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Posts tagged ‘Art’

Nov 14

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Happy First Birthday to The Daily Norm!!

Where has a year gone? When I sat down to write my first ever article for The Daily Norm one year ago today, I typed my first words with trepidation. I had chosen my wordpress theme, uploaded some artwork, and now wondered 1) what on earth I would write about and 2) whether people would be interested in what I had to say. One year later, and with 240 posts written, liked and responded to, with 180,099 total views and counting, and with some 510 current followers, I have to wonder why I was so scared. My initial misgivings soon turned to passion, as I caught the blogging bug big time.

Thanks to my blog, I see the world through new eyes – I see the polish and shine in everyday monotony, I appreciate the finer details of an exhibition or a show, I take greater note of names and situations, and I paint and photograph as though my very legacy depended on it. I no longer walk away from an event thinking – what a good show. Now I think – I can’t wait to write about this on my blog. My attitude has changed from solitary satisfaction, to a passion for sharing. I believe it’s worth writing a good post, even if one other person reads it – even if none do at all – for the process of writing about an experience, recalling the light and shade of an occasion, and immortalising an event in words and pictures gives the writer, to my mind, a tremendous sense of satisfaction. It makes you appreciate your life, encourages you to pack every hour with new and worthwhile activities, it installs a fantastic discipline of review and reflection, and it enables small experiences, which may be commonplace in one part of the world, to be shared across the globe.

The Daily Norm office celebrates its first birthday (2012, Nicholas de Lacy-Brown, pen on paper)

The Norms (my little white blobs, who were of course the source of and inspiration for this blog) and I would like to thank you all so much for your support, for your readership and for your comments over the last year. We want to thank my dear friend Cassandra who, if she is reading, knows only too well that it was she who suggested I start a blog at that time when I was so down in my life. And we would also like to thank all of those who have kindly nominated the blog for a variety of awards including the “Blog on Fire Award”, the “HUG award” (Hope Uniting Globally), the “Very Inspiring Blogger Award” and the “Versatile Blogger Award”. Your support makes me want to go on blogging, and for that I am truly grateful.

Here’s to another year of the Daily Norm!

Nov 4

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Sunday Supplement – The Spanish Double

For the last few weeks on a Sunday, I have been exploring the collection of 10 paintings I created during my convalescence from an accident between 2008-2010. True, the subject matter is not easy to write about, nor, possibly, easy to read, but I hope you will agree that these paintings are amongst the most worthy of my works for further exploration and examination. They are, after all, a representation of a potent threshold in my life. When I underwent not just physical change but mentally was forced to mature and re-evaluate life in a way I have never before considered necessary.

In today’s Sunday Supplement, I am featuring two of my accident paintings which almost formed a sub-category of their own. Both were painted, unlike the other 8, when I was convalescing in Spain, both have Spanish titles, both are painted with acrylic paints, rather than oil, and the result of the colours used makes them, in my opinion, a bit more “pop art” in finish.

Desayuno del Norte

Desayuno del Norte (2008 © Nicholas de Lacy-Brown, acrylic on canvas)

In the first of the two, Desayuno del Norte (“Breakfast of the North”), I cross-referenced a Lowry-inspired Northern industrial landscape with symbols of breakfast “desayuno”, while mixing in images direct from the legal world to which, at the point of painting this work, I had prematurely returned. Of all my accident paintings, this is perhaps the hardest to explain. It was a mood, a time experienced – a collection of various representations which at that time drove me to paint. In the purple-grey background, a sense of my depression and frustration at that time is shown, a time which is appropriately catalogued as Christmas by the holly on a jug of sticky dark gravy which pervades the piece. The industrial landscape is proliferated with an abundance of mauve smoke, while from one of the bigger chimneys in the foreground, the question “why me?” looms large.

While in the accident paintings before this one, I had painted feet, here, I paint a trainer – the specially fitted trainers which were integral to enabling me to travel into work and get around each day, along with the crutch, whose presence cuts across the canvas on the right. Meanwhile, in referencing breakfast throughout the painting, the eggs mark a note of the fragility of my recovery, the blood-like jelly pouring from the trainer suggests my continuing pain, the orange represents my location at the time of painting – Marbella in Southern Spain – and the Marmite gives a clue as to my fading appetite and loss of weight  – it was the only thing I could often bring myself to eat, spread on the toast hovering somewhere below it. Meanwhile, running throughout the painting are the double yellow lines of road markings – these representing prohibition and interdiction – a cessation of my liberty, both physically and in my profession in the overtly constrictive legal world of London’s Bar.

La Marcha de los Champiñones 

La Marcha de los Champiñones (2009 © Nicholas de Lacy-Brown, acrylic on canvas)

Road traffic symbols are continued in the second painting of this series, La Marcha de los Champiñones (“The March of the Mushrooms”), which represents two major events of my continuing convalescence a year after the original accident – first the fact that my leg became wracked with infection, and secondly that I was required to have my leg re-broken, in order to correct a fixed flexion deformity which had occurred during the healing process (in other words, the leg had healed at a fixed angle, and was unable to lie straight). In this work, I show my leg being re-broken, cut here into slices, each slice revealing, by way of the mushroom-symbol, the spread of infection throughout the limb. Meanwhile, on the outside, huge mushrooms loom over the slightly surreal scene, as the spread of infection becomes worse.

The road traffic symbols in the meantime become more prevalent in this piece. The leg is cordoned off behind road-works ribbon and a road-works warning sign, while the tools and paraphernalia of the workman are all around, including the various pins which were, in reality, holding my leg together (as shown by “windows” allowing the viewer to peer into my metal-ridden leg). A sign diverts pedestrians past the works, but also reminds viewers that throughout my convalescence, one of the worst experiences encountered was the continuous stares of pedestrians on the street, forever gawping at my leg encased in its pins and illizarov frame and covered with dressings and scars.

Meanwhile, the egg which was solid in Desayuno del Norte, has now cracked. The fragility of my steady recovery had given way, and I was back to square one.

© Nicholas de Lacy-Brown and The Daily Norm, 2001-2012. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of the material, whether written work, photography or artwork, included within The Daily Norm without express and written permission from The Daily Norm’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Nicholas de Lacy-Brown and The Daily Norm with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

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Oct 31

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The Daily Sketch: Prepare to Scream… It’s Normaween!!

The full moon is out, and gliding past, the menacing silhouette of a Witch Norm casting a midnight spell. Beneath the moon, the creepy dilapidated outline of a once glorious house, now abandoned, boarded up and left to decay and ruin comes into view. Within the dark echoes of its now empty chambers, something is stirring. A momentary white flash, a flutter in the breeze, the creak of a lone shutter moving in the wind. In the overgrown gardens, the century old tombs of the long dead previous occupants are starting to move. At the strike of midnight something quivers through the ground. The large, rusty Victorian gates swing open, the stone demon gargoyles upon the plinths come to life, the heavy tomb lid begins slowly to shift and at the window of the house, the previously dark interior is replaced by the screaming wide eyes of a Norm devastated by fear. All around the old mansion, Norm ghosts begin to waver and whir in the wind, moaning and howling at this witching hour, and amongst the graves below, the Vampire Norms awaken, eager in their hunt for their fresh intake of sickly sweet blood.

Norms at the Halloween House of Horrors (2012 © Nicholas de Lacy-Brown, pen on paper)

Are you scared? You should be. For tonight is Normaween, the night when the Norm dead come back to life, when no Norm is safe from the razor sharp teeth of the roaming Vampire Norms, and every little Norm will cower under his or her bedsheets as the screams of the Norm dead pierce their ears and bring the horrors of the underworld to life.

Keep your lights on, don’t dare go to sleep. Just prepare to scream – for tonight is Normaween!

© Nicholas de Lacy-Brown and The Daily Norm, 2001-2012. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of the material, whether written work, photography or artwork, included within The Daily Norm without express and written permission from The Daily Norm’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Nicholas de Lacy-Brown and The Daily Norm with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

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Oct 25

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Introducing my new painting: The Gentleman (in Paris)

For those keen-eyed amongst you, particularly those reading my recent Spanish posts and my various tapas recipes, you may have noticed (as I know a couple of my regular readers did) in the background in the garden of my Marbella house stood a little easel and upon it a small canvas – from the early photos, when just a blank canvas was present, to the latter shots which showed me making some progress on the work as the balmy days of my holiday whiled onwards.

A canvas awaits me – in my garden in Spain

As the idea developed, and owing to the sad reality that our holiday was only 9 days long, my painting became more compelx, and when I left Marbella, the work was only half done. Luckily the canvas fit in my case (although no doubt contributed to my excess of baggage weight for which the ever unreasonable British Airways charged me a 50 euros flat penalty fee, even though my partner’s luggage was massively underweight) and I continued work in London. Be my life in London as it is – full of work and busyness, it has taken me some time to complete the painting, even though I rushed home most evenings to fit in a few hours of work.

However, having had last weekend to myself, I finally managed to complete the work, a work which I now call The Gentleman (in Paris).

The Gentleman (in Paris) 2012 © Nicholas de Lacy-Brown, acrylic on canvas

Inspired by the icons of a time I hold dear, a yesteryear when men were gentlemen, when to go out to dinner was a time of dressing up in a top hat and gloves, when chivalry was at the forefront of society and manners were a thing held in the highest of esteem. It was a time when in a Gentleman’s study, such as this one, a Chesterton desk chair would be found amidst the paraphernalia of a professional’s equipage: a pipe, a magnifying glass, a pocket watch, some butterfly specimen and an emerald green desk lamp, an expensive fountain pen and even more expensive culinary delicacies such as lobster and oysters, all set against a black and white floor, a hefty wooden desk, rich damask green wallpaper, verdant plant life and a floor to ceiling window view of the Paris chimneys beyond. And of course, because it’s Paris, the Gentleman has to keep up with the French news in Le Figaro. Meanwhile at the heart of the image, representations of the Gentleman himself: his top hat, a bowtie and wing-collared shirt, and his face, masked in the enigmatic disguise of a masquerade ball.

Explaining this painting is a little like explaining one’s impulses. This is an image which came to my mind in Spain which always provides me with sufficient relaxation and creative stimulation to get my artistic juices running. And even though the resulting painting is far from Spanish, it nonetheless digs deep in my imagination, placing on canvas a time, a place with which I can feel an inexplicable evocation, like an experience which recalls the strongest of emotions, even though it never happened. In this way, I use painting to make sense of the deepest of subconscious sentimentality, helping me to both explore myself, and pay homage to the depth of my creativity.

I leave you with a few shots of the painting’s details. I hope you like it.

© Nicholas de Lacy-Brown and The Daily Norm, 2001-2012. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of the material, whether written work, photography or artwork, included within The Daily Norm without express and written permission from The Daily Norm’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Nicholas de Lacy-Brown and The Daily Norm with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Oct 21

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Sunday Supplement: Moules-Frites

Following on from the last two weeks of rather traumatic accident-based Sunday Supplement features, I’ve got another one for you I’m afraid – in fact there are 10 paintings in all, each depicting my experience of convalescence and the various stages of recovery entailed.

Barrister’s wig and tin

In this week’s feature, Moules-Frites: Nerve and Muscle Pain on a Legal Life Revisited (oil on canvas, 2008), the next stage of recovery requiring a chapter in my painting diary was the new found pain experienced on returning to work after almost 5 weeks being bed-bound post-accident. I should explain by way of background that despite my many artistic endeavours, I am in fact a qualified lawyer – a barrister to be precise – and some months before my accident, I secured myself a pupillage (the last year of training before qualification) in a top London barrister chambers, due to begin in October of my accident year. Pupillages are like gold dust – several hundred young lawyers apply for the handful of places that are given out each year. And so, while the accident came as a mighty blow to me, I was determined to start the pupillage as planned in October.

Traditional moules-frites

This return to work represented the biggest change for me since leaving hospital. I still had an illazarov frame affixed to my leg, so I had to rip my suit trousers down the middle and each day attempt to pin them half way around my leg to try and prevent people seeing the frame, and the blood bath beyond. And yet still they stared. I was still on crutches, and on around 30 pills and painkillers a day. I had to travel by taxi, and by the time I got home (people in London never bothered to give up their seat for me on the tube, despite the obvious paraphernalia of my injury attached to my leg) I was exhausted and in agony. When I attempted to do anything, not least cope with the demands of a full time job in central London, I started to experience a new type of pain – burning shooting spasms coursing down my damaged nerves, and the dull continuous hammering of my muscles as they tried to engage properly for the first time in months.

Moules-Frites: Nerve and muscle pain on a Legal Life revisited (2008 © Nicholas de Lacy-Brown, oil on canvas)

All of this was represented in my fifth painting. The title was an attempt to play on the name of the iconic French/Belgian dish, Moules-Frites – mussels with chips – as this in turn was a play on the words muscles and mussels (try explaining this to the Spanish as I had to do when the painting was exhibited there – not easy!) – In recognition of this word play, a pan of mussels sits in the centre of the piece, representing the burning pain I felt in my muscles as they attempted to rebuild and learn how to walk again.

The scene depicts the stormy Sussex of my childhood. In the sea, the “groynes” (man made sea defences) are replaced with crutches, and by the shore, my disembodied foot is alive with antagonised nerves whose angry electrical currents interact with (or cause) a lightening storm. Meanwhile on the beach, by the frying pan, the traditional black and gold tin of a barrister’s wig becomes a pill box for all of the painkillers on which I was reliant, they in turn being scattered around the beach like pebbles.

As I soon found, the pain of returning to work would all become too much. I stuck it out for five months, but as my condition deteriorated further, and 5  more operations hovered on the horizon, I had to leave again, not returning for almost 2 years.

© Nicholas de Lacy-Brown and The Daily Norm, 2001-2012. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of the material, whether written work, photography or artwork, included within The Daily Norm without express and written permission from The Daily Norm’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Nicholas de Lacy-Brown and The Daily Norm with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

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Oct 17

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Bored of the Pre-Raphaelites? Head straight to William Morris

The problem with the Pre-Raphaelites, the brotherhood of artists formed in England in 1984 by founding members John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt, is that they have become a British institution. As much an institution in fact as the Queen’s corgis, the black cab and Big Ben. And like many a British institution, they get carted out, every so often, more often than not when times are down, when blockbuster exhibitions are expensive to organise, and its cheaper to take the best of British out of the closet. So seems to be the case with Tate Britain’s new “blockbuster” show, Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde, which promises to be a re-examination of the PRB, but in actual fact presents us with the same old paintings, the same old themes, and the same old narrative that we have seen time and time again.

Lady in red – Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Lady Lilith (1866-8)

Usually in Liverpool – John Everett Millais, Isabella (1848)

Super twee: William Holman Hunt, Our English Coasts (1852)

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that these paintings aren’t good – they are in fact pretty incredible, packed with their flowing fantastical red locks, the precision of Millais’ plants and flowers, the scale of their pictorial ambition and the brilliance of their life-like representation within a mystical setting. It’s just that even the most incredible painting can lose its gleam when it’s seen time and time again. In the last 5 years alone, Tate gave us a Millais retrospective (Sept 2007-Jan 2008) and a Romanticism display (Aug 2010-April 2012), centred around Pre-Raph favourites. Meanwhile at the Royal Academy, we had a retrospective of that other PRB favourite, J W Waterhouse  (June-Sep 2009), and at the V&A the same old brotherhood was featured heavily in the exhibition on Aestheticism (April-July 2011). And so you see, with Tate’s new show, which promises to give us something new, and really doesn’t, it’s all a bit, well, underwhelming.

Skip through 6 rooms however, and in the room named “paradise” you really do get something worth visiting. For in showing the designs of William Morris, now famous for his Victorian fabrics which have become equally and intrinsically part of the “fabric” of British society (excuse the pun), you get to see these much loved designs in a new light – works which, when placed in a gallery setting, take on a new life force, as the viewer is encouraged to appreciate the intricacies of the designs and the decadent elegance of the period from which they arise. The Morris display did, admittedly, come as something of a surprise – Tate justifies its inclusion on the rather tenuous basis that Morris had been inspired by the PRB (as well as the medieval past, with which the PRB artists were also rather enamoured) in embarking upon his designs. Oh, and apparently Rossetti and a few other artists of the time were partners in Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co, the company which started producing the now widely-recognised fabrics on an almost industrial scale.

Whatever the connection, I was glad for it – Morris’ designs were my favourite part of the show and, although sparse in number, made me realise how often undervalued Morris is in art history. Too often overlooked as a designer, or at best an illustrator, are not these beautifully hand-crafted designs every bit as valid as artistic masterpieces as a Millais painting? Of course the art or illustration debate has gone on for years, and god knows, I have often been “accused” of being more an illustrator than an artist myself. But call it what you like – I’d far rather admire these “designs” in an art gallery than a filthy Tracey Emin bed any day.

I leave you with some of Morris’ best.

In the meantime, if you can stand the repetition, Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant Garde is on at Tate Britain, London, until 13 January 2013.

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Oct 14

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Sunday Supplement: Dicing with Death (La Pieta)

On last week’s Sunday Supplement, I got the ball rolling with an exploration of some of my more traumatic paintings, created while in the immediate and protracted recovery from my nasty life-changing collision with a collapsing wall. In today’s Sunday Supplement, I am featuring the fourth of my accident paintings, and perhaps the most intimate and private of them all.

Dicing with Death (La Pieta de l’accident) explores the nursing roll undertaken by my mother is the aftermath of my accident. While as a family, we had always been close, post-accident, a new extent of proximity was forced upon us, as I went back to being practically a baby in the everyday attention I required. Recovery in hospital was one thing, but three weeks later when I was discharged to my family home in Sussex, the real horrors of my convalescence begun. The daily trauma of wearing an illazarov frame, having to clean around the pin entry point, waking up to sheets soaked in blood, screams of agony when I tried to move from bed to the bathroom, and in the middle of the night when I could stand the pain no longer. All of this was for my parents to bear, and for my mother in particular, who was compelled to be a nurse as well as a physio, feeder and grieving mother, and once again become physically intimate with me when I needed help dressing, cleaning, even going to the toilet, it was a huge ordeal to experience.

Dicing with Death (La Pieta de l’accident) 2008 © Nicholas de Lacy-Brown, oil on canvas 120cm x 120cm

The worry, the concern and the strain this had on both of my parents was plain to see, even through the fog of pain which clouded my eyes during those terrible months. My attempt at expressing the uncontrollable spread of the effects of my accident upon my family was to paint this work. It is loosely based on the famous La Pieta sculpture by Michelangelo, which poingantly portrays the grieving Mary cradling, with disbelief and agony, the limp dead body of her son. How different this pose is from the celebratory felicity of the typical mother and child pose, the glowing Mary with her new baby Jesus.

Michelangelo’s La Pieta

It was tapping into the great pathos portrayed by La Pieta that I chose to reflect the pose in my Mother, cradling me, the wounded young adult in her arms, not dead, but so close to it as I practically embraced my end under the weight of a crushing collapsed 10ft concrete wall. There too is my baby nephew, born only a few days before the accident, representing both innocence and the cross-generational effect of my trauma, and also in the scene, a skull, reminding me of how close to death I came. The playing cards, the falling dominoes and the dice all go to represent the great gamble we take every day of our life – when everything appears normal until one, life-changing event occurs and alters everything for ever: Look then how the dominoes will fall and the effects of the event begin to traverse every facet of your existence.

Michelangelo’s La Piete is not unique of course, and I leave you with two other variations on the theme – Bellini’s painting, and Picasso’s heart-wrenching study for his great masterpiece of grief and tragedy, Guernica. 

Bellini’s La Pieta

Mother and Child by Picasso

© Nicholas de Lacy-Brown and The Daily Norm, 2001-2012. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of the material, whether written work, photography or artwork, included within The Daily Norm without express and written permission from The Daily Norm’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Nicholas de Lacy-Brown and The Daily Norm with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

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Oct 12

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Switching the artistic spotlight onto Liverpool: The John Moores Painting Prize 2012

In 1957, Sir John Moores, one time head of the clothing catalogue giant, Littlewoods, established his painting prize. His aim was to draw the attention of the artistic world from the bright lights of London, and instead to illuminate the talent and creativity of the North. Of course, inevitably, being that the prize, like the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition, is open to submissions from artists all over the country, it doesn’t necessarily steer that spotlight any brighter over Northern artists than those from the South. Nevertheless, every two years, when the prize, and the exhibition that goes with it, is held at the Walker Gallery in Liverpool, it certainly does its bit to place Liverpool on the cultural map. In fact, some go so far as to call the painting prize the Oscars of the British painting world. It is certainly renowned for spotting rising talent, with previous winners reading like a roll call of the most influencial artists of the last 50 years of British painting, from David Hockney and Richard Hamilton, to Peter Doig.

Paul Collinson’s Temple of Ancient Virtue (2010)

This year, the exhibition is shown as part of the Liverpool Biennial, which also includes other forerunners of the Liverpudlian art scene, such as Tate Liverpool on the Albert Docks. It contains some 62 paintings, whittled down from some 3000 hopefuls (which included my painting which was disgracefully turned down) by a panel of judges which included creative director of the BBC, Alan Yentob, and Iwona Blazwick, director of the Whitechapel gallery as well as previous exhibitors.

Ian Law, M is Many (2011)

This year’s prize was as varied as ever, but perhaps more manageable than the larger Summer Exhibition – it only fills a few galleries, and in those, the paintings are mercifully spread out so as not to bamboozle the viewer with a “salon style” hang. Of course, as is inevitable in any contemporary art prize, this show had its fair share of “works” whose artistic merit remained highly questionable, like M is many by Ian Law, which basically depicts a black line on a white canvas which, because of its purely geometric form manages to resemble an “M” without doing anything else (oh, and it won a prize, by the way), or Oscar Godfrey’s Mineral 9, a badly painted green curve on a white background, which, if painted with his phlegm may have had more merit, although the colour resembles little else.

Oscar Godfrey, Mineral 9 (2011)

Luckily for those of us who had traipsed several hundred miles from London to visit the exhibition, many of the other paintings showed much more promise. I really loved Emma Talbot’s, The Good Terrorists, which showed a cross-section of a large Victorian looking townhouse, with a number of faceless characters getting up to all sorts in the various rooms of the house. Somehow it seemed quite spooky to me, whether it was because of the faceless individuals who were yet full of expression, or because the roof of the house, with its shattered window, resembled the creepy hotel in Hitchcock’s acclaimed thriller, Psycho. The attention to detail made for great viewing, and I like the way that both the interior and exterior of the house could be seen in tandem.

Emma Talbot, The Good Terrorists

Damien Meade’s Talcum (2011)

Also on my watch list were Virginia Phongathorn’s Comma (Test Piece for an Eye Break) which to my mind looked more like a figure wearing headphones rather than a grammatical symbol, and also reminded me of the work of Philip Guston; I also liked Damien Meade’s Talcum, which looked much like a figure from Cluedo with a super-realistic painted sculptural mess upon its head, and Paul Collinson’s Temple of Ancient Virtue (above) which, painted with blurred edges like an off-focus photograph cleverly combines two forms of abandonment – the relics of an abandoned past, and dilapidated graffiti-covered snack bar of the recently vandalised present. I must also include in my favourites list Elizabeth Magill’s Sighting – too fantastical for some tastes maybe, but this piece really excels in close up, where a mysterious forest atmosphere is filled with little bubbles, specs of glittering dust and nearly missed magical hummingbirds. A wonderfully figurative piece for so contemporary a show.

Virginia Phongsathorn’s Comma (2011)

Elizabeth Magill, Sighting

What is perhaps best of all about the John Moores prize is not that it promotes Liverpool, although there is much to be said for that, but that it promotes painting, a so often overlooked media in the modern age, but one which will, in my opinion, outlive the age of installation, and remain at the centre of art history and art present for centuries to come.

The John Moores Prize is showing at the Walker Gallery until 6 January 2013.

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Oct 11

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Architectural Innovation in Liverpool

Coming as I do from the South Coast of England, my move to London 10 years ago seemed like quite a long way north to go. And living as I do in South London, I find any journey further north in the city than Bloomsbury to be a slight disorientating prospect. The idea therefore of going to Northern England, as I did last weekend, let alone finding a wealth of cultural and artistic gems up there was simply never conceivable. Which just goes to show how wrong I was.

Too often the rest of the UK is left in the very long shadow left by London’s worldwide glory. When tourists come to England, they head to London, and maybe Brighton if you’re lucky – they probably don’t even know the names of many of our other major cities. Having said this, the city of Liverpool has always been one step ahead. Not only was it a major shipbuilder of the past, putting its name to ships as famous as the Titanic, but it was also birthplace of the Beatles, the foursome who were inextricably linked with their hometown throughout their careers.

But today, Liverpool has gone so much further than being just the birthplace of the Beatles, and the name painted on the fated Titanic, and has proved itself to be a self-standing centre of artistic excellence, ready to shine in its own right. In fact, Liverpool is already being recognised as the UK’s new cultural capital: In 2008 it was the European Capital of Culture, and there can be little surprise why the city was chosen above the likes of London – it is literally bursting at the seams with culture, offering a cornucopia of superb art works hanging in the Walker Gallery including Pre-Raphaelite favourites and works by the likes of Hockney and Banksy, playing host to the biannual John Moores Painting Prize, and supporting innovative street art and sculpture like the now iconic Lambanana sculpture by Taro Chiezo which has very quickly become a symbol of the city. However, above all things, it is in its architecture, in my opinion, that Liverpool really shines.

An amazing mix of architectural styles

Old meets new

The Albert Docks reflected in the window of Danish-designed Museum of Liverpool

The architecture of the city is so fantastically mixed, so innovative in places and classical in others that one feels disbelief that planning permission was ever granted, and at the same time great relief that it was. So often, when in front of the likes of Bilbao’s Guggenheim by Frank Gehry, or on seeing the incredible curves of the vineyard building of Marquez de Riscal in the Rioja region of Spain, I have bemoaned the lack of British imagination when it comes to installing creative new architectural projects. Most of the new buildings going up in London are pretty standard skyscrapers, and not very exciting at all. Yes, so the Shard is tall, but it’s not all that interesting besides. Yet in Liverpool, you have a superb array of new architectural projects which fill the city with contemporary relevance and an air of bold innovation and creative exploration. From the beauty of the UNESCO protected “Three Graces” (the Liver Building, the Cunard Building and the Port of Liverpool Building) full of neo-classical extravagance and art-deco sophistication, you have the wonderfully regulated but faultlessly reinvigorated Albert Docks, and the brilliant new iconic creation of the curvaceous yet cubic  Museum of Liverpool (by Danish architect Kim Nielson) and the geometric and irregular Pier Head Ferry Terminal by Belfast architects, Hamilton’s.

The result is a brilliant mix of old and new; the old reflected in the sheer glass of the modern, the contemporary lines balancing out the elaborate facades of the old. Liverpool gives you hard industrial edges with refined cultural collections. Serious maritime history with playful Japanese sculptures. And all this some 2 hours north of London – it’s about time the spotlight of the world switched north and showed those European architectural innovators that the UK can do contemporary design too.

I leave you with some of my photos from the weekend. Enjoy!

© Nicholas de Lacy-Brown and The Daily Norm, 2001-2012. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of the material, whether written work, photography or artwork, included within The Daily Norm without express and written permission from The Daily Norm’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Nicholas de Lacy-Brown and The Daily Norm with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Oct 10

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Collecting conkers for a classy seasonal display

Collecting conkers, fallen from the golden boughs of large horse-chestnut trees, bursting as they are around this time with green spiky cases with their shiny auburn seeds, has always held something of a legendary status for me. When I was younger, it seemed that anyone who was anyone went conker collecting, and the more, the plumper, the shiner you could collect, the better. Of course tradition dictates that conkers are collected, threaded on a string, and then used in a good old game of conker and string, knocking the conkers together until one breaks, the winner being he or she who’s conker remains intact the longest.

Off on our conker search (that’s us in the shadows!)

Our conker haul!

The conker game never really appealed to me, but the thrill of finding these shiny round autumn gems certainly satisfied my magpie nature. There was always a great joy to be had in hunting them down, looking amongst piles of crispy brown fallen leaves, all around the wide tree trunks, and coming across a large, plump shiny chestnut-red conker, freshly fallen from the inside of its silky white enclosure, the pure and soft antithesis of the outer thorny shell.

Even now, I love the smell of freshly fallen leaves, slowly starting to decompose in the fresh damp air and the crisp sunny mornings, the scent recalling to my mind those long autumn walks and the joy of collection and discovery, of acorns and conkers, of spiky seeds and ruby red leaves. Living so close to Clapham Common, I have a host of large trees on my doorstep. Unlike the autumns of my Sussex childhood, when my father would use his umbrella to try and pull more conkers down from the trees, such was their scarcity, now, in a single walk, I can bring in a haul of freshly fallen conkers, before the high gloss marbled brown shells have gone dull, or been pecked at my birds or squirrels.

A shiny conker bursting from its shell

It was one such haul which I collected for myself the other day, as has become a new more adult tradition of my later years here in London. Depending on what I find, I tend to display my collection in fruit bowls so that their lustrous glory can be reflected upon during these darkening autumn days. And this year, so impressed was I with my find, that I even filled a vase full of them too. You should try it – while they don’t last forever, they’re guaranteed to last longer than your average vase of flowers, and better still, they’re free! Try getting a few barely opened complete pods – these will take a few days to open and when they do, the fresh shine of the conker within will look especially good in your display.

Displayed in our fruit bowl

Mixing other autumn seeds into the mix

My vase display

I leave you with some shots of the acorns and conkers I painted as part of my Richmond Park painting last year. Happy conker hunting!

Conkers as featured in my painting of Richmond Park last year

© Nicholas de Lacy-Brown and The Daily Norm, 2001-2012. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of the material, whether written work, photography or artwork, included within The Daily Norm without express and written permission from The Daily Norm’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Nicholas de Lacy-Brown and The Daily Norm with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

 

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