Unforgettable, that's what you are

I'm on the floor sketching a cardboard cut-out and a Warhol drawing, Head of Boy with Fingers and Heart at Lips, from 1956. Is he guarding a secret or about to divulge one?

The monochrome cut-outs are here (at The Violet Crab - see previous post) for three days while Canadian-born designer Edeline Lee's autumn/winter collection is on display. Luke Leitch, fashion journalism's Mr Handsome, is being shown around.

Then I hop on a bus to the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies in Bloomsbury for the launch of the Centre for Law and Information Policy, directed by the strikingly alert Judith Townend.

Your private life drama baby leave me out. The theme is privacy law. We're here for a workshop and a lecture from Timothy Pitt-Payne QC - recently seen acting for the Information Commissioner in the Supreme Court case about the Prince of Wales's confidential memos to government departments.

Should you protect yourself by keeping your entire life private, or by having no private life at all? I refer you to Henry James's short story The Private Life in which he sticks it to Lord Leighton and Robert Browning while examining drastic privacy measures.

Drones are on the agenda - flying cameras which can see round corners. It's reported on the news that five mysterious drones confounded the gendarmes this morning, snooping around sites in Paris including the US embassy. Who, and why? Bertie Wooster's Drones Club members would have flown drones for fun. Dr David Goldberg reminds us that news chiefs are going to have to get to grips with aviation law, and that the Kodak Box Brownie caused consternation - a cheap spying tool in public hands.

In the tea-break, I sell a house, kind of. Somewhere in the house is a blue-barred jay's feather which I picked up when I was about nine. I can't hang on to everything. Never mind the right to be forgotten, I could do with a right to forget. Sadly, there is no right not to forget. I forget Egon Schiele's name today. The best I can manage is: 'You know, not Klimt, the other one.'

While I remember, my exhibition of Supreme Court drawings continues at the Broadgate office of Pinsent Masons LLP.

More pictures if you scroll down.

The Violet Crab at DRAF - part 2

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

Drilling, hammering, a vacuum cleaner, no swearing except from me - sorry. I spend too much time alone.

I'm drawing the setting up of The Violet Crab at the David Roberts Art Foundation in Camden, a cabaret-themed exhibition designed and directed by Than Hussein Clark.

Sometimes I'm depicting other people's works here. Not copying but interpreting, as part of an established tradition - e.g. Zoffany's The Tribuna at the Uffizi.

Aristocrats on the Grand Tour are airing their aesthetic credentials. Zoffany has rearranged the works and imported others to suit his composition.

And I'll be drawing the opening night while I sit on stage as part of the cabaret. Help, I need something to hold my drawing clobber.

I go up Portobello Road. A battle-hardened sewing table says hello, where have you been? There is a tilth of rusty pins under its flowery lining. I buy some casters which allow it to make a self-important, fussy trundling noise on the hard gallery floor.  

Ayumi LaNoire performs an hypnotic dance of love and rejection on the golden pole designed by Than, the best she has ever used, she says. Tojan Thomas Browne and Taylor Yates dance as crabs in fake leopard.

The show is about colour.

The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold, 
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold. 

More pictures if you scroll down, and in the previous blog post.

Purple is half-mourning

Tears and black fluffy kitten ears, pearls for Daddy's girl and a candle flame for the elevation of his soul. An airy funeral with white flowers for his innocence and no one to guide us through the service.

But I have been found by strangers on the internet and an art project bobs up in the wake of the wake. I am to keep the captain's log, the black box of an exhibition called The Violet Crab. On a cabaret theme.

I think of Tyrian dye for imperial togas drawn from the shellfish. Born to the purple. Not unwanted in a back street like him.

I wear soft things for comfort these days, mohair or a tendrilly marabou boa that sticks to lipstick when you inhale.

Bist du bei mir, geh ich mit Freuden
zum Sterben und zu meiner Ruh.
Ach! Wie vergnügt wär so mein Ende,
es drückten deine schönen Hände
mir die getreuen Augen zu.

Two of my drawings get stuck together (tacky white ink). As the curatorial assistant deftly slices them apart with a Stanley knife he is slashing my barnacle soul off the submerged hulk but I am not ready to break through the surface. Not yet.

Oh don't worry, I can see you through the distortion of the water, but I see Daddy more.

The Violet Crab at the David Roberts Art Foundation (6 Feb-2 May 2015) is designed and directed by Than Hussein Clark and produced by Vincent Honoré (director) and Nicoletta Lambertucci (curator), with Dan Munn (curatorial assistant). 

More pictures if you scroll down.

Crisis at Christmas: a blurry picture

There are balloon sculptures all over the place.

Sky, with long pink hair, is doing ashtanga yoga: 'Their bodies are brittle. When they lie down they put their hands on their front to protect themselves. And their feet are very hard.'

If someone wants a conversation, you talk. After an hour you might try to move on - recommend an activity or a meal.


'We would flock home for lunch,' he says, talking about his childhood in what was then Ceylon. Flock. His rapid discourse is elegant and precise. Cricket, Shakespeare. He tells me there has been a disproportionately high number of Sri Lankan presidents of the Oxford Union.

A young Eritrean tells me he doesn't understand Kandinsky.

This is my fourth Christmas at Crisis and I feel a wave of concern that so many of the guests are regulars. But how do you fix homelessness when it can slip in through the keyhole and turn everything inside out? How do you fix mental illness and addiction? Amy, a resilient and cheerful activities officer wearing a Christmas pudding costume, reminds me that some guests rely on the annual Crisis reboot.

Guest's drawing

And while I am drawing I am falling, falling and I have a home, somewhere to crawl around in when I'm too ill to stand up. That makes me queen of the world.

He grabs my paper and one of my pens and the pen top flies off somewhere. Ah well, I think, that pen's a write off. Shame. I get them from Japan via the internet. He does this drawing on the right.

He says: 'Bla bla bla! They're all just saying bla bla bla!'

'Did you see my pen top anywhere?'

He goes and retrieves it and hands it back to me.

More pictures if you scroll down.