Why are Open Houses on in May?

Delving about in my ephemera, for my last post about the Two Fringes, I came across a couple of brochures of alternative Open House events. Around the time of the split from the Festival and then the Fringe, some AOHers, notably from the Fiveways trail, proposed moving the Open Houses Festival away from the 'umbrella' of the May Festival to other parts of the year.

This was trialed by a Council-backed (City of Culture/Where Else Campaign) initiative called Manifest, which took place in October 2002, for three weekends. Various talks/workshops/exhibitions/open houses took place, from Portslade to Rottingdean. But it never happened again.

Then, of course, came the Christmas Open Houses, still going strong. In its first year, 2003, there were just 16 venues; last year there were 65. The brochures are designed by AOH's Chris Lord, with woodcut illustrations on the cover by Judy Stevens, always on the theme of The Twelve days of Christmas. We look forward to its 13th year to see how she will illustrate that one!

In 2006, 11 Open Houses had a July opening for two weekends, as part of the Celebrating Age festival, featuring more mature artists, i.e. those over 50! The participating venues (I was in Jackie Jones' house at 51 Upper Lewes Road) were not impressed by the level of publicity it got, attendances were poor and it was never repeated. The consensus is that May is best!

Incidentally, almost all these events had websites, now gone to the great digital graveyard in the sky...

When Brighton had two Fringes

A recent Twitter exchange with the new Fringe Director @JulianCaddy, who by all accounts is a breath of fresh air, jogged my memory about the origins of the Fringe. Unlike Edinburgh's Fringe, which started the same time as the International Festival in 1947 and has since grown bigger than its posher rival, the current Brighton Fringe was created by Festival Director at the time Nick Dodds. Under Gavin Henderson, the Festival embraced all of May's cultural events, including also the Artists' Open Houses. Henderson was also responsible for using Brighton artists and makers to design the covers of the brochures. Under his successor, Christopher Barron, the miscellaneous events and artists houses were grouped at the back of the festival brochure under the heading of Umbrella. My collection only goes back to 1997, so earlier than that I don't know.

Dodds, however, wanted to split off the 'non-programmed' events (i.e. not taking place in the Dome complex) into an Edinburgh-like fringe. There were lots of heated meetings about it, main opposition coming from the AOHers. As a compromise, the 2002 festival brochure (the one with the jelly bean cover) included a bound-in supplement called Brighton Festival Open.

But also in 2002, some bright sparks - Helen Medland and Jeff Hemmings - started up the Brighton Fringe! This was described in their intro as the fifth ever Fringe 'after an enforced sabbatical last year'. This is where my memory fails me. I do remember seeing Fringe brochures from the 1960s in a small exhibition at North Star Studios once, but I think they related to the Open Studios that preceded the Open Houses.

In 2003 there was another Brighton Fringe ('the sixth real Brighton Fringe Festival'). But 2003 also saw the publication of a brochure by the new Brighton Festival Fringe, with the first 13 pages devoted to the Open Houses!

So for one year only, Brighton had two Fringes! What happened to Brighton Fringe you may ask? I don't know, but I believe pressure was put on them by the official festival. There was also the question of funding. The first 'official' Fringe was funded by the main festival, who were in turn funded by the Arts Council and Brighton Council. AOH stayed with the Fringe for a few years, before deciding to break off and produce a brochure of their own in 2005, but that's another story. And that's a cue for me to sort out my ephemera collection.

Edward Burra in Chichester

I really am still in two minds about Edward Burra. There's a Burra in Bury art gallery called 'News of the World', I have fond memories of seeing it as I was growing up, but I always assumed he was American, what with the unusual name and his best known pictures being of jazz-age Harlem. What I also didn't realise was that he worked almost excusively in watercolour.

So I set off to Pallant House in Chichester on half-price tuesday to see more. As ever they put on a fine exhibition, and I loved the first room of art deco sailors and showgirls from French ports, and in the corridor before you even get in is a fabulous and rare oil painting, and all in that flattened perspective with vibrant Léger-style shading of arms and legs. How did he achieve that depth of colour with watercolour? I squinted close up and all I could deduce was that he was using very dry paint, perhaps pounced like Maxfield Parrish. When I got home I googled about his technique - more later!

Anyway, after that first room with its smallish pictures, plus his photo album of tiny contact prints, we get to the Spanish war and some huge paintings that I thought were horrible. And I was pretty much disappointed from then in - everything he did I could think of someone who'd done it better. The early inter-war stuff you could compare with George Grosz and William Roberts (also featured in a Pallant House exhibition, 2007). The spanish paintings remind you of Dali, and put Burra in that sad category of English Surrealist. His Sussex paintings are not even in the same league as Ravilious. I find his pictures on the cusp of ugliness, with those big lumbering forms looming up in the foreground and the hideous lips on everyone. But I still can't help being fascinated.

The technique to achieve this intense tempera-type finish, I found out from a Guardian review, was as follows:

He came to prefer watercolour to oil, partly because it was physically easier to handle for a man who, perforce, painted sitting down [he suffered from rheumatoid arthritis, as well as other ailments]. Though he seems to have had a good idea of where he was going from the start, he did not make preliminary sketches. He started at the bottom right-hand corner, and in his 20s and 30s, drew a compartment, or section, in light pencil (he later dispensed with this). Then, using a rather small brush laden with paint lightly moistened with spit, he completed the entire section before moving on to the next, achieving a suave, velvety surface of intensely saturated colour.

Do go and see it, though. It's on until 19 February.

How authors go mad

I was planning a Moan on this subject, but someone beat me to it: How authors go mad

Fred through the ages

With my 65th birthday looming I thought I'd compile a slideshow of photos of me through the ages!

Daily Moan #19: Upgrading the computer

Another New year and it's back to having a good old moan! Now I must preface this moan with the statement that I love Apple and Apple products, and believe that Jony Ive should be knighted. I bought my first ever Mac Plus back in June 1989 and even before that, way back in the early 80s, I got my company - IPC Science and Technology Press - to buy an Apple ][e with a bank of four floppy drives, just to put conference delegate lists into alphabetical order. But...

BUT...

I hate upgrading. I dread it. I avoid it like the plague until I get dragged into doing it for the sake of a new gadget. It happened when I got my first iPod. I brought it home all excited and unpacked it, only to find my OS wasn't up-to-date enough. So I upgraded, and of course nothing worked - it took days to get the internet, printers and everything back working again. Stressful!

The same thing happened when I got the iPad 2. I was perfectly happy with OS 10.4 but it insisted I needed 10.5. So I borrowed a copy (the only alternative was to buy an expensive box set) and again it was traumatic, mainly because a program I'd been using for years, Adobe Streamline, which was working fine in 'classic' mode, was no longer happening. Ah well, I thought, I am almost retired and should I need to trace line drawings, I could learn Freehand's built-in trace tools. But then, just before Christmas, my trusty iMac died!

OK, I'd had seven years productive use from it (bought May 2005). It was the last of the PowerPC iMacs, the white one before they stuck a camera in. I'd woken it from sleep and everything was frozen. I restarted it from the power button, it chimed but never got past the blue screen. Hmm, what to do. I had the iPad so I was on Facebook and Gmail, but I couldn't work. I'd rigged up an old 12in Powerbook G4 (bought to handle Channel 4's dreadful content-management system, for which my iMac was too up to date) as a distraction-free writing machine for NaNoWriMo, so I could use that. I'd been thinking of buying a new iMac for a while, so I took the plunge and ordered one from the Apple Store, where I get an NUJ discount. The old iMac went to the menders. I was hoping it could be repaired so I could get at Filemaker Pro and my invoices etc.

When the new iMac arrived, I transferred all my life from an external hard drive (using Time Machine). My neighbours had already been caught out with the new Firewire 800 plug so I borrowed their £20+ cable to transfer everything from the hard drive into the new computer. So far so good, but I'd been reading up and was aware that Lion didn't support PowerPC apps. My plan was to get the old one mended and strip it down as a work computer, but as it worked out the logic board was gone and it was an uneconomic repair. Luckily Mick Swabey had an old iMac like mine but with smaller screen on sale for £85! So he swopped the internal hard drives for me and I was back in business, but with two computers on the go.

Now I've been using Freehand since the beginning, but that was no longer supported on the new computer. I had archives going back years and my new giclee prints had all been created using Freehand. I'm too old to learn Illustrator! Luckily, Photoshop CS3 still worked, but I didn't even attempt to connect my old scanner to it. All my records - invoices, addresses, etc were on FileMaker Pro - I could have bought an upgrade, but why should I when it was working fine on the old computer? Upgrading is not only stressful, it can be expensive too. So to do my Xmas cards I began transferring my contact info to Address Book - I didn't try printing labels, I still have that bridge to cross.

I'd also bought a Time Capsule, which I thought was just a glorified hard drive, but it is also a router. I couldn't get it to work as just a hard drive, so took my Netgear router out of the loop and everything was sweet as a nut, just like Apple products usually are - all working straight out of the box. I noticed it had a USB port to attach a printer, but after trying to get the old HP 990c printer to work on the network, discovered it too was no longer supported! Ah well.

Anyway, on New Year's Eve I went up to the 100 Club in London to see my favourite band David Devant and his Spirit Wife, and as usual I took my Flip video recorder to document the event. Back home, I put a couple of videos on YouTube and set about compiling the DVD. My trusty copy of iMovie HD was working and I started importing the Flip files and typing in the song titles. When it was all done, I clicked Share to power up iDVD then discovered my iDVD wouldn't work. OK, so I'd download an upgrade, only there isn't one! What! Yes, that's right, iDVD is no longer supported by Apple. So how the blazes can I make a DVD? The only solution was to start again on the old computer, transferring the Flip files by USB memory stick (the iMovie project file is 17 gigs, I could have used my old external drive to transfer it over but I don't have the right Firewire cable!). There may well be way of doing it via Time Capsule, but it's done now... or rather it's in the process of doing it!

Of course my PC friends will be killing themselves laughing at all this. I thought Macs never broke, they'll taunt. The upshot is that I have a beautiful, fast, state-of-the-art iMac with a crisp high-res screen, but it does little more than my iPad already does. My workhorse is an old 17in G5 iMac running all my favourite programs on Leopard. If only my iMac had died earlier when they were still sending out Macs with Snow Leopard, I would have been OK (for a year or two). Guess which computer I'm writing this on? The old one of course.

Up North again

Doing the NaNoWriMo in November made me a bit behind with my blog, but I did it! 50,000 words in less than 30 days! What I discovered about fiction, as opposed to non-fiction is that you can make things up! According to Julia Crouch I'll have to wait until January before I look at it again.

Just before November I made another trip to Bury for my Brother-in-Law's 60th birthday celebrations, and to take in the East Lancs Railway Autumn Steam Gala. I travelled up on the Saturday, so only had Sunday to enjoy the trains. The big disappointment was that 71000 Duke of Gloucester was stuck somewhere and wouldn't be on (but he'd be back the following weekend, hoorah!).



The ELR seems to be running out of locos so it was a pretty humdrum selection, the star of which was 49395 - the so-called Super-D. The only other big loco on was a Mickey, 45231 The Sherwood Forester. The rest were industrial tanks: Peckett and Sons 1370 May in Yates Duxbury paper mill livery, Manchester Ship Canal 32 Gothenburg in the guise of Thomas the Tank Engine, and WD132 Sapper.



On the Tuesday I took the tram to Manchester to see the Ford Madox Brown exhibition at the Manchester (City) Art Gallery. As you may know I'm a big fan of the Pre-Raphs and as Brown was a honorary member, and Rossetti's teacher, it was a must. Although I've seen all his major works before : Work, Manfred on the Jungfrau, and The last of England - there were lots of studies and sketches to see, including the drawings for his Manchester Town Hall murals. His faces always worry me though, they look so sinister some of them. If the later ones look a bit unfinished its because he suffered a stroke and had to finish them using his left hand!

On Wednesday my niece took me out to Bolton, where we stopped by at Fred Dibnah's house, now a heritage centre - there are tours but you have to book in advance. After fish and chips at Russells we looked at the magnificent Victorian market hall, now a shopping mall, and other architectural gems.



On Thursday I chose the day with the worst weather to take the Cumbrian Round Robin rail journey: train from Bolton to Carlisle, then back down the coast through Workington, Whitehaven, Sellafield, Barrow-in-Furness and Carnforth. Unfortunately the train north I was on caught fire (engine under central carriage) near Shap summit and I missed my connection, so it was dark as I reached Morecambe Bay. If I did it again, I'd only go up as far as Barrow, or maybe Sellafield if you like weird places. Whitehaven looked reasonably nice; but Workington was a wasteland. Ulverston, between Barrow and Carnforth, had a very impressive station with clock tower.



Friday was spent on Bury market buying Northern food, including black peas and black puddings. Saturday I took my Bruv-in-law on the steam trains while my sister's gaff was being decked out ready for the party. We drove to Ramsbottom and did a round trip, pulled by 45231 The Sherwood Forester. At Heywood we observed a party of VIPs, including the Mayor of Rochdale, inspect the train. On Sunday, the Duke was back in action, so I spent the day in a comfy carriage behind that most magnificent loco.

NaNoWriMo and my Hon Degree

In case you've been wondering where I've been, I've had my head down writing a 50,000 word novel for NaNoWriMo and you'll be glad to know that I'm just over half-way through. It's all Julia Crouch's fault - she did it three years ago and the result was her published novel Cuckoo, with another two on the way. I'm not sure there's a publishable novel in me, but it seemed like a good idea at the time, and easier than growing a moustache.

After my trip Up North, the second this year, which I have yet to blog, I travelled up to Guildford, along with thousands of others, to receive an honorary degree. No it wasn't for my outstanding contribution to social media, it was a B Univ given to all and sundry who spent time at Battersea, before the college became an University and moved to Guildford. It would have made more sense if they'd given it to those who just got an external London degree, but I did get a Surrey degree, and now I have two!

I met Chris Chelu (who took the photo), Tina, Groovy Rob Thomasson, and Wal - who missed the boat on a ticket for the ceremony so came as my guest - long with Maurice Valoir, Chris Taper, Phil Garel-Jones, Pete Baylis - and Sir David Varney! Plus many others. I shook hands with HRH the Duke of Kent and we had a slap-up reception with canapes and wine after.