Pretty much everyone of a certain age shouts Glove! whenever they see a Blue Meanie, and pretty much everyone of a certain age knows what a Blue Meanie is... such is the enduring power of Peter Max, the German-born graphic artist and illustrator who exploded on to the scene with The Beatles and Yellow Submarine. Part cartoon, part nightmare, the undeniable Sixties vibe still has the power to startle after so many decades. I grew up surrounded by these images on posters, in adverts, in my parents' friends' apartments, and like all keen artists squirrelled them away in my subconscious for later revival.

pretty much everyone of a certain age shouts glove! whenever they see a blue meanie, and pretty much everyone of a certain age knows what a blue meanie is

As I've said many, many times before, it took me a long time to pluck up the courage to even say I was an artist let alone be one, and I followed a circuitous route through writing and graphic design before I hit that day. So, I'm attracted to highly graphic images and what I'd call flat art. There's just something about Peter Max's designs that grab my attention and make me want to screen print - all those wonderful planes of stencil-like colour and that glorious saturation. The Sixties definitely loom large in my legend, put it that way, and psychedelia is top of my tree. So, here are five amazing reasons why I love Peter Max:

• Psychedelic: There's a definite acid head frenzy going on here, whether actual or conjured, with clashing fluorescents, undulating curls and swirls and the dreamlike state.
• Eerie: the undulating backgrounds of swirls and rays, the marshmallow puffiness of people and animals, the blinding flashes of clashing colours - this is the stuff of very bad dreams and very bad trips both with a sweet sugar coating of chocolate and sprinkles. Are you awake or asleep? High or sober?
• Tension: somewhere between a cartoon and a nightmare, there is a wonderful tension in the artwork that is both appealing and terrifying, rather like the poisonous liquid shapes of art nouveau - a dangerous beauty.
• Enduring: you can see echoes of Peter's work today in graphics, interiors and children's cartoons with an enduring legacy of bombastic colour and bold shape over a slightly scary undertone.
• Reduction: So much information and detail is conveyed by so few lines. The Beatles are pretty much solid blocks of colour, but you instantly know which Beatle is which. That's genius.

I'm looking at one of my pieces as I write this post, and I can see his influence in the flat planes of colour and the stark graphic quality of the collaged images I chose - there are more influences in there, but that's another post or several! You can see a glimmer of where I get my love for fluoro paints as well... You can pick up original pieces from him here and there - he did a lot of commercial work like posters, scarves and household goods. (Oh, and the above image is Love - © Peter Max.)

And another thing

Peter Max - Official Website and Store

Yellow Submarine Movie Trailer

A quick little interview compilation with Peter Max

Last week I was house-sitting in Barnes, which just so happens to be about ten or so minutes away from Kensington via bus and Tube, and it just so happened that there is an Ian Dury retrospective exhibition on at the Royal College of Art in the wonderfully named Kensington Gore... so it seemed churlish of me not to go. I love Ian Dury and am completely gutted that I had three separate opportunities to see him and The Blockheads live but never did. I firmly believe that he is one of Britain's foremost poets - and one of our greatest Bohemian eccentrics as well. I knew that he'd been an art student but had never actually seen any of his work - or so I thought. To get to the RCA you have to take a rather splendid walk up Kensington High Street and along by the side of Hyde Park. It was a blisteringly hot day with full sunshine so you can imagine how magnificent the full glow of Hyde Park Gates were set amongst all that lovely lush greenery - London has a stupendous amount of parks and wild spaces and I urge you to check them out!

shall i mourn your decline with some thunderbird wine and a black handkerchief? i miss your sad virginia whisper, i miss the voice that called my heart

Finally I arrived, and can now say that I've "been" to the RCA with a knowing wink. The exhibition itself is quite informal but no less hallowed and what struck me first was how strong the vibe of Ian Dury is in all his work, to the point where I felt that he was actually there. He was obsessed with lad mag style pinups and under the tutelage of his teacher and mentor Sir Peter Blake was something of a leading light in the Pop Art scene and it really shows. Movies and sex jostle with a saucy British vibe, and a lot of his paintings sing with acres of sequins around beautifully executed pencil drawings. That was the second thing that struck me - just how much hard graft he'd put into learning and executing his craft. Which brought me on to the "I never saw his work". It turns out that I had - he'd designed tons of record sleeves and illustrations for magazine articles, many of which I'd seen on my numerous excursions around secondhand record stores and in my obsessive collecting of old magazines. What I took away from the exhibit:

• I need to knuckle down and properly work on my drawing skills - Ian Dury managed all this whilst teaching, working and being in a band, so I really have no excuse
• Being true to yourself and your passion is key in artwork - without compromise and without hesitation
• You can mix the profane and the lofty with great results - and sequins don't hurt either
• The Royal Albert Hall (opposite the RCA) is a lot smaller than it looks on TV

The whole exhibition was lovingly curated by his daughter Jemima and features comments from former colleagues, band mates and teachers, and the amount of affection he's held in both by contemporaries and fans cannot be underestimated. If you happen to be house-sitting, or find yourself in Kensington, or are a fan of Ian Dury, then this is definitely an exhibition worth checking out - and it's free! The exhibition runs until September 1st 2013 at the Royal College of Art, Kensington Gore, London SW7 (link below).

And another thing

Ian Dury: More Than Fair
all the info!

My favourite Ian Dury song EVER
Sweet Gene Vincent

Hey Hey Mobile by Ian Dury
How glorious is this?!

Here's what I learned yesterday. I have AMAZING friends. Properly solid gold amazing friends. I asked for help and I received it in abundance, so much love and gratefulness goes out to Simon, Sarah, Annie, Lorrie, RichTea, and Sunny for their advice and support. You people ROCK. I actually felt much better after sharing my fears, and injected with renewed enthusiasm and creativity, headed out to my balcony (it's a thousand degrees in the UK at the moment) where I spent the afternoon happily painting. Not painting a canvas or anything, but painting my new sketchbook, which is going to house ideas and starting points for later canvasses. I figured this was a good place to begin - the sketchbook is for my eyes only and doesn't have to be perfect so I could just paint for the sheer glory and joy of painting. And I did. Sun on my face, cup of tea by my side, mp3 player blasting Roy Harper through the headphones. I find that just the right blend of music can do wonders for getting me in a creative mood. And this brings me on to Mr. Harper himself (as I promised a while ago that I would blog about him).

"Buying rides on Mother Nature's funny belly dance"

I first "discovered" Roy Harper, a massively underrated British folk/rock singer-songwriter who has not only influenced and hung out with legends like Jimmy Page and Macca, but has continued to influence and hang out with new bods like Joanna Newsome when I was a little hippie rebel in my teens in the mid-Seventies. I used to hang out with my like-minded hippie rebel friends, listening to Roy, Pink Floyd, and the like and dreaming of a time when I could leave the suburban enclave in Hampshire where I spent my formative years and go off to be a Boho artist hippie freak. Roy Harper and Syd Barrett were our twin gods of freakdom - they seemed to speak to us in ways that teenagers like to think that rock gods do. His voice is like honey and he has an appealing twinkle in his eye, put it that way.

• his voice is pure balm for my soul
• he sits very firmly in the counterculture hippie way of thinking with fabulous ecological and anti-establishment lyrics
• if that all sounds a bit too muesli for you, he also clearly is something of a sex fiend so there's some sauce in there as well
• and he's uber cute

I'm saving my pennies to see him at the Southbank in October - he's coming out of semi-retirement and I absolutely cannot miss this. I'll be in the front row smiling like an idiot. If he does When An Old Cricketer Leaves The Crease, the greatest eulogy song EVER WRITTEN, which John Peel dedicated to John Waters after his passing, I will weep buckets. Take my advice and listen to the album Stormcock in its entirety and without interruption. Great friends AND Roy Harper - what a difference a day makes. xx

Roy Harper 101

The greatest eulogy song ever
When An Old Cricketer Leaves The Crease

The perfect love song
Commune (from The Old Grey Whistle Test)

One of my get up and go songs
One of Those Days In England (Part One)

A good portion of examining and journeying through my creative recovery these last nine weeks has been about fear and procrastination (which are pretty much two sides of the same coin as it turns out). One of the exercises that I had to do was to create an art totem, a guardian angel who would sustain and nurture me in times of drought and doubt, and to that end I made a reblanos of the wonderful Frida Kahlo.

she was often declared to be a Surrealist, but denied this, stating that she painted her reality not her dreams

It is almost impossible to be afraid, doubt yourself or procrastinate when the steely yet playful gaze of Frida is upon you and you can hear her say, through cigarette smoke: "I dealt with a bus crash, countless operations, a leg amputation AND Diego Rivera - now GET TO WORK!" You can see one of the reasons why I chose her but there are so many more. Here are just five of the many, many reasons why I love Magdalena Carmen Frieda Kahlo y Calderón de Rivera:

• Fearless: she was born with polio - and still learned how to paint. She was in a bus crash so severe that doctors thought she would die. Then they said she'd never walk again. Then they said she'd never have a normal life. She didn't die. She did walk again. She kept on painting and she conquered Paris and married Diego Rivera. She had numerous back operations, each one more debilitating than the last, and she had a leg amputated and she STILL kept on painting, and seduced both men and women, among them Trotsky. The word fearless was invented for her.
• Revolutionary: She changed the date on her birth records so that it would seem she was born on the day of the Mexican Revolution. She fought social injustice, prejudice, stood up for the common man, marched, protested, distributed tracts, harboured Trotsky when he was on the run, and STILL kept on painting.
• Intimate: Frida looked at every deep, dark corner of her soul and put them on canvas. And kept putting them on canvas. We know about her because she painted all of it and never shied away from the truth of her life however painful, both physically or emotionally. Every lock of hair, every drop of blood, every shattered bone tells a story. I defy any woman (or any man for that matter) to look at her portraits and not feel the jagged ache of their own heartbreak, or the razor sharp slice of their own emotional pain, the snap of their own vulnerable bones.
• Diego: you cannot talk about Frida without mentioning Diego, her husband, soulmate and source of both joy and pain. Their love affair is in the annals of legend and all the fierceness, intensity, betrayal and reconciliation is played out on her canvasses.
• Avant Garde: she was often declared to be a Surrealist, but denied this, stating that she painted her reality not her dreams. She was ahead of the curve and fiercely so, not following any fashion or trend but painting her own truth in her own way.

I'm a Pagan by religion, and devote myself to the Goddess. My religion is all about passion and life, however messy, joyful, tragic or insane. It's also about empowerment, and Pagans tend to devote themselves to powerful female Goddesses - women of great compassion, fierce warriors, passionate lovers and nurturers. In the pantheon of Pagan Goddesses I like to think there's a place for Frida who embodies all of these traits and more. She was absolutely a one off.

And another thing

Secret Parisian restaurants from the delightful blog of Messy Nessy Chic
spend some time here

A daily blast of colour and texture from one of my favourite blogs
feast your eyes!

Occasionally I like to blow my own trumpet and offer this up for you
Rene Armand