Open Art 08 Towcester

Great to hear that Open Art Towcester is taking place this year.

Sat 13 – Sun 14 September 2008

Nicholas Hawksmoor Primary School
Balmoral Close,
Towcester,
Northants
NN12 6JA

I took part in last years show and really enjoyed myself and if you are a Midland artist reading this I would recommend you submit an application too.
A picture from Open Art 2007

Towcester unlike a large town or city does not have an art gallery and so this weekend event was originally put on to meet this need in some small way. The show began 4 years ago organised by parents and teachers at Nicholas Hawksmoor Primary School. I could somehow understand if this was based around a large comprehensive with a leaning towards the arts but I think its even more remarkable and unique because it takes place at a primary school.

I spoke to one of the organisers Morag Ballantyne earlier this year and she said that there was a possibility that it wouldn’t continue because the children of the parents who were involved in the past had moved on to senior schools and she doubted there would be the same commitment.

Great weather for …….working on my PC

Superb sunshine at the moment but I have no time to enjoy it, I cant even get out and take a few photos because this coming weekend I’m off to the Rhubarb photography festival and I’m deep in the process of compiling my marketing material for the reviewers there. This includes a new portfolio that brings together the new images that were featured for the first time at the New Generation Festival and my previous work. During this coming week I will be editing the photographs into a balanced presentation. There will be many swaps and changes in the order as I try to get a flowing mix but by Friday night I have to have it fully committed. My website is being updated to incorporate the new work and link in with this blog.

When Looking For Burnt Out Cars Never Jump To Conclusions

With the kids now on school holiday I can expect to find more burnt out cars than during term time, or is it just because its Summer time?

At the moment I’m flat out working on three “projects”:

• Preparing a portfolio and accompanying promotion material for the Rhubarb festival next weekend.
• Putting the finishing touches to a coffee table book featuring my artwork.
• Developing the website for the Solihull Artists Forum of which I am a proud member.

More about them in future blog posts, but I’m sure you can appreciate it involves round the clock work and some very late nights on the PC so at 4am this morning I took the dogs for a short round the block walk before getting to bed. After only a few hours I got a telephone call from one of my lookouts who had found a burnt out Jeep, now when he said it was only half burnt I was even more convinced to go back to bed but somehow and even I’m surprised I headed off to Kings Heath and found this.


At this stage I wasn’t convinced that I hadn’t wasted my time as you can see there is very little burn markings on the panels, but I started to click without much enthusiasm until I came to the bonnet which was one of the best I had recently seen. Bonnets are generally not that good the burn markings are predictably poor perhaps because of the heat resistant qualities required in that part of the car and also the fire brigade will instantly hack it away from the vehicle once they arrive so that they can put the engine fire out.

The Jeep was extensively damaged but unfortunately it was mostly on the inside, however a small panel on the roof above the windscreen and in between the sunroof had produced some markings that made it all worth while.

I’m sure I can make something of this when I get some time.

Jackson Pollack meets the Geysers

It’s interesting and I always listen to what people viewing my work for the first time think is the subject of the photography. No one has yet hit on the right answer, let’s face it photographing burnt out cars isn’t the most obvious thing to do with a camera although a favourite subject is the closely related cars in scrap yards.

There was of course many suggestions from people at the Jewellery Quarter Arts Fair but the one I really like “Jackson Pollack meets the Geysers” came from Brian Byrne. Brian is a compulsive clicker himself taking a mean photo of this Geyser,thanks for getting my good side and you can look at Brians other work on his Flickr site.

Other popular suggestions have been:
Landscape from above
Coast
Coral
Forest
Volcano
Waves
Beach
Aerial Photography
View from an airplane
View from space.

Have a look at one of my latest photos and see what you think


And finally one that had to make me laugh CUSTARD but I will stick with and be honoured to be associated with Jackson Pollock

Jewellery Quarter Arts and Designer Crafts Festival

Because of the trials and tribulations that I have experienced during the last few weeks with posting to the blog, I'm just updating some that have been missed in that time. This post should have been posted on:
Saturday 5th July 2008

I booked a stall at the Arts and Designer Crafts Festival at St Paul’s Square in the famous Birmingham Jewellery Quarter.

I have never done a market stall before but I have often thought about using this method to promote my art work to generate sales, clicks on my website and interest, normally I play cricket on Saturdays but an injury to my elbow seems to be stretching out for the whole season and this gives me the opportunity to test the water.

I spent a great deal of time leading up to Saturday making display stands for the work and portfolio books to illustrate all the images that I now offer so you can imagine my disappointment when I woke early on the morning to find heavy rain falling and a look on the weather forecast www made me think is it worth going. If I can keep dry can I keep my photos dry and with a forecast like this is anybody going to turn up.


The event was scheduled between 10am and 4pm and you notice from the trusted BBC Weather page that 4 o’clock is when the rain and showers would break up to give a reasonable dry early evening.

Suddenly there was a complete change in the weather, the rain stopped and the sun came out, so I pack everything into the car and away I go. There was a very gusty wind so I decided not to put the work on glass onto the stands (the very stands that I had spent so much time building) I decided just to spread them out flat on the table.

Glad I had my little compact camera on hand to take shots of the people who came to my stand.


It was great to see some old friends that I haven’t seen for some time.

This is Brod we go back a long long way to when we were just out of school in the 60s working at the fan engineering company Alldays and Onions in Small Heath, while I supplemented my apprentice wage of £2.50 a week as a DJ in night clubs, Brod was playing drums in various bands, I’m very thankful to him for getting me in to the then obscure Tamla Motown, Atlantic and Stax sound. From time to time we bump into one and other. Brod if your reading this send us an email and we can get together for a pint.


This is Asma (with glasses) with here two boys and her sister. Asma was on the same Fine Art Degree course as me at Solihull College. She now has a day job and with a family too its hard for her to do art. I wish she was still producing the lovely paintings that she did, of course she can always go back to it some day. Who am I to speak some say (including my son) that I should still do the old paintings I did before I did my degree.

Blogging is almost easy - O NO ITS NOT

As you can see my last post was successful. Well to a point the BlogJet programme (which will cost me £23) could not format the sentences correctly. has not add the Tags that I included and I have since found out that the spellchecker doesn't recognise any words other than. THE, TO, A, THAT etc

In fact just tried to post this small piece and guess what! using BlogJet I get the same error

I shall have a look and ask around and see what other options are available

And I Always Thought Blogging Was Supposed To Be Easy!

I have tried to upload a few posts to the “You Will Never Look at Them in the Same Way Again” without any success. I would of thought that “Blogger” the weblog publishing tool from Google would in line with all their free products be good and easy to use, after all I have heard stories of seriously none technical folk just starting a blog and getting on with it. But I have had nothing but trouble:

1) You will notice that the text size formatting throughout my blog is very inconsistent, that is not surprising because what ever formatting I set in the Blogger tool what ends up on   “You Will Never Look at Them in the Same Way Again” is totally different

2) Now when I try to upload I get an error that html code is not compatible, so I had a look at the code and found references to MS Word that appeared to be the offending code. I use MS Word to WP my post so that I could spell check. So I did various things like converting the word document to a txt doc before pasting into Blogger again Blogger rejected the post. So then followed a few other options including typing direct into Blogger and still I get errors.

So now I’m using a 30 day trial on a posting programme called BlogJet, on first impression I don’t know if it’s worth paying £23 for it, things like Help and List of Features are virtually none existent. Don’t get me wrong I don’t mind paying for software utilities but you want a bit of substance for your money. Any comments on were I should go from here? Mind you looks like it works 

This blog is not dead – I’m only knackered and confused!

I know the idea of blogging is to do it regular well life, work and family have just got in the way and taken priority this week. That’s not to say a whole load of things haven’t happened while I haven’t been blogging far from it, and I will update you on a few although the dates are all to pot.

I did try from time to time to put a very short entry but I had a few technical problems while uploading the blog: I get an error message refering to the HTML code yet I am not uploading via any HTML I just type merrilly away in Word (so that I can spellcheck) and then copy and paste into Bloggers own Publishing/Create Post facility. this time I'm not using word but straight into Notepad so that there is no hidden characters or code

Restore the PC back to Factory Settings

As much as I tried it finally became impossible to work on my PC, all the programmes began to crash after a few minutes working with them, one by one they all started to fail in some way, and the final straw was loosing my internet connection. Despite the countless Windows error messages I just needed to keep going until I could find a time slot to restore the operating system and then install my apps and the countless little utilities and freebies. Then of course I have to remember how to achieve all the customising that goes into Windows and Office so that the PC feels somewhere near familiar.

During the last week I was cadging my way around doing my work, for example MS Word would no longer open so I used a combination of Word Pad with a cut and paste into Outlook to spell check. I knew that I was only delaying the inevitable but I couldn’t find the time to do the job

So today I did my last checks, made certain that I had backed up my data and had a record of all the passwords and usernames (you know the ones you don’t often input because the computer remembers each time). Right, in goes the XP cd, and theres no turning back at that stage. Coming out the other side, at the moment, I can’t get any sound so I cant listen to music on YouTube while I’m working, and although I can receive emails at the moment I cant send them. The many times that I have done this I don’t think there has ever been a smooth restore and install operation.

The worst shock was when I tried to restore all my data files from my external hard drive and getting an error message of a corrupt disk that can’t be accessed. At this stage I’m a little worried. No I’m very worried because that’s all my photos, emails, address books; you name it its all on that 500gb hard drive. After a short time I take stock, its not as bad as I thought but still bad enough because I have parts of the data and certainly not the latest versions on various hard drives and DVDs, CDs and memory sticks. I decide to give it another go and switched the hard drive off at the mains before plugging it into another machine, wow it worked I am saved. Of course I work on the basis that I have a copy of all files on the tower and a backup on the hard drive, but the towers hard drive had been wiped and with it my files. Next time I will make a back up of the back up, a bit excessive but a necessity. So here I am with my pics and ready to blog on . Amazing I have just noticed that my new fresh installation of MS Word does not recognise the word Blog in the spellchecker.

The Strange Ways Ladies

Tuesday 1st July

A few years ago I was involved in a training programme organised by Creative Alliance, this course took us through making a living as an artist and everything I do is an extension of what I learnt on the course. The artists where split up into groups: Photographers, Visual Artists and another group whom came under the great banner heading of "Off the Wall" whose work involved sculpture and installation etc.

Artists from the "Off The Wall" stream have joined together for projects and are known collectively as Strange Ways individually they are: Angel Stripe, Annette Bowery, Avril Elward, Elena Cassidy-Smith, Fung Ye Tsang, Harmeet Chagger-Khan, Helen Grundy and Sharon Walford.

Their shared objective or Mission Statement says it all: "We are interested in engaging and attracting new audiences who may not encounter art on a daily basis for cultural, social or geographic reasons. We are linked by a common philosophy rather than common types of artwork. This gives us a coherent identity but ensures our work is diverse and interesting."

They had a show last week at the Edge in Cheapside, Digbeth. Birmingham. and I wanted to go along first of all because I like their thought provoking work but also they had the launch and preview on a Tuesday night instead of Thursday like every art event that happens in this city, and Thursday is one night in the week I cant make.

There were lots of people there whom because I cant make Thursday nights I don't make contact with that often it was good to see Annie Loughrin from Creative Alliance, Noel Dunne who told me how his recovery is going after the weekend at Glastonbury and Harry Palmer the driving force behind the The Worlds First Dedicated Eccentric Newspaper "The Eccentric City". With features on A Postman's Diary, The Moon Walking Club, The Wolverhampton Hermit and the Art of Pregnancy a few jottings about some idiot taking photographs of dumped burnt out car wrecks shouldn't be out of place with Cycling Ireland Without a Map and others. Watch this space and look out for your copy.

Quick Backup before my hard drive gives up completly.

Doing a little bit of of multi tasking, writing the blog while at the same time desperatley doing a hard drive back

For about 2 weeks my hard drive has been showing signs of going to that PC World in the sky, you know somethings wrong when you turn on the machine and it takes a good minute of blank screen before Windows begins to boot and during that time theres a load clicking sound. I was quite content thinking that all my data was backed up and then I realised that the latest backup was from the C: drive to the D; drive which is nothing more than a partition on my hard drive, yes the very hard drive that is about to give up the ghost. The PC is in mess at the moment with application programmes crashing others not even opening just giving me that famous "Contact Microsoft" error message. In fact I'm making these jottings in my Outlook email programme so that I can do a spell check and formatt the text.

So Close Yet So Far

A very busy week and no time to blog so here's a catch up all in one go.

Monday 30th June

On Monday I had to drive to Exeter and on the return journey we got caught in a long traffic jam so for an a hour we slowly moved along and then at the end of the queue there was something that I can only define as mental cruelty. The reason for the jam was a car fire and not just any car but a Range Rover, now Range Rovers are BIG and have lots of good surface areas but also the steel used in their manufacture responds well to a good bit of arson or in this case a bit of extreme overheating. It seems that all the car manufacturers use different types of steel in their cars and Range Rovers always produce great markings. And there is this beautiful burnt out specimen on the motorway hard shoulder just a few feet away from me as we pass it but of course I cant do anything because you cant stop on the motorway, If you can think of a good excuse that I can give blagg an excuse to get out a take some photos I will be extremely indebted.