Stamp album

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Stamp album

I'm fairly sure this was bought around 2005 in a little Asian corner shop on Stroud Green Road (but it might have been in 199, in  Bayswater where I used to hang around a lot for no reason other than that I find the wedding icing architecture and generally forlorn atmosphere there quite enchanting. I`ve always been attracted to melancholy places, I`m not sure why. But Dear God I hope Bayswater hasn`t become trendy and cleaned up- though given the charmless recent development of blocks just up from Paddington I suspect that`s a vain prayer).

Either way, the shop seemed to have stock dating back to the early 1950's;  This could be found, feeling sad, on a shelf down near the floor. As a result, of course, I couldn't resist going in whenever I passed and buying things like this gem, or little red and black notebooks which had been most pleasingly bound with thread and had soft, yellowing pages. 

The album is not large, 5,25 x 6.5 inches and has a coral pink cover of textured cardboard. It`s really nice to handle, fitting perfectly in one`s hand, and is a good size for a small collection.

I already have a stamp album and several albums of matchbox labels and I am not sure what I might use this for, except maybe leaves or pressed flowers. or some Mystery Items which have yet to Reveal Themselves, but when they do will make me and the album feel complete. 

Anyway,  I ought to fill it soon because it's starring at me like a hungry child.

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Rome

I had a delightful idea, to lift me from the torpor which is Brasil- go to Rome!

I often think of places to go, but none has lent me that instantaneous sense of delight that I need to get organised.

Perhaps I can fly there, visit some other cities too, Naples again, and the Amalfi coast, even cross to the Adriatic side and see Lecce.

I was in Rome less than a year ago, but not for long enough, and felt my work there was not as good as it should have been. But I also I felt that delerium that one feels on encountering a beautiful person too briefly.

But when I say in the car today, a devil visited me, and whispered to my torpor, telling me how the second meetings are too laden with expectations and invariably issue disappointment.

Oh go back to hell where you belong!

Our Velvet Sorrow

This painting does not exist any more because it was destroyed. It was painted over, I think.

I painted the picture then I felt that the heads were the wrong size (in fact it is not just the heads that are the wrong size but all the bodies are ill-proportioned, and there are innumerable strangenesses in drawing throughout the picture). I attempted to correct the heads some months after the picture was painted. However, this is almost always a foolish thing to try, in my experience, because one part of a picture cannot be isolated from the rest: all the component parts are inter-related, so you end up having to repaint to entire picture or the picture will not be harmonious.

And after meddling with this picture it seemed to get worse and worse, and in the end I painted over it all, dismissing it as a lost cause.

The photo represents the painting in its pre-meddling stage: and it is very popular on Flickr, so I reason that what I perceived to be errors of drawing are indeed the opposite: they are qualities of awkwardness that help contribute to the peculiar atmosphere of the work.

I also reasoned that the picture’s themes had been more r less dealt with in two other pictures, “Before the Party” (http://tadeuszderegowski.blogspot.com/2009/08/before-party.html), and, “A Russian Play” (which has yet to be photographed and put online). The face of the man seated on the bed reminds me of an Indian fellow I used to work with on the London Underground, whose hangdog expression was a source of enormous comfort to me during the freezing night shifts we shared in Shepherd’s Bush Station, London.

I suppose the idea suggested by the title is that of experiencing a sadness that is comfortable and warm and almost pleasurable: perhaps this is the sense of comfort people find in indulging in melancholy films or paintings.

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There are too many pictures in this room and I don’t regret the absence of the original picture. Some paintings work better as photos than in reality, usually because of failures in paint handling which are diminished on a small scale.

If you want any of the pictures on Flickr then contact me: I need to clear space, and the pictures need good homes: I’m not charging much for them, and they are just gathering dust here.

The Dreaminess.

The dreaminess was a response to life's general nastiness, an inner migration.

I read once about how people in solitary confinement taught themselves to survive the ordeal by developing fantasies, one of which was called "the hotel". In order to maintain control of his mind, the prisoner would elaborate the fantasy of being a millionaire hotel owner, imagining everything from the bellboy's buttons to the hotels architecture and the streets around it in fantastic detail.

The dreaminess is involuntary. It's an Apollonian state of mind, about self-removal. It's connected to music. When I got the dreaminess I'd hear music in my mind and then the dreaminess was most powerful the music was apocalyptic, distressing. At other times the music was usually melancholy: Neil Young from "After the Gold Rush", or Joy Division. The films that best capture the dreaminess are "Closely Observed Trains" and "My Own Private Idaho", where the dreaminess is transformed into narcolepsy. The author is probably Celine, perhaps Hamsun.

I remember one summer I had a job in a shop in Edinburgh. The under-manager was an ugly hag from Wester Hailes with a drooping lower lip and hideously pink skin and a penchant for nagging in her plebian accent and I spent the whole three months in the dreaminess, never leaving. I survived by anaesthetising myself totally from the monster.

I remember entering the dreaminess when I was walking to school. The tedium of the walk (twice daily, as I lunched with my mother at home) pushed me into the dreaminess and I began to imagine mysterious underground railways or that I had wings to fly so that I could complete the journey more rapidly. Transport and movement have often been a theme of the dreaminess, perhaps because it is a response to confinement and restriction.

At other times, my childhood experience of the dreaminess involved self-transformations into animals, (usually hybrid animals combining the fierce cats with eagles and sharks) or cavalry officers: beings that expressed unassailable will-power, energy and force, qualities my languid mind so clearly lacked.

I have never spoken to anyone about the dreaminess. When I was a child I imagined it to be commonplace: now I am older I have come to realize that few people ever enter it. It feels like being stoned, or that you are in that suspended state of mind usual after waking from a deep sleep. I developed the dreaminess as an antidote to the extreme tedium and restriction of school (I still feel considerable resentment about how my time was wasted there). It is a sort of respite from pain too. In one way it makes one quite powerful because you are unassailable in the dreaminess. On the other hand, it weakens you because you are prevented from confronting the things tht might permit you to change your life: because the dreaminess is involuntary it can come and prevent you from achieving things, like an unwanted dose of morphine.

For example, the dreaminess prevented me from passing my driving test: I found it so nasty to sit with the boorish instructor (why are so many driving instructors such oafs?) that the dreaminess engulfed me and I would go through the lessons as if asleep.

Of course, these people don't know about the dreaminess and think that by being rude or aggressive they can make you "snap out of it".

Ultimately, the dreaminess is a morbid state, and when the dreaminess has been at its strongest is when I've felt closest to suicide. I don't enter it often now because I am lucky and don't so often have to suffer the ennui and nastiness that seemed to colour the first thirty years of my life.

The photo is a detail of a photo of Chantilly by Frederick H. Evans, from The Chateaux of France, from the Archives of Country Life 1897 - 1939, by Marcus Binney (pub. Mitchell Beazley, London, 1994).

Going to the Sea

You feel fed up, you drive to the sea

The waves come in, the waves go out: you watch them listlessly from the window of your Fiat Uno.

Nothing has changed: you drive home.