Rusty Cage

Had a call last week from Sant Yago, the cocktails and tapas bar in Southsea who are a bit keen on the birds I make from used disposable barbecue grills. They are opening the basement room up as a new 'steam punk' themed bar and could they have some more birds please? More? Of course! 

Went along for a look and the room is being kitted out like a cross between a Victorian library/study and a Jules Verne/HG Wells collab. It's dark down there, but there are wing-backs and book shelves, lighting over the bar that could have come from a mine somewhere and the toilet doors are covered in shark's teeth - that's Shark's teeth!.. (fiver a kilo on eBay..!) Peter Clutterbuck, Southsea's finest creator and crafter of iron and steel has made a stunning staircase using architectural salvage finials. He's also provided some tables and menu holders. The original old boiler has found a place in the bathroom (*). There will be some art on the walls, suitably illuminated by classic gallery lamps. My birds will fit in perfectly!

We settled on three birds because of the short deadline. This will bring their total up to 20, which I suppose might put you off your olives and Manhattan if birds give you the willies. Everybody likes the birds with the hats and because of the context I figured hats would be ok this time. (I've tended to poo-poo the hats in the past because, well just because). I've also included a couple of little 'trinkets' to give these fellows a touch of narrative. (I like narratives, even if they are oblique! Oblique narratives don't really keep your head warm, but I prefer them to hats).

It's a cracking little space. The room is not bookable and will have a capacity limit of only 30 because of it's size and Fire regs, and will only serve drinks - food you can get upstairs in the main restaurant. But it sounds like a great little place to have a quick after work snifter and discuss your plans for a Cavorite sphere to take you to the centre of the Moon!

*insert own gag here - and 'B'dum tish'

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Cats Cradle

One of my favourite watering holes is Southsea Coffee Co in Osborne Road. Martyn and Tara's approach is warm and open; they seriously love their coffee, home-made healthy food and celebrate their love of art with, among other things a wall in the snug given over to muraling by a number of local artists. Over the last two years the wall has been painted by around ten or so different artists, in as many different styles.

 Having spent the majority of this year making art for other people, I was chuffed when my friend Midge agreed to collaborate on a mural for the Southsea Coffee Co wall. (We have a tacit agreement to collab on a joint show at some indeterminate point in the future, and this will either spur us on to that, or it will satisfy that idea in one hit). So, over a coffee one morning we sketched up an idea on a napkin - as you do, and got the go ahead.


For a while, Midge had her studio in the basement at SSCCo and naturally became something of an 'accidental' resident artist. Midge's figures and creatures are beautiful, evocative and mysterious. 'Mysterious' seems such a weak adjective to describe them, but they have a wonderful air of ethereal inscrutability that is genuinely mysterious. 
(Check out her Big Cartel shop HERE.)

We've barely strayed from our original concept. Midge drew a few doodles of these cats hanging from red threads and I was immediately taken with them; their connotations of 'cat's cradle' and the strangeness of their putti-like forms. They have a rich, fluid sense of movement which compliments their expressions perfectly. 


I chose to set these in a landscape that is dark and brooding; wintery but open, that still radiates from reflected light. The original of this was a charcoal drawing that I'd done on a piece of driftwood a year or so ago. Here, because it is painted, I was free to play with more expressive, looser brushwork and thinner paint to let some of the light shine through from below, and I think it's given the painting a greater depth of field, and a vibrancy. Painting with a single colour, plus black, with very little white/light grey gives a solid structure and strength to the landscape; the light and airy mountains anchored to the plain by the clumps of trees.

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Lady Hamilton's Cottage Mural

 Putting some garden into a cottage courtyard

This is a tidy little mural job that came about while I was painting the Comet Classics mural back in April. One of those word-of-mouth jobs that sometimes actually materialise into something. Happily in this case, rather better than it was first described. Word-of-mouth and recommendation has a satisfying caché to it. I really must remember to stop painting outdoors in bloody November though...

The house is known as Lady Hamilton's Cottage, and is reputedly a former residence of the scandalous mistress of Lord Nelson. Her story makes for some wonderful reading if you're unfamiliar with it, and sheds a fascinating domestic light on our nations most famous national hero himself! They were as famous as the Beckhams' in their day - with knobs on! Seriously, I don't know why this hasn't been turned into a TV costume drama, it would be brilliant! A classically British rags to riches to rags story of the aristocracy, art, love, passion, politics, war, revolution and scandal set against the backdrop of the Napoleonic War and the French Revolution. 

I don't know what the actual provenance of the cottage is, (I suspect it was "named in her honour", but that would be to suggest she had some...) However, it's a rather lovely original 18th century, three storey 'cottage' in the centre of Old Portsmouth, with a small courtyard bounded on one side by this 5-arched wall. St Thomas' St was evidently heavily hit during WW2 and the area is quite a warren, but the wall's fairly easily findable if you're keen. It is a private courtyard though, so you'll need to respect that.

The first suggestion was to paint portraits of Nelson and Lady H in separate arches looking out over the Solent, with HMS Victory in the middle distance. Since there are 5 panels, and it's quite an enclosed space, I felt the courtyard needed a view - something to give a sense of space. Luckily the client liked the idea of a more informal panorama that would connect the 5 panels into a continuous landscape, that included a few implicit allusions to the story; a couple that could be Nelson and Lady H, she's pointing to a ship out on the water that could be Victory, at the other end are ships gathering that could be readying to go off and fight... After all, why let facts get in the way of a cracking yarn, right? 

The form of the landscape and the composition is drawn from a couple of JMW Turners' coastal watercolours. There are other stories going on in the details though. There is a small family group walking along the lane, below the church. The boy is turned around looking back up the lane saying something to his mother, while further along beneath the trees at the top of the hill, heading in the other direction a cart driver is looking back toward the family. What gives?The low wall in front of the arches is planned to encompass a raised bed with planting, so the painting includes foliage and flora in the foreground as a lead-in.

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On The Downbeat - Crows on Canvas

For a few years now, I've been watching, photographing, feeding and enjoying the company of the crows on Southsea common with a view to committing them to canvas. These creatures have been built and tuned by evolution to scavenge. This gives them a brilliant set of skills; flexibility, adaptability, creativity, understanding, sociability, confidence and courage. They are well known to be one of the finest minds in the bird kingdom.

Often kept as pets, they have gregarious personalities. They can recognise individual humans and talk to each other about us. They tell each other who can be trusted, who brings food, or whether a person should be avoided. They stash food away, hiding it from their peers, for later. To me though, it's their character that I find the most interesting. The way they move. Those lithe, lightweight skeletons and musculature; the way it shifts inside their skin, and the control they have over the feathers. The precision and grace in flight so close to the ground - their bounciness! They're like flying cats, or monkeys, or racing cars, or some mad mix of everything. They're not dull though. And it's all of this that I want to try and catch on canvas if possible. The 'Reservoir Dogs' swagger, the bounce of 'Uptown Funk' and the black, broody menace of Sabbath. They're like John Coltrane, XTC, Sade* and Sleaford Mods all rolled into one.

(*yeah, but they are though).

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All birds have the advantage of a long history on the planet. Considerably longer than us. Their ancestry goes way back, thought to have begun in the Jurassic period, with the earliest birds derived from a class of theropoda dinosaurs named Paraves. Birds are categorized as a biological class, Aves. The earliest known is Archaeopteryx lithographica, from the Late Jurassic period, though Archaeopteryx is not commonly considered to have been a true bird. Modern phylogenies place birds in the dinosaur class Theropoda. According to the current consensus, Aves and a sister group, the order Crocodilia, together are the sole living members of an unranked "reptile" class, the Archosauria.

Phylogenetically, Aves is usually defined as all descendants of the most recent common ancestor of a specific modern bird species (such as the house sparrow, Passer domesticus), and either Archaeopteryx, or some prehistoric species closer to Neornithes (to avoid the problems caused by the unclear relationships of Archaeopteryx to other theropods). If the latter classification is used then the larger group is termed Avialae. Currently, the relationship between dinosaurs, Archaeopteryx, and modern birds is still under debate.

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Hen & Chicken - Upfest Bristol 2015

This year I figured I'd go do Upfest again. It's been a couple of years since I last painted on the green in Bedminster and it was such a buzz painting in front of a crowd of people in the bright Brizzle sunshine. 250 street artists from around 30 countries gather in Bedminster and around Bristol to paint the streets - all legit and above board, like.

Part of the deal is that artists are invited to bring some work for sale direct to the public. The only stipulation is that it must be affordable. So I figured I'd do a specifically 'Upfest' edition of barbecue grill bird sculptures. The idea was that they'd all be based around spray cans giving them a 'street art' connection. Four pieces were made, all treated slightly differently. I liked the idea of the cans being preyed or scavenged upon, so empty Montana 94's were torn open and painted. A fragment of each, hand coloured was then carefully threaded into the beak of each bird. A third can was artificially, but authentically rusted, and a classic Montana 'Black' was adapted to hang smartly on the wall.

The hardest part of all of these birds is getting the feet and legs to grip and hold each one in a stance that is both stable and gives the sculpture a sense of dynamic movement - not just standing there immobile. Likewise the choice of whether or not to add wings. They don't all need it, but it does give an extra dimension to the activity of the creature.

Right up until the moment that I arrived I had no idea of the space I was going to be painting in, so it was impossible to plan or prepare anything. Besides, I really wanted to try and keep things simple - so monochrome and brushes was the way forward. As it turned out, I was allocated a space at the Hen and Chicken pub, in the garden. This meant that the piece would stay up for the year - bonus! And in one of those lovely circular connections that I enjoy, this is the pub where my half sister Maggie worked in the late '80's and where my younger sister met her first husband. There's something satisfying in that sort of thing for me.

I've been working on a series of crow paintings for a couple of years which seem to have gone down quite well, so that was the image of choice. It could be quick and rough, not too "finished" and I could get on with the proper business of drinking - I was in a pub garden for goodness sake! The sun was again blazing and I fried. The garden was packed with a great crowd and I was well away with the painting fairies. Some of the punters even liked what I was doing! I got the bulk of the work done on day one, and as some of the other artists began to rock up for the evenings 'entertainment', it was clear that the details would have to wait for the second day. 

By 9:30 though, I was a write off. I'd hired a van for the weekend, the first time I'd driven anything for about seven years, and because of my worries about that, I'd not left home until almost midnight on the Friday, arriving in Bristol around four in the morning. I'd grabbed a few hours kip in the back of the van before heading off to register and hunt down some breakfast and coffee. So painting, burning and drinking in the glare of the Bristol summer, took its toll. I crawled back into the van and bedded down in Bedminster down.

The rain started smattering the van roof around half six in the morning. Loudly. And it continued on through the day pretty much non-stop. It was clear fairly early on that I wasn't going to get any more time on the wall, so spent the day hanging around, taking the tour to see what other guys had been up to and grabbing some lunch before heading back home. (**They do excellent pizzas at the Hen and Chicken). I'm not unhappy with what I'd achieved on the wall and I'm okay with it as it is. Sure, I'd have liked another day to fiddle with it, but it is what it is.


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Sant Yago - Birds Revisited

Back in 2014 I was commissioned by Southsea tapas and cocktails restaurant, Sant Yago to make four of my reclaimed, used, disposable barbecue grill birds. They hang in various spots from the light fittings watching the diners, waiting for the chance to snaffle an anchovy. Early in 2015 Sant Yago got back in touch to order another 12. In the meantime, Sarah had managed to collect a set of recycled chairs and a long table. These she had decorated Jackson Pollock style, with drips and splashes of bright primary coloured paint. We decided the new birds would look great as a small 'installation' above the table, swooping down stealing cutlery and maybe a bit of your dinner.

All of these birds are made from used disposable barbecue grills that I collect from Southsea common over the summer months. They are bent and shaped according to utterly arbitrary, self-imposed 'rules' taken from traditional origami. So, no cutting, no adding bits or taking away. This means the birds have a purity of form and space that I really like. However, Sarah wanted them painted to match the table and chairs. I wasn't so sure, but then, I wouldn't have to live with them. So 12 were made, all be-winged and in flight and painted splishy splashy style like Jackson Pollock. At least there were no top hats this time...

Setting them up was a bit of a sod - working up a step ladder on a table. Not exactly H+S friendly. I'm not keen on heights at the best of times. The earlier four are less easy to spot in their natural 'plumage', (although the top hats are a give-away). But I think they all look absolutely brilliant in situ. I'm dead chuffed with them as an installation. 

To frighten the ornithophobes among you even more, there is even a Hitchcock-ian animation on that there You Tube. While I was photographing the set for the blog and other promo, I realised that they would [almost*] fall into a sequence which could be looped, thus making a very basic stop-frame animation. Check it out -> Here :>

[*don't be rude; I know how rough it is!]