Two days after the previous post, I was flattened by a virus that took me out for more than four weeks. I said to someone that I knew how a computer must feel when its operating system crashes and it has to rebuild it without a manual. I’ve rarely felt so insightful. When mine came back up it was Windows 95 in safe mode and with no keyboard. I was on automatic, doing only what I’d done before; routine tasks which, fortunately, included feeding my cats and eventually myself. Meanwhile, my ‘screen’ blinked its cursor and did basic Windows housekeeping. It didn’t save much to the hard drive and RAM was pitiful.

I wrote though because that’s a thing I do, and so when I went back to my online journal to fill in what I expected to be several days’ blanks, I found them to be fully present, fluent, and comprehensive. This is the only reason I know what happened while I was effectively offline.

I delayed starting 3.2 because, even as I began to improve physically, my supra executive function – the capacity to imagine and create – remained flat. It returned at 3am one night; chattering about this next project, going on and on about the possibilities, coming up with one idea after another, and buzzing like a hive of bees waking up to the dance of a new queen. Now I need to put some of this in writing to see how it looks so here goes!

I actually began my art education in 1967 at Brighton College of Art. I didn’t last long. Back then, there was a huge North-South cultural divide and what passed for trendy teenage fashion in Bradford didn’t qualify as fashion at all there. Girls went from children to middle-aged women overnight, a few racey individuals at sleazy night clubs notwithstanding. I was an anachronism, an object of ridicule and exploitation, culturally dislocated and lost and it crushed my creativity.

But still. Brighton. I had never seen a sea so high, so sparkling, so alive, nor people so vibrant and unselfconsciously weird. There was colour everywhere; music everywhere; substances everywhere. Unlike Bill Clinton, I didn’t smoke but I did inhale[1] and spent an evening watching clouds curl into unnatural shapes, and pebbledash beetles with jewels for carapaces swarm the walls of the flat that had no front door.

My ambition for this project is to make paintings reflecting and updating the imagery of the 60s and to supplement these with AR (augmented reality) layers that draw on snippets of my own artwork from that time.

I think the theme may be perspective, unless that turns out to be a distraction. For now though it might explore the social perspectives that underwent a seismic change and also the physical ones typified by the railings along the promenade and the pier. Or it may do nether of those things.

‘Oh What a Lovely War’ was filmed there in 1968[2] and my friend and I hustled to be taken on as extras. We got as far as the tea wagon which was positioned at the bottom of a hill covered in white crosses. Fewer than 20 years later the IRA tried to take out the entire UK government by bombing the Grand Hotel.

It would be satisfying to include what’s left of the West pier, which closed to the public in 1975 and has been on fire several times since. On each occasion I seem to have been emerging from the car park opposite, one time disputing an emerging rumour that a rocket had been fired at it. There is little of it left now.

1. https://www.nytimes.com/1992/03/30/us/the-1992-campaign-new-york-clinton-admits-experiment-with-marijuana-in-1960-s.html
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oh!_What_a_Lovely_War

SCH 2024