On Affairs of Style & Sound

A fashionable digression today, in response to an article in yesterday’s Guardian on the subject of an admiration for & inspiration by the sartorial style of David Hockney, otherwise in the news for his current exhibition of landscapes, ‘A Bigger Picture’, at the Royal Academy.
As regards what he might be wearing rather than painting, however, in a related incident late last year Hockney appeared pictured in the November issue of ‘Artists & Illustrators’, resplendent in a knitted tie, thus following the style lead of TOoT as premiered earlier in the year & sported rather fetchingly since, in the contexts of both business & pleasure/leisure: something that perhaps, should be the preferred choice of artists & aesthetes, debonair yet with a certain bohemian air. The estimable Lord Whimsy too has been known to affect ‘the look’, or at least his own idiosyncratic take on it.


Hockney, indeed, has obviously had a thing for horizontally-striped ties (although not necessarily of the knitted variety, for all that the straight end of this illustrated example suggests it might be) since way back, if the drawing 'My Suit and Tie' from 1971 & which image graces the cover of the hardback edition of his 'Drawing Retrospective' volume is any sort of guide.


By one of those serendipitous coincidences that have occurred in these parts on previous occasions, I had only yesterday morning taken delivery of a fresh consignment of knitted ties, thus:


Also pictured is one of the ties as worn, without further ado, with shirt, at ‘wirk’ (note also the Duchampian object in the background – one has to find art where one can!): in such an affronting environment, one has to try & rise above the circumstances & the hoi polloi, not least through one’s apparel & devotion to one’s style…


Finally on the general subject of ties & art, some examples of Fabian Peake's painting from the early-to-mid 1980s featuring just such iconography can be found here, here & here.

Further to yesterday’s cultural matters, A & I were later privileged to attend a performance of Sounds Affairs’ musical accompaniment to 'Salomé' (a fabulously-designed treasure of early arthouse silent cinematic history), a compelling combination of live percussion (with four black-attired musicians arranged within a pair of two-tiered metal-framed open tower structures flanking either side of the screen) & recorded voices, the sonic & visual elements of the event mutually enhancing each other, an exhilarating experience indeed.



We also had the opportunity to peruse an extensive exhibition of the paintings, mostly large scale with some of smaller format also included, of Emrys Williams, of, one might say, imaginative spaces, interior & exterior, the imagery familiar in its details yet strange in their conjunctions & juxtapositions - indeed, depicting forms of both exterior & interior reality, 'topographies of the mind', to paraphrase the intriguing artist's own words, with a pleasing aesthetic dialogue between the structure of the drawing & looseness of painterly technique.

Also on view was an exhibition of photographic work by the members of North Wales-based collective Photernative: particularly enjoyable was a grid-format multiple-image piece by Ewart Hulse entitled 'Urban Forest', which can be seen in the photograph below (in the lower left corner), illustrating another exhibition context, featuring various examples of telegraph poles & pylons & the cables strung between, observed against the sky, very much up TOoT's formal & aesthetic street.