Coding my own website has taken a lot of my time this summer, and just as I gather the strength to start testing it I realise just how much left I have to do before it’s ready. ( A lot)
Nevertheless I’m pressing on, wrestling with the technology necessary these days to promote yourself as an artist. Is it just me or is there more and more administration?
I was lying in bed last night, failing to sleep as my mind raced on through a tumble of thoughts, websites, exhibitions, press… And then suddenly new work. An idea.. a precious idea.
No, three! How did that happen? Like London buses, nothing for ages and then a crowd all at once.
So what precipitated this ‘having ideas’? For one, a possible series of photographs, it was a chance remark by a peer about light, and a phrase popped into my head which was suggestive of concept and content.
For another it came as I was reflecting on hanging my Seventies Romance Portraits in a pop-up exhibition (PAPER NAUTILUS) in Ladbroke Grove. The show is being held in a derelict house, and I’ve hung my series of small gouches from the towel rails in an old bathroom with pale pink fittings and crystal taps. Odd but strangely apt, because the paintings are of old romance fiction covers from the 1970s, and feature lurid titles and melodramatic blurbs. I liked the pieces, but they’ve been put away for a few months, or off on their hoidays being exhibited in Romania, and it was the first time I’ve really looked at them in a while.
Romance is one of the things I’ve been thinking about for a while, and I’ve been tossing some ideas about nostalgia around too. It goes with the territory when you are examining the kinds of ephemera I’m interested in. So I think I’ll make some more gouaches which reflect on this. I like the idea of revisiting the art of the jacket or cover designer, all gouache and layout pads, completely at odds with digital photography and editing packages.
If that weren’t enough I’ve been mulling over making some more peeled photographs after reading a good portion of Svetlana Boym’s book The Future of Nostalgia. I liked very much the passage from Charles Baudelaire’s ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ on Modernity “impersonated” by a beautiful veiled woman.
Elsewhere! Too far, too late or never at all!
Of me you know nothing, I nothing of you-you
whom I might have loved and who knew it too!
Boym talks about nostalgia for the present, and the future too, but Baudelaire’s sighing and exclaiming rather makes me wonder if romance and nostalgia might be synonyms I can use together. He talks of Modernity as an unknowable love, he knows he would love her, and she him, but the modern world is too busy and fleeting for them ever to really meet. In fact he enjoys himself so much with melodramatic exclamations that any actual meeting couldn’t compete.
Paper Nautilus is on at Nautilus Press, 77-79 Southern Row, W10 5AL
Private View 6-9pm 25th October. Also open 28th October 2-8pm
Entry is invite only but you can print and invite here eepurl.com/qQu15.
