View From Windowsill Bay

A Bit Sheepish

2012-01-12T13:59:00.004Z

Ah.. the season of wooly jumpers. Alright, a complete break from footballers - here’s some sheep that graze a field not far from here: I was up there the other day and thought what a perfect subject to kick off the new year. Okay you see sheep everywhere, we take them completely for granted - little dots of cotton wool slowly working their way around a field. Are they really intrinsically comic? To me they are gentle, placid creatures happy to mind their own business and extremely restful to sit nearby and quietly observe.
These ones are Norfolk Horned - an ancient breed and apparent precursors of the Suffolk Black-Faced strain which are also popular around here -some of Suffolk’s finest medieval towns and villages were built on the back of the wool business.

Me and Bobby Moore...

2012-01-09T13:03:00.021Z

I’m not a great lover of football anymore. I watch the occasional big game on tv and I still follow West Ham’s results in that Pavlovian saturday afternoon knee-jerk manner. And of course it remains a sort of lingua franca between men all around the world. But it’s changed a lot since I was a regular matchgoer. The strange middle-class-isation of the sport in the eighties and the influx of grotesque amounts of money (largely from Murdoch’s Sky project) have not been completely beneficial as far as I’m concerned. Last year I was saddened to read of the premature death of Bobby Moore’s son and it made me reflect on a little period of my life that once seemed so intense.

When I was small I would draw footballers incessantly. In fact for one phase that’s all I would draw. My Mum got a bit concerned I think and once said to me “I think you need a rest from footballers, draw something different”. But for 10 year old me there was nothing else ...

I suppose the brick reflects the new hooligan fashion of those days.

Oh look - it's the original Frank Lampard looking remarkably like his son!

More Violence! (Also note the careful observation of Puma and Adidas boots - v. important.)

I was actually born nearer to White Hart Lane than Upton Park (I only realised this when it was far too late), but we moved to Stratford in 1962. WHU won the F.A. Cup in '64, the European Cup Winners Cup in '65 and, as everybody knows, the 1966 World Cup. How could any little boy not want to grow up to be Bobby Moore?I was going to say I saw him play hundreds of times but that can’t be true. But it must have been scores and scores of games. In truth, he’d often have an indifferent match. He had a relaxed, nonchalent way with him but also some sort of star charisma that made him stand out from his team-mates (younger readers: think Beckham). When he ran from the tunnel (strolled would perhaps be more apt), he somehow appeared luminescent, the vibrant claret and blue and his blond curly hair catching the light. Six feet tall but he seemed bigger and had a natural authority that couldn’t help but reassure you. His play was always graceful, at times almost without effort. He never had the volatile saturnine edge of George Best, Bobby seemed more wholesome, but also good and kind and you instinctively felt that with Bob in charge of defence everything would turn out okay.

My Dad got to meet him a couple of times and said he appeared almost shy and lacking in confidence in real life. He certainly liked a drink. And he had an eye for the girls. And if he’d had the freedom of contract of today’s players he'd probably never have stayed at Upton Park (He wanted to go to Spurs at one point, but the old WH board wouldn’t wear it - instead they brought his mate Jimmy Greaves to UP).

Although I have photos inscribed to me from Bob I never did meet him face to face. The photo below is the closest I got...

This remarkable image appears in Bobby’s first ‘autobiography’ (Bobby Moore - My Soccer Story). It’s taken in Stratford Broadway, E.15, from outside Newham Town Hall. It’s 1964. Bob himself is holding the cup aloft on the coach, but... wait for it... below him in the crowd is ME (very blonde hair) on the shoulders of my uncle Kenny. Also there is my younger brother Matthew (pea jacket) astride my Dad and also my Grandad Charlie and Great Uncle John. I had been watching from the roof of The Puddings for hours waiting for the coach to arrive. Then when it did, my Dad and Kenny grabbed me and my brother and waded into the crowd to get us a closer look.

It remains quite clear as a memory. I remember how bizarre it seemed that grown men were sitting on top of traffic lights. Normal rules seemed suspended and anything appeared suddenly permissible. West Ham were on top of the world and everyone seemed so happy. And that’s how you begin a lifetime of footballing disappointment....

Come on Big Sam!

Owl Service

2011-12-14T21:47:00.005Z

There's no doubt that owls are special.

Catch a barn owl in your headlights and you think you've seen a ghost or an angel.

The classic owl hoot or t-wit-t-woo is the call of the tawny owl and there are few sounds more guaranteed to send a tingle down the spine.

This little sketch, a humble offering for the winter solstice, is probably a cross between the two. A tarn owl perhaps. Happy Yuletide.

Electrickery

2011-10-30T14:48:00.032Z

Inasmuch as I thought about them at all I used to dislike pylons. A chain of blots besmirching a much loved landscape. Etc. And I would happily put my name to any petition that sought to discourage their relentless march.

But a while ago drawing one made me look at them afresh.

And I realised I actually quite like their extraordinary height, their slowly tapering perpendiculars and intricate geometric symmetries.

And just as with weeds, once you've learned the name of something it’s harder to hate it. Pylons are officially called ‘transmission towers’ and they come in a multitude of styles and permutations. The most common are L2s and L6s but just when you think you have their measure you’ll spot one that doesn’t conform to anything you’ve previously seen.

Wouldn’t this look just dandy in the Turbine Hall ?....

(And as it turns out I'm not the only one: they even have their own Pylon Appreciation Society. Check it out.)

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William S. Burroughs and These Paranoid Times

2011-10-05T12:55:00.034+01:00

Bill Burroughs was an early literary hero of mine, mainly because he was so far out there. I read - or struggled through - The Naked Lunch just for respite from the Eng Lit A Level novels I was studying at school. I really had never read anything quite like it. A comic strip adaptation of the Mugwump sequence I attempted was soon discarded: I realised it would just be impossible.

I worked behind the bar in my parents' pub at the weekend for a bit of pocket money. A regular customer was Robert, a small middle-aged man of Indian origin who spent lengthy periods of the year abroad doing some unspecified job for Texas Instruments. With his hare-lip and mildly scarred face Robert had the slightly sinister air of a Peter Lorre-ish outsider figure, but he was well travelled and had a good knowledge of literature. If he’d been in the Middle East, as he often was, by the time he got back to the UK he had worked up quite a thirst and we always held a case of Jack Daniels bourbon just for him. On quiet Saturday lunchtimes after he’d knocked back a few he would tell me stories of his travels and one of these was of the time he lived in the same hotel in Paris as the writer William Burroughs. In suburban Essex I had scarcely met anyone who’d even heard of Burroughs at this point. “A strange man” Robert said, “I would look into his room occasionally and he’d just be sitting there staring out of the window....”

I never met Burroughs but I did see him read at an event in London once. And I made many drawings inspired by his writings. I haven't read him for a long time but I’ve been thinking about him again recently because one of his themes was the paranoia that begins to seep when big business and the machinery of state become too closely entwined.

I was observing this gorgeous dragonfly in my garden yesterday when I was startled by a loud thrashing engine noise above my head. I swung my lens upwards and framed this Apache Gunship circling and hovering around my patch. From one bug to another. I assume they’re practicing for some deployment in Afghanistan or somewhere. This is not so unusual. The Colchester Airborne Garrison is not that far away to the south and there are still USAF bases up in Lakenheath and Mildenhall. As a small boy I found soldiers thrilling. Watching the changing of the Horseguards at Whitehall, I felt proud and reassured to think that they were there to protect us. But now ...? I know they’re there to protect something, but I’m pretty certain it’s not my interests they care about....

This morning an unsolicited email from Amazon headed ‘Tilt’, informing me of some discounted Scott Walker albums. Firstly, I’ve never ever purchased an album from Amazon and secondly, how the hell do they know I like Scott Walker? Maybe that's what that helicopter was finding out? The Soviet Bloc was notorious for keeping it’s citizens under constant surveillance lest they think an ideologically unsound thought. We appear to be adopting similar if more advanced techniques in order to monitor and encourage the public's spending habits. Is there a future just around the corner where we’ll be arrested and taken for questioning for simply not buying enough? “Tell me, Meester Johnson, vhen vas ze last time you were in Next? And vere are ze receipts? And ve can find no ZZTV records of you in Westfield at all!”

Paranoia.... just paranoia....

Pushing The Envelope

2011-10-03T12:58:00.004+01:00

Some of my new envelope drawings can be seen (and even purchased) alongside many other nice bijou pieces by talented local artists as part of Gallery Q's 'Small is Beautiful' currently showing at Quay Theatre and Arts, Sudbury, Suffolk CO10 2AN. Until December 2.

In The Land of Grey and Pink....

2011-09-09T16:46:00.011+01:00

Today I'm looking through the ... bay window. And what do I see? The faces below are from my local town and although they look made up they are in fact all from real life - can you recognise someone you know? Or perhaps yourself....?

And to go with: a little helping of classic English whimsy-rock for no other reason than that the girl above and the grey and pink and it all sort of you get the picture...

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The Road To Ruin

2011-09-01T12:28:00.017+01:00

What is it that draws many of us to old abandoned buildings? For many years I thought it was just my own personal quirk but now there’s a whole internet subculture of ‘Urban Exploration’ dedicated to finding and documenting obscure and disused buildings and structures.

When I was a child, my corner of London still had plenty of WWII bombsites along with derelict and deserted warehouses. That’s all gone now (see Ghost Milk entry). But perhaps it gave me a hankering curiosity. Some need to always want to look inside. Just to see. Usually, what one finds is always the same detritus. But the aura of mystery and the small frisson of trespass remains.

Here’s a place I used to visit in Essex. A classic ruined 18th Century 'haunted' mansion - at the time it had become almost completely overgrown with creeper and bramble; every crevice sprouting with elder and buddleia. The only people that seemed to know about it were thieves and vandals. And me. I spent many afternoons up there hacking through the undergrowth to find a stone face staring blankly back at me. I felt as though I were discovering some lost Incan city.

Since that time, the house and it’s gardens have been rescued from decay by a Trust who are diligently restoring it to it’s former grandeur. Finally safe from the depradations of the antiquity raiders and the tendrils of nature, it can be visited on several open days each year when you will be guided around the good works.

Here’s a ruin from another age. This place can be found, almost incongruously, hidden tree-deep in otherwise bucolic Suffolk countryside. It’s a former chemical factory. I stumbled on it almost by accident and was suddenly transported back to ‘the Zone’ in Tarkovsky’s ‘Stalker’. Even the weedlife looks oddly mutated. Hope I don’t grow any extra fingers....

Where Have All The Flutterbys Gone?

2011-08-17T11:36:00.002+01:00

A couple of years ago, we had what can be called a real 'butterfly summer' around these parts. Never have I seen so many and of such wide variety. Everything seemed right in the world.

This year, in contrast, I've seen only a handful of Cabbage Whites and one or two Red Admirals (above). Hope this is just a seasonal blip and not a sign of anything more alarming...

One Swallow May Not Make A Summer ... But Four?

2011-08-12T18:13:00.025+01:00

Okay, after the darkness the light. Couldn't resist sharing these little fellows with you all. A family of swallows have been returning to my garage studio for as long as I've been here. They arrive back from Africa on virtually the same day each spring and it so gladdens my heart when I hear their chattering and chirruping again. They normally raise two broods each summer. This is this year's second clutch. Once they're big enough mum and dad encourage them outside for trial flights, guiding them and showing them how to hunt for insects. In between they come back to their perch to rest - at night they return to the little mud nest to sleep. By September they will gather together with the local flock and make that incredible flight south for the winter. A really remarkable little bird and a real privilege to share my space with them.

Bill Oddie and friend.

London Metamorphosis

2011-08-09T20:50:00.013+01:00

All this does take me right back - I wasn't involved in the 1980’s riots but I well remember the sense of young male excitement at seeing normal laws and rules suspended and not knowing what might happen next. Now it doesn't excite me, it just makes me depressed and concerned. I was listening to Radio Five-Live last night in bed and from the panicky and heightened reporting it appeared to be spreading right across London.

No doubt that most of what's happening is what they call 'recreational violence' with no point other than thieving and 'fun'. But you can't help reflect that we've built this culture where we send signals all the time that we value possessions and status above all else. How can we be surprised when people without cushy jobs in the city or the media suddenly decide to just help themselves?

I feel sorry for the small businesses that have felt the brunt of it all. I feel like there could be some political justification if they were marching on big multinational business but it seems to be mostly small family concerns being ransacked and burnt to the ground for no other reason than that they can. My gut feeling is that it will all peter out but what I dread now is the forthcoming weeks and months of endless analysis, enquiries, newspaper columns etc etc. The left will blame it on racism and economic deprivation - the right will want to bring back the birch, hanging and national service. In the end police powers will be even more beefed up and we'll all lose. Anyone would think we were back in the days of a Conservative Government....

I was looking for a drawing to illustrate this piece... but what do you do? What would be a suitable artistic response to all this? An angsty graphic of police stormtroopers? An ink spattered apocalypse of menacing hoodies, maybe some leading politicians wryly portrayed as looters? Other artists will be busy doing this right now: guns, fire, anger... but it’s all been done and it all seems a bit inadequate to be honest. So I’ll simply leave you with the lady above who wandered across my drawing board earlier today...

Sleep tight.

And to go with, the beautiful and incomparable Karen Dalton 'It's Alright' ...

Wanted ...and Found

2011-07-28T18:27:00.006+01:00

Found this old card when it fell out of a library book. Wonder if Tessa ever got her donkey?

In Praise of the Sketchbook

2011-07-21T11:01:00.023+01:00

The cloud drawing in the last post is not there because I thought it so great that I must share it - it’s there because that was what I happened to draw at that moment watching those clouds. It’s a sequence of scribbles, almost doodles based only on shapes I could see. But even as I’m looking and drawing, there’s a kind of editing and selecting going on. Decisions to slightly emphasise that particular curve, to perhaps omit that piece of ragged vapour or stretch this bit to make it more elegant and proportionally pleasing. Whenever we’re looking we’re also filtering and editing. In a way the drawing itself is merely the receipt of that mental transaction.

In the days when I was a student at Camberwell the venerable old school regarded itself as the last proper ‘drawing’ college. Ie. it still placed a premium on drawing from observation when other schools were adopting a freer, more laissez-faire approach. Art teaching seemed to be having a crisis at that point. No-one seemed to know what they were supposed to teach or indeed whether art could actually be taught at all.

But at Camberwell, the traditionalists were still just about clinging on. In the old Wilson Road annexe the ancient charcoal and graphite stained floorboards would creak under the weight of life-size plaster statues. To be honest by this time most of them were pushed into corners under cobwebbed dustsheets and I don’t remember drawing from them myself but we were required to be in the life-room at least once a week and to carry sketchbooks at all times. Coming from my background of comics and ‘imaginative’ drawing it took a while to get used to this new regimen. But oh, what a marvellous discipline it proved to be.

Sketchbooks are totally addictive and even now I’m never without one. I’ve amassed hundreds of them. Large under-the-arm ones; tiny pocket-sized ones. A small ‘Moleskine’ always in the car. An old ‘Silvine’ pad by the telly. I have ‘lucky’ ones and favourite ones. Some of them for observing; some for inventing; most a mixture of the two. They also function as unofficial diaries. Most pages take me back so precisely to where and when I was as I made the drawing.... priceless to me.

In truth I probably enjoy prying into most artists’ sketchbooks more than their finished work. The finished piece is the final polished performance if you like, but the sketchbooks take you behind the scenes, let you peek into the rehearsal room as ideas develop, thought processes begin to ravel. Mistakes, wrong turnings, naivety. All fascinating stuff because it’s a place you’re not really supposed to see.

Like a diary, a ‘proper’ sketchbook ought to be a private, secluded place to try things and to fail. To record fleeting errant thoughts and notions that may grow into something substantial or just as likely remain as stunted, feeble seedlings that deserve to be thinned away.

The only downside is that when you have amassed too many they are pretty much useless as a reference archive. Last week I went rooting through looking for a drawing, a study, of rain and puddles that I KNEW I’d made in the past few years. After an hour I just gave up. Flicking quickly through hundreds of images induces a sort of car-sick type nausea.

And talking of the good old days here’s a couple of shots of my student self enjoying a hearty breakfast (tea and Bensons by the look of things) and here’s a record that never seemed to be not playing on the student bar jukebox during my first year....

(photo: Joelle Depont)

Alone In A Cloud

2011-07-11T22:08:00.018+01:00

I’m a big fan of clouds. Very cheap entertainment. Going about my business in the yard today I couldn’t help but admire the huge banked up cumulus bee-ships unfurling and rolling out from horizon to horizon. Dark white and light black. East Anglia is good for skies they say. It’s known for the breadth and depth of them and the luminescent light that diffuses from them.

I suppose the most famous painter from this region is John Constable. Known for biscuit tins and calendars nowadays, in his time he was actually a bit of a revolutionary. He looked long and hard at nature, didn’t make any assumptions about what it was - he just looked until he saw. Skies and clouds were among his specialities. He was quite a student of them.

This marks the grave of two of the Constable family. John himself isn’t here but this is where he grew up - it was the place he came from. I think this is the grave of his aunt and uncle. It’s in a wonderfully tranquil little churchyard to be found after a gently undulating walk across a couple of meadows and through a herd of softly lowing cattle. The grave of John Nash is also here, war artist and brother of Paul Nash. There are worse places to end up.

For fellow lovers of Clouds: The Cloud Appreciation Society;
A Day With John Constable on Hampstead Heath (thanks Jeremy).

Ghost Milk

2011-07-05T20:06:00.028+01:00

I’ve mentioned Iain Sinclair on here before I think. He’s a fine writer and his painstaking documentation of the complex layers and strands of London history and culture is something of great interest to me. The parts of London he most often writes about are the parts where I have my roots. The places I came from and frequently return to. I have a slightly uneasy love/hate relationship with the capital and it’s something that crops up in my work now and then if you look out for it.

Sinclair's latest book - Ghost Milk : Calling Time on the Grand Project - focuses on the River Lea Valley and the 2012 Olympic site. A " scorching 400 page diatribe...a literary polemic, full of dazzling phrases and angry denunciation ". The site of the Olympic project is a place I knew very well. Marshgate Lane, Pudding Mill Lane, The Promenade and the toxic canals that dissected them. This is where I once rode my bike and climbed along the sewage pipes just as my father had done years before me. As an adult I frequently went back just to walk and draw and take photographs. It was perhaps the last real inner city wilderness and it was a place I felt very close to. Now it has been literally ring-fenced as the old fabric is swept away to make room for the shining gewgaw of the 2012 Olympic Games.

I could go on at length but better to read Sinclair.

"We are all suckling on this new chemical, this ghost milk, this substance that buffers between the old dream of London that I have and the computer generated, perfected, hard edged dream where nothing is what it looks like".

Ghost Milk will be available from 07/07/2011.

The Return of Git Boy

2011-07-03T17:36:00.032+01:00

I’ve recently enrolled on a short course in children’s book illustration with the brilliant and inspirational Rebecca Elliott. Illustrating a book for kids has been at the back of my mind ever since I first thought of going to art college. When I was growing up some of my strongest visual impressions of the outside world were from the books and pictures of artists like Edward Ardizzone, Charles Keeping, Thomas Henry and Pauline Baynes. Even as a young artist my idealised old age was as an elderly illustrator of slightly subversive children’s books pottering about his cottage garden like Ernest Shephard or Alfred Bestall.

I think there’s an impression that writing and drawing for children is somehow ‘easy’. That makes me think of the kind of people that used to say to my brother Matt: “why don’t you just write a hit record?” as though it were something that you could just knock off in an afternoon whenever you felt like it. There is a scrupulous art to writing and designing a good children’s book. Whether it is too exact a science for me remains to be seen...

But the search for stories has prompted me to prise open the old ‘pending’ drawer in my plan-chest, blow off the dust and revisit some older projects that never made it into the sunlight.

Here’s one from the early 1990's called ‘Git-Boy’. I was inspired, I think, by tabloid reports of some feral child up north called ‘Rat-boy’ who had compiled a jaw-dropping list of minor offences in a very short life. I re-imagined him as a sort of ‘Baby Crockett’ figure. In fact his first working name was ‘Baby Fukett’ (yes I know but this was then and it seemed the apogee of ‘dark & edgy’ wit to be sweary). For a while he became ‘Naughty Boy - the Little Pudding of Hatred’. Then someone I knew, otherwise very reputable, bought a car with a numberplate that went GT 8OY or something so obviously he became known (to us) as ‘Git Boy’ (to much hilarity) and I also thought it a perfect fit for my nascent character.

These are obviously just rough first layouts but they show the way I had begun to work - and still do - producing lots of small drawings (doodles often) and collaging them together to create some sort of narrative.

The stories - as far as they went (and they didn’t go far) - involved Gitsy (sometimes he was a small boy, other times a baby in a nappy) variously drinking, drug dealing, fighting and stealing, trying to have relationships with older women and generally feeling very fed up with his lot. I’d recently been enormously impressed by Jim Cartwright and Alan Clarke’s film Road and I think you can see the influence of that here. The male figures are generally feckless, depressed alcoholics. the women tearful and hard done by. It was determinedly violent and antisocial, urban (the back streets and wastelands of Bethnal Green I think were my model) and despondent. Perhaps it wouldn’t have made a very suitable children’s book.

By way of a theme tune I think only this man comes close to a musical equivalent of what I wanted to do with Git-Boy. I love this song (and it might interest you to know that the dark-haired girl on keyboards is now the pain medicine consultant at my local hospital. Lord, how time does fly!)

Come Into My Parlour...

2011-06-30T17:38:00.009+01:00

Here are two recent studio visitors. Actually I think the spider lives here. Well, loads do and they go about their business decorating the upper reaches of the room with their handiwork. I think we're going for that Miss Havisham look. The moth is a ‘fly-in’. I think it’s a Privet Hawkmoth. Quite big and impressive. And absolutely harmless. Just curious for a look around to see what’s what. One of the things I love are the small moments when people and wildlife overlap in a harmonious manner. We’re so lucky in Britain that everything that lives out there is benign. Nothing wants to hurt us. I only wish we would treat nature with a little reciprocal respect.

And here’s two art spiders. One by me for Insectopedia and the other by Odilon Redon, whose work I like very much.

And a little tune to go with: Wire's Blessed State.

Thomas Leer and The Long Mac

2011-06-27T21:43:00.015+01:00

Youth tribes in my young England never remained static. Fashions were always mutating and tastes shifting with the seasons. Styles were never quite as rigid and uniform as some of our latter-day style history gurus would have you believe.

Mods became skins became suedes and smoothies and hippies etc. Punk was no different. One faction took to wearing face-powder and capes and set up camp at the Blitz Rooms in Covent Garden (a former failed attempt at a West End pie & mash shop). But for those of us who didn’t look so good in pantaloons there was the Long Mac. The heavy fustian WW1 greatcoats beloved of the progressive rock hippies were replaced by our lightweight green military raincoats (U.S. preferably). This was where Punk went Prog I guess. No-one danced at Long Mac gigs. You would stand at the back nodding sagely, perhaps taking notes to effect a writerly air. The pockets in the macs were good for wedging paperbacks in so that the title was poking out: Albert Camus was popular, as was The Naked Lunch and Colin Wilson’s The Outsider. And anything with Nietsche's name on. It was all very earnest.

But it created some fantastically innovative music and performances. Cabaret Voltaire, Wire, Throbbing Gristle, Joy Division, The Human League, Soft Cell, The Normal, The The, Robert Rental, Thomas Leer are just the first few that spring to mind.

Thomas Leer is I think one of the great unsung influential figures in music at this time. I’d heard ‘Private Plane’/’International’ over the P.A. at a gig and immediately had to find out who it was. It’s irresistible layers of raw lo-fi synth sounds and almost ethereal, dreamy psychedelia (he had to whisper the vocals to avoid waking up his girlfriend in the bedroom where he recorded) made it quite unlike anything anyone else was doing. Maybe the first and greatest Post-Punk record.

Anyway, I tubed over to Rough Trade on Saturday afternoon and bought it and Robert Rental’s ‘Paralysis’ single. I took them both back to my mate Paul’s house in Epping and we sat up all night playing them over and over again. Sometimes, especially when you are young, you have these little moments where you see with sudden clarity where the future is and you know nothing will be quite the same again. These two home-made records suggested so many possibilities for where music could go next. We sat there chain-smoking Bensons and lifting the arm back to the beginning over and over again as we excitedly outlined a new direction for our own group and weighed up the cost of a Wasp synthesiser.

My band never did come up with anything as beguiling as ‘Private Plane’/’International’ . After a year of endless rehearsing, one single and a handful of gigs around Essex supporting our near neighbours Crass and The Poison Girls, I realised that my real love was with drawing and not making music. I got rid of my little P.A. system and went to art college. Over the next few years as The The took off, people often asked me if I regretted not staying with music. And I must admit I sometimes wondered myself. But the truth was I didn’t. I’d had fun but also boredom (b’dum b’dum) and I knew that it wasn’t where my heart lay.

A couple of years later, I had the opportunity to meet Thomas and tell him what a god-like genius I thought he was. He is a modest, quiet, charming Scotsman. We even talked about me doing some cover artwork. But as is the way of these things, it didn’t materialise. But I still often play his music and it sounds as vital now as it did then.

"Don't Stand Outside And Be Miserable - Come In And Be Fed Up!"

2011-06-25T13:44:00.022+01:00

When you are born in the East End of London, there are always certain assumptions made. I actually don’t like jellied eels much. Over the years I’ve tried them every now and again thinking perhaps I’ll finally acquire the elusive ‘taste’ but it’s never happened. Something about the combination of texture and flavour is not appealing to me. Stewed eels are supposed to be a subtler delicacy but I’ve never really taken to them either. When I was a very small boy in Walthamstow, I would play with the little girl from next door. Sometimes she would take me into her flat and I was both horrified and fascinated to see their bath was full of live eels. (Her dad would put them there temporarily before selling them on, but I assumed they were kept there all the time like an aquarium).

Anyway, eels are not for me, but Pie & Mash definitely is. A traditional staple food of the London working classes from at least the Victorian times, to be honest I think you are best introduced to it at a young age. I’ve taken people to my favourite shop a few times but I can tell by their slightly uncomfortable expressions and weakly feigned enthusiasm that it’s not really for them.

Every East Ender will have his own favourite pie-shop and there will be heated discussions about the qualities of each one. There are better looking shops but my own favourite is the ‘Noted Eel and Pie House’ in Leytonstone High Road. It was originally in Bow but moved to this location about thirty years ago. It always looks as though it opened last week and is likely to close next week. It had the air of a pop-up shop before anyone had coined that term. The cutlery is a jumble of mismatched knives forks and spoons, the tables and benchs of varying heights, some topped with stainless steel, others with marble, all with a big bottle of vinegar and a pot of pepper plonked down. The service hardly ever comes with a smile. I go there regularly with my Dad and we often have a wry laugh that having been regulars all that time we are still treated as though it’s the first time we’ve ever walked through the door! But we keep going back because of the pies. Pie & Mash pies are made in a traditionally slightly secretive way. Somehow steamed underneath and baked on top - they are a combination of crisp and soft pastry with juicy minced beef in gravy - they taste nothing like any sort of pie you would get anywhere else. Three pies and a double scoop of mash doused with a good ladleful of parsley sauce (‘licker’) and plenty of pepper and vinegar. I always have a can of pepsi with mine (this is slightly frowned upon by my old-school father who suggests tea or preferably nothing). This is comfort food of the highest order. I always leave here feeling replete and at ease with the world (and a bit fatter).

Like pie shops we all have our favourite fish n’ chip plaices. So here’s a drawing of mine. A world away from urban East London it’s in the genteel Suffolk coastal town of Aldeburgh. It’s certainly no secret and sometimes you can queue for three-quarters of an hour but it’s always worth it. The fish are freshly caught in the sea that morning, the golden batter is crisp and barely greasy and the chips are perfectly fried in beef dripping. The ladies behind the counter are always cheerful and super-efficient. And perhaps best of all, you take your hot package through the alleyway and onto the long shingle beach and sit and scoff while watching the north sea rolling in. The seagulls will patiently hover nearby but a word of warning: don’t feed them - there’s now a £1000 fine! Fish and chips don’t get better than this...

Bon Apetit!

For anyone interested in the history of pies and eels there’s a really good book by Chris Clunn called ‘Eels, Pies and Mash’ with far more information than I can offer here. It may be hard to find now but here are some of Chris’ excellent photographs.

Can You Guess What It Is Yet?

2011-06-22T21:16:00.009+01:00

I was lucky enough to meet the great Bruno Richard in Paris in the early 1980’s and overnight became heavily influenced by his transgressive Elles Sont de Sortie project. I began producing lots of stuff like this - I had a strong desire to make an aggressively visceral way of drawing that would in some way mirror the cultural and political atmosphere of that time. You don’t have to listen to too many punk records to sense the frustration in the air at the beginning of that decade. But somehow Thatcher, Murdoch and the corporate state, one way or another managed to marginalise a lot of that feeling. Council house dwellers were enabled to buy their homes and ordinary people were encouraged to buy into the stockmarket as the national utilities were all put up for sale. Amongst the young creative types that I knew, ideology began to give way to the pragmatism of getting onto the property ladder, filing tax returns and filling up that filofax with all those lucrative contacts. I carried on producing ‘angry’ looking artwork for a while but increasingly began to feel looked upon as a quaint but misguided soul. Anger just wasn't cool anymore. It took a while for that to sink in.

Actually I still really like this stuff and can’t understand why I don’t work in this manner nowadays.

To add a bit of period flavour, here's another big influence, the brilliant JG Thirlwell (don't call him Foetus!) as Clint Ruin here performing 'Ghost Rider' with Marc Almond:

"Their Tiny Racing Hearts..."

2011-06-21T08:56:00.016+01:00

A couple of birdspreads from recent sketchbooks...

Elbow have long been among my favourite current groups. But I like them even more since those songs about birds on their last album.

Bird activity is at it’s annual peak here. My garden sounds like a school playground with squadrons of sparrows and tits and finches and blackbirds and woodpeckers and crows whooping and swooping from bush to tree to rooftop to birdtable. When I wander out in the morning with their food I feel like I’m stepping into some extraordinary Disney fantasy.

In my studio fledgling swallows are circling over my head shepherded with shrill squeaks and squawks from mum and dad. I love it when they’re in residence. This year they arrived back from Africa on exactly the same day as last year. I know this because I’ve started to log things like this (my excite-o-meter is calibrated to a very low threshold these days). They sit on a perch and talk to each other for ages - I feel like an eavesdropper - a complicated series of chirrups often ending with that decaying ‘chiiiirrrrrrrrr’. Noone can tell me they aren’t having conversations.

Birds remain so fascinating because we still know so little about them. How do they find their way from South Africa to my garage/studio every year on the same day? (I’ve got friends that can’t find their way from Wanstead to here). Do they follow the sun and the stars? Or is it the pull of magnetic fields? There are lots of theories, lots of ‘may’, ‘might’ and ‘perhaps’ but no-one seems to know properly.

Anyway, here’s a fresh face that flew in last week. A nondescript little brown bird - I couldn’t quite place him - not a dunnock, not a whitethroat. I reached for my bird book and was delighted to identify him as a nightingale. He didn’t sing but he seemed a spirited little fellow who only reluctantly let me give him a hand to get back to the great outdoors.

“...what we gonna do with you?... same tail every time....”

The Third Man...

2011-04-26T20:43:00.003+01:00

Walked past me and he just kept going....

The Pale Corridor

2011-03-07T21:14:00.002Z

More trees. Maybe it's going to be this year's theme?

Red Bole

2011-01-24T10:29:00.005Z

Tree by me, words by Alasdair Gray.

Here's Where...

2010-11-13T21:58:00.006Z

This was snapped half hour or so after I’d been scraped off the tarmac by some kindly ambulancemen having had a particularly nasty cycle smash. What you can't see is my snapped pelvis and my broken left shoulder. I’m smiling because I’ve been given a huge dose of morphine and I’ve just seen the beautiful young nurse who’s going to clean my wounds.

My heartfelt thanks to the absolutely wonderful staff at The West Suffolk Hospital in Bury St Edmunds who glued me, stitched me, set my smashed bones and generally nursed me back to my old self. Humpty Dumpty should have had the NHS - truly one of the great achievements of the civilised world.

Anyway, that’s where I’ve been recently. Normal service will be resumed shortly.

(photo: Gerard Johnson)

Where to from here?

2010-07-20T10:17:00.002+01:00

Three Hideouts

2010-07-20T10:09:00.006+01:00

Offside

2010-06-12T09:24:00.002+01:00

Things I Never Leave Home Without...

2010-05-16T08:54:00.001+01:00

Got Cute If Ya Wan' It....

2010-05-14T08:13:00.000+01:00

Anyone passing this way is liable to get roped in to model. Some rabbits have recently set up warren at the end of my garden and have been happily munching away all my most prized green stuff. They've had to be deported but not before assisting me in the studio...

Urban Fox

2010-05-10T09:09:00.008+01:00

All the urban foxes I’ve seen tend to be scrawny shadowy creatures. But sometimes in the country I’ve occasioned on a big red healthy looking specimen. And you both stop in your tracks and you’re looking at each other, both weighing up the situation and there’s something that never ceases to be magical and extraordinary about that...

New signed limited edition screenprint now available for a bargain £45 from Artswipe. Tally ho...

Election Night Blues?

2010-05-02T15:01:00.011+01:00

If you're in or about London on Election night, pop down to the Rag Factory at 16 Heneage Street, E1 (just off Brick Lane). Loads of super groovesque new prints and artwork from a motley gang of urban art terrorist types. Two DJs and lots of beer are promised and the chance to collect some exclusive limited edition prints at very reasonable prices.

Also available will be the new issue of Artswipe newspaper containing, amongst other things, interview with and rare artwork by Andy Dog who has also designed a superb brand new screenprint just for the event (above).

'Hang 'Em High' continues until Sunday 9th May.

more details: Artswipe

More Monkey Business...

2010-03-20T13:00:00.003Z

I love drawing 'monkeys'. I've been back to the zoo this month filling up sketchbooks with 1001 ideas. This spread looks a bit messy but I think it does capture the mad energy of the crazy Chimpanzee gang at Colchester. I think I'll work these up into a print. Maybe there's even a book there. We'll see. More soon.

The 3 Strangers

2010-03-20T12:59:00.002Z

Next Show...

2010-02-27T20:30:00.004Z

Gerard and Peter's film...

2010-02-12T21:28:00.001Z

...out now!

Bill Ellis

2010-02-10T22:22:00.006Z

A show by a very good friend and former collaborator. Runs until 30th March - if you're in South London, pop along...

Posy Simmonds

2010-02-04T13:39:00.009Z

I’m not normally inclined to giving plugs or recommendations here - it would just become endless list-making. But once in a while I’ll make an exception. I stopped reading comics (or graphic novels) a few years ago. Despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that I spent a large part of my teens and twenties reading, collecting, drawing and publishing them, I eventually became a bit bored with the form. It began to seem, even at it’s best, neither fish nor fowl and in that way, always a little unsatisfying (to me).

But Posy Simmonds is a class apart from most comic book illustrators. Her light touch belies a shrewd eye and ear. I marvel at this work. No flashiness or designery cleverness - everything quietly noticed and gently stated. In ‘Tamara Drewe’ she creates a wonderfully detailed and believable world that derives nothing from other comics and everything from just looking at what is actually going on around her. Warm, funny, moving, involving.

Brilliant stuff.

Digital Residue

2010-02-03T21:35:00.003Z

I much prefer working with pen on paper. But these days one more often than not finds oneself constructing things completely within the computer - no originals actually exist.

Simply put - for the non-artist - images can be constructed bit by bit on individual digital layers and then tweaked until they are 'perfect'.

The above image is simply a merge of rejected layers from a recent design. Load of rubbish really... but sort of interesting nonetheless....

Old Man At The Zoo

2010-02-03T21:26:00.012Z

'Bob'

For a couple of years after 2000 and into the noughties the only friends I had were chimpanzees....

I started to go off the rails after my dog died in 2000. And then in Feb 2001 my girlfriend threw in the towel as well ...

I decided I needed the company of wolves. I began going to Colchester Zoo. Every week. At first to the wolfpack because they reminded me of my dog. But the wolves were nervy and self-contained and happy in their own pack and they had no interest in me. I moved on to the big cats. Big, gorgeous, predatory machines. And they look right through you. I’d squash my face against the reinforced glass wall and look deep into those huge perfectly steady golden eyes. But nothing reflects. I didn’t register on their radar.

Sooner or later I found myself shuffling up to the primates. My last relationship with a big ape was Guy the Gorilla at Regent’s Park Zoo in the nineteen-sixties. He was the reason I loved to go. My family would traipse around looking for somewhere to eat. And my nine year old self would make excuses to keep returning to look at poor old Guy. Massive, magnificent, bored and depressed Guy. The real King Kong.

Anyway, for a couple of years in the early Noughties, these chimps at Colchester were the only friends I had. Drizzly monday mornings, I’d nestle down on my sketching stool, pull my collar up and watch with delight and rapture and try and jot down some pencil impressions. Within a few weeks the younger ones recognised me and would signal my arrival with screams and excited thumping and kicking on the glass and would show curiosity in seeing my drawings afterwards.

The alpha male of this group was an old man named Bob. Not the biggest of the troop, not the loudest, but he carried a quiet authority and a nod or a gesture from him was enough to keep things just the way he liked. Well, apart from the young ones, who seemed as wayward and mischievous as any teenage humans. In response to frequent tormenting and boisterousness, Bob would eventually raise his voice and occasionally give one of them a clip around the ear and things would settle down again...

Chimpanzees are immensely strong and in the wild will ferociously defend their territory against rival troops. They have been known to use weapons, commit genocide (like humans) and even eat their own kind. When I was a child, they were perceived as cuddly little doll-like creatures like Tarzan’s Cheetah. Gorillas. on the other hand, were regarded, thanks to King Kong, as being brutal, aggressive, threatening creatures. But now the reverse seems to be the real case.

Random Sketchbook

2010-01-29T18:42:00.006Z

Hyena

Hosta

...whoops it's January and I'm falling behind already! Been busy working away but on stuff that I'll preview here at a later date. In the meantime a couple of contrasting bits from recent sketchbooks... More soon.

Hats On

2010-01-06T15:51:00.006Z

Can you tell that it's still a bit nippy round here?

At The Turn of the Year...

2009-12-31T18:18:00.004Z

...an oldie, but it still has a certain something.

Happy New Year. X

Boxing Day Triptych

2009-12-28T17:39:00.021Z

...and then I watched these little fellows as they sat watching Christmas TV.

Titmouse On My Trail

2009-12-22T18:34:00.004Z

All this snow looks fabulous but it's too cold to go out and draw. So I stayed in the warm and watched these little fellows through my window...

Christmas Print

2009-12-16T16:34:00.009Z

For the past ten years or so I've always made a drawing for Christmas. This gets used on a card etc. Since seeing a rare White Hart in Thetford forest earlier this year I've been thinking about the mythological and ghost-like qualities of deer, so this year's subject sort of chose itself. I normally pick a line of poetry or a quote from a favourite writer as a text. This year it's William Blake, from Proverbs of Hell, 1790.

From the December sketchbook

2009-12-16T16:30:00.016Z

I was sitting quietly sketching shoppers in Cambridge last week. A young indian guy comes up and looks over my shoulder: "You should get yourself a digital camera mate".

New Prints

2009-12-09T17:24:00.005Z

Two new prints designed for Helen Edwards and Infinity Bunce's bumper Christmas exhibition at Shoreditch Town Hall.

Potter on Rupert

2009-11-17T22:45:00.003Z

Dennis Potter was not only the grandson of one of our great drawing heroines Beatrix Potter, but also a wonderfully creative TV playwright. Here are his thoughts on Rupert Murdoch. Fifteen years old but still completely relevant.

Kindly Uncle Rupert

2009-11-12T14:01:00.002Z

The Holy Switch Board

2009-11-10T23:16:00.005Z

This will mean nothing unless you know what it means...

Hackney Hospital 1979

2009-11-09T23:20:00.010Z

Been walking not drinking recently.

And reading.

Iain Sinclair’s ‘Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire’. I’m a long-time Sinclair fan.
But this one is particularly redolent for me. Long-forgotten names and places rise from these pages like an evening mist. 1970’s Alternative London. My first proper job, between art schools, was at Hackney Hospital on Homerton High Street. Paid to paint life-size illustrations of the Whitechapel Waste for the walls of the London Hospital. It’s a complicated story and involves the Elephant Man and anarchist art squats in Murder Street and it’s something to go into at greater depth at a later point. In the meantime, here’s me brooding on a requisitioned old scooter that I smuggled up into one of the deserted floors of the block we were given as a ‘studio’. I had a vague notion of restoring it but it never happened...

The Gates of Hell

2009-10-31T19:40:00.007Z

A couple of miles south of here is the site of the "Most Haunted House in England", Borley Rectory. Numerous books have been written about it and there are plenty of websites. I've taken people up there many times but in truth, there's little now to see. No signs lead to Borley, the church is always locked and the locals actively discourage tourists and ghosthunters. The house itself burnt down in 1939 and bungalows have been built on the site. All that remains of the old estate are these gates that I snapped earlier this evening. Happy Halloween...

Mum

2009-10-24T12:17:00.003+01:00

Last drawing.

Shoreditch Types...

2009-10-14T17:42:00.005+01:00

For one reason or another I sometimes find myself in the Shoreditch area of London. When I first knew it decades ago, it was a gloomy, Dickensian labyrinth of tight cobbled lanes and alleyways connecting shadowy Victorian railway arches, decaying warehouses and dormant manufacturing workshops. Like other pockets of forgotten and unfashionable London at the time, it had a distinctly eerie ghost-town atmosphere. Now of course, it is far, far from that. A super-fashionable ‘artistic’ quarter, the factories and shops have long given way to ‘NY-style loft apartments’ and bars, galleries, bars and more bars encourage the streets to teem with revellers almost 24 hours a day. Not really my cup of tea. But the strenuous sartorial efforts of some of these ‘bohemians’ still amuse. To misquote Garrison Keilor: “Hoxton Square - where the women are strong, the children average, and the men dress like village idiots...”

Big Bird

2009-10-14T17:39:00.005+01:00

Over the last two years I’ve occasionally seen a large broad-winged bird circling high on the thermals of the wide Suffolk skies near where I live. Now I’m pretty familiar with all the usual suspects, but once in a while you catch something from the corner of your eye and you just think “what was that?” I did once have a camera in the car with me, but by the time I’d pulled over and got the lens on it it was heading for the horizon and could have been anything. Another time, it appeared to hover directly above me and I watched it long enough to be able to grab an envelope and do this little memory sketch shortly afterwards. It’s a Buzzard. They’re more common in the West of Britain, but increasingly they seem to be turning up in the East, apparently swept here by strong winds.

Eugene

2009-10-10T15:19:00.007+01:00

Just for a change a drawing not by me, but by my young brother Eugene. Eugene went through a bit of a ska/2-tone phase when he was at school and this drawing is from that time. It could be The Specials but I think it's a made-up group. I just love the attention to the smallest details. Eugene was a talented drawrer and briefly toyed with the idea of going to art college, but he decided his interests lay elsewhere. Eugene died suddenly in 1989. We still really miss him and talk about him often.

Small Chap with Large Hair

2009-10-05T15:29:00.004+01:00

This fellow walked past me in Bury St Edmunds yesterday - all smart in fitted overcoat, shiny cuban-heeled winkle-pickers and fashionably huge hair. But it was a very blustery day and I thought he and his hair were about to take off at any moment...

2 Girls...

2009-10-02T22:43:00.003+01:00

2 girls in the street. Still in 'Fish Tank' mode maybe....

Cambridge

2009-10-02T22:42:00.002+01:00

A few street studies from Cambridge earlier this week. Was there to catch up with the wonderful Darwin exhibition at the Fitzwilliam and also Andrea Arnold’s tough but tender little film ‘Fish Tank’. Both recommended.

S.

2009-10-02T22:40:00.002+01:00

A fifteen minute pencil sketch of one of my favourite models. (42 x 59.4 cm.)

Handy...

2009-10-02T22:38:00.003+01:00

Took a couple of quick reference photos of my hands the other day for a drawing I was working on. The colour echoes are completely co-incidental but I quite like it. I used to have quite slender little hands, long and sensitive ‘artists’ fingers. But judging from this I seem to be ending up with my dad’s hands - pudgy little ex-boxers dukes.

The The at Shepherd's Bush

2009-09-25T22:22:00.008+01:00

Here’s a little rarity. A quick thumbnail of brother Matt and his group onstage at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire 6/4/00. This was being used as a bookmark in a long abandoned novel and only fell out onto the carpet a couple of weeks ago - I vaguely remember jotting it down in situ as the set opened. But why, I don’t know - I have rarely ever drawn live bands. The only other time was a Television gig in the late seventies. Tom Verlaine and his band projected a slightly more cerebral experience than most punk groups at the time and it probably seemed (to my aspiring teenage mind) more appropriate to sit and sketch rather than just trash the seats and throw plastic lager glasses... sadly those drawings seem to have been lost for good. Perhaps just as well....

An East Anglian Alp

2009-09-25T22:17:00.004+01:00

I love walking big hills and small mountains. Sadly, Suffolk only has a few... sometimes you just have to improvise.

Local Colour

2009-09-24T16:11:00.004+01:00

... not all abstractions. A spread of local types from last week.

Vague Creatures

2009-09-24T14:34:00.006+01:00

My work seems to be undergoing some sort of abstract shift lately. Sketchbooks are filling up with this sort of thing... don't know what it means yet but kindof like it...

'Tony'

2009-09-24T14:24:00.010+01:00

Went to the Cambridge Film Festival to see my brother Gerard's first full length film 'Tony'. Very black and very enjoyable, it will be properly released early next year - more can be found out about it here. In the meantime, a little thumbnail sketch from ten years ago: Gerry engrossed in one of his favourite books - 'Halliwell's Film Guide' ....

Skulls

2009-09-15T09:20:00.026+01:00

Rather like the word “cool”, skulls have become a terribly lazy cliche in the visual grammar of the modern world. They are so ubiquitous that they almost don’t register anymore. But sometimes you come across something in it’s original context and it is still powerful enough to make you look twice. Here's a handful of images from local churches.

The churches in East Anglia are it's real jewels. They are cool and dark and musty smelling but get to know them and each one has it’s own atmosphere, it’s own characteristics, and it’s own intriguing treasures. Some are overblown and pretentious, others touching in their artless simplicity. But all are wonderful places to quietly poke around or just to sit and contemplate matters of spiritual (or not) concern.

(The definitive guidebook is Mortlock's Guide to Suffolk Churches. But there is also a superb and comprehensive online guide to the churches of Suffolk and Norfolk here. But you can’t beat getting out on foot and visiting a few of them.)

The Two Puddings

2009-09-13T12:57:00.008+01:00

The 'Puddings' was my Mum and Dad's pub in Stratford E.15 and where we lived in the 1960's. The 'Devil's Kitchen' was a nightclub/dance hall above the pub and run by my Dad and his brothers and was decorated like a psychedelic ghost train with day-glo murals of ghouls and monsters all lit with ultra-violet light. It made a massive and indelible impression on my young mind and I loved playing in there during the day. Not too many pictures of it's interior remain but this old poster is very evocative...

Someone

2009-09-13T12:54:00.002+01:00

No idea who this is. I often like to just sit and draw people as they come and go about their business. You soon learn to draw very fast. I try to pin down facial expressions, not always successfully. This girl looks a bit in distress but she was probably just laughing. But I like it.

On and Off The Buses...

2009-09-12T18:03:00.006+01:00

... in Forest Gate. From one of last year's sketchbooks.

Boris

2009-09-12T12:48:00.012+01:00

Two dead blackbirds in the garden this week. Don’t know what that’s about but it prompted me to post this drawing of Boris. Boris was the resident cock blackbird a couple of years ago. He kept a weather eye over his patch from deep inside the laurel bush. He quite quickly became tame and would come just inside the the kitchen door and chirp for food. Soon he would take mealworms from my hand with no worries at all. He was a good father and husband, foraging tirelessly to provide for his family. At the end of one summer he just disappeared and I never saw him again...

His place has been taken by Bert - another hard-working patriarch. But Bert is altogether more wary and shows little curiosity about people - much more interested in fighting with a rival male blackbird from next door - they both frequently appear with feathers missing and looking generally roughed up.

(below is Boris on his favourite perch in my studio. I share my work space with all sorts of wildlife - it's both an amazing and comforting privilege).

Life Class

2009-09-11T13:42:00.009+01:00

Once a week I try to meet up with a small group of fellow artists and a model and we draw 'from life' for a few hours. I believe the life class is as fundamental to an artist's practice as the gym is to an athlete. Sometimes the results can be artworks in themselves. But often it's simply the purest way of keeping your vision sharp - if you don't use it you'll lose it... and so forth. Here are a couple of quick sketchbook poses from this week's session... the model was heavily pregnant and made for some really beautiful shapes.

Another Green Man...

2009-09-11T12:15:00.031+01:00

Trudging along an ancient green lane the other evening I came across this (click on the photo above for a bigger picture). I don’t know if it’s a work in progress or if it’s been abandoned, but I like it. It’s that hoary old pagan symbol the ‘green man’, carved neatly into the flank of a dead tree. It’s just something that you come upon and it delights you. It can be found a few miles outside Sudbury but I won't say exactly where - it’s for others to stumble across accidentally like I did.

I do like things like this. I once came across some wind-chimes made from animal bones strung high up in a tree many miles from the nearest road. Who placed them there and when I have no idea. You could hear them eerily click-clacking in the breeze above your head. I love this sort of stuff. Subtle little interventions that help re-invest a sense of mystery and surprise into the landscape around us.