At last at LAST! The four days of tweaks and blog changes are done, four of the most intense days I've had in a long time. I spent Sunday, Monday and Tuesday underpainting a new painting that espouses my ideas of 'symphonic painting', ideas which are probably scattered here and there even in this fragmented blog.
As I mentioned in the previous post, I gradually faded off from blogging at around 2012.
2012 was a great year for productivity, a bounce-back from about 18 months of lows and anxious difficulty. I painted the Richard Dadd painting and made the cabinet for it, completed The Many Beautiful Worlds novel and published the poems I wrote in 2010, founding Pentangel Books.
I continued the trend of pushing as many boundaries as my resources would allow. The Eden Iris in 2014 was a logical step up from the Dadd Cabinet, circular, hand carved, and with much more complex engineering. I began to continue to learn many new skills, to supplement mere painting. Lindsey Piper's Art Up Close started a new art club in a Nantwich photography studio, that of Adam Capper and a small group of us, perhaps under 10, met there regularly.
I entered my first art fair, paying £1500 or so to exhibit in Chelsea Town Hall for the Parallax Art Fair, but this was a huge flop for all involved; two scorching days at the height of summer, and a major football match perhaps contributed to the lack of visitors (the art was, sadly, really good quality and many artists had travelled from across Europe to attend; in contrast to many other fairs I've visited). The plus side of the fair was that I met a few fabulous artists, and made contact with a short-lived gallery named Gabriel Fine Art, who I subsequently exhibited a few times with.
In 2014 the art club building succumbed to its decay and I took the initiative, running a weekday art club myself in a church hall, although it was always a struggle to find enough regular participants. I had my first London solo exhibition, The Phenomenology of Love, in March 2015, and in July my first art performance event, also in London at a Gabriel event where I played piano for the first time, with other artists Sabine Kussmaul projecting video, and Escargot reading stream-of-consciousness text in French. This event began a trend for live performances and a lit the touchpaper of a passion of piano playing.
I appeared on local radio station, RedShift, to promote an art event. Liz, the wonderful station manager asked if I would like to host an arts programme, and after some hesitation, I agreed and joined the RedShift team to produce and host ArtsLab from October 2015, closing the doors on the moribund art club soon after.
I continued to paint, write music and everything else, of course, but I took part in many more live events. In 2016 I began to attend monthly art performance events in a small bar, helping to organise these with Sabine. Sabine and I collaborated on a few performances and installations, and in September I premiered 6 of my piano pieces in the magnificent surroundings of Chester Cathedral, to her projected videos.
After a first year of seeking and listening to avant-garde (well, to me!) music, the radio programme ArtsLab became more experimental as I changed the format, inviting anyone to create material to premiere, all in an attempt to boost engagement and the number of listeners. This requirement for new content, and the exploration of new music changed my music. The albums The Anatomy of Emotions and Cycles & Shadows, as played in Chester, were in a new direction to my music from before.
In 2017 I began to perform with Deborah Edgeley as 'Fall in Green', myself on piano and keyboards, with words by Deborah, creating a contemporary 'lieder' form of music. In 2018 we performed about once a month, adding to the invaluable experiences of staging live performances. After two years on the presenting radio I left ArtsLab to start a YouTube video version of the show, ArtSwarm, for a mix of reasons: the workload of the voluntary radio show was all-consuming; I'd explored experimental audio thoroughly and wanted to move to a next logical step; and so few people could listen to the internet radio, we often had less than 10 listeners.
In 2018 I published my first non-fiction book, 21st Century Surrealism, and held a solo exhibition (my 15th) in Stockport, inviting poets from the Write Out Loud group to contribute poems. This collaboration has led to a second; an exhibition exploring ekphrasis, and my latest album, Music of Poetic Objects.
Well, this is another mammoth post, so well done for getting this far. I thought it would be useful to put this update here, because quite a lot of this information is missing on this blog, and I wanted it to all feel neat and complete in one space, at very least. God bless the organisers! I'm more convinced than ever that the purpose of life is to order and to organise. Thus, those who do so, we cleaners and filers, are the most living of beings.
Now it's time to catch up on the things I should have been doing this week. Enjoy your weekend.
