These images were created recently. I was surprised to discover that they had dried out , giving the paper a kind of crispy character as well as causing the pigment to fall off the glossy , printed photographs. The images seem quite painterly as a fortunate result of the weathering process. These are images which are stored outside, in the garden.

I am not sure if the pictures are not diary like in some way. A lot of time is spent looking through magazines and newspapers as well as the  occasional wastepaper bin. I have a huge clipping collection which I sometimes go through for suitable material. I pay a lot of attention to magazine display racks these days. You never know what may jump out. The covers on show indicate tittilation, nostalgia, niche domestic genres, impossible aspirational targets. Just nothing but stuff.

Prince image

Rotting

Four tracked studies.

Two images of the late Christopher Hitchens, writer

Garden image

Garden image

Tracked image

Tracked image

Magazine

Cover image

Some Royals

Wedding image ( first version )

Sodden

More recent images. The ones from the garden no longer exist in paper form as they have more or less been destroyed by the recent rain. The newer ones , culled from Vogue and Hello magazines are more predictable. What looks mashed and screwed up to the naked eye looks rather less dramatic in 2D form. Not enough visual cues I suspect to indicate my essentially vandalistic intent.

There are still some images out there in the garden, they may be beyond recovery. I will be putting out a new group of glossy , aspirational images of high end fashion items soon. 

Cold

Cold is a way of life. You can control cold most of the time. If cold were an art piece, some frozen gallery would be a nice place to visit. Just a really cold room. One's breath turning into a cloud would be the art itself.

I am fascinated by the myth of the Spitfire, an object striving for modernity, the last gasp of a failing
colonial power. It is not unusual to see examples fly over the house during the air show season. Post
war they were sold off to a variety of different countries and became utilitarian rather than iconic.

I think it is like a spade. A spade in the hands of a Russian landworker of the 1930's is a heroic tool,
pass that spade on to a British person and it will stay in his shed.

Two more images from the archive. One is just a straight appropriation and the other is the image I have come to call The Bag Lady. Currently I am looking around for some super glossy material to act as a ground on which to place the most weathered images. The deadline for the Recontres in Arles looms so I want to have something definite sorted out.

As usual the climates , both political and weather wise continue to worsen. Money is tight.
Here are two images that may function as good luck charms , rather like a St. Christopher's medallion.

Car park 2010

Car park 2011

A couple of images from the archive, I am going to use them in a piece for the Art and Architecture website a bit later on. Originally these images were intended for a series of drawings I was planning.
These examples are not particularly good . I would like it to be a film in an ideal world.

Advertising image 2011

 A tracked image from the garden. I am surprised at how long the magazine pages last in the open air , exposed to Autumn/Winter weather. This particular advertising image must have been hanging around outside for quite a few weeks by now.

Three studies towards a series of images depicting current politicians. These images are of the Foreign Minister.

Towards an image of the late Lucien Freud, this is a work in progress.

gesture

The unknown features

Exported from the U.K.

Waving at poor people

A servant

Snobbery on parade

A selection of provisional images from the archive.paulgneale.tumblr.com/ They are here in sketchbook mode. They are the type of images that serve as reminders to not forget more ambitious work. By ambitious I mean scale or thematic series, or something with a bit of a bite. I am quite interested in using magazines as source material. I am quite riled by them really; are they telling us to love the rich, the

aristocrats, media moguls and all the rest ? Who honestly really cares?  

My feeling is that if one were to go up to the Queen , hand her a copy of Hello magazine and ask her to  sign it, naturally just under a photo of her good self with the thick black felt pen one was proffering, with an appropriate supplicatory facial expression ( see the Radiator Woman in David Lynch's Eraserhead ) well , she would just have you removed from the premises.  To Paul, luv Liz.xxx

Friday was a pretty good day as I got to see Vermeer's Women, a small but focussed show at the Fitzwilliam Museum. I was pretty much moved to tears in fact. And that does not happen very much in front of paintings that is for sure. I think it was the intensity of the paintings themselves.

The same reaction did not happen at the Kettle's Yard show of Bridget Riley. I love her work, always have , always will.

There is a phrase I heard ages ago, it is "Naked chicks! What's not to like ?" This is the expression I equate with a fine contemporary art exhibition. When I am filled with a puppyish enthusiasm for the images on display. That was the Bridget Riley experience.

I am wondering how valid it is to say that Thatcher as icon may well last in the visual imagination in the same way that images of Lenin or Mao or Hitler. Or Eisenhower or Churchill. She has joined that group of ex- politicians who have had a Hollywood movie made about them. If I were an ex-miner I would consider that a real slap in the face. American soft power supporting our current right wing government. As a film it is closer to propaganda than drama. Although there has always been a strong ideological slant to mainstream American movie making, as opposed to strictly underground or artists' films, I think this is the first time an American actress has portrayed a British prime minister.

This image haunts us all : a living ghost

Bus, central Cambridge. This photograph aspires to be an American Photorealist painting.