There are three sites where periwinkles grow in Talfourd Road (including those planted by Megan in my own front garden). The most richly coloured variety occurs in the garden of Anne and Trevor Dannatt (Trevor is the other Royal Academician in the street) but theirs have been less profuse this year than last. I pick the day's victim on the way back from getting the newspaper [hardly dawn-gathered then, are they? - Ed] in order not to walk both up and down the road waving a flower like Bunthorne in 'Patience'.

  
Monday/Tuesday 2007, 5" x 5"

In May last year I drew a different Peckham-picked dawn-gathered periwinkle flower each morning for a week, framing the small drawings together as A Periwinkle Diary. When this came back unwanted from a Jerwood Drawing Show (which usually welcomes my work) I viewed its return [according to my vows] as negative endorsement; a call to carry on. This year the first periwinkles appeared in March and now are in full spate, so I must start anew...

  
Periwinkle Diary 2006

[to be continued...]

No sooner than Part 2 of Miami Dice is put up than TP receives a message from his friend in Saskatchewan, Bill Hurrell.

"Another coincidence in our long history. I've only just moved from Indian Head to nearby Wolseley, a pleasant little town famous for its swinging bridge. I'm enjoying the blog but it might be helpful to point out to folk outside Britain that Wolseley and Austin (whose great library in Texas coincidentally collects your books) are both names of defunct British automobiles and that there indeed was a small 7hp car when we were kids marketed as the 'Baby Austin'. I shall, tomorrow I hope, be the first to toast the amazing Sackners with an Austin in Wolseley..."

So I stand on a staircase in front of a window. Behind me buzzards, and the occasional lazy pelican, glide by on the rise of cushioning thermals and glare into our sky-high humanarium. What do they make of the bronzed throng and the walls crowded with pictures? Many of the latter I recognise as mine, one or two almost forgotten, some I would not now know how to do, most made for love alone,
a few to impress
but I digress

I start to tell how I arrived at the cocktail scheme and how I wanted it to be about Mallarmé the founder of concrete poetry and first god of the Sackner Archive and to use his poem Un Coup de Dès whose first lines I have translated (for the spots in Miami Dice)

A throw of dice
will never do
away with chance

which by permutation produces a concrete flourish of ambiguity:-

Away with chance!
---
A throw of dice
will never do!
---
A throw of dice
will never do
away with chance.

Yet Mallarmé did not yield a quaffable clue which was a pity since the disposition of words on the page of his seminal poem was the liberating model for my own texts in a humument. It would also have suited the cocktail to be called 'aleator' (from the latin for 'thrower of dice', pronounced as in 'See you later, aleator'). But it was not to be, so I turned to the next in the French succession, Wilhelm Albert Apollinaris Kostrowitzky, and struck if not gold then liquid amber . It was under this, his real name, that Guillaume Apollinaire was drafted into the army. His comrades in arms found the name Kostrowitzky a bit of a mouthful so called him 'Cointreau-whisky'.

Jeremy King considered this combination mixed in equal parts a novel but viable recipe for a classic cocktail, to which would be added a dash of the poet's third given name, the mineral water Apollinaris.

Thus I had a cocktail but had to end my shaky oration with a stirring toast to the Sackners in a conceptual drink neither titled nor poured.

The evening continued ever more convivially with the arrival of Sara Sackner the filmmaker, and John Pull the eminence grise of my website.

Now the guests depart as they do in American events, like guilty creatures upon a fearful summons. The party's nuclear group finds its floridian way (ie without seeming to touch a sidewalk or encountering the open air) to a cosy corner of a cavernous restaurant, eating again. Then somehow Ruth, Marvin and myself are reteleported to the penthouse.

I seek a smoke and head for the balcony imagining a calm moment of solitude in the balmy night, savouring the view over the city. I open a door and walk into a wall, a solid rush of suicide-assisting air which if I hold my cigarette aloft smokes it for me faster than I could myself. Another round to the Sackners in their war against the weed.

Oh Those Reds... Acrylic on canvas, 1969-1973

Instead I sit in the kitchen with a cup of coffee facing an old picture of mine, the best of the catalogue of colours I made over thirty years ago with intervals determined by coin tossing. It is a special (and infrequent) pleasure to enjoy a picture one made long before hiding as it does within its stripes such mixed memories.

Mall Pavement, 2004, oil on board.

I recently revived this procedure when designing a pavement in Bellenden Road which runs along the fronts of the shops (in appropriate tribute to the ubiquitous barcodes). I echoed this in a little painting (now proudly using a minted coin of my own design, one of only 18,000,000 copies) of a projected mall flooring in black and white marble with a granite border in dollar-green.
But it is time for bed. I make for my alloted room, fearful of its ceiling composed entirely of mirrors. This was installed by the previous tenant, a famous fancy dancer, and has no doubt witnessed many a steamy and athletic pas de deux on the enormous bed below. Certainly it has never looked down on so drab a sight as the lone ageing artist turning the unarousing pages
of the TLS
but I digress
I did indeed find the name of the cocktail some weeks later when reading about Apollinaire in Richardson's splendid life of Picasso: how the poet first met the artist in Austin's Hotel in which seedy establishment I stayed for a month in 1955 on a travel scholarship, reading the works of Henry Miller while remaining unaware as only youth can be that the frequent feet upon the stairs were those of clients visiting prostitutes. It is still there in the rue d'Amsterdam though now considerably smarter and more respectable. The fact that it was also at the premises of a Mr Austin in Peckham that I bought the original copy of A Human Document in 1966 (unaware in this case that I would still be working on the book more than forty years later) clinched the matter. Austin's Furniture Repository has now gone the way of such emporia (replaced by Austin's Buildings, a more profitable property speculation). If a restaurant can be called the Wolseley then a cocktail can surely be called an Austin. One day perhaps I'll have an Austin at the Wolseley. Not my sort of drink really, so perhaps a Baby Austin will do.

Miami Dice (one of a pair), after Mallarmé. 12.5cm cube, 2003.

A quick trip from Princeton in November to see my friends and supporters for over thirty years, Ruth and Marvin Sackner. Boldly they moved (and well) as their fiftieth wedding anniversary approached, from Miami Beach to the penthouse of an apartment block in Miami itself. Great deflectors of attention, their celebration of both events is disguised as a party in my honour.

Miami and Party are synonymous for me since I've never visited the Sackners but that I was soon steered to some lavish gathering, the most opulent of which was to mark the blessing by a rabbi of a new jetty for the hosts' yacht. Was it at that themed evening (Welcome Aboard said the invitation which took the form of a T shirt) that a professional mermaid swam round and round a giant illuminated pool? and was it there that I watched the immolation of a million dollars in an endless firework display and was the sole witness, all other necks by then having returned to steaks like bibles and hat-high mounds of caviare, of its final showpiece, the sparkling portraits of host and hostess hovering expensively in the air with the coruscating, if enigmatic, inscription WE - WE - COME - YO - - ABOAR - ! and was it also there that a flotilla of imported gondolas ferried us beneath the stars across a small lagoon from entrée to dessert? Or was that the party we reached over many a bridge and small islet and sinister checkpoint to a gilded hall, loudly echoing with popping corks, where two executives stood with a tiny tape-recorder that eventually issued the message, "this is Baby Johnson saying Hi and welcome to my birthday party. I'm sorry I can't join you; I have a slight cold; but you all have a wonderful time now", after which the corks resumed their popping, a band struck up and all the guests started dancing glumly in their glittering gowns and evening dress - but I digress for the Sackners are victims rather than purveyors of social ostentation. Their soirée was warmly austere, though the gay caterer (much praised by all and his card taken by many) had arranged the excellently chaste food with artistic precision as if feng shui dictated the alignment of asparagus spears, or some severe aesthetic one might call bauhaus baroque governed the relative location, on a dish, of ghostly chanterelles and dark green cress

but I digress...

Suffice to say that all was perfect: but the moment arrives when I must make a speech, instructed by Ruth and Marvin not to talk about them but of myself. I have to ignore this injunction since what I say will contain my anniversary gift.

Somehow a work of mine would not have been right; their walls are already lined, their shelves heaving with them (as you can imagine if you check the Sackner Archive). I have instead devised a cocktail with the help of my friend, that prince of restaurateurs, Jeremy King who knows a thing or two about such matters and, moreover, knows that I know nothing.I shall explain...

[to be continued]

TP will feature on BBC Radio 3 Nightwaves on Wednesday 14th March at 9.45 to 10.30pm discussing the Unknown Monet exhibition opening at the Royal Academy.

Royal Academy link for more information on the exhibition.

Two things seen together on my kitchen table both recently acquired give me as much pleasure and provoke as much thought as anything I've ever owned. They are united in many ways being roughly the same size and designed for holding in the hand. Indeed their tactile aspects are equally satisfying: each gives an instant feel of inviting rightness and in each the thumb finds itself in an instinctive position of control.

Both are exemplars of the aesthetic principle of high modernism that perfection of function equals beauty of form. What separates them however is the distance between their moments of manufacture, a space of half a million years.

The iPod represents the future as imagined in my past, from the forties when I read of Dick Tracy's wrist radio and the fifties when I voyaged in space with Dan Dare.

The flint multi purpose tool (axe/knife/saw) from Tchad, whitened by millenia of wind and sand takes me on an opposite flight of the imagination to when it was held and used by a hairier hand than mine.

A third object on my table catches my eye and picking it up I find that my thumb reaches the controlling button at exactly the same point as the thumbgroove of the axe. Although the phone, patinated by a few years of studio use, is not so elegant as the axe, their length is, uncannily, exactly the same.

At the moment. artist engaged in meeting deadlines, some small like writing a review of hogarth exhibition for art in america and some large like finishing the designs for westminster abbey: a memorial to the fallen in recent follies of war... though don't mention the war is still the watchword since this is a conflict memorial, a project which since first embarked on many months ago has had its up and downs, delays and disputes, revisions and rerevisions during which time another few dozen poor sods have met their end in distant and desert places. Tacitus still has the last word on such ventures:  when they have created a wasteland they call it peace.

The long and the short of it is
that even my visits to the barber
are trimmed according to demands of work.
One aesthetic battles with another
under the occam's razor of art.

And so to George's in the Peckham Road
which I first patronised in 1962
(a qualifier then for student rates)
there to be shorn by George (the son of George,
himself a son of that eponymous George
who served me long ago).
He now snips off
a pensioner's percentage from the bill.

Scissorwork done, the mirror is flashed
the gown whisked off.
Then George who knows the ritual
sweeps up my shearings lock by lock
and (to the surprise of other customers)
wraps them in yesterday’s Sun.

Clutching my red top reliquary
I hurry to the studio
where on a dedicated table
crowded with bowls and jars
a dark receptacle
(courtesy of Tesco’s microwave meals)
awaits replenishment;
material for morning toil to come.

So on this normal morning
my Gandhi hour begins the working day
a time for tweezers and rumination
sorting out one by one
the white hairs from the black.

I long ago discovered
that though my hair would be described as grey
there's no grey hair to sort.
Nature the pointillist
makes an optic mix
changing the proportion with the years
(I'm running 60/40 now:
black hair still in the lead).

I'd wear my hair short
if I had the choice
but art that shapes my ends
delays delilah-time.

And all this to what purpose?
Why tennis balls and skulls?

A postcard stapled to my studio wall
shows Titian's Allegory of Prudence
[so loosely painted with such enviable ease];
a man of middle years
flanked by a younger self and self grown old
plus emblematic animals and moral text.

Also in the studio
casts of skulls
variously covered in paint, mud,
orange peel, or fragments of a humument.


Humument Skull, 1986

Now three such skulls
entirely clad in my own hair
one black one white
and one in salt and pepper mix
will stand (when I have finished them)
for Titian's heads.

Instead of his symbolic beasts
I seek a metaphor
that might less gravely mark
the frittered past.
Macbeth is on my mind and Eliot
with coffee spoons and
all our yesterdays
and summers gone whose sunlit tournaments
(together with the Oval Test)
have measured out my life.

...., and all our wimbledons
have lighted fools the way to dusty death.

Enough of hair... but wait
I'll also have a hat before I'm through
If I can use my hoard for making felt
to fashion a fedora [beuys will be beuys]:
recycled life to adorn its place of birth.

This Thursday, 1st Februrary at 21.30 on BBC Radio 3 TP takes part in a programme in which Philip Dodd and guests explore Pablo Picasso's 1907 work Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, which would become arguably the most important painting of the century. Picasso portrayed five prostitutes gazing out at the viewer, their faces bold and solicitous, apparently inspired by African and Oceanic carvings that he had seen in Parisian museums.