Cosmonauts by Jeremy Geddes

Whilst looking up some images for a future post, I came across these wonderful paintings of floating Cosmonauts by the New Zealand artist Jeremy Geddes.

They have a haunting, ethereal quality bourne of the muted colours, the displaced floating figures and birds, and the familiar yet at the same time, otherworldliness of the settings.

Geddes paints buildings, vehicles and streetscapes in a beautifully observed and painstaking hyper-realistic style, and then inserts a note of the surreal to create these fantastic and intriguing images…

I think they are truly amazing and I can’t stop looking at them…

Barney Bubbles, Elvis Costello & Armed Forces

What with seeing some Barney Bubbles stuff at the V&A the other week and catching the end of what looked like an excellent Elvis Costello gig on TV over the weekend, I thought I’d write about one of the all time classic “Music Packages” (not to mention it being one of my favourite albums)

Released in early 1979 (a year I seem to keep coming back to) Armed Forces by Elvis Costello and the Attractions was an immediate success, reaching the top 10 on both sides of the Atlantic. It was Costello’s third album (following My Aim is True (1977) and This Year’s Model (1978) and heralded a new, richer (arguably more accessible and poppy) sound for the band, whilst still retaining Costello’s politically sharp and incisive lyrical dexterity (Oliver’s Army, Accidents will happen and my favourite, Green Shirt). The working title for the record was Emotional Fascism and the whole thing is littered with references and allusions to both politics and love, often using them as metaphors for each other.

As the Stiff Records in house designer and art director, Barney Bubbles (Colin Fulcher on his birth certificate) had worked with Costello on both his previous records. These were altogether much more sedate affairs, and I can’t find online whose decision it was to really push the boat out for this release (probably Barney’s I would guess)

Barney Bubbles is undoubtably one of the unsung and shockingly little known geniuses of UK graphic design. Responsible for a staggering number of instantly recognisable record sleeves between the late 1960′s and 1983 (at which point he very sadly took his own life at the age of 41), a 15 year period that includes Hawkwind, Ian Dury, Depeche Mode, Doctor Feelgood and The Damned to name just a few, and which all sport examples of the man’s ability, be it the early fantasy graphic style of the Hawkwind covers or the more familiar angular and brightly coloured post punk stuff… (there are a few reminders at the end of the post, after the Armed Forces images)

As Design Director, Bubbles was responsible for the overall concept of the Armed Forces sleeve and for much of the art itself, although the elephant painting on the front cover is actually by Tom Pogson. As you can see from the images here, the mix of styles and techniques and the diversity of subject matter used throughout the package is quite startling, ranging from the figurative to Pop and Abstract and from marching Chinese soldiers to faux tiger print…

The whole thing  was designed to open up and display more of the art as you got closer to the inner sleeve… wherein you’d find photos of the band lounging around a swimming pool (their house) or standing in the middle of a “nice” suburban front garden (your house).

Hours of fun was then had re-arranging the panels in all manner of various ways until (like happened with mine) it got ripped and started to fall apart…

All in all a very lovely thing, and I for one am very pleased that, as evidenced by the inclusion of his work at the current V&A exhibition about post war British Design, there is a renewed interest in the work of this very gifted and influential man…

If you want to know more, there is a recently published book called Reasons to Be Cheerful by John Gorman which chronicles Barney’s work in exhaustive detail, whilst John Coulthart’s excellent post on his Feuilleton site here is also worth a read.

Super Heroes visit Sofia, Bulgaria

In June last year, some mysterious visitors appeared overnight in Sofia, the Capital of Bulgaria…

Some of them you may recongnise… all true Heroes of the West: Superman, Santa Claus, Ronald McDonald, The Joker and I’m pretty sure that’s a rather chunky looking Wonder Woman at the back there….

The graffiti reads “In step with the times” and I think it’s a very fine effort indeed….

Sadly the Bulgarian Authorities didn’t appreciate the update and spray cleaned the statue back to its former glory within a few days…

London’s only Deconstructivist Building? Peter Clash* @ Canary Wharf

When I was at PCL at the turn of the Nineties, learning how to be an Architect, one of the big architectural movements of the time was Deconstructivism, a sometimes complex approach to design in which surfaces, plans and form were subjected to rigorous processes of fragmentation, reorganisation and manipulation. The resultant proposals were often chaotic and random in appearance, and it was often hard not to think that much of it was made up as it went along and then post rationalised to some sense of validity only at the very end… (As students of course the rigour bit was usually missing, and the post rationalising bit overly relied on…)

Still, in many ways it was the perfect antidote to the tedious formal excesses of Postmodernism, allowing students and architects alike, to really let their imaginations loose, creating many thousands of miles of paper architecture (i.e. stuff that could never be built) whilst only a relatively few practices achieved convincing projects that were actually constructed (Co-op Himmelb(l)au, Morphosis and Peter Wilson come first to mind…)

Anyway, I never really worked out why, but outside of the student environment, the Europeans and Americans were always better at Deconstructivism and seemed to take it more seriously than we did. In fact, I can only really think of one building in London that I might suggest has any Deconstructivist leanings… and that is this little building near Canary Wharf by one of my old PCL visiting tutors, Peter Clash. A building which I happened to cycle past recently, having completely forgotten all about it, and which I think still looks pretty amazing…

Tucked away at the back of the Canary Wharf Development, is what I think it is a control building for raising the bridge next to which it stands, so allowing boats through to the inner dock areas. Surprisingly I can find absolutely nothing at all about it on line, so I can’t even confirm its proper title or use, but it must have been completed before about 1991 when I left PCL, because I can clearly remember cycling over to see it when Peter told us it had been completed. Docklands then was not the place it is today, trust me… I seemed to cycle around for hours through the wilderness of E14 looking for the bloody thing…

It’s a wonderful little gem… A utilitarian, silver, metal clad base building the shape of a quarter circle, with a variety of sized and shaped openings punched through its skin. A simple staircase placed externally along one side, leading up to a control box held in its seemingly precarious position via two steels that don’t seem to have enough fixing back to the structure, whilst the “monocoque” roof curves down to an interesting flick of an eaves and on down to the floor.

Then there’s the curved services tray, playfully reflecting the form of the cables should they have been left unsupported, and the knowing, sci-fi like appearance of the control room perched rather off-puttingly at almost exactly eye level height from the bridge… It looks like the control tower could retract into the main armoured body of the building if it sensed it was in danger…

Whether Peter Clash (still working, still making lovely things) would have thought of it as Deconstructivist, I don’t know and can’t now remember, but I suspect not. He always struck me as something of a cool dude, who would surely have resisted any such obvious attempts at categorisation…

But it made my day seeing it once again after all this time and remembering the fun we had at PCL being encouraged to do silly things in the name of architecture…

* UPDATE : I have been corrected, this building is credited to Allsop & Störmer. As such, I am somewhat confused. Everything I wrote in this post is the truth as  I remember it… I can only think that Peter Clash was maybe working at A&S and involved on this project when I knew him, and I had forgottten that…

QlockTwo Watch

I like the stylings of this new watch by Biegert & Funk…

The face is a grid of 110 letters and to tell the time you press the big shiny button on the side and it tells you in words…

There’s also an App for my Android phone, which at 70p looks pretty good, until you realise (as one reviewer points out) that by the time you’ve opened the app, waited for the inevitable advert to go away and then pressed the screen to get the time, the moments already gone…

Still the watch itself looks very fine indeed, which it should do for around €500.

It reminds me of a watch that And bought a couple of years back. A beautiful thing made by a Japanese company called TokyoFlash, it had a grid of 42 LED’s which could be used to tell the time in three ways, Hour centric, Minute centric and (our favourite) Binary… Hours of fun, especially if (like And) you could never remember how to read the dots….

And in case you’re wondering, to tell the time in binary, you only use the top two lines of the display and read the dots like this…

British Design 1948 to 2012 at the V&A

Me & A went to see this newly opened exhibition over the Easter weekend, and for the most part, I thought it was very good.

Divided into three sections, assessing (in order) the post war years, the late 60′s/ early 70′s up to current times, and the third section concentrating on the industrial and technological aspects rather than arts and culture, it was the immediate Post War years that appealed to me most. There was nothing we hadn’t seen before really (being regular visitors to the V&A), but it’s always impressive seeing lots of things which really appeal to your own sense of aesthetics, all collected together in one space, it definitely gives them additional impact: Spence’s Coventry Cathedral, Robin And Lucien Day’s chairs and fabrics, lots Festival of Britain stuff, a Henry Moore sculpture, Hans Coper and Lucie Rei ceramics…

It was particularly pleasing in this section to see the original artwork produced by Jock Kinnear and Margaret Calvert for their ground breaking new road signs. A pioneering piece of design so good that its hasn’t really changed since the mid 1960′s when it was first unveiled (an achievement that almost certainly deserves a post all of its own).

There were also some excellent objects in the final section. You might of course expect to see an E Type Jaguar and Concorde as good examples of British Industrial design, but it’s always good to be reminded of the smaller, everyday objects, like the Trim phone, the Moulton Stowaway small wheeled bike or the mixers, shavers and camera’s that the hugely talented Kenneth Graham designed throughout this period.

So you’ve probably concluded that it was the middle section that didn’t quite work for me. The 70′s were fine, the whole Punk thing is always good to see, but it was the 80′s and 90′s that not only disappointed, but actually made me quite cross… One quite large room consisted of four hats made of dead fish, 2 dresses (one of which was shaped like and egg and looked silly) and two throughly hideous pretend verdigris doors by someone I’d never heard of… Pointless, uninformative and a wasted opportunity in my book. I didn’t really like the Damien Hirst room either but I’ve gone on about him lots before, so I’ll let that go…

Maybe it’s all still too close to be able to look back effectively and be anything less than critical, but for me, the stuff representing the last years of the Century, all seemed vacuous and pointless: all a bit too clever, clever and self reverential… I mean Nigel Coates and Ron Arad might well be nice guys, but I can’t see their product design from this period as anything other than overblown and ridiculous…

As with any exhibition that attempts to cover a 60+ year period there were inevitably a number of important names sadly missing, the biggest omissions to my mind would include Neville Brody, Ken Adam, Vaughan Oliver and Stanley Kubrick.

Having said all that, and aiming as always to finish on a positive note, I would definitely recommend a visit if only to make your own mind up, because without doubt, the good stuff far outweighs the weak… and like I did, you will almost certainly leave with the feeling that we Brits are pretty good at creating clever and beautiful things..

Mid Century Eastern European Graphic Design

I came across these rather wonderful images recently.

Taken from a new book with the rather clumsy title of “Iron Curtain Graphics“, they offer a selection of Propaganda, Safety at Work, Cultural and Educational themed posters and signs, that were all (as the books tagline reminds us) “created without computers”, somewhere in Romania and sometime between the 1950′s and 1970′s.

I think it’s fair to say that Communist Eastern Europe is usually thought of as a rather grey and austere place,  full of monotonous housing blocks, cheap fabrics, political repression and food shortages. Thankfully these striking images go some way to addressing these preconceptions, with their bold use of colour and form.

Working within very strict rules regarding what and how topics and messages could be illustrated, it is without doubt these very limitations that created such strong and powerful graphics.

To my eyes its testament to the (generally unknown) designers that these images are still so powerful… especially when taken out of the context of the Communist regimes hatred of such bourgeois concepts of irony and humour…

Mudchute Park and Farm to close forever. “It’s H&S gone mad… again” (says Daily Mail reader Joe Blogs, 15)

After my post last week about the wonders at the heart of the Isle of Dogs, I was very saddened to read this article in last Tuesday’s edition of The Evening Standard…

Its a well argued piece by Simon Jenkins and is about the distinct possibility that Mudchute Park and Farm will no longer be allowed to let its animals loose in the meadow due to the possibility of e-coli in their poo. This is of course as decreed by that favourite scourge of common sense, The Man from The Health and Safety Executive…

I must say after taking the photos week before last, I was definitely wondering where all the sheep had gone this week, and this was not the answer I was expecting.

It will be very sad indeed if the sheeps will no longer be allowed to roam about. I liked having them about.

And at the risk of over doing the whole Daily Mail parody thing, it would be nice if, as grown ups, we could be allowed to take some responsibility for our own lives. I mean it’s not a difficult concept to grasp; you eat poo, you get sick… how hard can it be….

I will be following this story and fingers crossed that common sense and cheap grass cutting triumphs over petty bureaucracy and small mindedness…

Venus – Jupiter Conjunction

For those of you like me who have noticed two unusually bright objects in the recently very clear night skies, and wondered what they were… then wonder no more… as we are all witnessing the best Venus-Jupiter conjunction for many years..

In astrological terms, a conjunction is simply when two or more planets appear to be close together in the sky, when in reality they are separated by almost unimaginable distances. The brighter of the two objects the we can see at the moment is Venus which despite being much smaller than Jupiter is obviously very much closer to us.

Venus is generally considered to be the second brightest object in our skies after the Moon, and at it’s closest, can be only about 38 million km (24 million miles) away, whilst at other times it disappears completely as it spins out on its 225 day orbit around the sun.

The closest Jupiter gets to Earth on the other hand is in the order of about 630 million km (390 million miles) so despite it being more than 120 times bigger than either Earth or Venus (which are surprisingly similar in size) its magnitude of brightness is significantly less.

Jupiter has quite a special place in my heart, as when we were in Peru a few years back, we visited the Maria Reiche Observatory in Nazca and saw with our own eyes (with the help of a big telescope obviously) Jupiter and four of her moons, clear as anything, about as big as a tennis ball. A trully amazing experience…

Anyway, I tried taking some photos of the conjunction last weekend when the two planets were closest together, but I just didn’t have the technology to pull it off. So I tried again with another camera this weekend and this one just about captures this alluring spectacle, especially as I also managed to catch the crescent moon (the lowest of the three lights).

If you’re interested, the next opportunity to see a Venus-Jupiter conjunction will be in May next year, although as the planets will be much lower in the sky, they will be visible together for less than an hour before they disappear below the horizon.

The rather nice image below is from someone’s Astroblg here. Taken looking over the River Spey towards Garmouth up in Scotland, I think it’s fair to say that it better captures the brightness and size of the two planets than mine does above.

A Walk through the Heart of the Isle of Dogs….

When we first moved to the Isle of Dogs about 11 years ago, I was not sure if it would be a place to stay long term.  It was very handy for getting to work in Greenwich, walking through the foot tunnel, but it seemed to lack a heart, not having a discernible local high street that previous places I’d lived like Crouch End, Wood Green and Putney thrived upon. Moreover, the whole place was associated in my mind with the seemingly unstoppable Canary Wharf Development…

11 years later, we’re still here and I must say, I’m now rather a fan of the place. All right, it’s pretty polarised: the wealthy are over on the west side with that winning river view/ sunny aspect combination, the people like me & And who are doing OK are over here on the east (“making do” with only the river) and everyone else is plonked in a ring of social housing around the inside edge… but one of the main reasons I enjoying living here is the proximity to the River Thames…  I really do “live by the river” as my namesake Joe Strummer memorably sang back in the day, and it’s a surprisingly good feeling to see it everyday meandering past our bedroom window..

One of the other reasons is that I’ve now discovered the islands’ heart, and it has nothing to do with retail. Through the centre of the Isle of dogs runs an amazing mixture of things that as far as I know, is unique in Zone 2… There are the docks, with their water, boats and wildlife, the new developments, an open meadow, three parks, Mudchute City farm, Canary Wharf and Foster’s magnificent Jubilee Line underground station…

I’ve been walking to CW every morning for a while now, and in the 20 minutes it took to walk it on a typical day last week, I saw (in no particular order): squirrels, sheep, goats, llamas, turkeys, chickens, ducks, geese, seagulls. moorhens, swans, a robin, crows, magpies, several dogs and a crested grebe. (Last year I could have added cows and pigs to the list as well, but sadly, I suspect they’ve gone to visit the big man with the straw boater and the blue and white striped apron…)

This walk is also a great way to introduce yourself to the day as well.. At this end, there are only a few people around and I usually have the meadow to myself (other than the odd dog walker). Then as I get closer to CW and my fitness, wakefulness and tolerance start to increase, so too does the number of people, so that by the time I’m crossing the swing bridge, there’s a spring in my step and I’m more than prepared to meet the masses on the Jubilee line (so to speak).

The photos below are a visual record (in a Richard Long documentary type style) of my walk on Tuesday 13th March 2012, a day that was misty, dry and cool and perfect for a morning stroll…