JUGGLING WORK, LIFE AND BEER

As a climax to the commemorations of the 50th anniversary of the June 1956 events in Poznań, the opera Ca Ira has its premiere there on August 25, and it seems it’s taken the composer Roger Waters fifteen years to complete the thing! I empathise and sympathise with the man for sticking with it! After my recent stint of just four or five days locked away with these bloody paintings, which incidentally are currently having as many ups and downs as Caligula's pants, then I just had to get out for a few hours last night! Nothing outrageous it has to be said, just a breath of fresh air to stretch my head and legs before I was due to meet Dominika around ten.

Walking the parks and streets of Śródmieście then, as I surveyed enviously the Posh of Warsaw enjoying one another's company in the beautiful warm evening moments which this gloriously long hot summer is offering up to those who can afford it, it occurred to me just how much time I spend locked away on my own. On neutral turf and away from the studio I'm by nature a sociable sort, but must have spent the best part of the last twenty six years as a painter on my tod and the rest, well, drinking in as much life as I can guzzle – It must be said - there's not many occupations that are quite so solitary yet gregarious at the same time.

Yes, the investment in creativity is certainly a strange and paradoxical obsession in that to truly flourish it needs to feed off the experience to be found in living yet requires a massive outlay in time either spent locked away in the studio, at the ‘typewriter’, or in the case of Roger Waters here - at the piano’s keyboard for fifteen long years during which time living itself is put on hold in favour of travelling in a personal wonder/hell-land for far longer than a single life has to give in this short spell on earth.

Still, it beats having to follow in the footsteps of Daniel’s brother who has had to pack his bags and set sail for England to earn his crust. Like many Polish workers, young Grzegorz now spends his waking hours (for that’s all he seems to have left now given that he never has the time to sleep), in a dead end job British workers have shunned, living in a tiny London flat with a trillion other Poles and working twelve hours a day - seven days a week!

In honour of Grzegorz then, no more complaints, just an observation or two here and there and for me now - a daft wish that finishing off paintings could just be a wee bit quicker to realize! And anyway, what have I to complain about? All be it a one which lacks a grown up bank balance, this particular life-choice isn't all that bad as proved last week when for the first time in ages, unburdened by work commitments as we were, we managed to lock ourselves away in that ‘selfish’ creative space where we could concentrate on nothing but the loftier things in life, and of course, meeting new, as well as old faces, whenever the mood took us down at our favourite twenty-four hour opening watering holes – All in all, it was both sheer bliss and more inspiringly productive than it’s been for a very long time!

Incidentally, by the time it got to ten forty-five last night I made my way home on my own, the text disappointingly outlining more down to earth and pressing concerns for Dominika and her daughter to contend with, such as new shoes and accessories to be hunted down for the nieces’ imminent Barmitzvah or whatever it is Catholic girls go through to be welcomed into adulthood. An overrun, non productive, demand filled trudge around the glitzy late night shopping mall somewhere near Zoliborz then meant she was equally knackered, hairless and couldn’t make it to meet me… All I can say is, thank God all I have to juggle with is whether to paint, eat or simply ‘piss-off’ down to the pub!

HARD LABOUR

Not unlike Mike Leigh’s early work, where the proverbial toils of ordinary life are played out impassively, but, painting in this current heat wave, more akin to the pointless, procedural, physical torments dished out to convicts of old!

So that’s me broken? Not quite, but almost! With ‘number one canvas’ close to completion I’m not kidding, in temperatures reaching the mid to late thirties and a back bent double over two large canvases for most of the last four days, we can add to the medium of Acrylic on Canvas - A River of Sweat!

A River of Sweat and An Ocean of Words…

... It’s odd and just a bit different for me to lay down under-painting to such a finished degree in the form of a catalogue of complete phrases rather than just merely laying down the usual ground work consisting of line, texture, colour etc – This too, with the clear intention of obscuring, even covering completely, most of it as the work progresses. What's more, the canvases aren’t looking too bad in their own right, and there’s been some temptation to leave them alone as they stand and to move on - Certainly worth putting aside for a week or two anyway…

Looking ok then, and I’ve got an understanding girl-friend along with the fact that Niall Quinn has finally made a decision on who will ‘finally’ manage my beloved football club to thank for that and keeping me focussed and away respectively from the club’s message boards day and night! And, baring the one very early morning wake-up call from the madman downstairs two nights ago and luckily you can add to this good work practice a dramatic drop in temperature last night. It feels positively fresh today at 32 C..*!~^?, so, after a good sleep for a change, you find me as good as new this morning, feeling a need for a short break to do a little catching up with the likes of emailing, my scribblings here and perhaps just a little look on the club’s message boards to catch up ;-) Back to work for two or three week’s solid graft after this then, and the final push to get these two ‘buggers’ done!

For now then - do zobaczenia.

FALSE AWAKENINGS (Is Life a Dream)

Although this has happened to me before years ago it seems that nothing can prepare you for it happening again – and it’s really freaked me out!

Thing is, I’ve gone through a whole morning this morning thinking I’ve been awake when in fact I haven’t..! In truth, I’m pinching myself right now just in case..?

I ‘woke’ up between quarter past and six-thirty (remember putting on my glasses and checking the clock the moment I prised my eyes open), showered first as planned, had a breakfast of cheese on toast and got an early start on the larger of the two canvases I’m currently working on. Well, after a bit of a struggle the painting went really well and I swear to God I wouldn’t have woken up at all if it wasn’t for just one thing.

After putting the kettle on to make coffee at around ten-thirty I went to text my girlfriend to let her know I was taking a break so she could give me a bell on the landline; nothing strange in that – true enough, until the phone rang and I began to realize something was just a wee bit odd. What didn’t fully register when I was on my way over to pick up the receiver was what amounted to a peculiar ring tone and it was only when I was just about to pick up the handset itself that it dawned on me that the phone had completely changed – In place of my cordless BT Quartet 1100 (just checked to see it’s back where it should be) was the big red seventies style telephone of my youth. Even then I just remained puzzled and frozen to the spot – me racking my brain trying to figure out when on earth I’d picked the old thing up from Dad’s back in England! Bear in mind now, this was nothing like a dream, so, while staring at the thing, which kept on ringing perhaps longer than it would normally have done, it took me what seemed like an age before I worked out that along with the phone none of this was actually happening for 'real', and only then did I wake up.

Found this on the Web amongst other things, and it seems it’s a fairly common phenomenon…

Anyway, it’s around ten-thirty ‘again’ and unfortunately I’m not as far on as I was when ‘asleep’!

REPULSIVE,BEAUTIFUL CONCRETE (In Search of Home)

When I was a kid growing up in the North-East of England in the 60s and 70s I found everything, from the old bomb sites of town to the ‘failed’ tower-blocks cast in grey concrete with their furnished details highlighted in brightly coloured steel, wood and graffiti, to be absolutely spellbinding.

At the time not only did I believe the place to be everlasting in substance but eternal in spirit. However, as with most of England and the urban landscape in general, the subsequent ephemeral nature of the North-East, together with the memories of the sheer vigilante aspect of its character when I felt welded to its very structures, has left little more today other than feelings of grief and a longing for what amounted to something profoundly outgoing, inspiring, yet insular and intensely homely at the same time.

Living in Warsaw though means the old excitement and reassurance is back tenfold in the form of a physical animation and a kind of well being based inexplicably on feelings of menace - But for how long? Only time will tell – but, with the help of European Funds, probably no more time than it takes to erase the graffiti from the walls and to witness the old grey communist blocks getting a lick of pastel shades and fancy hats to top off their currently bald roofs! It’s happening big style all over the city as I type, and increasingly so.

If recently being back in the North-East of England, with its increasingly sanitized city centres and open precincts for the wealthy that is now the Quaysides of Newcastle, Gateshead and soon to be Sunderland, had me weeping and feeling overwhelmingly nostalgic for the place of my youth with all the grit and tangible excitement and danger that brought hanging in the air, then what of a disinfected Warsaw? It’s surely soon to be goodbye forever to the sounds, smells and sights of anything I can bed down in which remotely resembles home!

"JACEK THE RIPPER"?

The Ripper was a Polish Jew. That was the opinion of the head of the investigation into the Whitechapel murders in 1888, according to ‘evidence’ released yesterday...

More here from The Beatroot

THE WORD OF GOD

Belonging to every child in Poland, and etched deeply in the minds of every adult here, is something called a book of prayer outlining the dos and don’ts of being a good Catholic! From the Alley of Liberation here in the relatively salubrious Śródmieście district of Warsaw to the ‘grey’ apartment blocks of Huta to the North-West, there’s no getting away from the fact that apposed to the turn of phrase used by the Law and Justice government (who by the way, are trusted about as far as you can chuck a downy white feather), along with the smooth talking, silky tongued mouthpiece of big name branding, (to which Poles give little more than a knowing wink with their firmly sceptical left and right eyes), the ‘word’ of God remains Król..!

Or does it? Something in the mix of style and prose here suggests that the educated use of words alone, and by whom, is the standard by which Poles rate language. We can discount what is peddled by the government and just about anyone or anything else that tries to flog something to the Polish people, on account of ‘corruption’ (the most assured of words here in the ‘ears’ of the population); this, through years of hard lessons learnt and in having a well-developed sense (ogórek kiszony aside) for quality control… And the church itself isn’t getting away lightly either. With falling attendances, especially amongst the young, Poles are turning on mass to other sources of knowledge and enlightenment which were previously forbidden by both state and church. What does remain, however, (and this is unfortunate for a typical English speaker who doesn’t know his adverbs from his nouns, or his case endings from his case beginnings, and is trying desperately to grasp the second most difficult language on the planet) is an absolute faith in language along with a strict adherence to the correctness of syntax! Well, all this in my opinion anyway...

Thing is, this has had me thinking lately just how important the need for words has increasingly become for me. From my continuously abandoned first novel started way back in 1996 (don’t we all have one of those) to the tentative use of the odd word or two placed discretely on the edge of canvases gone by, the need to write the script, or rather pen any type of bull-shit, continues to haunt! As in the lyrics of Bread.., (if anyone can remember who the hell they were), a picture may promise to paint a thousand words.., but in this multi layered world, where art and information live happily pasted together, is it now enough just to offer painting up for show on the basis of little more than craftsmanship or dubious exhibitionism based on ambiguity? For is it not true, True ambiguity is the domain of true thinkers, but often goes unseen as the results of the charlatan aren’t always easy to tell from the labours of the god-dam clever!

In his work ‘Redman’, and other paintings from the same period, fellow artist and good mate Dale Atkinson makes use of the kind of speech balloons to be found in comic book illustration, the beauty being here that what is said is ‘merely’ implied though immense by the absence of words at all - true ambiguity which speaks volumes! Then we have Peter Moore (unfortunately no links), whose copious use of words, phrases, even chapters transcends the merely decorative to become both a cacophony of thought and deed, and an ambiguous palimpsest to his life! Somewhere in-between however may lie the script for me as the current paintings unfold...

AND BACK TO WORK

Since returning to Warsaw developments have gone reasonably well! ‘All Change’ it’s been then, and the paintings are beginning to progress for the better. I’m certainly not counting my chickens – far too long in the tooth for that, but gone is the laborious re-defining of the photographs of Warsaw, which hold up well in their own right, in favour of starting from scratch and painting directly onto canvas each and every time. Without the restraint of such still images as a starting point and relying more on the experience of living here in Warsaw day to day, this should allow the paintings to develop and grow in a way which defines this Polish encounter along with any lingering personal issues much better..!

ENGLISH WIMPS

England’s despair after Rooney's dodgy dismissal spoils the party

It never changes does it! Always someone else’s fault! The rest of the world hates us and has it in for us!

True to form, crying like bloody milk babies, when are we going to be big enough to accept responsibility for our own failings..!

We f*cked it up - not the Argentinean ref – not some imagined cheating little bugger who should have been laughed at in the face – not the weather – not even Sven ‘nee guts’ Eriksson, but us! Us, when we had every chance of winning the thing, not only this time, but anytime if this English spirit of ours was anything but a myth these days!

For Christ’s-sake, grow up England – stop moaning, walk like men, (even this - clichéd - worst German team in yet another generation knows how to do this), and take a leaf out of your grandfather’s book - They must turn in their graves every time this on mass oppressed hysteria happens and England’s current crop of ‘men’ wimp about like spoilt little children, throwing tantrums, (more disgraceful violence abroad by English supporters), and bawling their eyes out at any little problem to be faced!

Good article here in the Guardian outlining why perhaps:

Complacent to the last, Eriksson and his spoilt players got what they deserved - absolutely nichts.