The NME - New Musical Extinguisher

You know those nights when you've had a quality time at the pub with a couple of excellent buddies? You're not staggeringly drunk, but pleasantly basking in the warm glow of a good single malt, and grinning inanely at everything on the way home, when you spot a brilliant object in a skip and spontaneously drag it out, sling it over your shoulder and scuttle home. Next morning you're staring at it wondering what the fuck you were thinking...?

For all you fire extinguisher nerds - this is a 1965 Nu Swift pressurised water extinguisher, currently tuned to D4...

This piece is the culmination of disparate circumstances. The arrival of a brand new and rather excellent power tool, recent performances with other people, conversations with the lads from TVIAPB, the discovery of interesting and challenging cross-over artists playing with multiple disciplines and performances... and the never ending desire for new toys, new sounds...

Currently playing around with this thing. Looking for some more acoustic vibes - bows//drones//chimes//new ideas//themes//and stuff in the studio. It's delightfully flexible - way more so than the old Bikesichord. It doesn't have pick-ups installed yet, but that might happen in the future at some point. Right now, it resonates like a bell at certain points and tones, and a mike in the top played through a couple of effects pedals is plenty to be going on with.

Check out my Soundcloud for previous recordings, YouTube for performances and keep an ear peeled for new performance related gubbins.

Cheers.
D

 

Woodpeckers' Wildlife Mural - Devonshire Infants School - 2016

Back in November 2015, I wrote about the Woodlands Hall mural that I partially restored for Devonshire Infants School.

Well they came back for more - which is nice. The school has had a new building built to serve ass a meeting room, lunch room and additional teaching space. The main wall is some twenty something metres long and they were looking for a mural that would connect with the school's 'wildlife' themes. The classes are recognised by their wildlife names; badgers, foxes, mice etc. As you walk through the school, both the wildlife and art themes really hit you.

A while back on a family trip, we'd stopped at Ockham Bites cafe just off the A3//M25. It's a funky weird little place. Run by Surrey Wildlife trust and jolly convenient if your doggy and//or children needs a pee break. There's also an historical Semaphore Tower... a bit like one of Terry Pratchett's 'Clacks' towers...

The Semaphore Tower located on Chatley Heath was once part of a chain used to pass messages between the Admiralty in Whitehall and the Royal Naval Dockyard in Portsmouth. It was built in 1822 and is now the only restored surviving tower in a line of signalling stations that stretched from London to Portsmouth. The Tower is open to the public once a month between March and September.

However, there is also a really rather excellent tea room which has one of the best wildlife murals I've seen. By the award winning artist Helen Shackleton, the mural depicts the huge variety of wildlife around the area. That might come as something as a surprise given its proximity to two major motorway routes.

Ockham cafe mural by Helen Shackleton

Ockham cafe mural by Helen Shackleton

The style and composition were definitely cues for the mural at Devonshire Inf Sch.where I needed to include a range of creatures and environments in a coherent composition across a broad span of wall. I wanted to really go to town on this one and stretch my skills with regard to figurative painting. I know it will surprise some people to learn that I can actually paint properly, and here's the proof. 

The school were kind enough to nominate me for an award for the Woodpeckers mural too! Which was nice.

Eric Rimmington - Trafalgar House

One of the fastest turnaround murals I've been commissioned to do - less than 24 hours notice from first contact to starting to paint with a very particular brief, with a super tight deadline... and at a 45% discount on my standard rate to meet the budget... I do this to myself, why?

The Trafalgar building in Fountain Street is a former Naval officers club now in the process of being converted into student accommodation. The street level is a Wetherspoons pub that has on its back wall a post-war mural painted in 1949 by the artist Eric Rimmington who studied in Portsmouth as an ex-serviceman in the 1940's. Following his studies at the Slade School in London, Rimmington became well known as a masterful still life painter, often incorporating and combining aspects of both still life and landscape or seascape into his paintings.

The mural he painted in The Trafalgar was fought for and conserved by the Portsmouth Society, and is now listed as a scheduled part of the architecture, meaning that it cannot be taken down or removed. You can read the artists personal account of his mural HERE.

Trafalgar House Mural - Eric Rimmington 1949

Trafalgar House Mural - Eric Rimmington 1949

For my mural, upstairs in the students refectory, I wanted to echo various aspects of Eric Rimmingtons' mural. His panorama of Portsmouth and Southsea is divided into three sections with his portraits of local working class men and women viewing their 'historical landscape' from the platform of an imaginary railway station with stairs leading down [from the past] and up [to the future].

I've incorporated the full panorama of Portsmouth's landscape and the Solent in an almost 360 degree view from Fort Cumberland at Eastney to the Defra defence research establishment on Portsdown Hill, including the Solent Forts, the bandstand, Southsea Common, the Skatepark, Clarence Pier, the Square and Round Towers and the Spinnaker.

The monochromatic sepia tones evoke earlier ages, while the students sitting in the room themselves take the role of Rimmington's ordinary, everyday people observing the scene and the broad historical landscape in which they sit.

Southsea Pier, Solent Fort, Isle of Wight

Southsea Castle, Skate Park, Bandstand, Solent Fort

Southsea Castle, Skate Park, Bandstand

Fort Cumberland to the Castle

The Solent and Isle of Wight over the Southsea Common