Miro's Pets

A water garden for Miro’s pets & other stories from the mid-noughties.

Whilst going through the proverbial attic looking for something else, I came across these drawings. I had completely forgotten doing them. They are basically reworkings of notes and little drawings a couple of years later on.
Some of the ideas I have quietly carried around with me for many years, makes me feel like looking out much earlier versions of the same.
Whatever, many of them came out & resurfaced during my son’s early childhood of little drawings and jokes we shared together. One of the titles is completely in his own words. A couple of the pictures follow on from, or in fact were part of the planning I had for a couple of different art projects.

I’ve lost them how silly

thousands of them.

“ Old lost animal finds his way and saves the day for everybody who have also lost their way. On a day, little precious go to sleep, close your eyes & let uncle Sam take care of your alibis”

Swipe Hands, the piano playing streamer
not giving a lick about his bootlaces or the fairies he can’t find (anywhere)
and (luck) getting dreamier all the time
what with being up in the mountains
Having no problems with monsters
as the streamers seem to be taking care of that
when they aren’t flinging each other into the air.

A Water garden for Miro’s pets
I remember writing in a sketchbook something along the lines of:
Dali painted about surreal landscapes, whilst Miro actually made something that was surreal & otherworldly with a life of its own – it existed!
I was based at Birmingham Art College, Margaret Street for a while, not teaching – making things and using the workshops. One morning, Gaye Plaice a knowledgeable and capable technician announced that she was going to introduce me to “a plasma cutter”. One of the greatest and most dangerous tools I have ever come across!
At the time, I was constructing a small stage for an art project at the X-Ray Factory in Smethwick. It needed a finishing touch and Miro’s animal personages were just the thing I had these rusty cut outs all the way across the roof. I then made a large illustration for the opening show (Live/work project)

Sparky’s Magic Organ
Sparky was a nick-name that I briefly owned at school owing to the fact that I was so bad at maths. That would have been around 1963.
The idea for a massive organ a-la Captain Nemo came as a throw away pic that I made for fun in the middle of a larger body of work in Llandaff North, Cardiff in the mid 80’s.
I was quite fond of it and gave it to a musician friend and gave it a title: “And from the pipes came a warm, melodious glow”
In the early 2000s I was part of quite a large art project, involving quite a few active people & we managed to achieve pretty well what we were aiming at. Following that, I decided to make the large organ out of about a dozen keyboards. I built it, and I am still grateful to Dave Checkley for finding many of the parts for me. Unfortunately, it was too big an idea and simply faded away in the middle of a large, cold studio. I mean, how was I to transport it around?
The penultimate chapter came when I did an illustration of it for a newspaper magazine called “Eccentric City” edited by Harry Palmer.
& I don’t remember doing it, but this image was the last I have of it – maybe, I was drawing a line under it!