More Nostalgia

'Seventies Project 3: Death Disco 7-inch Picture Sleeve'

oil on canvas/25 x 25cm/September 2019

More from the 1970s-themed project, with another object from the decade providing grist to the painting mill. On this occasion, the source material is, in effect, an item of packaging material, being the cardboard ‘picture sleeve’ housing an object within, a seven-inch vinyl 45rpm ‘single’ featuring Public Image Ltd’s ‘Death Disco’ as its A-side, coupled with ‘No Birds Do Sing’ on the reverse. Dating from 1979, this item thus signifies and encapsulates that latter part of the designated period when I’d reached my nascent post-punk music-obsessive stage that has endured and remained influential since, not least in the current circumstance.

Back in the day, as an aspiring artist/graphic designer and as something I’d started to do often, given the source material I was being attracted to, acquiring and becoming familiar with, this is undoubtedly a record cover I would have copied in drawing form, both the strange, compellingly gruesome image and the text, probably on a number of occasions, so the present painting as made constitutes an update of this process, this time presenting an object of a certain time-worn vintage that happens to feature an image and text upon its surface as a still life. Both the image, which research has unfortunately failed to establish an original artist to give credit to, and the music contained within, particularly ‘Death Disco’ itself, remain, forty years on, striking, harsh and uncompromising, suitably complementary in appearance and sound, and they provide a potent link back to their time.

[detail]

[detail]

[detail]

[detail]

The Art of ‘Quick and Easy Haircutting’

Creative inspiration can strike from anywhere at any time and the following pair of examples of recent painting illustrate that very point.

I’m a keen fan of Instagram for both promotion and research, enjoying the exchange, the give-and-take, of creative endeavour that it facilitates in what I consider to be user-friendly style. One of the accounts I follow, with keen anticipation, features regular postings of vintage products in their original packaging and one such update provided irresistible grist to the mill. I must confess a particular nostalgia for the things and imagery of the time of my own childhood in the 1960s and 70s, and packaging and advertising are evocative and fertile source material indeed. I should also confess that despite the attraction of this image, I was most averse to having my hair cut until well into my teens, so there's no way I would have ever been pictured beaming, as the depicted young chap is, in the presence of any such implements.

There was just something so insistent about the image illustrating a box of ‘Pifco’ electric home hair clippers that it demanded representation, with certain artistic licence taken in the process of.

'untitled (Pifco) #1'

oil on canvas/16 x 20"/December 2018 - January 2019

[detail]

[detail]

[detail]

Subsequent research produced evidence of a related product, or another temporally similar version of, either a predecessor or successor, with its associated packaging imagery providing the perfect complement to the original, a parental coupling attending to the tonsorial maintenance of their offspring with tender regard.

Interpretation as to meaning is left entirely to the spectator.

'untitled (Pifco) #2'

oil on canvas/16 x 20"/January 2019

[detail]

[detail]

To conclude, the paintings presented as a diptych.