Yes, yes - late again. I am officially giving up on keeping a set schedule for Substack for the time being. I’ll be back in the States next week, so, maybe then. In the meantime, there’s lots to report. At top of this post is the finished Whip-poor-will I mentioned in my last post, proof that the painting continues. Mostly what we’ve been doing is the important task of building our nest together and running around. Yesterday, an off-hand remark of mine about the rickety old table in the back garden led to a full-on repair job involving two of Paul’s toolboxes, the sawing of wood and a can of undercoat. I did the dog’s body fetching and finding the perfect screws and such while he did the heavy lifting. 

This was after we spent several hours discussing and resolving an unexpected warp on one side of stretcher that only became obvious once I painted the dark background color on the Work In Progress above. The piece is an experiment to see how I adapt to a larger sized canvas and is coming along nicely. At 90x90cm (which is just short of 36x36”) it is the largest piece in the Bird series to date. There are several ways to deal with a warped canvas, all are potentially dangerous to a painting in progress, but in the end we went with my suggestion of replacing the warped stretcher bar with a spare one in Paul’s studio. After some delicate surgery, the painting survived intact and is ready for me to hopefully finish before I leave on Thursday.

That and the garden table took up half of the day, the rest was spent in the Ouseburn area of Newcastle where I shopped a bit and had a delicious lunch, or what they call dinner here in the North East and is generally their main meal of the day instead of what we Yanks call dinner and they call tea. That’s a shot of the canal in Ouseburn above and you can tell it’s been a dry summer, although the tide was out when I took the picture. Below is a shot of the Seaburn/Roker beach where we were last weekend to visit an artist/friend and where I got a bit of a surprise sunburn.

But the big news this week was our whirlwind trip to Liverpool, which was way too short but great fun. Our hotel was an easy walk from the Lime Street Station and minutes away from what is known as Cavern Central, a back lane anchored by the Beatles Museum surrounded by pubs and shops that are all Beatles all of the time. I thoroughly recommend a visit to both the city and the whole Beatles-arama thing, especially the museum which is kitschy and hokey but quite moving and informative too. There were plenty of people wandering through the displays and not all of them were old fogey tourists. I saw a Megadeth t-shirt, lots of tattoos and neon colored hairdos. I was a little disappointed there wasn’t more about Ringo, but much of the memorabilia was provided by Pete Best who is still alive and the drummer Ringo replaced.

We also visited the Walker Museum, which has a nice collection of classical art including some exquisite Medieval icons, plus interesting contemporary work and a separate show devoted to the topic of Gender. We trekked over in the rain to the waterfront and Mann Island, all newly renovated or in the process, to see some great photography at the Open Eye Gallery, and Tate Liverpool in its temporary location at the RIBA space in the same building. Liverpool has an arty friendly vibe which I attribute to the Beatles and what they brought to a city well into its decline and how much of that energy still survives today. Can you imagine life without the Beatles? Consider the scope of their influence and what has followed. Not just on the music industry or fashion, but your own life as well. Give it some thought - and with that, let’s get on with the day.

A little late as usual - it’s hard to keep a schedule when one is far from one’s home routine. However, I’ve done the three untitled collages in this post and have a painting on canvas of a whip-poor-will in progress on the easel I bought to use here. I’m back in my morning sun space by the glass doors off the back garden in the kitchen. I like it there and I’m out of Paul’s way in the studio. We’ve continued to run around Newcastle and it’s hard to remember what we did and when, but we did venture out to the IKEA in Gateshead thinking we were going to buy an ottoman but ended up with a full length mirror for my room because the ottoman we wanted was not out on display and we didn’t fancy buying something sight unseen.

Fancy - listen to me, two weeks away from the Cape and I’m losing my lingo along with my regular diet. Yesterday, I had my first piece of blood, or black, pudding at Ernest’s in Ousburn, the Newcastle neighborhood that reminds me of Manhattan’s Soho in the 80’s. I didn’t hate the pudding and would eat it again if it came on a plate of other things. I’m a fan of steak pies, and fish and chips, as well as bangers and mash since they do make delicious sausages in the UK. And, by the way, leopard print is everywhere in Newcastle including my closet, although I still tend to wear my standard black uniform and black slip-on sneakers. Mostly this trip has been about being domestic with Paul and building a home together. We both love flea markets and charity shops, and are not too proud to scavenge the back lanes for treasure like the dresser we found to store his massive DVD collection. Now, if only we could find a nice ottoman.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention some of the art we’ve seen this week. There was a large installation by Fred Williams in the MFA post-graduate exhibition at Newcastle University which I found interesting - that’s a shot of Paul walking through it below. And Wednesday we went to a presentation of photos and a discussion afterwards with members of the SIDE gallery. You may recall how thrilled I was when they selected a photograph of mine for an online show a few months ago, and I felt so comfortable at this presentation that I plan to attend more when I’m here. But for now I’m going to bake some gingerbread for Paul and finish the whip-poor-will this weekend. Time is, as always, a’wasting - so on with the day.

I’ve been in the UK for a week now. Since I didn’t have a ride to the Boston airport shuttle this time, the trip involved three buses to Logan and way too much sitting around waiting, but the only drama was a man on the second bus cut himself and bled all over his seat causing the driver to deviate from his route to drop him at a hospital. This made some of the passengers, including myself, late for the third bus. However, the third driver knew we were coming and would be stranded otherwise so thankfully waited for us. Other than that, it was twenty hours from my door to Paul’s, and I got to watch Maggie Gyllenhaal’s “The Bride” starring Jesse Buckley and Christian Bale who were both amazing and worked really well together. So far, this visit’s been non-stop, and I’m only now catching up on my NY Times puzzles and had just enough time to create the Loon collage above, but we cut up cardboard yesterday and I have plenty of tissue paper and xeroxes of bird images to make more.

In the meantime, we saw the Trish Murtha exhibition at The Baltic. As you can see from my snapshot above, the photography was brilliant but the curation was, to my eyes, unfortunate. We also spent an afternoon pruning and weeding the jungle that is Paul’s back garden and have done a lot of shopping. Mostly groceries, but there was a bus ride out of town to a DIY store for materials Paul uses in his art practice that we couldn’t find in Newcastle. I also bought a vegan leather motorcycle jacket while looking for something more suitable for rain. The raincoat, I found yesterday. It’s transparent, plastic and leopard print but looks very “Vivienne Westwood Cool” and will definitely keep me dry. There was a dinner party at Shehla’s for Ian’s birthday on Saturday and that was good fun and relaxed. Yesterday we were meant to rest because Monday we took the Metro to South Shields and then the ferry across the Tyne to North Shields where we had lunch before walking through Tynemouth, below, and up the coastal beach to Cullercoats and were exhausted. But yesterday was spent doing admin and errands instead. So tomorrow, perhaps, as today we’re shopping for an easel and watching the solar eclipse if the weather cooperates. No rest for the weary apparently - on with the day

It’s been a busy week and there is lots I could report, but what I most want to discuss is the collage workshop I ran on Thursday. As I mentioned last week, I wasn’t sure if it was going to take place until two sets of brothers signed up together making it a Go. As it happened, those same four boys didn’t show and I was left with another teenage boy and a nine year old girl, both of whom blew my mind. Since I had set up supplies for six, the gallery owner and I made collages too. Along with the colored tissue paper, glue sticks and crayons I’d provided, I also had a stack of old New Yorker and Vanity Fair magazines as well as a folder of xeroxes of bird photos. After I showed the kids the samples I had prepared as examples and explained my process, they both launched into their projects. I watched the boy obliterate the xeroxes he’d selected by covering them with slices of magazine and wadded up tissue that extended off the cardboard he adhered his work to. He went through a few glue sticks and wound up with something both feral and very sophisticated.The nine year old girl got the brief right away and impressed me with her calm focus as she cut up birds to create a fantastic, fantasy creature - I could not believe it was her first collage. Then, in a moment of genius, she folded and unfolded several sheets of tissue to give her bird an enormous crest that also extended off the cardboard by at least a foot. The work was inspired and inspiring, so much so I did the untitled pelican at the top of this post during the workshop, and then did the vulture below at home two days later.