Frozen Muzak

Imagine our delight when we discovered that there was a sculpture trail in The World of Pies (not to be confused with Wigan, which is a very inferior land of pastry). We were underwhelmed when we discovered that two of the crap local objects of mystery are part of the collection. Neither the neon lights at the railway station saying: "And there was light," nor the graffiti on the canal bridge saying: "And water made it wet" exactly enthused us. The sort of thing that proliferated when Lottery money was young and spent by people whose bicycle clips were too tight.

We wandered over to the parkland where the old paper mill used to be and had a wander round while it was still not raining. About half a mile along the trail to the main road we encountered a dirty great big block of concrete.

"And what's this supposed to be?" asked The Small Object of Desire, who's even less Avante Garde than I am.

"It's a fucking big lump of concrete," I explained.

"It can't just be a fucking big lump of concrete," she protested.

"Might be," I muttered.

"So what do you think it is?" she persisted.

"Dunno. I expect it signifies something or other."

"Look: there's a plaque at the top up there. What does it say?"

I wandered over, read the inscription on the plaque and wandered back.

"Well?"

"It says it's a fucking big lump of concrete."

Paper wonder

I can only marvel at the skill of people who can do stuff like this:

One of a bunch of astonishing bits of origami on Robert J Lang's site.

King of the B-Movies by Rocky Gallbladder (part one)

"King of the B-Movies" sprang by accident from the loins of The Rev. Ignatius Pubes (Mrs.) O.B.E.'s Cosy Corner a couple of years into its run and eventually came to supplant it. Whereas the Cosy Corner was sort of a topical mish-mash with a bit of an obsession for Stanley Baldwin and Muffin the Mule and its adverts for Whizzo the Wonder Duck-Whitener "King of the B-Movies" was an unholy mess of film, comics and radio references.

The basic premise of "King of the B-Movies" was that sense of being cheated when you came to watch the next episode of a Republic serial and found that far from the hero having to cheat death by inches as the car plummeted over the cliff he's gotten out, gone home and made himself a cup of tea long before the car had even started rolling down the hill. In the first few single strips there'd be a storyline of sorts, though with glaring continuity breaks between panels. When the strip became a full-pager continuity flew out of the window, with panels from entirely different stories barging in and upsetting the flow of what little storyline was going on.

This didn't last long. In fact, it didn't take long until I'd completely extinguished any continuity even within individual panels. By the time the first eight-page collection was issued my method of putting it together was to have the pages there and add art or lettering almost (but not quite) at random - sometimes an art panel with word balloons or captions left blank for future inspiration; sometimes a word balloon and/or caption just waiting for some art to be drawn around it.

As will be evident with these early examples, I'm not a good enough artist to really get away with this sort of nonsense and certainly not a good enough creative artist to not have to rely on swipes of other people's work. I didn't get any better, and "King of the B-Movies" got considerably dafter.

Statesmen

Pausing to take a photograph of the Duke of Wellington, a passing drunk congratulated me on my choice of subject.

Doodles

This was Edinburgh some time in the late eighties. Damned if I can remember who it was. Tippex(!) on black Canford paper.

A la recherce de scribbles past

These were done a long, long time ago. Before I convinced myself I couldn't do it. Most of these were done with a 0.1 cartographic nib and India ink on cartridge paper.

Whiskered bat

A drake shoveler (just coming out of eclipse plumage).
Brush and ink.

Bramblings

A badger

Grey Partridge

I couldn't do these for toffee these days, sadly.

Balaclava

I often get the impression, reading some of our national newspapers, that there is no art outside the confines of the M25. This is, of course, the purest nonsense. Our provincial galleries are more than just repositories for the local second-rate and Victorian pot-boilers: there is some seriously good stuff out there.

Nipping into Manchester Art Gallery I had a look at the current featured exhibitions (both very good, just a few weeks left to catch them) and then had a wander round the permanent exhibitions. It's a varied collection, though I tend to spend most of my time ogling the Valettes or else mooching round the Gallery of Craft and Design. This is a bad habit as this means that I tend to forget just how good some of the other works are. Much to my shame it was only by the purest chance that I happened to stop and pay proper attention to:

Balaclava, by Elizabeth Thompson, Lady Butler (1876)

The central figure was modelled by W.H. Pennington, an actor who had taken part in this action. Other veterans were also consulted and used as models.

The portrayal of the soldiers was controversial as it depicted the psychological effects of war rather than some martial glory. This is no triumphal set: it is a gathering of comrades after trauma and tragedy. Most of the main figures reek of exhaustion and concern for the well-being of their fellows coming back from the field. The depth of the detail is staggering: figures who would be background fillers or mere bodies in the wings are real people with pain, shock and worry in their eyes. You can almost feel the agonies of fatigue and injury, the body language showing this much more graphically than do the bloodstains and tears.

Pennington's pose itself is astonishing. He stands and stares you in the eyes but is completely out of it: eyes blank, slack-jawed and with his bloodstained sword held limply as if the merest irrelevance.

This painting is immensely moving seen in real life. I'd been stood standing, gobsmacked for a good ten minutes when an old chap next to me observed:

"That's a very powerful picture. Even the birds in the sky over the battlefield look shell-shocked."

And damn me, he was right.