Black

Since we've touched on the subject of black oil paint in the comments on the last post, I thought this was a good opportunity to side-step into these little paintings.



I make no great claims for them as works of art, but they were all produced using what I've always known as "the Matisse palette" - white (titanium in this case), ivory black, vermilion, and yellow ochre.



You'll see there's no blue on the palette. This means that to make green you have to use black and yellow, to make purple you have to use black and white with a bit of vermilion. To approximate blue, you can only really use black and white, which gives grey, of course.

The trick - and I admit that when I painted these I hadn't mastered it - is to influence the grey by simultaneous contrast. If you surround the grey with orange, you'll make the grey take on a bluish cast. Similarly, the purple can be made more purple by putting it next to yellow.



I've no idea whether Matisse ever actually used this palette. If he did, I guess he'd have used the colours in rather discrete flat areas. But I found it interesting to use them for more modelled forms, like Torquil's head in the picture above.

The peculiar orange rim round his head is due to the orange lamp he was sitting in front of. All of these were done inside an environment constructed from torn and draped newspaper, lit by coloured lamps. So they're not abstracts in the strict sense. Felt you should know that.

A Certain Something

Draining the last few drops of tea from his mug, Mr Zip stood up from the Comfy Chair and stared morosely out of the window. The painting was not going well in the absence of his original source material. He knew it must be in the house somewhere, but all attempts to locate it had failed. Progress was, therefore, proving slower than he'd hoped. He would get there, he knew, but time was running out.

In the gathering gloom, something caught his eye. A dark form ran across the path at the bottom of the garden. A blackbird perhaps? No, there it was again, running quickly to the remains of the morning's pile of seed, then just as swiftly back to the shelter of the little wall. And again.

Over and over, he watched in horror as the sleek dark torpedo of the rat collected its provisions and carried them to the safety of it's damnable burrow.

Back to Work

Sometimes Falling, Sometimes Flying
(charcoal and compressed charcoal on paper)

Who's a lucky boy, then? That nice Patsy123 bought me a digital camera for Xmas, so I can now bring you the latest breaking news from the Zip Studio.

I went to the Art Club today to wish Compo & Clegg and the boys a Happy New Year. While I was there we got on the subject of the People Show and how I intended to submit something as usual.

That was when I realised that my habit of not getting a new calendar written up with January's birthdays and events before the beginning of January can be a dangerous practice. Pictures for the People Show have to be submitted next Monday.

Bugger.

I knew what it was I intended to submit, but it isn't finished. It's based on the drawing above, done when I was really having rather a bad time of it. A very personal picture. I'd started the painting but when things improved I didn't feel the urge to go on with it.

Now, in the depths of miserable winter, I knew it was the right painting to move along. So here it is back on the easel in the studio. I think it can be finished in time, but if things go wrong with it, it'll be a struggle. But hey, painting's all about struggle!

Goodbye to all that

I hope New Year's Eve was a positive experience for you all and that you find yourselves in keen anticipation of the year to come.

Patsy123 and I were invited to the pied a terre of Buddy K and SuzieSue to see the New Year in, along with Mrs Sums, The Glum Architect and The Apologist.

As always, we had a good time. SuzieSue had prepared lots of antipasti, with stuffed peppers, meatballs in tomato sauce and a vegetable dish for The Apologist. Yes, you got it, traditional north-east food. We eased our way into the evening with a bottle of Prosecco and then red and white wines kept things lubricated. But I guess we're getting old. Nothing scandalous happened and we eventually settled down to watch good ol' Jools and his 14th Hootenanny on the telly.

I think most of us were surprised to find that the hairy man who conjured up a wonderful noise from a three string electric guitar was not called C16, but Seasick Steve.

Mostly we just talked over the music, however, barely even pausing to yell in unison, oh god, not Roland Rivron again! until the time came to fling open the window to hear a few ships' hooters on the Tyne sing in the New Year.

The fireworks that lit up the night last year were absent this time, probably due to the rotten weather (gusts of wind and rain) and I suppose I'm the only one who still hankers after a proper First Footing and a chorus of Auld Lang Syne. Anyway, we didn't have that.

On New Year's Day we met up again and after tea in Saltwell Towers, we wandered round the windswept lake in Saltwell Park. Then back to Stately Zip Mansion for blue stilton and biscuits with lashings of port.

2006 is in the ground, where much of it belongs. Now for 2007. It'll be so much better, don't you think?

.....and a Happy New Year!

Made me laugh, but even The Sun wouldn't touch it.

Merry Xmas...

...to all our reader.

Something Else

Something has been digging in the garden. I first noticed it about a week ago. I was putting out some seed for the birds when I saw a pile of earth by the path. Then I spotted another pile a little further along.

Something had burrowed under the path. Something frantically digging, piling up the earth. What could it be, that something? I remembered the rat I'd seen a while ago. Had it returned to live under the path, near my daily piles of birdseed?

For the next few days, I watched out of the window for signs of the rat. Or something else. But nothing seemed to spoil the tranquillity of the garden and the birds showed no sign of being alarmed by that something living under the path.

Perhaps it wasn't a rat. It occurred to me that the two excavated piles of earth were very near what I'd always supposed were the entrances to the home of the woodmice. Perhaps something had burrowed under the path in pursuit of the mice.

I went to look. The earth showed signs of having been dug out in a frenzy. A blood frenzy? Stones had been pulled out from under the path as if some horrid force were desperately trying to reach the cowering mice. The two tunnels created by that something were large enough for .... what? A rat certainly, but what else? Might something nameless and vile even now be tunnelling not only under the path, but under the house?

At every opportunity I looked out of the window in the living room. When doing the dishes, my mind was not so much on cleaning the crockery, but on staring out of the window, searching for whatever might have dug those hellish holes.

At night, I caught myself peering into the darkness, the lights off in the house the better to accommodate my search. As I stared into the blackness, the light from the street lamp shone through the tatters of Winter foliage and as the chill breeze moved them I fancied I saw something move on the path. I stared until my eyes ached from the effort, but the movements seemed only insubstantial shadows.

Days have gone by without signs of any further digging. Yesterday I pushed some of the earth back into the burrows, blocking the exits. I'll check again in a few days to see if they remain blocked. Maybe I will have sealed the fate of whatever dug its way under the path.

But what if that something has indeed tunnelled on towards the house?

This morning I thought I heard scratching under the floor of the cellar.

Colours

I sit in the bay and watch the sun go down. Although the day started with frost glittering on everything around and a ragged fog lay in the Valley, the sun put on a brave face and burnt most of it away. But now the sun is going down.

It has dropped behind the Silver Hills and is burning the sky a startling orange. The hills take on a deep purple cast but darken quickly to indigo. The orange gives way in the upper sky to a gentler cadmium violet, Monet's favourite colour. Where the orange and violet meet, there's a paler band of greenish blue, fading even as I watch.

Further north, the sky over the city has turned already to a deep ultramarine and then darker still, to Payne's grey.

The lights are on in the Valley. Mostly sodium yellow, but scattered with motes of brilliant white. Here and there are patches of cobalt or cerulean blue, winking from the shop signs at the Retail Park.

Nearer at hand, although they've been on all day, the Christmas lights which cover the trees and bushes at the house where the Cat Who Rings the Doorbell lives, now excite the darkness with their manic flash and jiggle.

The soundtrack of this early evening show is, as always at this time, provided by the hum and shush of tires on the damp road. Not to be outdone, a blackbird shrieks his defiance.

All my Nightmares

I am startled awake by something inflating suddenly and rapidly underneath my pillow.

Looking up, I see on the wall above the headboard, a flashing and sparking piece of electrical equipment, crackling and buzzing. It may in some way be connected to whatever has inflated under my pillow.

Ants have invaded the bed. They are swarming under the bedclothes. I can feel them running over me. They may actually be spiders.

Outside the window, presumably on a ladder, a man is looking in, impassively.

Hogwash

I'm not a fan of the works of Terry Pratchett. Every Christmas I would buy the latest of his books for No.2 Ex but could not bring myself to read any of them. A few pages was always sufficient to suggest they were full of rather obvious attempts at humour. I know there are those among you who would vehemently disagree, but I'm pleased to know that many of my friends feel as I do.

Nevertheless, in the absence of anything better to do last night, Patsy123 and I sat ourselves down with a bottle of Australian cleanskin and gave Sky One our rapt attention as they screened the first half of Hogfather.

"Rapt" is something of an exaggeration. As the plot failed to unfold and the scenes plodded inexorably by, Patsy123 and I took it in turns to nod off. Taking it in turns meant that we could update each other on events we might have missed, but curiously neither of us actually seemed to want to do this, preferring instead to sit in something of a blank stupor until it was all over.

And then ........ hurrah! It was all over.

And the new episode of LOST came on. In a blinding blur of fascinating plot and sharp direction, the one hour of LOST had been and gone.

Tonight I decided to give Hogfather a chance to acquit itself honourably. A further two hours of my life Ticked. Ponderously. By.

In one of his last lines in the "action" Death says something like:

"In a Universe so full of Wonders, they have managed to invent Boredom."

I couldn't have put it better myself.

Attack of the Sprouts

Here it is the 14th already. Must be time to get the sprouts on the boil for Xmas Day.

For those who think that sprouts "just taste like poo," here, courtesy of Patsy123, is a bit of Xmas Fun.

Heartbreaker

After Rain (oil on canvas)

I came across this yesterday:

FOR SALE:Original 'Tyne Bridge' canvas.(38 x 26 inches) Purchased at Ruebens Gallery in Leeds in Summer Collection 2003.Still in wrapping and original condition. OFFERS INVITED.

"Still in wrapping" eh? Is this meant to be a selling point? So good you haven't even unwrapped it. Bummer. That one could have sold three times over.

Closed & Opened

Last week I went to the Christmas Show Private View at The Henshelwood Gallery in Newcastle. This was both exhilarating and sad. Sad, because it was the final private view there. The gallery is closing. When it goes, Newcastle will have lost the best private gallery it has, leaving only Gallagher & Turner to carry the flag for good honest painting.

But it was also an exhilarating show because it included half a dozen exquisite small oils by Andrew Gifford. A real painter's painter, Gifford has made the study of light his life's work and his pictures glow with a radiance which is hard to describe.

He was studying for his BA in Fine Art at Newcastle University when I was taking a part-time OCA course there, and I followed his working methods and his progress with great interest. His work was a major influence on me at the time. My only regret is that I didn't buy one of his River Tyne paintings then. I certainly couldn't afford one now, given that his small oils (about 8 x 8 ins) at the Henshelwood were selling (and they did all sell) for £4600. Amazing, considering in the same show were a couple of oils about the same size by John Houston, and they were for sale at only £1700.

For days afterwards, I found myself looking at Andrew Gifford skies and it's set me to reappraising some of my own work and rethinking where it is I ought to be going. Inevitably, of course, I have to be my own person, but I think I may at times have strayed too far from the Gifford-inspired road I set out on 15 years ago.

Tomma Abts

I suppose I should come clean on where I stand on Tomma Abts and her winning of the Turner Prize.

I've posted comments about this on one or two blogs and it began to seem to me that I was vacillating. But my opinion varies to reflect the question. Am I glad a painter won the Turner Prize? Of course, given that I'm a painter and painters have not done well previously.

What did I think of her being given the prize? I was interested in her quiet demeanour at the prize-giving, and the fact that she seemed to be mercifully free of self-aggrandisement and meaningless artspeak. I was amused by the Channel 4 interviewer's question, "How do you know when a painting is finished?" and half-expected him to go on to, "Where do you get your ideas from?" On reflection, that last might have been a difficult one as she seems to have no ideas.

What do I think of her work? I quite like it, but only in a very low-key way. I think I saw a couple of her paintings in last year's soul-achingly boring British Art Show at the Baltic and remember thinking, well, at least it's painting, and then drifting on.

The trouble is, I guess, she's coming from a different direction from mine. While I value working in what I regard as a long and honourable tradition growing out of the history of painting, she, I suspect is approaching it from a Postmodern sensibility.

Her working method is to start without any prior idea and to work the paint by layering and abrading until an image begins to clarify. I have no quarrel with the method. David Prentice often starts his paintings in this way. Max Ernst often maintained that he never knew what his pictures would look like before he started. Before him, Gustave Moreau used what would later be called Decalcomania to develop parts of his paintings.

The images Tomma Abts discovers in her paintings appear in most cases to be reflections of work done by the Abstractionists of the early 20th Century. I'm not even sure the images are important, except as a form of Conceptualist irony

Irony: the prophylactic of the 21st century

This seems like a kind of arid archaeology, quite unlike Ernst's exciting psychological self-discovery.

So: do I like Tomma Abts's paintings? Only a little and not very much

Oh, and what do I think of the Turner Prize? I gave up being either irritated by it or particularly interested in it a long time ago.

Hullo clouds hullo sky

The way out is via the door. Why is it that no one will use this
method?
-- Confucius

I used the Confucian method in a very literal sense last night. I stormed up the hill, all 10% hilliness of it, in record time, blowing the greyness out of the pores of my being.

It was a black night, and by the time I came back down the hill it was raining quite heavily. I was wet and not very warm, but I like the night - it has none of that indeterminacy of the grey twilit world. By the time I'd settled down to a bowl of hot three bean and lentil soup, the clouds in my head were dissipating fast.

Today the sun is shining and all's right with the world.

Well, not everything, unfortunately. The Nice Department Store Man rang to say that his client has had a burst pipe and his house is flooded, so there may be a delay in moving forward with the placing of one of my pictures. My troubles seem to evaporate even further in comparison.

I also got an email from Mr Kiwi Collector. He and his partner want to either buy a picture they saw last time they called, or commission one on the lines of the one below.

I may make a living out of this yet.


Grey's Monument (Homage to Claude) (oil on canvas)

Grey Days

(Mr Zip, mixed media)

God, how I hate these short days. With luck there's a little sun early in the day, but that gives way to a horrid blankness that leeches all the colour out of everything. By 4 o'clock the light has gone and the oppressive greyness asserts itself, oozing into every pore.

AGM

I went to the Art Club AGM last week. I don't usually bother because I'm only an Associate Member with no voting rights, but there was something curious about the wording of the invitation this time.

I arrived in a bad mood because someone had left the lift door open at the top and I had to walk up to the fifth floor, by which time the meeting was in full swing.

There had obviously already been some heated debate. There were scowls aplenty and muttering in every corner.

The Secretary had been deposed, along with his wife, the Membership Secretary, and the Treasurer. All of them Associate Members. It was beginning to look like the Night of the Long Knives for Associates everywhere.

I kept my head down and said nothing.

The President and Acting Chairman, said, "I suppose it would be churlish of me not to ask The Secretary to read his Report."

"Yes it would," said The Secretary, "and whether you like it or not, I'm going to read it."

He began to read his Report.

Within minutes, an Angry Woman stood up and shouted, "This is not a Report, it's a Diatribe!"

"No it's not, it's a Report," said The Secretary, "and I'm going to read all of it."

Which he did, while the Angry Woman stormed off to the back of the room to make a cup of coffee as loudly as she could manage it.

When The Secretary had finished, The President and Acting Chairman said, "I think it would be beneficial for the Membership's understanding of events if I were to read out some of the correspondence which has passed between The Secretary and myself."

"You can't do that!" said The Secretary. "It's private correspondence."

"Then I shall only read out my own letters," said The President and Acting Chairman. "To read out some of yours would offend the sensibilities of some of those present."

And so he read out some of his own letters and the picture became clearer and Members and even, dare I say, some Associate Members were seen to be nodding in understanding.

The meeting came to a close and blows were not traded, but some of the problems arising were passed to a Sub-Committee composed of disinterested parties.

The President and Acting Chairman became, temporarily, The President and Acting Chairman and Acting Secretary and Acting Treasurer. He went home looking tired.

I had a piece of cake and some coffee and went home, pleased to be not on a committee any more.

A Department Store Calls

Blackett Street (Oil on canvas, 36 x 36 ins)

The Nice Department Store Man phoned yesterday to make an appointment and, as arranged, called round this morning.

He's looking for a picture to finish off a room he's designing for a client of the Department Store and had seen one or two of mine in a gallery his wife works for.

We had a good chat about the Valley and my view of it from the window of Stately Zip Mansion and then had a cup of tea.

Over the cuppa he told me about the voile he'd chosen and the colour of the desk top and how he was hoping to get his clients away from the idea of art prints to Go With The Curtains. I agreed this would be a good thing and that real paintings were much to be preferred.

Then we had a little parade of paintings. It became obvious that what he was looking for was something less strongly coloured.

This amuses me periodically. I used to be criticised for making work that was a bit sombre and gradually I moved into the field of colour. Not simply out of a need to make a buck, but because it was something I felt I wanted to do. Now I get people asking if I have anything a bit more sombre. I suppose it takes all sorts.

Luckily, I think I have the very thing - this painting seemed to hit the spot. Now we await the reaction of his client.

"....by the time I'd climbed four flights of stairs..."

Another commission finished. This time for some friends, to illustrate an article in their fanzine. This is just a detail.

I agonised over this one. It's a long time since I did any illustrating and I found I wavered from illustration to fine art techniques. The end result is in pencil with some monoprinting in black oil paint.

My friends are happy with it, which is the main thing.

Alchemy

I've spent a lot of time just looking at a small picture today. It started life as a picture of Scottish moorland, a field stretching away to hills disappearing in mist, but it never completely convinced me.

A few days ago, I happened to be standing near it and in my hands was an inkjet print of a sky photographed from the window of Stately Zip Mansion. The two came together in my mind and within a minute or so, I was blocking in this new sky on top of the hills of the painting.

It's curious now. I'm not sure what it might be a picture of. Patsy123, looking at it this weekend, thought it was a picture of a lake. It's beginning to look like a lake to me too. Oddly, the field has indeed taken on the aspect and colour of a lake. The clouds at the far side now begin to be hills and perhaps trees.

I might let the picture take me there. It needs more work and it's always possible that the accidents of paint will change its direction. We'll see.




















(House on a Hill, 12x12 ins, oil on canvas)

I rather like it when a painting starts to take on a life of its own. This one began life as a daytime picture of a castle somewhere in Dorset. It never quite worked and as I played with it, the river came into existence, followed by the trees, then the castle became a house and the moon came out to light it up.

A complete surprise to me.

Pictures at an Exhibition

Fettercairn Distillery (Oil on canvas, 12 x 12 ins)

Evening Sky (oil on canvas, 12 x 12 ins.)

Big Dave and I went to the opening of the Friends' Exhibition yesterday. I have three pictures in it. These are two of them.

Big Dave

Big Dave arrived. He brought with him a bottle of M&S Islay single malt whisky. He was not unwelcome.

I summoned up my most creative kitchen mode and made a pasta dish of wholemeal penne with smoked bacon, onions, garlic, celery, plum tomatoes, a few sliced black olives, chilli, a pinch of thyme, a bit of chicken stock and a couple of teaspoons of anchovy sauce. It was grand, even if I say so myself, and Big Dave, who puts himself forward as something of a Big Man in the Kitchen, was interested in the two teaspoons of anchovy essence which had lent the dish a piquancy he had not been able to identify.

"Oh, just a passing reference to puttanesca," I posed.

Smoky bacon and anchovy essence being the salty elements they are, we resorted to making sure there were two empty spaces in the red wine racks in the kitchen. And then we had to find out if the M&S whisky was any good (it most definitely was), but not before we'd done a mutual sampling of an interesting sloe whisky I picked up last month.

And so to bed, grateful that we'd not wasted our time buying drink in the pub.

A Blustery Day

I heard by email today that the painting arrived safely and is "looking good!" Which sets my mind at rest.

Time now to prepare for the arrival of Big Dave. Before going home, Patsy123 helped me clear out the stuff which had accumulated in the small front bedroom - the room Big Dave refers to as The Cupboard.

We removed

• a 3ft square heavily textured and so very heavy oil painting
• a vacuum cleaner
• a large roll of canvas
• some canvas shears
• a cheap champagne flute wrapped in newspaper
• a wine decanter without the stopper (which I think I threw away because I couldn't find the decanter)
• a square of paper with the number 138 on it - my entry number for the Great North Walk which I didn't do because of the onset of plantar fasciitis two years ago
• a big blue towel
• a pair of shorts in need of ironing
• some curious pieces of exercise, or possibly bondage equipment, belonging to my late father
• 8 Summer shirts on hangers waiting to be ironed
• 3 pairs of sandals
• 1 pair of walking boots
• 1 pair of tan suede loafers

and then we were able to make the bed ready for Big Dave's arrival.

Patsy123 went off home, her head down as she walked into the blustery Sou'westerly blowing leaves at her from the Dene at the end of the street.

The Driver's Knock

Taking the Glum Man at DHL at his word, I decided I'd go with the mighty Parcelf Force and duly made arrangements - online no less - to have the parcel picked up between 10.00 and 15.00 today, for delivery tomorrow before noon.

Cost me £38, including full insurance cover, which I guess is OK enough.

The online facility even allowed me to print off my own despatch label, to be put in an envelope by the driver and clagged on the front of the parcel.

I worry about these things. I was up early so as not to miss the driver's knock. They always knock, as if to demonstrate some secret loathing of doorbells. I paced the floor, picking up odds and ends, putting them back down. I find that when I'm waiting for someone to call, I can't settle on anything that might distract me from the Driver's Knock.

Lunch time rolled around and still no Driver's Knock. I checked the phone to see if somehow, perhaps because I'd been playing Michael McDonald's Motown too loudly, Parcel Force had phoned to tell me some bad news about my collection arrangements. No message. I turned Mr McDonald up again and could now actually hear him.

The weary hours dragged by. I looked out at the collared doves sitting wistfully among the tattered leaves of the cherry tree and sympathised. But I didn't dare feed the birds because experience has taught me that the moment I go out into the garden, there will come a Knock at the door which I will not hear.

I shuffled papers on the table, but couldn't find it in me to concentrate on filing them away. Patsy123 will tut when she calls round later today.

She phoned me just after 3 o'clock. That's 15.00. The time when my window of opportunity for parcel collection closed. I was doing the dishes, on the principle that by not showing my agitation, the forces that move in mysterious ways would remind the Parcel Force Driver of their commitment to me and cause him suddenly to Knock like thunder at the door, the words of apology tumbling from his lips.

"I would just phone them up and complain," said the ever-practical and phone confident Patsy123.

I looked up the number in the Phone Book and gave them a call. "We have changed our number," said a Recording.

I rang the new number. "Choose one of the following five options......, " said another Recording. I chose No.1, Tracking Your Order.

"Hello, said a voice, "I am a Recording but you can talk to me as if I were a real person and I will understand."

I hung up and dialled again, this time going for No.5, All Other Enquiries.

A real human female person answered and we chatted amicably about my problem. She promised to ring the Driver and find out what had gone wrong. True to her word, she rang back about five minutes later to say the Driver could be with me in 15 minutes or at 5 o'clock, whichever I preferred. I said, "Fifteen minutes would be good."

"OK," she said cheerfully, "I'll get him to do that. He must not have noticed the collection times on the documentation."

Well that's OK, isn't it? I mean, the collection times are only for my convenience, after all. I fumed a little. Steamed a little. Paced a little more, watching the clock tick away the 15 minutes.

And then there he was. The Driver had Knocked! And he was so nice and friendly, giving me a little bundle of envelopes in case I might need to send more parcels in the future, that I completely forgot to be surly and stern.

The painting has gone, and I can relax, conscious only dimly of the other commitments I've made to get more artwork done. In the horribly near future.

Watching Paint Dry

I finished the commissioned painting tonight; two days in hand. Provided the paint is dry, I may be able to get it in the post tomorrow, although how it'll be travelling remains to be seen.

The man at DHL was decidedly sniffy. "I wouldn't send a painting by us," he said glumly. "Not enough insurance."

The start of the painting process was, as always, rather slow. I squared up an inkjet print and drew it out on the 24 x 20 ins. canvas. I fixed the drawing and covered it with a magenta acrylic wash. After that it was a matter of laying in the basic colours, and then comparing and adjusting colour, tone, perspective as I went along.

When I was at university, I was encouraged to use soft brushes and to thin my paint, usually with Liquin. I've been working more or less like that ever since, and most of this painting was done that way. But I do find this method lends itself to fiddly detail.

When I began painting, I was a much broader painter and I was beginning to think I'd lost that for good. I'd look at my older pictures and wonder how on earth I actually made them.

Part of the way through this painting, however, I dug out an old tube of Oleopasto and mixed that in the paint. Wonder of wonders! That was what I'd been missing all this time. It makes the paint thicker and stickier and has such a drying effect that I find I have to work faster. Working faster means less fiddly. This is a Good Thing and something to be taken on board for the future.

Frans Widerberg

Before going on to a birthday dinner engagement last night, I went with Patsy123 to the opening of the new Frans Widerberg show of prints at the University Gallery. There are over 100 prints, mostly etchings and woodcuts, and it's a splendid show. Widerberg's imagery consists of horses and riders, naked figures, singly or in groups, and birds. They exist in a strange metaphysical world, often coloured in vibrant red, yellow and blue.

I love them, but as with all private views, much of the time was taken up with schmoozing, so I'll be going back for a more considered viewing later in the week.

Later in the week, that is, after I've finished the commission I'm working on. A red brick building in another city, I'm working from client's photographs with the brief to "get away from the brick red colour " (!)

It's proving to be an interesting venture, but blogging may have to take a back seat until it's done.

Comment Boxing

Patsy123 tells me that, having accepted the offer of a patch from Microsoft, she can now access my Comments Box. Haloscan suggest, for their part, that problems associated with Symantec's working away in the background, may cause problems in raising the Comments Box.

I don't run Symantec, partly because Norton Security caused me no end of problems as it battled with other software. So maybe the problem some people are having leaving comments isn't down to my set-up at all.

Rhythm Kings

What could be more fun than a load of old farts playing old fart music to an audience full of old farts?

A couple of nights ago, Patsy123 and I went to see Bill Wyman's Rhythm Kings. It was exactly as I've just described it and it was magic

Bill Wyman sat contentedly on his stool most of the time, surrounded by ace musicians like Albert Lee and Georgie Fame, who all had a go at lead vocals. Now and again even Bill took his "turn in the barrel," as he put it.. Beverly Skeet was getting over a bout of the 'flu and so couldn't perform I Put a Spell on You, apparently her usual standout number, but still lent excitement to the vocals.

The songs had been chosen to reflect the influence they'd had on all of the band members - songs by Mose Allison, Bob Dylan, Clifton Chenier, Ray Charles and like so.

To cap it all, Soul Man Eddie Floyd put in a guest appearance and was a show-stopper.

And then, when they would normally have done a number in tribute to Lonnie Donegan, who'd inspired them all, they were unexpectedly able to bring on Lonnie's son, Peter, who did an amazing rendition of his father's version of Frankie & Johnny, complete with Jerry Lee Lewis-style piano. His curse and his gift is that he's inherited his dad's nose, through which he sings in the family manner. From the live dates on his website it looks like the boy lives in the north-east.

A great night. A great band.

Sacred & Profane

My Bonfire Night was a curious mixture, but not easily forgotten.

My Mum died a few months ago, just after her 90th birthday. The vicar who performed the funeral ceremony, suggested that I might like to attend the All Souls-Tide service she carries out each year at her church, St Chad's.

Patsy123 and I decided it seemed the right thing to do. and so found ourselves sitting at the back of a surprisingly full church, joining in the hymns, when we knew them from years of school assemblies, (Amazing Grace; Morning has broken; The Lord's my shepherd; Guide me O thou great redeemer) and the call-and-response elements of the service.

The climax of the service was the Reading of the Names. The Rector and the Vicar took turns in reading out the names of those whose funerals they'd officiated at in the parish. We were invited, on hearing the name we knew, to go forward and light a candle and place it on a tray before the altar. When Mum's name was read out, I found it really quite moving to light my candle, with Patsy123 close behind me.

I'm not religious. Indeed, I'm mostly anti-religious, but I found the service quite affecting. Not, I have to say, convincing in the religious sense, but the taking part in a ritual, a ceremony, fulfilled a need for something to mark Mum's passing; something in addition to her funeral.

I came away with that sense I always have after church services. That feeling that I envy the congregation their certainty of faith. I sit in churches and wait for my Damascene conversion, but of course it doesn't happen, and I don't honestly expect it to. It's just that, in my rationalist heart, there's a romantic longing for a bit of superstitious inexplicableness.

My romantic leanings were amply satisfied after the service at St Chad's, when we walked back along to Saltwell Park and it's bonfire and firework display. The bonfire was a decent size and Patsy123's frantic search for a flashing blue glow-in-the-dark light-sabre was thankfully cut short by the start of the fireworks.

We Ooohed and we Aaaahed, following the unwritten form of this ceremony, and then wandered happily home to big bowls of spicy lentil soup, reflecting as we went that we must be the only country in the world that has a night of fireworks that doesn't really celebrate anything. Guy Fawkes? Who cares? Gunpowder Plot? Wot Gunpowder Plot? Why, it's just Bonna Neet, man!

Irritation

The phone rang.

A voice at the other end said, "Are you registered with the Telephone Preference Service?"

"Yes," I said. "I am."

"Well, sir, you may have noticed an increase in the number of house and car alarms going off and being ignored by the people round about. We market a product which alerts a central control office who can deal with this problem Our demonstrators will be in your area tomorrow and will be able to demonstrate to a small number of clients -------"

"Excuse me," I said. "You asked me if I was registered with the Telephone Preference Service, yes?"

"Yes, sir, that's right."

"And I said 'yes, I am.' "

"Yes, you did, sir."

"Well, what that means is that I don't want you to make these BLOODY STUPID UNSOLICITED CALLS!"