It's been a while...

Street Walking : Lyon, December 2009. IPhone 3GS

It's been a while since I blogged so I thought I'd share this image from Lyon. Originally taken in Camera Bag, I've revisited the photograph many times. This version has been re-processed in the latest version of Picture Show.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

The Juliet Journals: Please Come Home

PLEASE COME HOME: MIXED MEDIA ART JOURNAL PAGE BY JULES CAPULET AGED 16

digital collage 12ins x 12ins

best viewed larger HERE

This morning, Mudlark Production's Charles Hunter tweeted: "the last few days of SuchTweetSorrow. Can we do Tragedy on Twitter?" For those who have been avidly following the Twitter retelling of Romeo and Juliet, it's a daft question: many of us are already emotionally wrung out and hung out to dry on the line with the washing. That's one of the joys of this production: the scary, bottomless depth of it. The director, writers, and cast's ability to convey and engender in their audience, such a vast range of emotions and levels of meaning, through sporadic Tweets of 140 characters or less. It's astonishing, but no less than we should expect of a Royal Shakespeare Company production.

The version Romeo and Juliet that we are witnessing is, amongst many other things, an angry, often frenetic exploration across the messy landscape of Loss. When we first meet them, the three Capulet children are each, in their own way, damaged by the traumatic death of Susan, their mother. Jess, the oldest, is over-responsible and has taken on the role of emotionally parenting her siblings. Following his mother's death, Tybalt suffered even more loss when he was sent away to boarding school and his unresolved anger knows no bounds. Juliet's sheltered, compliant life is about to be torn apart as hormones blow the lid off her grief. Beyond the Capulet family, Mercutio, in effect, an orphan, as his unloving parents have gone to live in the South of France, fills the emotional vacuum by becoming a surrogate member of the Montague family and he loves Romeo as a brother. Romeo falls in love with Juliet, leaving Mercutio feeling abandoned by his mate. In turn, Romeo looses his friend when Mercutio loyally defends the Montague name against out-of-control Tybalt who kills him and is then himself accidentally slain by Romeo. Laurence Friar's desire to reunite the warring Capulet and Montague families is almost certainly a misdirected attempt to deal with his own loss and regret: his father is dead; he has turned his back on a shady past but still carries a torch for Susan Capulet, whom he secretly adored. Whatever their motives and despite their best efforts, Laurence and Jess must ultimately witness and feel in some way responsible for the deaths of all the young people whose lives they have desperately sought to protect.

The intimacy of Twitter enables followers to engage with the play's characters on a very intense level and we've certainly had our minds toyed-with: our belief systems and loyalties storm-tossed from one Tweet to the next. And then, ready to prod us, whenever we get too comfortable with our sympathy for someone's dilemma, there's always Jago, the malevolent, disaffected adolescent lurker, lingering around like the bad smell of rubbish bins during a garbage strike, reminding us that this drama portrays the lives of spoiled, rich kids. Admirably, the actors don't beg us to love them either. Jules is charming but complex and not easy to like: we first meet her, ten years after the death of Susan Capulet, a teenager with unresolved abandonment issues, who has created a perfect, romantic version of the mother she lost when she was six years old. Let's face it, had her mum lived, Jules would, almost certainly, now be a rebellious daughter of divorced parents, going through the usual mother/daughter love/hate ritual. She has coped with her loss in the best way she can but she is not equipped to make good choices. Instinctively drawn to Romeo, the boy that her family will most disapprove of, her intense love is accompanied by equally intense fears that she will loose him. Whilst dealing with these conflicting emotions, Jules is told, not only that her brother is dead, but that the love of her life has killed him. Her response to the news is denial: the first stage of grief, followed by violent emotional regression: back to the age when she experienced her first traumatic loss. From now on in, none of the others are emotionally equipped to reach her. This is where I've chosen to re-join Jules: a place where all the teenage romance has been stripped away, leaving only a frightened little girl who just wants her brother to come home.

Juliet's previous journal page can be viewed HERE

Sexy Things

GUNNERA

taken and processed on my iPhone 3GS

Hipstamatic shot processed in PhotoFX and LoMob Apps

These handsome beasts were sighted last weekend at Lydney Park in Gloucestershire.

I've posted a freebie texture from Lydney Park on my other, more random blog:

Slowly Loosing The Plot

Saved From The Skip!

My contribution to the "Save Mercutio"campaign currently been waged by followers of Such Tweet Sorrow: the Twitter version of Romeo and Juliet, produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company and Mudlark productions. Surely they cannot ignore the "evidence" presented here???!!!

The Observer: Sunday 2nd May 2010

Lost version of Romeo and Juliet

stuns academics and theatre world

Papers found in skip “no hoax” says expert

Saved from the skip: Shakespeare's "Lethal Joker" Mercutio. Photo: L.Lyon

A fabled lost revision of Romeo and Juliet, often referred to as the “Holy Grail” of Shakespearian scholarship, has been discovered during the insulation of a Birmingham pensioner’s loft, thus saving the fortunes of one of Shakespeare’s most popular but doomed characters. Mercutio, “The Lethal Joker” was a special favourite of Queen Elizabeth the First who, it is said, was so distraught, following the play’s first performance, that she penned a personal letter to the Bard, demanding script changes, on pain of death. In the orginal, Mercutio meets his death in a fight with rival Tybalt, punning to the last: “Ask for me tomorrow and you will find me a grave man”. In the revised text, he flees the scene, but not before making an aside to the audience: “Ask for me tomorrow and you will find me at Gravelly Hill”. He later returns, revealing himself to the Nurse, and declaring his passionate

love for her “ Buxome wenche, thye scoldes have stirred mye errant loynes”. His act of contrition wins Nurse’s heart and they consummate thier passion beside the bodies of the star-crossed lovers: an act that unites the warring Capulet and Montague families.

Following the news, directors, producers and writers from the Royal Shakespeare Company and Mudlark Productions are holding an emergency script revison meeting with actors from the Twitter version “Such Tweet Sorrow”. Ben Ashton, who plays Mercutio, commented: “I want a pay rise.”

Whilst academics and theatre directors assess the impact of the discovery, Jubilant residents of Gravelly Hill, a much maligned suburb of Birmingham, are celebrating an end to years of local speculation that Erdington was the orginal inspiration for Shakespeares’s “Verona”. Local resident Elsie Whitehouse commented “it stands to reason doesn’t it?

Why else is the Gravelly Hill Interchange known as ”Spaghetti Junction?"

Such Tweet Sorrow can be found HERE

More iPhone collages

BURNT OFFERINGS

iPhone collage

I'm taking another short break from Such Tweet Sorrow, to catch up with sharing some more of my recent iPhone work with those of you who don't visit Flickr.

Burnt Offerings is a collage of several flowers and flower pattern photographs, taken in Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris.

ATTACHMENT

iPhone collage

Attachment is the title of an on-going series that I'm working on: exploring memory, sentiment and lies in family relationships. As in The Juliet Journals, I'm creating images from the perspective of imagined characters, but in this instance, I'm also inventing their stories. As is often the case with my iPhone work, I made many versions of this piece and finally settled on this one as it best suggests the fragmented and fragile nature of desperately clung-onto childhood fables.

A BOY'S OWN STORY

iphone collage

A Boy's Own Story was made following a trip to STEAM: the railway heritage museum in Swindon, Wiltshire, where I had been drawn to take photographs of the mannequins used in tableaux that depict aspects of work and recreation in the age of Steam. I wondered what other narratives might occur once the inanimate figures were extracted from their museum settings, so I took close-up views of figures and faces, from different viewing angles than those naturally imposed upon visitors by the positions and arrangements of displays (whilst at the same time, trying not to attract the attention of the museum's staff and be guided-off the premises for suspicious behaviour). This image is a collage of two photographs: the young lad was originally enjoying the view from a train carriage window, as he travelled with his mother and sister to an unknown seaside destination; the scantily clad lady was extracted from a photograph that I took by pointing my iPhone down the viewfinder of an antique What The Butler Saw Fairground machine.

The Juliet Journals: Sleeping With The Enemy

SLEEPING WITH THE ENEMY: MIXED MEDIA ART JOURNAL PAGE BY JULES CAPULET AGED 16 (right panel)

digital collage 12ins x 12ins

At some point during last Friday or Saturday, depending on which time zone they were in, followers of Such Tweet Sorrow: the Twitter-based re-telling of Romeo and Juliet, finally witnessed the eagerly-anticipated meeting of Shakespeare's star-crossed lovers. This being a version set in contemporary Britain, and all that, 16 year-old Jules Capulet had no sooner clapped eyes on OMG! OMG! OMG! The Most Beautiful

Boy In The World, than she was inviting him up to her bedroom for a night of enthusiastic love-making, edited highlights of which were relayed via Romeo's mobile phone. Personally, I would have swiftly shown the boudoir door to any lover who engaged in post-coital Tweeting, but maybe I'm just old-fashioned. Could it be that today's teenagers, raised on a diet of reality TV, have no problems with the live-broadcasting of their sexual encounters? For all I know, Jules might have been mortally offended if Romeo hadn't let the rest of the world know what a great time he was having. Being a typical, self-centered teenager, Jules choose meeting up with Romeo, for round two of Strictly Come Shagging, over going down to London to cheer on her sister Jess ("Nursey") in the London Marathon. This rebuffing of family-solidarity did not go down well, but it paled in comparison to what came next. "So which one of you muppets stole my sister's cherry?" raged Tybalt, and indeed, some of us had to suspend our disbelief: how could Jules have engaged in so much intimacy with Romeo and not discovered his surname? When Jess spelt out the truth to a disbelieving Jules, was it really by mistake, or was Big Sis getting her own back? The news that Romeo is a member of the reviled Montague tribe left poor Jules so dazed and confused that she lost the will to Tweet. Meanwhile, Romeo, bereft of his new playmate, skulked around at home like Puff the Magic Dragon: his spirits so low, that even his mate Mercuteio, Tweeting surreptitiously-taken photos of female decolletage could not cheer him up. Whilst on the subject of Mercuteio: Twitter is currently all-a-jitter with anticipation of this popular character's impending demise. As those who already know the story are aware: Mercuteo's youth is indeed a stuff that will not endure.

The collage posted here is the right-hand side of a double page, the left hand side of which contains Jules's journaling but it is not yet complete and ready to post.It may have to wait until later, as the action over at Capulet Towers is moving swiftly on and really must try to keep up.

The previous journal page can be viewed HERE

The Juliet Journals: Butterfly's Ball

BUTTERFLY'S BALL: MIXED MEDIA ART JOURNAL PAGES BY JULES CAPULET AGED 16

Digital collage 24ins x 12 ins

This morning I woke up with a MASSIVE zit on my face

I feel like such a minger! I have SO TOTALLY hated being 15

It feels like a nothing age when you are not a girl

any more but not a woman either.

On Friday I will wake up 16 and suddenly

Everything will be different. I am SO excited about

my party! Even if I still feel like

an ugly grub I can put on a mask and

I will become a BEAUTIFUL BUTTERFLY

This is the first time I've worked on companion pages together: both image and journaling. At some point, I shall spend more time re-working the font to make it look more hand-written, but it's a job to keep up with the young people as they dash towards their inevitable fate. This page is already a few days out-of-date: today is Jules's sixteenth birthday and this morning, before going to school, she Tweeted happily about her new mobile phone and how excited she is about tonight's party, which is to be a masked ball. The entrance rules stipulate home-made masks only. Laurence Friar has gone up in my estimation, as he has miraculously, and some might suggest, unbelievably, managed to get Romeo to make a mask without yelling "THIS IS SOOOO F*CKIN' BORING!!!!" and storming back to his comfort zone of Xbox and internet dating. Romeo believes that he has just found THE ONE in an online chat room but, unless Jules has been up to something that she hasn't shared with us (which would be completely in character for a girl of her age) we, of course, know better and so are eagerly awaiting tonight's famous, romantic encounter.

My sixteenth birthday was a long time ago but I do remember the frustration of being 15: still very much a child but feeling oh-so-grown-up and ready to fall in love. If I could go back and give some advice to my 16 year-old self, I'd tell me not to take life so seriously or be afraid to make a few mistakes: not that my mother and grandmother didn't give me that sensible advice at the time, it was just that, of course, I knew far, far better than they did...

If you missed Jules's last journal page, you can find it HERE