Another for the Marble Halls of Embarrassment: the woman who loved Tommy Steele

At a supper party last night, instead of trying to suss out the lay of the land as I normally do,  I just asked the man on my right 'What do you do?'   He said he was a musician and my heart sank because I can never find anything intelligent to say to musicians.  I lament the fact I'm an unmusical, elderly Radio 4 addict with embarrassingly middle of the road tastes.  You only have to look at my blog profile: 

• Doris Day
 
• bland 60s standards
 
• Mozart
 
• Tommy Steele
 
• nothing clever except for Delius

I sighed a little, apologised and asked if he could kind of put himself 'in a musical context' for me.

He replied  'I play in a band called Pink Floyd'.  


And he really does, has done since the beginning.  Hard to describe how I felt at that moment.. basically the flight option of the so-called fight or flight response to a situation that is none too comfortable.  But I need not have panicked because Nick Mason, the band's drummer, was utterly charming and far from offended.  I suggested  I lost interest in pop music in 1965 and he teased me for liking Tommy Steele (spot on) and sang me a couple of bars of  'Green Door' by Frankie Vaughan  - both British  names, lost in the mists of time to everyone else I suspect. We were virtually quits by now and the conversation moved to everything but music. Well, that's not quite true because I found out that Nick Mason loves working with youngsters and encouraging their musical ambitions.

Had he been to art school as many  musicians had?  No, but he had a degree in architecture.

I was beginning to realise that this was no ordinary world famous rock star.  He's clearly addicted to adventure and admitted  - somewhat affectingly - that he loves collecting certificates. 'I got my helicopter's pilot licence but not content with that I became a helicopter instructor. I did scuba diving but had to become a diving instructor. And then I had to qualify as a rescue diver!'   This didn't strike me as boasting, just the natural enthusiasm of a terrifically talented and intelligent man. It was only when I looked him up on Wikipedia that I found he has a phenomenal collection of cars, has taken part in the 24-hour Le Mans race and lives in the house formerly owned by Camilla Park Bowles.   Oh, and he has a gorgeous wife called Nettie who is also a helicopter pilot.  (I didn't bother to tell them that I have got a million plus score at a  computer game called Bejeweled.)

By the way, I am labelling this post 'name-dropping'.

Here is  Nick Mason as I confess I never remember him:

And here is Tommy Steele.  Can you spot me in the audience?  Well, it could have been 
me.

ABRACADABRA! The mess in my house disappears

  

A new dawn breaks in my kitchen

The work surface used to look like this  on a bad day (out of focus, the way I prefer to remember it)

Where I used to blog  

Where I would paint on the dining table which gave me an excuse to eat standing up at the fridge

Bingo! The reason it's all changed

I took over a spare bedroom and all this was beautifully made for me by Colin Failes, a multi-talented man who worked on the massive Armada paintings for the House of Lords [here].  I had a bit of a flouncey moment when the pinboard stuff arrived and it was a cold slatey blue.  Colin looked perplexed but set about giving it the subtle trompe l'oeil effect you can just see here.  I should have got him to sign it, dammit.  I can only describe him as a class act, suggesting  the wide plan-chest drawers and a fold down table to the right of the picture. 

This isn't quite the end of the story. For a number of regrettable reasons,  I have just decided to give up my studio in Bermondsey and that's full of canvases, paint, books, drawings, a  mountain of paint-spattered old clothes, a glorious easel on wheels, my virgin's couch (a Vono 1950s studio bed that's past redemption) and a pommel horse I upholstered at art school.  I stood there last night and practically wept.  Where the hell will I put it all? 

  

My MA (Textiles) show at Goldsmiths College, London 2003.  The series of paintings entitled 'Calamity Fixes Her Makeup' are in the Ernst & Young Collection but I am stuck with the pommel horse entitled 'Last Chance for Horseplay'.  It's conceptual innit.

I produced the screen-printed fabric myself which contains illustrations of how to sit in a ladylike manner  from a 50's beauty book.  Someone else did the upholstery, which is beyond my pay-grade, in an attempt to morph the horse into a dressing table like the one I had growing up.  I am still kicking myself for not making it pale lilac instead of pink to match the ground in the paintings. I am proud to say that it was recommended for the Warden's prize but the poor man said he didn't think he could live with it in his office.  I could hardly blame him.  Shall I put it in my bedroom and use it as a clothes horse?

[Last two images courtesy Gerard Williams.  All artwork © Rosie West]

The Holiday Wardrobe

'There's no such thing as bad weather only bad clothing.' (Trust the Norwegians to coin such a phrase.) Most of us got it right for a pre-breakfast walk in the drizzle along the cliff path.  But someone decided that to save on washing (eight days in our delightful rural siberia sans  electricity,  sans water even that didn't have to be pumped out of the rainwater tank by hand) he'd dispense with one of his precious pairs of trousers. We decided later that it was just as well that my small grandson hadn't gone out alone with his grandfather,  yikes.  (I've illustrated his shorts just to prove he was wearing some.)  

Young Storm, appropriately named for the abysmal weather that luckily didn't coincide with our arrival but kept us housebound playing SNAP the second day, became the most elegant person on this stretch of National Trust coastline. Being a bit chesty, we fashioned a blue and white silk spotted scarf of mine into a cravat for him and he was quite oblivious of looking like Cary Grant.

The next day I set off for a little painting en plein air.

Ah but the next day dawned fine and clear and Olivia woke early.  This was partly because she had retired at nine fed up with listening to Radio 4 in the guttering candlelight, partly because she had to share the other double bed with a restless Storm who was kicking her tummy.  Dressed casually for the weather then, she wandered out onto the cliff with her large Canon to capture the dawn.  Imagine the surprise of a keep-fit fanatic on his wordless encounter with a tousle-haired seven-month pregnant woman in a nightdress apparently waiting to take his picture at 6 am.  I suppose it gave him something to think about on his long run home.

Actually, we had a spiffing time all in all.

Images © Rosie West

Outward Bound

I am not sure if anyone's terribly interested, but I am off on holiday here till the beginning of September.  As the the old coastguard house, part of a row of seven (the big dark smudge on top of this Dorset cliff) has no electricity,  I shall be in radio silence.  Unable then, to answer any comments were you to be kind enough to think of making any.  There's a tempest and torrential rain forecast for tomorrow as we drive there across the fields ( who's going to open the damn gates? You guessed it) and unload food, water, foul weather gear, torch batteries, gas mantles and rather a lot of booze.
I think I might be getting too old for this game. I'll tell you later.

My son Will made a little film about the place . He introduces it like this "We shot this at one of my favorite places in the world, in Dorset. Exact location to remain a secret. Its an adaptation of a joke my dad used to tell; any excuse for a film.  And this was real micro- budget. 75 pounds for radio mics, and 25 for sandwiches and petrol!

Image © Rosie West 

The Generation Game: The Distaff Side

For the distaff side of my family, I  recently came across this crumpled photo of me with my daughter Olivia, as embellished by her.  I was presented with it by way of a birthday card a few years ago.  As  she has become a photographer herself (with her own blog) I hope she will now treat other people's work with more respect!  This  and the one below were taken by artist Peter Glover, an old friend of ours.

We looked rather more like this at the time.

My mother Mitzi with me. I remember that dress.  I wrote about her here.

My grandmother Ethel with my mother.  I could only find this image of her superimposed with a fragment of a sort of poem I wrote about her once.  Like my maternal grandfather I never knew her or very much about her but nothing ill was spoken of her.  She ended her life in London but had once run a club for gentlemen in Durban, South Africa or possibly in Laurenco Marques, now called Maputo in Mozambique. My mother said that this probably accounted for smart chaps in London's St. James tipping their hat to her. Funny the things you remember.   She was married to my raffish grandfather here.  


And finally, I have a granddaughter of my own.  

Arabella India Rose born in May this year with my daughter-in-law Joan (neé Gibbons)

The Scruffy Gene

  My paternal grandparents with the incredibly scruffy next generation. The Childs family. They would become two lawyers, two doctors and an almoner (social worker).  My father is on the far left.  I don't remember any of them being that threadbare and woolly but clearly it was in the family somewhere..

I think my great grandmother had a Beatrix Potter thing going on with her Benjamin Bunny 
tam o shanter and  Mr Alderman Ptolemy Tortoise's string bag. You will remember that he went to dinner with Mr Jeremy Fisher, taking his  own lettuce with him in one.  


The little girl, Joyce, was the younger sister of Grandfather's wife Mabel, standing next to him.  Joyce, unencumbered by the Childs aesthetic became a fashion illustrator in Paris! Alas, I never knew her because she died in childbirth.

THE GENERATION GAME: A Tale of Two Grandfathers

No wonder the Right and Left sides of my brain are constantly at war. I like to think they are personified by my two grandfathers.  My mother's father  Frank Gillam (above) was a dandy, gambler, a raffish character by all accounts.  He was a good artist too and I have some marvellous characatures he did of army officers in World War I.  Born in India, he spent most of his life in South Africa, doing what I have know idea, but he owned a Bugatti and was, my mama hastened to tell me, a 'gentleman' jockey.  He's reading 'Sporting Sketches' in this picture.  He survived the war but died young and I would love to have met him.  

By contrast, this is Philip Childs JP channelling Van Gogh.  He wasn't an artist, he was a provincial solicitor, magistrate and HM Coroner for Portsmouth and he was probably on holiday here. (I hope so!) His father was a pharmacist and his grandfather a 'tide-watcher' (port customs officer).  My grandmother, Mabel (not in the picture) would take her four sons and one daughter to the Isle of Wight and set up camp for the summer, hiring Pickfords removals to take all the canvas and kit by water and then horse and cart to Compton Bay.   Coming from a non-Conformist religious tradition, Grandfather was a teetotaller, but full of fun and occasional mischief. He was judicious and kind and never took himself too seriously.  The story goes that he was late back from the office for lunch one day.  Granny went out into the road and saw the coalman's cart approaching with her husband sitting up alongside the driver, a client of his.

I suppose another way I always sum up the difference between these two men is that in The English Civil War, Philip Childs would have been a Roundhead and Frank Gillam a Cavalier. Definitely. Meanwhile I permanently feel conflicted between these two opposing inherited strands of my character.  Creative tension, I guess.

When The Postman Knocked Twice

OK, it's not so bad but I had a dispiriting day.  My new all-singing all-adjusting ergonomic office chair finally arrived, in pieces with no instructions, which brought my other half out in hives.  " I hate these sodding things, they always effing say they're easy and they never effing are."  Followed by the IKEA flat-pack rant. The situation did look menacing but once we'd calmed down, it was easy. A piece of cake. So I sit on it, apply my tortoiseshell specs, smooth my skirt, thrust the bust and .. realise they've sent me the wrong flaming chair.  My work surface is draughtsman's height and I know I ordered the tall version. Instead of feeling like that secretary in Mad Men, I'm like an old lady driving a rather large motor car. When I press a lever, I'm a child driving a motor car.  That's crap isn't it?

But cheer is on its way because a parcel lands on the doormat.  I've waited a long time for it to arrive from The USA courtesy of a firm called Alibris via Amazon.  Recommended by Peak of Chic, it's 'Only the Best: a Celebration of Gift Giving in America'. . Except it's not.   It's just what I've always wanted:

I trust I can be justified in saying that's crap too.

Image top by Magda Archer for POLITE cards here

Great Colour Combos II : Red & Green China Style

Mao by Andy Warhol

From one of my all-time favourite fashion shoots Vogue in China October 1979.Why don't they still dress like this?  I know, but still..

The fibreglass version by Sui Jianguo  here

Conveniently dressed Beijing cyclists

Red lacquer and green leather does it for me

Red Lacquer and Nature not bad either

Me as Mao


Images 4,5& 6 from China Style Photos Reto Gunti  ed. Taschen

What a Pill

The artist Grayson Perry in his motorcycle leathers.


I can't say I'm not always pleased and flattered to get a comment on my blog.  The latest was in response to an old post entitled The Transvestite Artist and the Harley Salesman and  I read it with mounting pleasure:  'I liked this blog, is very interesting and wonderful.It catched my attention since the first time that i saw it,that because it´s very entertainment.I feel happy when i reache what i am looking for,like...


when i buy viagra the result is really great.' (Linked to a site selling the stuff)


Oh f*** off, do.  


Wondering if anyone else has received stealth merchandising like this?  I am constantly bombarded with offers of penis enhancement but they go straight into my, erm, spam.

PET

If I offend dog lovers by dressing pooches up in frocks, I am only using these sad little confections as a metaphor for what we tend to do with our human pets.

That Pinking Feeling

Pink is a delicious colour but little girls, particularly the ‘tween’ market, are bombarded with pink merchandising opportunities that dominate their wardrobes, their accessories, their worlds.  This seems to pose no other narrative, no other gender choice than a ‘girliness’ that is becoming commodified and toxic: contaminated with sentimentality, anxiety and a sophistication that only accelerates the loss of childhood innocence.

Most of these paintings were made for an exhibition at Southampton Solent University in 2008.  The horrible phenomenon of the beauty pageant was an insistent idea behind this somewhat uncomfortable project.  

Caged Bird

Candy Lamb

Are You Sure You Really Love Me?

 Bunny Cuddles

Play Time

All images © Rosie West

Pure Allure

Oh what a treat last night! We were invited to the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden  for the Bolshoi Ballet’s ‘Spartacus’ with the music of Khachaturian.   Excited by the prospect the fabled Bolshoi,  I was unsure about the choice of Spartacus imagining it to be visually spare, ascetic and  just hard work, frankly. I was wrong and had to eat my uninformed hat: it was thrilling, beguiling and a magnificent spectacle.

The background to Spartacus’s rebellion of the slaves was the dissolute behaviour at the heart of the Roman Empire. With sly wit, choreographer Yuri Grigovich juxtaposed the military aggression with a bacchanal of the effete Roman elite, of satyrs and dancing girls; and later amongst half the followers of Spartacus who turned against their leader when seduced into lustful abandon by the Roman general’s courtesan Aegina.  Maria Allash in that role was  sexy and capricious, a real handful.  Her tiny toga was draped to expose a bare breast cleverly conceived by a little circle of red sequins on flesh-coloured net.  Her General (Alexander Volchkov) had the finest legs below his leather tunic that I’ve ever had the privilege to dwell upon and, boyishly glamorous, he evinced a camp kind of menace. (On a fashion note, here were the most fitting gladiator sandals of the season.)   

Dominating the production was  the overwhelmingly virile, saturnine presence of Ivan Vasiliev as Spartacus.  At only twenty-one, he is being hailed as a once-in-a-generation icon, the next Barishnikov?    Stocky, athletic and savage he seemed to demonstrate the limits of human strength and agility as well as the gift of flight. And yet he was most tenderly passionate towards his lover Phrygia (Nina Kaptsova) who bent and wavered and wafted like a willow in the breeze.

In the midst of my first attempt as ballet critic, a curious thought struck me.  I don't suppose the T*l*b*n would be too happy with this physicality, this intimacy, this state of undress.  I pondered the matter from a socio-religio-political angle on the way to the pub and suddenly heard myself asking my other half ‘By the way, did you find anything untoward happening in the trouser department tonight?’  Choking on his Guinness the answer was an emphatic NO.  ‘Okay, okay, just checking out the corrupting power of dance on the average British male.’

Great Colour Combinations: Red & Pink

One of the most depressing aspects of the landscape of bringing up children  is the cacophony of crude colours or sickly pastels.  (Luckily my small grandson prefers a more muted palette: any kind of hose pipe, mobile phones, tools, car steering wheels..  )  I  turn to Hollywood musical ensembles or ballet on You Tube to find the World's unsung colourist heroes - costume designers.  The gift of creating a moving tableau that is gorgeous but subtle, I always find miraculous.  


Well here, the bold juxtaposition of pink and red, or pink and vermillion is not exactly subtle but they really pull it off in these two films.  As a child with red hair, my mother would never let me wear pink. As much as I loved her,  I never forgave her then and still don't. 


Here is Rosemary Clooney in Red Garters (1954) directed by George Marshall.  Costumes by Edith Head.  (No surprise there for genius.)





And Dorothy Jeakins created these shockingly wonderful petticoats in The Music Man (1962) dir. Morton DaCosta.

Scenes From The Mess In My House

Uh oh, I'm panicking again because I need to do another post in a hurry.  Here is a selection of my artwork interspersed with my mess.  That's it, really.

Toot Toot!  Back Soon

That Time of Year

The Stars and Stripes on the River Thames at Henley Royal Regatta 

For all my lovely American friends
on the Fourth of July

Mallards settle on Brian Flattery's slipper launch moored outside his fine house which overlooks the Regatta's finishing line.  He has lived there for over ten years. Mr Flattery, a former state energy official in North Carolina, looked unmistakably American when we met him on Friday in his blue and white striped seersucker suit and preppy rounded collar with pink braces (suspenders, I think you call them.)  His blue tie bore the emblem of the famous Leander Rowing Club, pink hippos.  Pink is the colour at Henley: it is Leander. 

 Famously hospitable, whenever possible he hosts an Independence Day party, inviting American crews to participate. “We read the Declaration of Independence and throw tea into the Thames at 1:30 p.m. on July 4th…. it’s all done in good sport. We always have an Englishman read the Declaration so we have the proper accent” he laughs. [quoted from The Henley Standard July 2008]