Monthly Archives: November 2014

A Strange Case of Catalepsy

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If you read my blog of two days ago you will know that I thought my old friend – my latterly not-so-trusty mobile camera – had finally given up the ghost, and I lamented her passing in a fittingly respectful way; I even showcased her last creations, which were rather good considering she was at death’s door at the time. Perhaps because of habit, or long attachment, I took her out shopping with me as usual this morning, though I wasn’t expecting any miracles. And indeed, nothing remarkable happened whilst we were wandering around either Tesco’s or Trago Mills store (although I did pick up some good canvasses at bargain prices).

However, as we were dropping my mother home, Chris pulled up in the car park at the end of Mum’s garden path and I noticed a fine looking ginger cat waiting on the tarmac.

“That’s Philip,” said Mum, “he’s the one who sometimes gets in through the bathroom window and likes to sleep on my bed.”

I remembered her telling me about her neighbour’s cat and I felt an affinity for him because he likes my mum. While Chris took the shopping indoors, and Mum had followed him, I stayed and talked to Philip, who was shy and jumped up on the fence. Nevertheless, he was interested and peered at me from on high. Instinctively, I reached in my bag and brought out my dead mobile…

As you can see from the photograph, my camera is not actually dead (yet) but catatonic; at least, Philip the cat was a tonic… if only for a few moments. Just look at the clouds behind Philip – see anything?

Cloudscape – the Perfect Anvil

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It’s rather coincidental that on a day when I have been painting some brooding clouds above Le Conquet (Brittany, where we were two weeks ago), we should have a sky full of our own magnificent clouds. Chris, who is a closet meteorologist, called me out onto the terrace to show me “the perfect example of an anvil cloud”. My painting is in the early stages – there will be two windswept trees in the foreground…

 

Farewell to a Dear Old Friend

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I’m rather sad for it really is time to say goodbye to my faithful companion, although, to be honest with you, she hasn’t been particularly faithful of late; you could say that she’s been well and truly going her own way, furrowing her own field. That might sound okay to some people but, believe me, she did her furrowing in a most harrowing way. Where once I knew how to press all her buttons the right way, recently she just stared at me blankly; it wasn’t simply a case of insolence or even a slowing down in old age – I think her brain had gone. I still plugged her in to the life-support machine… but to no avail, she kept going in and out of consciousness.

Yesterday morning I thought she might like a trip out with me on my bike to Cockwood harbour. She seemed to perk up when I mentioned it, and seemed not to notice how cold and windy it was. The sun was shining, which was a blessing – she normally responded well in the sunshine – but that North-Easterly wind against us all the way proved to be too much for her. Before reaching Cockwood I stopped and coaxed her to look at a pretty pastoral scene – and she snapped. It was her penultimate snap. I didn’t hear the last one, which she did quite silently, in her own good time, in my bicycle basket. Somehow it was fitting that she was in the casket basket, and not simply because she was a bit of “a basket case”.

To mark the occasion of her passing I shall attach the results of her final efforts. The last one showed a touch of genius that a normal mind such as my own would never have considered.

On Monday, or even tomorrow if I’m lucky, I hope to have a much smarter companion.

Blow-Up

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Inspired by watching the film Blow-Up (1966), about a photographer who thinks he has witnessed a murder through his camera lens, I thought I would treat you to some blow-up photographs of the men in orange who work on our sea wall. This afternoon I was kind of like an annoying fly on the wall, out with my Canon on our terrace wall; I hoped the workmen wouldn’t see me while I clicked away.

In fact, I hoped they didn’t see me yesterday morning either, when, after my shower, I streaked down the stairs to our bedroom; Chris said that the sunlight would have reflected from the glass door back into their eyes, had they looked up from their machinery at that moment. I don’t mind if they saw me run down the stairs on any of the during-the-night occasions – sometimes one o’clock, two o’clock, three o’clock (rock)… well you get the picture. Our bedroom is so cold at night now that I scamper up and down in warm onesies, my favourite being the grey and white striped one that makes me look like a very long-bodied convict with short legs (the crotch nearly reaches my knees). My other onesie is a very normal, pink and grey, leopard-skin print so I don’t think the men in orange would have been too shocked to see me in either of my outfits during my insomnolent wanderings around the house on noisy sea wall repair nights.

Anyway, I don’t think they saw me with my camera today; I kept low and rested my Canon on the top of the balustrade on the terrace, and when I was downstairs I attempted to hide behind the wooden railings – hopefully, the bright paintwork was a distraction – they are very thin railings. I remembered how in Blow-Up David Hemmings tried to hide in the bushes so as not to make the couple he was shooting secretly in the park feel self-conscious – I thought that was particularly realistic – and I could see myself behaving similarly; of course, at that point in the film, the trendy photographer had no idea that someone else, also hiding in the bushes, was really shooting the man he had photographed.

Funnily enough, Chris and I both remembered the film as being rather good (he saw it years ago at the cinema whilst I saw it many years later on the television – he’s older than me); I say, “funnily enough”, because we didn’t find it that good upon second viewing all these years later. Groundbreaking films often become dated, and this was no exception; however, it made us think.

“What was the point of those mime artists playing tennis?” I asked Chris.

“I don’t know,” Chris answered (I think he just awoken), “let me think.”

“Do you think it meant that you can’t be sure what’s real, especially  when it comes to photography?” I spurred him on.

“Possibly,” he yawned (Chris hasn’t been sleeping well through the noise of the sea wall repairs).

My photographs of the men in orange (as I like to call them) were quite good, especially when I cropped them (as David Hemmings did); but then I wondered if my blog readers might be bored with photographs of our sea wall workmen – interesting and hunky as the chaps are – even when the shots are blown-up. Not wishing to bore or disappoint, I decided to turn the best of the photographs into drawings and watercolour paintings. I’m a fast worker, or am I? Did I really paint those brilliant watercolours in one afternoon? Do those men in orange actually exist? Are you dreaming this? Am I dreaming this? Oh, I’m so modern!

 

Here is some interesting material about the film for all you film buffs.

Blowup

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This article is about the British-Italian film. For other uses, see Blow up (disambiguation).
Blowup
Blowup poster.jpg

theatrical release poster
Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni
Produced by
Screenplay by
Story by Michelangelo Antonioni
Based on “Las babas del diablo”
by Julio Cortázar
Starring
Music by Herbie Hancock
Cinematography Carlo Di Palma
Edited by Frank Clarke
Production
company
  • MGM
  • Bridge Films
Distributed by
  • MGM
  • Premier Productions
Release dates
  • 18 December 1966 (US)
  • 29 August 1967 (UK)
Running time 110 minutes
Country
  • Italy
  • United Kingdom
  • United States
Language English
Budget $1.8 million[1]
Box office $20,000,000[1]

Blowup, or Blow-Up, is a 1966 film directed by Michelangelo Antonioni about a fashion photographer, played by David Hemmings, who believes he has unwittingly captured a murder on film. It was Antonioni’s first entirely English-language film.[2]

The film also stars Vanessa Redgrave, Sarah Miles, John Castle, Jane Birkin, Tsai Chin and Gillian Hills as well as sixties modelVeruschka. The screenplay was by Antonioni and Tonino Guerra, with English dialogue by British playwright Edward Bond. The film was produced by Carlo Ponti, who had contracted Antonioni to make three English-language films for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (the others were Zabriskie Point and The Passenger).

The plot was inspired by Julio Cortázar‘s short story, “Las babas del diablo” or “The Devil’s Drool” (1959),[3] translated also as “Blow Up” in Blow-up and Other Stories, and by the life of Swinging London photographer David Bailey.[4] The film was scored by jazz pianist Herbie Hancock. The music is diegetic, as Hancock noted: “It’s only there when someone turns on the radio or puts on a record.”[5] Nominated for several awards at the Cannes Film Festival, Blowup won the Grand Prix.

The American release of the counterculture-era[6] film with its explicit sexual content (by contemporary standards) by a major Hollywood studio was in direct defiance of the Production Code. Its subsequent outstanding critical and box office success proved to be one of the final events that led to the final abandonment of the code in 1968 in favour of the MPAA film rating system.[7]

Plot[edit]

The plot is a day in the life of a glamorous fashion photographer, Thomas (Hemmings), inspired by the life of an actual “Swinging London” photographer, David Bailey.[8] After spending the night at a doss house where he has taken pictures for a book of art photos, Thomas is late for a photo shoot with Veruschka at his studio, which in turn makes him late for a shoot with other models later in the morning. He grows bored and walks off, leaving the models and production staff in the lurch. As he leaves the studio, two teenage girls who are aspiring models (Birkin and Hills) ask to speak with him, but the photographer drives off to look at an antiques shop. Wandering into Maryon Park, he takes photos of two lovers. The woman (Redgrave) is furious at being photographed. The photographer then meets his agent for lunch, and notices a man following him and looking into his car. Back at his studio, Redgrave arrives asking for the film, but he deliberately hands her a different roll. She in turn writes down a false telephone number to give to him. His many enlargements of the black and white film are grainy but seem to show a body in the grass and a killer lurking in the trees with a gun. He is disturbed by a knock on the door, but it is the two girls again, with whom he has a romp in his studio and falls asleep. Awakening, he finds they hope he will photograph them but he tells them to leave, saying, “Tomorrow! Tomorrow!”

As evening falls, the photographer goes back to the park and finds a body, but he has not brought his camera and is scared off by a twig breaking, as if being stepped on. The photographer returns to his studio to find that all the negatives and prints are gone except for one very grainy blowup showing the body. After driving into town, he sees Redgrave and follows her into a club whereThe Yardbirds, featuring both Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck on guitar and Keith Relf on vocals, are seen performing the song “Stroll On.” A buzz in Beck’s amplifier angers him so much he smashes his guitar on stage, then throws its neck into the crowd, who make a grab for it as a souvenir. The photographer gets the neck and runs out of the club before anyone can snatch it from him. Then he has second thoughts about it, throws it on the sidewalk and walks away. A passer-by picks up the neck and throws it back down, not realizing it’s from Jeff Beck‘s guitar.[9]

At a drug-drenched party in a house on the Thames near central London, the photographer finds both Veruschka, who had told him that she was going to Paris – when confronted, she says she is in Paris – and his agent (Peter Bowles), whom he wants to bring to the park as a witness. However, the photographer cannot put across what he has photographed. Waking up in the house at sunrise, he goes back to the park alone and finds that the body is gone.

Befuddled, he watches a mimed tennis match, is drawn into it, picks up the imaginary ball and throws it back to the two players. While he watches the mime, the sound of the ball being played is heard. As the photographer watches this mimed match alone on the lawn, his image fades away, leaving only the grass as the film ends.

Sleepless in Dawlish

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They may behave like busy elves, working industriously during each night, or at least part of every night – when the tide is low, but, actually, they are big hunky workmen dressed in orange overalls (as I have mentioned many times before). And yes, they are our heroes for they are repairing the stricken sea wall just along from our house, and we are extremely grateful; however, the generators (which have grown in number) and the lights and machinery (which also has increased) are kept, not only on the rig, but also on the stretch of sea wall directly in front of our house. Hence, I’m finding it difficult to sleep. Even Chris, who is a tad deaf, is having trouble sleeping, which, on the plus side, means that he’s not snoring as much; and I can count on him for consolation in the early hours when the activity outside seems to be at its most turbulent.

Last Saturday Chris and I were having dinner with our friends, Alan and his daughter, Caroline, who live two doors up from us on our Victorian terrace, when I happened to mention our little sleeping problem.

“I don’t suppose it’s quite so bad for you, being a little farther along?” I queried between yawns.

“What are you talking about?” Alan snapped into life (having, hitherto, nearly nodded off during the lasagna course). “The worst of it comes from right in front of our house!”

“Oh yes, that big blue generator is perhaps nearer your house,” I conceded, too tired to argue over the exact location of the greatest source of disturbance.

“Of course, my bedroom is on the storey above yours so it may be worse for you on the ground floor,” Alan, weary again, passed the conversation back to me and yawned behind his napkin.

I nodded.

“What about you? How are you sleeping?” I turned to Caroline.

“Me?” Caroline laughed so perkily, and infectiously, that Chris woke up and laughed too.

“Yes, how about you?” Chris joined in (well, Caroline is a stunner).

“I’m fine because my bedroom is on the other side of the house,” she reminded us.

And bubbly Caroline held centre stage, keeping us all amused and awake until it was time for us to leave a little earlier than we might have, had we not been so tired.

 

That night we slept reasonably well, mostly due to the sheer exhaustion of not sleeping more than two hours the night before, and maybe also because the elves in orange had a night off (or was it that we were so tired we didn’t notice them?). However, even with one relatively early and peaceful night under our belts, we had not caught up from the lack of sleep over a particularly bad week in the sleep stakes (not to be confused with sweepstakes).

The following afternoon, while I was hoping for inspiration and staring blankly at my computer screen, my friend, Catherine, who lives at the end of our terrace, tapped on my studio door.

“Come in and have a cup of tea,” I invited.

Like me, she was rather pale but with dark rings around her eyes. We both looked like Henri Charriere (Papillion) after five years in solitary confinement.

“Ah, you can’t sleep either?” Catherine asked.

“No, but I thought it might have been better for you, being that bit farther down from all the hubbub and lights…”

“What are you talking about? We have the worst of it outside our house…”

 

And here are some photographs, taken this morning, of the elves in orange…

 

Beautiful Lanildut – A Painting of a Cloudy day

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It’s my Study in Grey, an oil painting of Lanildut, Brittany, on a cloudy October day; but it’s not gloomy because the sun found a way through the thick clouds and sparkled on the sea around the rocks in the middle-ground. As you can see from the progression from beginning to near completion, out of the grey came both darkness and light. Aptly enough, today began grey and cloudy here in Dawlish, then rain, sunshine, and now it’s dark – hence the need to photograph in artificial light.

 

Some Rays of Sunshine

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It is easy to get a bit gloomy, like the weather, at this time of year in England; in truth, right at the moment I’m not inclined to say “Dear old Devon” as I usually do (especially when in Australia) because it’s grey, rainy and cold, and we’re waiting for a new heating engineer to come and repair the boiler.

Geoff, the previous heating engineer, who came here so often that I felt we had become friends, wishes to terminate our friendship (I could tell when he suggested that we purchase a new boiler – no labour charges for fitting); in the end (two evenings ago) Geoff’s strained smile could not mask the despair he was feeling at, yet again, being called out to fix his bête noire of boilers – the one that would not respond to all his tweaking and, even worse, reacted with explosive convulsions each time Geoff, with shoulders slumped, had walked out of the premises. Recently, poor Geoff had taken to walking in bearing the same dejected attitude. Somehow I sensed that it was to be his last visit on Saturday – his one year guarantee had been a rash promise, meant genuinely but said with an overconfidence that was to last only two months – and I kissed Geoff goodbye to signify an acceptance of the termination. We would not ask our friend to fit a new boiler, not even for a paltry eight hundred pounds.

“Darling, not many people kiss their heating engineer goodbye,” said Chris when Geoff had slumped off.

“Not many people have such intense relationships with their heating engineers,” I answered.

“What now?” asked Chris as he turned on the hot tap to see if Geoff’s efforts had made any impression this time.

The boiler made not one, but two, ignition explosions, not large enough to blow up the kitchen but sufficient to make one jump several feet into the air (if one hadn’t been expecting it, which we were, so we jumped slightly less).

“Let’s do what I suggested last year and join the manufacturer’s repair and insure scheme,” I suggested a tad pointedly.

 

Wayne arrived a second after I wrote my first sentence. We shook hands and he asked what the problem was; while we explained, he nodded his head and smiled. He laughed heartily when I asked if we needed a new boiler. He didn’t even want a cup of tea. He did the repairs, tested the work and left within these minutes that I have been writing this. I didn’t give Wayne a kiss goodbye (although he did smell very nice), I patted him on the shoulder; he’s not our friend… he’s Superman.

Would you believe it? The sun has come out! Over the last week, ten thousand miles away in Brisbane, our friend Roland has been photographing the emergence of the first blooms on his frangipani trees. Frangipanis are my favourite flowers. Not only are they pretty but also they have the most beautiful fragrance, which is why we Aussie girls like to put them in our hair. Three months to go before we’ll be back there, but now it doesn’t seem so bad, not now that we have heat and sunshine.

Chris just came smiling into my studio and said:

“I keep turning on the hot tap for fun!”

And if you’ll excuse me, I’m about to do exactly the same.

 

 

Baby Love

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A few photographs of the two latest additions to our family – Aidan, aged three and a half weeks and his second cousin Rosie, who is approximately twice as old as him.