Born in 1954. Chequered career including Lecturer in English, Social Worker and Lecturer in Social Work. Had breaks related to mental health that also meant I worked in social care. Now retired.
What are your favorite animals? I have given up with these daily prompts but I have to honour my old doggy, Daisy, given the opportunity, even if I still have to bend the question to my own purposes. Let’s do it by pictures only: There is no doubt that she is camera shy. A friend … More I love Daisy
Drawing from Life for a portrait artist is rarely about ‘struggling for a likeness’ according to David Hockney – what a person is ‘like’, the ways of understanding what a person is like and how we show what a person is like each change, and, as each does so, interact with and change each other … More My visit to the National Portrait Gallery’s (NPG) exhibition Drawing from Life on Tuesday 22nd November and reading of the catalogue, Sarah Howgate [ed.] (2023) ‘David Hockney: drawing from life’.
I wrote a blog in preparation for this show. You can read it if you wish at this link: https://livesteven.com/2023/10/29/this-blog-is-my-preparation-to-see-the-retrospective-exhibition-on-the-work-of-marina-abramovic-at-the-royal-academy-the-first-held-there-on-a-female-artist-in-london-on-22nd-november-i-prepared-by/. Some things I guessed but got wrong. On entering we are first confronted by The Artist is Present (2011) which fills an entire room. But it is, in the bodily absence of stills as I … More Marina Abramović: but essentially the artist is absent. The conceptual pitfalls of a beautiful show.
In a corridor connecting the two wings of the Philip Guston exhibition at Tate Modern, the legend above is displayed on a wall. Sometimes a curation of a retrospective of a life makes you feel a person is exposed in front of you, being forcibly opened up and a whole excess of visceral content spread … More Philip Guston: what kind of man am I?
What’s your favorite month of the year? Why? April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow, feeding A little life with dried tubers. T.S. Eliot ‘The Waste Land’, lines 1ff. For whole … More April pierces to my root, no wonder we call him cruel.
What is your favorite place to go in your city? The front of the then School of Education, Durham University Soon after I moved to County Durham I studied for a PGCE in teaching English and Drama. Those portals to teaching were taught in then School of Education in Durham University in the College of … More Durham: a cathedral, a castle and a prison – and a river runs through it.
‘I close my eyes, just for a moment, and I think about tomorrow. / And the days afterward. / And what it’ll mean to step through a home, in a brand-new place, where my people aren’t’.[1] This is a blog about the emergent meanings of family, home and the endurance of relationships in a global … More This is a blog about the emergent meanings of family, home and the endurance of relationships in a global multicultural queer world where those categories no longer have a simple meaning. It discusses Bryan Washington (2023) ‘Family Meal’.
What does Johny Pitts mean by Visibilty (a little book with a big message published by the Tate Gallery in 2022). My title This book is only 48 pages including the front pages / copyrights / and list of picture captions at the end. It’s message is huge. Let’s take one – by no means … More Are you sure you see what is there?
If you could live anywhere in the world, where would it be? Daily prompt? I have seen this question come and go and shuddered at the assumptions that I feared were its motives. Today, I want to confront it, in the light of my visceral response to it, for the world is too much with … More ‘Eyeless in Gaza, at the mill with slaves’: The dream of a permanent home or the choice of a luxury setting?
If you could meet a historical figure, who would it be and why? Daily prompt – laptop options We turned a corner off that street halfway Between the library and museum. The day was already in its decay So present was the past that had Priam stood as if in metal made, Trojan brass, we … More To meet and part and then travel on. ‘Nothing beside remains’.
“Everything I had willingly drawn was female. But here, through these coal-mine drawings, I discovered the male figure and the qualities of the figure in action. As a sculptor I had previously believed only in static forms, that is, forms in repose”.[1] Henry Moore said this when talking to James Sweeney in 1947. It suggests … More “Everything I had willingly drawn was female. But here, through these coal-mine drawings, I discovered the male figure and the qualities of the figure in action”. How a concern with sex / gender manifest itself in Moore’s mining drawings. This blog looks at Chris Owen (2022) ‘Drawing In The Dark: Henry Moore’s Coalmining Commission’.
What book are you reading right now? Daily prompt on laptop – why does it differ it from mobile? I have never read only one book at a time, although these days I tend to just read two. One I read at night when I go to bed earlier. At the moment that is Bryan … More Reading in multiples.
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