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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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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