Ken in The Times, 3 Mar 2009
The on-line version has a different title from the printed title above “George Always: Maggi makes Melly with her old friend”. Ken looks at George Always, an exhibition by Maggi Hambling, at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool 31 May 2009 The exhibition is of portraits of jazz musician George Melly. Ken writes
“…George Melly's mix of energy, camp and rhythm was totally original, funny and very sexy. And here he is as a revolving pot-bellied bundle of dazzling rainbow blue with a black eye patch in a painting by Maggi Hambling.… She paints the action of a wave breaking and the suppleness of her good friend Melly dancing, singing or laughing. “Paint can live, move and breathe in front of us,” she says. “This wave breaks for him.”
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"Melly kept performing until a week before his death in 2007. Six weeks before he died, his dementia by now advanced, he came to lunch with Hambling. “Dementia suits me,” he confided, “I'm a surrealist.” A short time later he died of cancer.… The Melly paintings are vibrating, speaking to me. Here he's lecturing at a garden party, an interdimensional portal extending from his shoulder. “That's an angel's wing,” Hambling says. “What's this in his eyeball?” I ask. “His long-time love, Squeaky,” she replies. Here he is with a fish in air. “George loved fishing. Fish are always showing up in surrealistic paintings.”
Talking of the artist Maggi Hambling Ken says
“I browse through her London home, where a massive elephant chair, cowskin rugs, flying Indonesian sky dancers, Mexican masks, a mechanical ostrich, a glamorous long-lashed bust of her by the sculptor Andrew Logan, stuffed parrots, her own glorious portraits and a jungle garden straight out of Rousseau provide an ambience not unlike a gorgeous Art Deco salon. “George was very pleased to see I'd finally got a grand piano,” she laughs, pointing to a working toy replica. Up the stairs under her portrait of Derek Jarman on the stairwell ceiling is her haven, although she spends most of each week at her house on the sea in Suffolk. Fedora at the ready for outside wear, she's wry, sharp as a tack, self-possessed and immeasurably loyal. “I cultivate a tough persona, because I'm very choosy about who I let eat me up.” She displays that loyalty by keeping alive in her paintings those dearest to her - Melly, Jarman and her one-time muse, the decadent beauty Henrietta Moraes, the failed cat burglar. “
Ken in The Times, 10 Mar 2009
Ken looks at We Live in Two Worlds , a DVD boxed set of short films by the legendary GPO Film Unit (the GPO are the British Post Office).
Ken says “The GPO Film Unit had directors such as Len Lye, Harry Watt, Basil Wright, Norman McLaren and Humphrey Jennings, composers such as Brian Easdale and Benjamin Britten, the poet W.H. Auden, the author J.B. Priestley, and producers such as the Brazilian Alberto Cavalcanti. From 1933, for seven years, the unit produced arty educational films on how the Post Office worked,.. They were mildly amusing, had a certain naive charm and were delivered in a pastiche of animation, mini-drama and mythic poetic gushes.”
The most famous is Night Mail with music by Benjamin Britten and text by WH Auden which reflects the noise of thetrain in the rails “Now the Night Mail is crossing the border/ Bringing the cheques and the postal orders/ Letters for the rich, letters for the poor/ The shop on the corner and the girl next door.”
Ken says “this collaboration between Auden and Britten, makes it romantic that 40 workers scooping millions of letters into nets leave Euston [Railway Station] at 8.30pm daily on the travelling Postal Special. “
Ken describes many of the other films such as The Horsey Mail "set during a storm on the east coast of Norfolk. Seven hundred yards of sea wall have collapsed. There are floods everywhere. So Postman Pat goes to rescue Mrs Stokes, whose bed is surrounded by ducks swimming in 5ft of water. Postman Pat rows her the 15 miles to Horsey High Street to mail a postcard to Farmer Fred. "
“Buy this box set and enter the twilight zone of 22 films from 1936-38. You'll get technical marvels, simple smiles, insights into manpower when it was still elegantly organised and trips across the country with the love letters of a nation. “
You can buy the DVD here:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/B001MK9ZHG/savagmessiakenru (http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/B001MK9ZHG/savagmessiakenru)
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