Unpicking the Bayeux Tapestry

The Bayeux Tapestry, so called because it is an embroidery made in Canterbury, doesn't actually reside in Hastings - it's in Bayeux - but I've given it to the Jedwood on loan for a day.

The tapestry is possibly one of the world's first comic strips - it tells the story of the Norman invasion of England and the battle of Hastings in sequential art form, complete with captions. All that's missing is speech balloons and panels separating the episodes in the story.

Raw sculpture

Call me old fashioned, but I do like my artists to have made some sort of effort. Just plonking a stone on a plinth and calling it art 'because the artist says so' is just cheating.

Bridget Riley

Ever stood in front of a Bridget Riley op-art painting? I went to an exhibition of her stuff at the Serpentine Gallery in Hyde Park once. The paintings are huge, they take up an entire wall. Stand in front of them and stare for too long and suddenly everything goes all wibbly - all you can see is black and white lines and they shimmer and start to move of their own accord. Her paintings are quite literally staggering - it's hard to stay upright while looking at them.

Mobile

You don't see mobiles in art galleries any more. You see them in the SkyMall catalogue instead. They were a very 1950s form of art - the spindlier the better.

Today is the tenth anniversary of the wedding of Linda and I. Moo! Linda, I love you. Here's to many more years of mooing at one another.

The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living

Damien Hirst's famous pickled shark, a mixed media piece (tiger shark, glass, steel, 5% formaldehyde solution, 213 x 518 x 213cm according to the catalogue to the 'Sensation' show that it first appeared in).

The artwork is currently on its second shark, after the first one decayed and made the fluid it floated in go all cloudy. Despite being a remake it still sold for $8,000,000 in 2004.

The smell of technology

This is the first colouring job done on my new Mac. Thank goodness my graphics tablet still runs on it! I've been running an old Power PC iMac for the last eight years and I was starting to find I was no longer able to update my software or run anything over the web any more. GoComics had even started to refuse to upload my comics. So it was time to get a new iMac. I've suddenly leapt four systems and five versions of Photoshop.

The irony is I'm having to keep my old Mac going just as a scanning machine, as Canon can't be bothered to update the drivers for their scanners any more.

Can I say the new Photoshop interface is going to take a bit of getting used to - I can't put two cartoons next to one another and use the eye dropper tool to copy colours from one to the other - I now have to toggle between two tabs. It's like working in MS windows 20 years ago - I am not impressed.

It smells nice, though.

Kitsch

Yeah, but no, but yeah... Actually it's an incisive subversion of the Japanese Maneki Neko 'lucky cat' custom - would we accept it if it were real cats posed in shop doorways, forever forced to beckon customers over the threshold? Yeah. Right on.

Jocasta and Henry are typical metropolitan PIB's* down for the weekend in Hastings to look at the art and the poverty ("Gosh, it's terribly authentic here, isn't it, Jocasta?"). On the Jedward's opening night the town was full of art beings like these two, eating fish and chips out of newspapers and kidding themselves they were doing it ironically.

*Persons in black.

Parp!

The sculpture isn't actually based on anything - it's a sort of tromboney stainless steel thing of my own devising, possibly inspired by Anish Kapoor's Orbit sculpture in the Olympic Park. (Sorry, Mr Kapoor, your stuff is normally excellent but this is a bit of a dud, I'm afraid. I can see what you meant but the execution of those smooth curves in straight structural steel sections just makes it look awkward.) Or maybe the fantasy organ on the cover of Pink Floyd's 'Relics' album.

Spark

No, it's not a lack of inspiration - it's a series. Jones is going through her 'identical pictures of cats' period, and each one is subtly different, tackling aspects of catdom that the lumpen proletariat just wouldn't be capable of understanding. Or something like that.

But its essentially a set-up strip for the next fortnight, spent at the gallery. Sorry, all those fans of Jones' beret, this is the last time you'll see it for a bit. But who knows, it may return...

Smith rampant, argent.

Smith is posed in the 'rampant' fashioned so loved by heraldic artists. Lions have a tendency to take up this position on shields, as do Kentish horses. However it's a really awkward pose to keep up.

The only animal I've ever seen which makes anything like this pose naturally in the wild is, of all things, the humble black-tailed prairie dog. It's a territorial display known as the jump-yip, and it's exactly what it sounds like. I've seen them in the Prairie Dog Town in Lubbock, Texas, and its fascinating to see one dog jump-yip and set off a chain reaction of other jump-yippers through the rest of the colony.

Twisted logic

I'm not sure this strip works, which is why I've moved it to midweek, rather than leave it exposed for an entire weekend on Friday. Either the logic is too twisted or not twisted enough, but I'm not sure which. Either that or I'm a bad judge of my own work - quite often I've found that what I consider to be sub-par strips are the ones that get the best reaction.

Jones' face goes all cubist in the last frame.

Coastal Currents, day one.

Coastal Currents launched this weekend. So far I've visited Laurence Poole and donated a few cars to his latest assemblage, which looks like it should be interesting. Baldly put, he's mounting a bunch of model cars onto a bit of board - arranged chromatically. Is this art? I'd say definitely, yes; it's the kind of thing I could put on a wall and stare at forever, considering the relationships between the models, the colours, the models themselves, etc etc. But then, I'm a middle aged man who collects model cars. His other assemblages involve pens and pencils, stamps and old vinyl records. I like them a lot. Take a look at them here.

Going from the sublime to the ridiculous, last night I visited the Stade Open space and watched the Karavan Ensemble combine 'promenade elements, dance, physical and visual theatre, interactivity and object animation in a site responsive context'. Or, to put it another way, they put a lampshade on their head and waved their arms around mysteriously. Then they hid behind a sheet and did some basic shadow puppetry (they waved their arms around in front of a torch) while someone else above the sheet, arranged so she appeared to be wearing it, waved her arms around as well (if you've seen Wicked, you've seen this done much better during 'Defying Gravity'). On my 'Emperor's got no clothes' scale, this performance scored a 'completely naked' rating. However, I award their publicity material the full five pseuds.

Splodge

This is very much how I used to work before I discovered painting using Photoshop, which involves using much less clothes washing at the end of the day.

Pfouag!

From this I think we can deduce that Jones does not work in oils. I think she has more of a taste for poster paints. Especially the blue - that one tastes the best.

Coastal Currents

It's been a bit of an eventful month here are the Pilcher's. We got called over to the States where Linda's mum has been very ill. It's been a bit grim, but I won't concern you with the details - I'll just say that we wish Fumiko Robertson a quick and speedy recovery, and that we love her.

We're back now, and I'm a bit behind with my drawing, but I'm hoping I won't end up posting any strips late this month. I have three weeks in hand, so I'll be drawing like a madman this month to bring myself back to my usual month's worth ahead by the end of September.

We've got an new gallery in Hastings, The Jerwood Gallery, known to everyone in town as The Jedward. It opened this spring in a prominent position on the fishing beach, next to the net shops. It's an unpreposessing building, looking like a black-tiled public toilet from the outside, so low key that you almost feel it's apologising for being there. In fact there is a black tiled public toilet next door to it. If you get confused - the way to tell them apart is that the Jedward is the one with the windows.

Once you're inside though everything changes. It's bright and airy and the windows give you some beautifully framed views of the Old Town. The art inside the gallery is, to be frank, a bit of a mixed bunch. It's all modern and contemporary art, mainly 20th and 21st Century stuff. It all depends on what your tastes are I suppose - abstract expressionism doesn't impress me in the least, and canvases made up of formless splodges of paint are what take up most of the walls on the lower floor. Go upstairs and things improve immeasurably - this is where the Lowrys, the Stephen Spenders, the Walter Sickerts and the Augustus Johns are. Call me a Stuckist if you like, but I like my art to look like stuff.

This month is also when the Coastal Currents festival takes place in 1066 Country. It's essentially a three week period in which the local art community tries to outpseud one another. This year, amongst other artworks, we shall have a recreation of the US/Mexico border in a church hall, the end of the world in a town centre basement, an assemblage of model cars, a forest of bamboo and silk in a park by the seafront, and lots and lots of utterly pointless video masquerading as art. It's never less than interesting, and I wouldn't mind betting a lot of the least promising and most pretentious sounding art will actually turn out to be really worthwhile. Apart from the video art of course - by definition that's beneath contempt.

So this month you'll see the strip has a bit of an artistic bent, and will even include a visit to the gallery.

Jones' studio will not be part of the Coastal Currents Open Studio programme.