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.

What a difference a day makes:

The problem with the washing machine was nothing more than the waste pipe coming away from the piping that takes the water down to the drain.

I went to the dentist first thing in the morning and had the tooth taken out, unbelievably I never experienced any pain at all, I was expecting an ache when the effect of the anaesthetic subsided but again not in the slightest.

and once again the pictures are formatting correct as you can see from this picture from the New Photography On Screen exhibion


Solihull College Fine Art Degree Show 2008 Birmingham Institute of Art and Design BA (Hons) Fine Art Degree Show

Its that time of the year when every night there's a degree show of some kind on first I went to the show at Solihull, I graduated here and its good to see friends who have passed through the college. I was very impressed with the work this year it showed a great deal of thought in the concepts. Very good.

I'm fascinated by the way students work develops over the three years of study painters show installations or sculpture and of course there is no better example of this change or evolution of an art practise than myself because when I joined I came from a background in watercolours and pencil drawing and came out the other end as a photographer.

So then onto the City of Birmingham show: This is massive in comparison to Solihull you realise this first as you have to fight your way through the masses congregated on the street outside then inside there are so many students and artwork on every wall and in every space its great fun but little chance to speak to the artist.


I'm not going to change and go looking for burnt out caravans

walking my 3 dogs through the park on Wednesday morning I got very excited when I saw black smoke coming from Slade Lane but it was something of a false alarm as it was only a caravan that had been set alight. The fire had only just been started and at that stage the flames had engulfed the van making it so hot that you couldn't pass it on the road. For once I didn't have my camera with me, I'm always taking shots in the park and nature reserve in particular I look out for a heron on the lake at the other end of the park but I recently gave up trying to get any decent shots because at the moment he is hiding behind the heavy summer coverage of leaves. I was in no rush to get the camera because caravans are made of fibre glass, wood, a very small amount of aluminium and a steel chassis that is generally covered in so much ash and therefore there is nothing worth taking a photo off.


When I returned with the camera I hoped there might be the odd markings amongst the mess perhaps the aluminium would produce a different angle on the metal but there was nothing really exciting to report, this was the first time that I had taken photos while the vehicle is still burning and its not a great experience with the smoke getting in your eyes.


Slade Lane has produced a few burnt cars for me as its an ideal dumping area. Its about 200 yards from any houses and separates the park and nature reserve from the waste ground fields. It used to be a short cut off the beaten track between Priory Road in Yardley Wood and Baldwins Lane in the Hall Green district of Birmingham, there's a ford across a stream of a river. The road was closed off to traffic a few years ago creating a dead end which attracts people dumping anything from building rubbish, furniture and thankfully the odd car.