Just Cuz... Anna Bloom

 I was riffling through some papers the other day and what should fall out but this! The original bad translation of Anna Blume that I found in a second-hand wallet I bought about fifty years ago. How magnificent it's still here. Testament to the enduring power of art. AI will never get it.

Video interview for WOS 25

Inktober 2024

 I had a touch of artist's block at the start of the month, so Inktober forced me to actually sit down and draw every day. This year's words struck me as some kind of adventure, so they turned into a story...

Adventurer

 "You have to be young to print," said HAP Grieshaber, "Printing is an adventure." (Drucken ist ein Abenteuer, 1978)

Some days I feel younger than on others. But I am ready for the adventure. "Printing is an encounter of chance with meaning," he says in the same essay. That is what makes it an adventure, what makes printing so exciting.

Anna Bloom returns

I think it was in 2014 I did my own translation of Kurt Schwitters' poem Anna Blume. I posted about it on the Policy Police blog because that was the locus of my arty stuff back then. I also thought that I should do some illustrations, and had a go at some drypoints, but they didn't really work out. So the project has been lurking among the fluff in my back pocket since then.

It's Open Studios time again and I was looking for something to do, so I decided to revisit it. I can't remember how much I may have tweaked the poem, do here's the text again:

ANNA BLOOM Kurt Schwitters

O you, beloved of my twenty-seven senses, I love you! - Thee thy thou you, I you, you me. - We?

This doesn't belong here (by the way).

Who are you undocumented damsel? You are - - are you? People say, you would - - let them talk, they don't know how the church tower stands.

You wear your hat on your feet and walk on your hands, on your hands you walk.

O, your red dress, sawn with white pleats.

I love Anna Bloom red, I love you red! - Thee thy thou you, I you, you me. - We?

This belongs in the cold embers (by the way).

Red bloom, red Anna Bloom, how can people talk so?

Prize question: 

1. Anna Bloom has a bird.
2. Anna Bloom is red.
3. What colour is the bird?

Blue is the colour of your yellow hair.

Red is the cooing of your green bird.

You simple girl in everyday clothes, you dear green creature, I love you! - Thee thy thou you, I you, you me. - We?

This belongs in the ashcan (by the way).

Anna Bloom! Anna, a-n-n-a, I trickle your name. Your name drips like soft tallow.

Do you know, Anna, do you know yet?

One can read you from behind, and you, you fairest of them all, you are from behind as you are from the front: “a-n-n-a”.

Tallow trickles caressingly over my back.

Anna Bloom, you dripping creature, I love you!

I'm still quite pleased with the translation - it seems to have survived nine years in my pocket so seems worth trying. We've just had the first 4 days of Open Studios and I've got a couple of prints done, but I've been too knackered to post about them here, so they all come in a bunch, like buses.

PS 10th July 2023. Just revised my translation again. I substitute the word creature for animal. It seems to fit better with the love thing. It was brought to mind by my very occasional remembering of the song, "No, John, No". "On yonder hill there stands a creature..."

PPS 31 July. Finally replaced "clothes" with "dress" - there is enough of an implication of clothes in dress. And dress makes more sense vis-a-vis pleats. I think so anyway.

Self Portrait in Blue

 I noticed that the Ruth Borchard self portrait prize is coming up at the beginning of next year. That meant it was getting on for two years since I did the last one. An interesting two years ago. Interesting times as they say. My beard is certainly whiter now.

My life is unexpectedly busy now, being deeply involved in setting up Art at the Alex, so I have to take every little opportunity to do some work. I did a couple of drawings last week and then did the whole cutting and printing this weekend as my "public performance" at the two artist days here.

Some people commented that I don't look happy, but that's my natural drawing face. I do look Kind of Blue, hence the heavy use of blue ink and the title.

As an aside, I have tried pulling faces to draw, a la Rembrandt, and it's quite hard to keep it up. Your face hurts afterwards. So to get something that recognisably me, you tend to get my "looking" and drawing face. There's only so many things I can do at the same time.

The picture is a photo of a print hanging up to dry, hence slightly distorted, but the colours are pretty true. I might replace it later with a scan, or maybe not.

PS. Decided to just add the scan at the bottom - this one's maybe a bit bright, but there you go. You'll have to see it in real life to decide.

Personal Archaeology

 I found this in the bottom of a drawer. Letter to The Guardian December 16 1986. I'd half forgotton about it, but Gosh. Half a lifetime ago and I was a master of art bollocks even then.

There are lovely bits in it, and some of it makes me laugh, even now.

"Nostalgia" appears to have gone the way of all things, replaced, perhaps, by "ideology" as the insult of choice for both sides in an argument.

Plus ca change...

On being "edgy"

I’ve had my work described as “edgy” twice in the past week or so. By other artists, too.

It did surprise me. I hadn’t thought I was that edgy. I thought I was just doing art.

Maybe they meant edgy for the rural backwater I live in. Maybe the real edgy stuff happens elsewhere. Maybe its all relative. Or not.

There is for sure a mainstream art here, a very safe, don’t-scare-the-horses art. I definitely feel I don’t belong. But I always felt like that. Didn’t belong in the bank. Didn’t belong in the quango. Didn’t belong in the working class neighbourhood I grew up in. Don’t belong in the middle class one I live in now. I’ve lived my life on the edges, so edgy I guess is just normalcy for me. It’s just my human condition, isn’t it?

And I can’t resist the temptation to poke the status quo. So I added the picture above from a dozen years back when I was in a corporate world. OK. I’m edgy.

I’m also in the happy position that I don’t need to chase an income any more. So I don’t have to heed the siren calls of customers’ dollars. “Do it like this,” they say, “And we’ll buy you.” So I can say what I need to say, Put all the soul I want into it and adopt a totally take-it-or-leave-it attitude. And some people like it, and are willing to give my stuff house room. That’s all the encouragement I need. One or two people hunt me out or stumble upon me by accident, and by some miracle kinda get what I’m saying.

As irritating as it is to be out on the edge of everything, in my heart of hearts I know that I don’t want to be mainstream. I don’t want the baggage that comes with it. I don’t want the compromise and I don’t want to be on the committee. For in the mainstream, there’s always a committee.