30 12 2022

Still looks like St G is being tickled to death by a big kitten... 

and the Last supper dosnt bear thinking about. 

And the stuff I can't organise for the improved website and the photos I cant store elsewhere and the general frustration of life - well, it all made for interesting dreams.
 

27 12 2022

 Got in a decent days slog yesterday, despite festivities - and totally screwed up. Need to reconnect with the ideas? 

25 12 2022

Bad photo of Last Orders :) but its cracking on. St George etc on hold, its too difficult. Actually everything I'm on is too difficult, but its all at that stage where it just has to be enacted and understood later. If at all.

Here's a Christmas deer on the floor of the Cafe du Pont.
 

20 12 2022

Calling the boat one finished, which leaves only one of them unfinished... and this precious thang to hammer. It has already changed a lot since I took this snap, before lunch - 

 

13 12 2022

 Rather pleased with this resolution of an image previously thought to be finished... will now move it out of the studio to avoid further fiddling.

Also pleased to find a weird paint in my stock - seem to be all out of any yellows so in desperation opened a tube called yellow glaze which is transparent and very like lemon curd. Smashed it all over everything that has been worrying me. 

Got a full studio day to repair the damage. Working with fancy glazes in artificial light really is collaborating with the darkness. Ha!

08 12 2022 Dex Wright

 Here's Dex Wright, taken from a photo with his co-workers The Grim Beepers.

And an interview:

The Sunday Underbelly Oct 2021 DEX WRIGHT unedited full interview by LCRFMLincoln | Mixcloud

I'd forgotten that flat Lincolnshire accent... but not his commitment to going against the flow. 

So: we met somewhere (??cant remember) when I held the Artescape Fellowship in 1991. Wherever it was we met, I invited him round. I knew which day he would turn up - two days afterwards was too keen, longer than three was too late - and when indeed he arrived as predicted (with a bunch of wild flowers) he was perturbed by my prediction. No doubt this influenced our relationship.

We were lovers, we were collaborators. I was some many years older than him, he 24, me 42, which seemed irrelevant. To whom might it be relevant? Well, there was the nasty moment when I though I might be pregnant - which is how I found out I was menopausal. We rarely spoke of these things though, painting and sculpture were our lingua franca. His life intruded from time to time; I was vegan, he was not only omnivore but shot birds on the family estate. His was the Little Lord of the village. People actually touched their forelocks when he passed. He lied to me a lot, no doubt thinking it was easier. He would leave me early on a Saturday morning to go to the shoot, saying something quite different: but then we'd bump into one of his friends and 'good days shooting' would be mentioned. I pretended not to notice. How could I expect to change him?

There were the little kindnesses too, he could be very empathic when not distressed. I recall an ear cuff he suddenly bought me (=money was always tight for us both) because he clocked I liked it. There was the meeting with the Queen Mother at the Hayward, totally accidental but impactive; we both painted the event. There was the little picture of us kissing, painted onto Elastoplast and stuck on a box - 

We passed the Christmas meal together in a resturant with his family, my introduction to them. His mother had been at the Slade and seemed fairly accepting; the father, a farmer, frankly curious without asking questions. Dex lived in the family home but had his own rooms so my coming and going was never remarked upon. We slept on a horsehair mattress. We ate mushrooms that grew on the lawn with eggs from the hens that pottered about. First time I'd taken an egg from under a hen...

He wore his dead grandfathers clothes, which were fairly smashing and of course beautifully made and in excellent condition. He derived comfort from them. He had been abused as a child by a distant family member and was all-but consumed with hatred for the man, spending a deal of time plotting murder. I tried to help him channel that into the work.

Outside of his place he was a disaster. I took him to London for a party, from which he absented himself. He disappeared - I wasn't worried. Until he turned up in the middle of the night having had to climb over the security fences, furious with me for not going to look for him. He might have killed himself, he said. This was taking in loco parentis too far, I figured, and on getting back to Lincoln we politely distanced ourselves from each other.

But we kept in touch. I  got him an exhibition somewhere, small event but  a start. He turned up in Amsterdam for Biekes expo where he ran into Ian.  And after that every few years we'd touch base... when he lived in Spain with a Spanish girl, which didn't last; when he became a father. 

Recently I suggested he visited a councillor as his home life was shambolic. He said he'd had a go and they tried to put him on antipsychotics. 

 - And latterly I was to do an installation for 10 Digital Place... 

dreadfully heavy hearted at his death. 

05 12 2022

 

Dex has died.... think he must have been 54. Just beginning, just getting recognition for his amazing work. So many memories; managed to finish these three death-boat pictures with him in mind. 

He died of covid complications, ie refusing to be jabbed and distancing himself from medics and drugs. I'm surprisingly angry with him.

What to do now with the installation we had prepared?? Wonder where he would have taken it... I was hunting for ways to animate it and failing, the pieces missed their lift to Lincoln. The show was for the end of this month. Perhaps the work - which was not slight, in terms of effort - can be used as a memorial in some way. Or perhaps I should bury it.

Dear man. There are many special memories. 

02 12 2022

 Very full painty day yesterday; put away the last supper as far too gloopy and must dry - and returned to the little death boats which are easier to deal with now the shock and loss of (especially) Bernards death are passing. Unfortunately... this means tidying and destroying the bright lively freshness and arriving at a more formal Dante/Virgil thang which, lets face it, better artists have dealt to death.

Awake most of the night with dreams - loving and caring blind baby with no belly button, what??Going to go rational today: walk, shop, clean out parrots.