bit of simulated sex. It wasn't a perfect or particularly subtle re-telling of the story and fans of historical hosiery almost certainly hated it but the young people in the audience totally "got it".

As I write this, actors from the Royal Shakespeare Company are "performing" a version of Romeo and Juliet in which tights will, almost certainly, feature only in a scene during which "Laurence Friar" engages in some form of drug-induced fetishism or "Mercuteio" rips the scanties off his latest party pick-up. The story is unfolding over six weeks, in real-time, via Twitter and we, the audience, are regularly invited to respond to the characters' personal dilemmas and vendettas. Last night, "Jess Nurse" asked us how she might cheer up her younger sister "Jules" who had been bullied at school. My suggestion was that they should put on their PJs, snuggle up on the sofa under a cosy duvet, with lots of chocolate at hand, and watch a good DVD. Jess later tweeted that they had done just that and watched Twilight. Result! I had forgotten what fun making theatre can be! I've declined "Mercuteio's" request to join "Team Montague" and chant abuse at the "Crapulets" because what I really want to do is put his head down the nearest virtual toilet, which is where most of his dialogue appears to have come from. This is, of course, exactly as it should be: the yoof of today eh?

Being inside the characters' heads makes for an exhilharating ride and I hope that every drama student is following this exciting experiment: and that includes YOU, nephew Dan! My creative response has been to make a series of digital Art Journal pages, based on Jules's tweets, as if she herself is doing the journaling. It's an interesting challenge: what is the visual language of this lovely but grieving 16 year old girl? How might the ways that she expresses her feelings develop as she falls in love? My first piece is posted here: Jules had just made her annual video to her mum and posted it on YouTube. My intention is to make a companion page to the one above. incorporating Jules's words, but in the meantime, you can watch it HERE. I'm off to catch up with the latest on Twitter: when do this lot take thier Equity breaks?

My Father's Eyes

MY FATHER'S EYES

digital scrapbook layout 12ins x 12ins

I grew up during the 1960s and 70s, in a Black Country town that was taking its last, wheezing gasps of Industrialism. Before his parents managed to graft their way into the ranks of middle class shopkeepers, my grandfather's forebears had worked on the canals and as Whitesmiths and Glass Flatteners, so I could lay claim to being a "proper Black Country wench" but somehow, I never felt that I "fitted in" with the other kids at my school. One morning, in assembly, Mr. Heslop, our headmaster, asked us all to mime our fathers' jobs. Adrift in a sea of whirring arms, deafened by the din of hissing and stamping, I was silent, confounded and forlorn, having absolutely no idea how to demonstrate what my dad did for a living. All my mates had fathers who worked in local foundries or at the brewery: places with names that were, at least to me, strange and mystical: Smethwick Drop Forgings; The Birmid; Guest, Keen and Nettlefolds; British Pens. My dad didn't work at any of those places. My dad worked in a shed that he had built at the end of our narrow brick-paved yard, next to the coal bunker and outside loo.

My father, or Brian, as I now call him, was born in 1938, with Myopia and a condition called Nystagmus: an involuntary movement of the eyes, usually from side to side but sometimes up and down and, in certain cases, in a circular motion. My grandmother wanted the best for her only son and despite my grandfather's protestations, was determined to send him to a boarding school run by the Royal National Institute for The Blind. Brian first walked through the doors of Lickey Grange in Birmingham, at the age of seven and, in accordance with the school's rules, he took with him not a single toy or momento of his family. At Lickey Grange, partially sighted children were treated in exactly the same way as those who were completely blind and so my father was taught to read and make Braille, rather than read and write text which he has described to me as a tortuous, humiliating experience. Indeed, the emotional scars from his days at this first boarding school have never completely healed. Brian remembers that the matrons were kind, but some of the teachers could be cruel. This was the 1940's, children were still expected to be seen and not heard and physical disability did not exempt them from physical punishment.

At about eleven years old, Brian moved to Exhall Grange in Coventry: a boarding school for young people of all "disabilities". Here again, the headmaster believed that each child should be treated as equal to the next, a view which extended to the nurturing of their ambitions. In earlier childhood, my dad's ambition was to be a lavatory attendant, his reasoning being that lavatory attendants wore a uniform and spent all day, not doing much, in a place that was warm and dry. Understandably, my respectable middle-class grandmother saw things somewhat differently and by the time he went to Exhall Grange, my dad's dreams of a future, working with sanitary cleansing fluids had moved on to working with chemicals of a very different kind.

Like many people in those days, Nan and Grandad printed their family photographs at home and that might have been where it all began, but my dad thinks it was the 9.5 Pathe Box Sound Projector, a birthday gift from his grandmother, that turned him around. Brian was mad about films. He and a chum from school would often sneak into the local cinema until one day, Dad's rather overweight friend got stuck as he was squeezing through a toilet window: their usual way in. After much heaving and pulling, my dad had to finally admit defeat and call for help. Fearing their headmaster's cane, at the very least, the boys were met by a perplexed cinema manager who couldn't understand why two lads from Exhall Grange were sneaking into the matinee, when they were actually entitled to free seats every Wednesday.

Brian now desperately wanted to be a film projectionist and asked if he could sit in the box during school film shows. To begin with, his teachers were concerned that a partially sighted lad might accidentally damage the expensive-to-hire films, but eventually he was shown how to thread up the reels and in time, was even allowed to run the projector while his teacher kept a close eye. Brian began a photography club at Exhall Grange and recognising his potential, but lacking the facilities to teach photographic printing, the school arranged for him to attend Birmingham Art Collage, every Wednesday. These days, blind and visually impaired young people can learn photography at collage or University, but my Father may have been the first visually impaired person in the UK to become a professional photographer and film maker. He doesn't seem to make much of this and when asked for tips to share with other visually impaired photographers, his advice is "Bullshit will get you anywhere!"

My father's chosen career was the cause of much family unhappiness and memories of hours spent with him in the darkroom shed: the dim red light; the unforgettable smell of photographic chemicals; the ghostly negative images appearing under the enlarger, intermingle with the vision of my mother ceremoniously burning her beautiful lavender-coloured wedding dress, atop a bonfire of photographic prints and negatives, not long after dad had run off with a glamorous young woman who modeled for the local photographic society. It has taken me forty years to reach into the embers of that fire and pick my art from out of its ashes, to come to terms with my own love of photography, to accept it as part of who I am.

LEN & NETTIE: MALLIN STREET 1960

photograph taken and processed on my iPhone of an original print by my father

CHRIS: RHYL 1963

photograph taken and processed on my iPhone of an original print by my father

Photograph of my father was taken in the Dubarry Studios, Great Western Arcade, Birmingham in about 1944

Chocks Away!!!

The pages used for the iPhone/AddLib collages above are from a vintage Odhams Press publication: Britain's Wonderful Fighting Forces by Captain Ellison Hawks, R.A., who was clearly born to take to the skies.

The AddLib layouts below were created with items from my personal collection of Lithuanian portraits and Soviet Movie Star post cards.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Add Libbing

I've been mashing up items from my ephemera collection, with a lovely new App named AddLib. The last two were taken a little further, utilizing a few more of my favourite Apps.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone