John's Quavering Pencil

Dead pigeon on the lawn

I listened to Elton John’s song ‘Skyline pigeon’ the other day and very much enjoyed it. This morning, I found a dead pigeon on my lawn. I am a tad squeamish about these things. The pigeon no doubt provided a tasty midnight feast for its predator. Tennyson, in the mid 19th century, wrote:

Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation’s final law
Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriek’d against his creed

I shall have to clear it up a little later today. Once bagged and binned I shall probably run the mower over the patch to remove all traces of death and agony. After all, that is not what one wants when sitting quietly in a deck chair, reading one’s novel and sipping a cup of tea in the gentle summer breeze. Of course, the topic of many a thriller or who-dunnit is, precisely, death and agony. Last night on TV there was a programme about the Normans. William, King of England and devout Christian as he was, apparently liked to chop the hands and feet off people who plotted against him, and then goug out their eyes. I think, on balance, I would rather deal with a decapitated pigeon than think about William the Conqueror.

Today I finished reading a biography of the English artist John Constable. As a boy, I remember cycling with my friend Charles to Flatford Mill and looking at Willy Lott’s cottage. On at least one occasion we took a small camping stove with us and made hot baked beans and saussages for our lunch when we got there.

Biographies are often interesting, but I do find them a tad sad in conclusion; they inevitably end in the person’s death. Whereas Turner was an immensely popular artist, Constable had a long and hard job getting any kind of proper appreciation of his work, apparently. A note found amongst his papers after his death says:

My art flatters nobody by imitation, it courts nobody by smoothness, it tickles nobody by petiteness, it is without either fal de lal or fiddle de dee, how then can I hope to be popular?

I don’t think Constable was happy about this; I think it made him sad.

I have often wondered about the lack of popularity for my music and songs. For example, since January 2008 I have played approximately 550 one hour shows live, streamed up to the Second Life community on the internet. Although there are some exceptions, I typically attract very small audiences. I do, however, have a small number of very loyal fans. I jokingly say to my audience that my original compositions are an acquired taste. Be that as it may, I do not wish to go down the path of ‘poor me’ or bewail the lack of a large successful fan base. Rather, the passage from Constable has made me think twice about the strategy I have pursued over the past couple of years or so. Whereas in the past I focussed almost entirely upon my original compositions, I have recently directed a lot more effort into working up covers (and I do these songs on piano). I am now wondering whether I need to re-adjust the balance somewhat.

I have become interested in cartoons, of late, mainly through looking at the sketches of Osbert Lancaster. I have tried to copy some of his characters and here is an example taken from the Penguin Book collection of his cartoons (p.13). This is not an exact copy and was not traced.  I was trying to learn a little about his technique.

My copy of a couple of Lancaster characters

I am a very long way from being able to do anything remotely as good as the Master, but if you would like to have a look at my first original attempt, you can find it on my website, here:
http://www.lewismusic.co.uk/Cartoons/CameronTrimmer.html
It is a cartoon of David Cameron, the British prime minister. I have played around with the notion of a ‘hedge trimmer’: on the one hand a power tool for clipping hedges in the garden; on the other hand a hedge fund is a slightly dubious super-ordinate lump of cash in the banking and money markets. Well, have a look and see what you think. The scanned version is not so good, but I will have to live with it for now.

This morning I drove over to Penshaw monument, a folly just outside the city of Sunderland. I was meeting my friend Tom for our weekly Friday breakfast. I arrived about twenty minutes ahead of schedule and so walked up the pathway to the monument. I think it looks much better from a distance; the building itself did not strike me as a thing of beauty. Still, more importantly, I hurried down to the cafe at the bottom of the hill and settled down to a bacon butty (Tom had a sausage butty). This location made a pleasant change from our regular haunts but I have to say that the bacon butty was no real substitute for the full English (which, regrettably, they did not do).

Penshaw monument

The other week I had made contact with my former music teacher, Graham Garton (from when I was at school). Somebody else who had been at the school was able to forward me his address. I had long hoped to be able to thank him for all he had done for me, back then, and at last I was able to write him a letter. This week, I had a lovely reply from him telling me what he had been doing with his life, all these years. Although now over 80 years old, he is still giving individual music lessons each week in term time, to both adults and children. He certainly inspired me, and nurtured my life-long interest and practical involvement with music.

I have been reading Danny Gregory’s book ‘An illustrated life’ which presents samples from around 50 people who keep sketchbook journals. I read a couple of his previous books on this topic when I was studying in the animation and design studio at my local university. I find it almost impossible to sketch in public, even when I am using a tiny A6 pad which can almost be held in the palm of my hand. Some people write a commentary in their sketch books, often the equivalent to a stream of consciousness as they are drawing. I am not inclined to do that; I would rather scan from the sketchbook and embed the image within my blog, for example. One of the contributors to Danny’s book, Butch Belair (and what a name that is) explained that he felt most comfortable drawing in his car. He would park up some place and sketch away. I wondered whether that might be a good approach for me to adopt.

Inspired by Butch and Danny, I threw my pencil case and sketchbook into a bag to take with me when I went out to visit the bank and do one or two other chores around the city. I then drove around looking for possible subjects. I found this strategy very difficult in practice in the city centre area owing to traffic flow and the general lack of convenient places to park the car. I found myself on one of the approaches to the south side of the river at one point and parked the car near an isolated pub on the river bank. I got out of the car and walked down to the railings along the footpath. I was then faced with the decision as to what, exactly, to draw. This is by no means a trivial problem for a sketching artist. Indeed, why do you think Van Gough ended up drawing a pot of flowers, or Monet ended up with a bridge over a lily pond? The choice of subject matter for sketching could easily become a separate blog post in its own right.

Here is a small selection of views that I considered.

Small boats on the river

Muddy dingy

   The row of boats strung out seemed to provide a nice composition, I was more enchanted by mud spattered dingy. The question of scale and framing throws up yet another set of decisions. For example, the view across the river to the far bank provided a somewhat messy industrial image. I liked the strong lines of the columns holding up the cement quay. However, zooming in, I loved the geometric structure of a close up of the blue trailer with the circular wheels and tyres set against the heavy virtical bars of the timber supports to the quayside. 

Industry on the river bank

Trailer on the far bank

I know that some modern artists move out into the world to capture their images with the digital camera and then return to the comfort of their studio to do the bulk of the sketching and finished artwork. This seems to me to be a good strategy if you want to paint or use pastels. In my case, it is a way to get around my neurotic fear of sketching in public. 

The sketch, below, started on location with a drawing in pen on a small A6 pad. I drew the view sitting in my car, parked up conveniently, so I could look at the scened through the front windscreen. I finished it back home in the studio with some pastel work.  

Pen and pastel sketch across the Wear

I seem to have been busy but shall get another post onto this blog, forthwith. I have a few things to report.

I have been cooking some quiches. Last weekend I made one from courgettes, mushroom and onion. For this I bought some ready-made shortcrust pastry from the supermarket. I can see that this saves time but I don’t really like to do that. After all, part of the fun of making a quiche is making the pastry. Although I oiled my quiche tine, I had a lot of difficulty getting the pastry out once it was cooked. I therefore bought a new non-stick version.

I made the second on a few days later. For this, I consulted my Delia Smith cookbook and went with her recommendation of 50-50 butter-lard combination for the fat (and then twice that weight in plain flour and water to mix). I made a prawn filling for this. Although I used raw prawns, they ended up being over-cooked and rubbery to bite on (obviously way too long in the oven). For this quiche, I followed Delia’s exhortation to go for double cream in the custard. The result was a little too rich for my taste.

I decided to make a third variation of the quiche to take to my friend Tony’s 50th birthday party, since they were having  buffet food. Once more. I used the butter and lard combination for the fat in the pastry because I find it yields a pleasant crispness around the edge of the tart. I made a plain filling with eggs, single cream and yoghurt (50-50), together with some grated Gruyere cheese. As usual, I baked the pastry blind. While the filling was cooking, I cut out letters and numbers from a red and green pepper with a small sharp knife (TONY = 50). I had to wait until the custard had nearly set before placing the letters onto the surface of the quiche, otherwise they would have sunk in the liquid and disappeared from view (I had already established this in a previous experiment). So, after about 20 minutes I was able to delicately place the pepper letters onto the surface. It really did look lovely and the pic I have put up for you, here, does not really do it justice (it might have been better if I had not taken it from the bird’s eye view).

Onto another topic: I have found some couch grass in one of my borders in the garden. Fortunately the roots do not run very deep but they become densely matted. Now that I know where it is, I shall target the area and hope to have gotten rid of it in about a couple of month’s providing I keep checking regularly.

The dreaded couch grass

As for my Second Life internet shows, I have now played 530 one hour gigs since January 2008, so they are ticking over at a fairly regular rate of about 4 or 5 shows per week. For some months I have been working on a group of about 25 new songs to play on digital piano. It has been rather frustrating but I feel that some of them should be moving into performance over the comming month.

I am doing some preliminary work in terms of writing my autobiography with the intention of publishing an illustrated version through blurb.com. This has not been progressing as fast as I had hoped, but my mood is currently optimistic. It will be a long-term project and I would imagine that it will take me at least one year, possibly two, to complete.

The progress I had been making in getting my tracks up onto bandcamp.com has dwindled considerably. I want to get that kick-started again in the near future. So, lots to be getting on with, I feel. Bye for now… talk to you later, my dear blogophiles.

For some time I have wanted a portable vacuum cleaner, rather like the kind used for car interiors. I have a USB mixer for streaming my sound to the internet at my shows and this has lots of little knobs on it which provide numerous spaces that attract thick layers of dust over time. I also find that the keys on my pianos get very dusty. Yesterday, I went to a store that sold household electrical goods and found one of these machines at a ridiculously low price in a stock clearance sale. My hand went to my pocket and a twenty pound note was passed to the sales assistant. A minute later I was the proud owner of a dustbuster.

Vac lacking a bristle nozzle

Back home I subjected the machine to close examination and found that the mouth of the vacuum was a solid plastic slit. What I really wanted was something more flexible, such as the circular brush attachment that comes with most full size vacs. I rummaged in the cupboard under the stairs and, to my delight, found one that had belonged to one our our previous vacs. This left me with a problem to solve. Somehow, I needed to connect the brush head to the solid body of the portable vac. This needed to be done in a way that would be air tight, since otherwise the vacuum would be lost. At first I improvised with a highly flexible plastic A4 document folder and a few bits of sticky tape. The prototype passed with flying colours as it sucked a nice clean line through a very dusty shelf in my studio. I then addressed the problem of how to arrive at a more permanent solution, using a material that was similarly flexible but more robust than the plastic document file.

The old brush attachment is joined to the rubber glove

The answer came to me in a flash: I needed to adapt a rubber glove to the purpose. In the kitchen I found a new pair of yellow washing up gloves and decided to sacrifice one of them at the altar of Piano Key Cleanliness. I cut off the fingers just below the wrist and eased the glove over the brush attachment, securing it firmly with duct tape. Duct tape is sometimes called ‘gaffer’ tape and it is a strong waterproof cloth tape that is very sticky on one side. For many years I thought it was called ‘duck’ tape because of the fact that it was waterproof. Be that as it may, I am happy to report that this journey into the world of Heath Robinson invention has been entirely successful.

My finished Heath Robinson brush attachment

I have neglected this blog lately. Although I have been busy with other things, I have been reading quite a few library books. This is part of my plan to find entertainments that cost zero money. I have been making my weekly trip to the library for several months now. I have not been reading serious literature. Rather, I have opted for fairly light page-turners. Here is what I have read over the past four weeks:

• Freeman Wills Crofts: The affair at Little Wokenham
  Iris Murdoch: The nice and the good
  Reginald Hill: Arms and the women
  Iris Murdoch: The green knight
  John Sergeant: Give me ten seconds
  Fryman Wills Crofts: Mystery in the channel
  Anita Brookner: Brief lives
  Ian Rankin: Knots & crosses.

As you can see, that works out at about two books per week and I have been enjoying this. I much prefer reading to watching TV. Apart from that, I have continued to play around five one hour music shows per week in Second Life on the internet. That means I am at home playing music for about five evenings in the week. Once again, they are five evenings that cost me no money for my entertainment. All these things are pertinent to the challenge of managing on my pension and I am pleased to say that I do break even.

On my website in the poetry section I have published my Sonnet of Sonnets, entitled ‘Autobiographical shards’. I am currently exploring the possibility of using each one of the 14 sonnets as the basis for a prose chapter in what could become my autobiography. I have written a draft of the first chapter. I feel fairly ambivalent about the project but I don’t have to make my mind up until I have a first draft of the full manuscript. At present my inclination is to include two or three illustrations per chapter and these I plan to sketch or draw digitally (rather in the style of my bandcamp.com song illustrations). If I do complete this book, I will probably publish it with blurb.com. My friend Tom has made a photo book that way and was extremely pleased with the result. Of course, if I start to work seriously on the manuscript for the autobiography, then that might take writing time away from this blog. I shall have to monitor the situation. Still, good to talk to you once more, my dear blogophiles.

The finished tadcaster

I have completed construction of the tadcaster. There are one or two residual problems to attend to and I shall talk to the friend who made the body about these in due course. However, I finished soldering the electrics this morning. At some point, I shall have to do some further work on both the intonation and the action but the main objective today has been to plug it in and see if it makes a vaguely pleasant noise. I am pleased to report that it does. I have tested it on a small Marshall amplifier and it also plays ok when plugged in directly to my Alesis USB mixer. I don’t think that I shall be playing it until I have sorted out some of the minor issues that remain outstanding but it is a proper guitar and it does work.

Here is a pic of the tad front. I think it is more or less done now. I feel a tad ambivalent about the tad. Maybe it has become a tad too heavy metal in its appearance. Still, for better or for worse, this is what it now is. I think the front is so busy that the back needs to be a plain colour, possibly a dark green.

Front of body for the tad