Four's (part of) a Crowd...(7)

Today the opposite of tomato is Heaps of Sheeps

graphite, putty eraser & watercolour/30x20cm
original source: 'The Guardian' 16/06/08

Continuing the sequence of drawings transcribed from the large-scale photographic original, again in synecdochical part-for-the-whole mode courtesy of the basic grid format. In this instance, although not all the figures' faces are visible, as has been the case previously, this nevertheless seems to create a pleasing, 'human' dynamic between them.

Soundtrack:


Robert Wyatt 'His Greatest Misses'
Tunng 'Good Arrows'
Rachel Unthank & the Winterset 'The Bairns'

A visit to the local library resulted in the loaning of a couple of CDs from the available stock:
Robert Wyatt's self-chosen 'greatest misses', not least because the realisation dawned that I didn't have any of the man's music on CD, despite once owning some on vinyl, in the good old days, a grave omission indeed. How delightful to be reunited with the gorgeous & somehow very poignant reading of 'At Last I Am Free' (one of those worth-the-price-on-its-own, every-music-collection-must-have classics) & also, of course, RW's unsurpassable, heartrending interpretation of Elvis Costello's 'Shipbuilding', a song to which his singularly plaintive tones are perfectly suited to extracting maximum, thoughtful, subdued emotion (EC's own reading always seeming just a little bit too polished &, perhaps, 'cabaret' in comparison, for all of Chet Baker's exquisite contribution) & a veritable treasure trove of other absolutely unique, magical 'songs' or, perhaps more appropriately with many examples, musical works that follow their own idiosyncratic course.
Particularly of such nature, having the opportunity to hear his 'Sea Song' then inspired a comparative listen to Rachel Unthank's thus-far more familiar interpretation of the original, a good excuse to listen to another fine, rolling album of 'otherness' again.
The reflective, philosophically-inclined 'Free Will & Testament' features such an apposite lyric in "Demented forces push me madly round a treadmill", perfectly summing up the nature of much of one's modern, daily life & its insistent, clamouring commitments - "Let me off, please, I am so tired", indeed: how vital the privilege of retreating into art & one's world of, of drawing, & research, & books, & music, & cinema, the saving graces. Approaching the end of the 3rd of 9 weeks' summer break from the mostly enervating demands of the day job, I probably shouldn't complain, but still how I envied Stanley Kubrick's creative reclusiveness as alluded to in Jon Ronson's recent, intriguing TV documentary on More4, featuring the director's extensive store of archive boxes, a fascinating collection of research & other material, with such intense attention to detail, allowing intimate access to the creative process & the nature of, now in the possession of London's University of the Arts.

And Tunng - only previously, intriguingly, experienced in remixed form - & their contemporary, urban take on the tradition of folk (see also The Winterset's approach to, different, more obviously traditional in nature, but again 'expansive' in its scope), jolly good stuff, an engaging sort-of slightly skewed mix of the acoustic & electronic, great groove & relaxed ambience, frequently conversational in tone (&, indeed, form), especially sympathetic to the drawing process.