A Village Affair (1995): review: 8/10

A depressed artist and her shallow lawyer husband move to a small village: there they make a aquaintance of a  sexually voracious brunette with very red lipstick, a spoiled young woman and the subject of  much gossip.

Well acted and sensitively made film about relationships and attitudes among the English country bourgesie, described through the prism of the artist's romantic crisis, which intelligently balances melodrama and seriousness.

The Amityville Horror (2005): review: 4/10

An attractive young couple find and purchase an substantial Victorian property for an unually low price, and move their with two children, a blonde boy and girl spawn of the female's previous dallaince. They also bring a dog, which happens to belong to the boy.

There follows a series of harrowing incidents, often involving taps, in which the boyfriend reveals intense dislike of his obese stepson and his dog. The mother, who has become quite anxious, attempts to seek the assistance of a priest, but he proves quite useless and the family reluctantly choose to abandon their dream home and sail off in a speedboat.

Self-portrait on a Tuesday

Self-portrait on a Tuesday, oil on card, 14.2 x 9.5 cm

Well, my week of self-portraiture got annexed by paper cutouts. It's good to change medium, it keeps one fresh. This one has a certain fifties ring to it.

The Guardians of the Moth- in conference.

They meet at night, in whispers conferring. What are they planning? No wickedness I trust...

Different media allow such different responses in artists- Picasso is perhaps the best example for this- the Picasso of cereamics being a different personality from the Picasso of paint.

Myself, I find that paper cutout, which only really allows mimetic effects through silhouettes, forces a degree of abstraction on me. And the cutting process, so absolute, allows no equivocation: oil paint by contrast can endlessly, hopelessly ponderous.

With cutout, I find myself more engaged with humour and storytelling, and drawn into communion with artists such as Richard Dadd, or Henry Darger and (less nutty) Maurice Sendak. There are some imaginative forces that are only ever released in play, and using a medium like paper cutout which has relatively little historical weight, allows me to play more freely. And the cutouts can be moved about like dolls to make different scentarios. This is, of course, delightful.

The Forest of Dreams IV: Guardians of the Moth

The Guardians of the Moth:, above: I concieve a special guard consisting of eight such cutouts (see below).

The Forest of Dreams III: Hallowed be the Glory of Moth

Three more from the Forest of Dreams.

I realise that I revisiting ideas which I attempted to tackle with in The Kingdom of Moth.

Sometimes an idea has to incubate quietly: I'd attempted to do something related to the horror and gamour of moths before, but hadn't felt quite satisfied with the results, which were too cartoonish, overstated in their expressionism. Now the time is ripe capture the glory of moth in the language of Polish peasant cutouts and Art Noveau perversity.

The Forest of Dreams: drawings

Two drawings for a paper cutout sculpture piece which I shall work on over the next few days.