James Hamilton on Culture, Technology and Art
Of course, the advent of digital photography, disposing as it did with the endless cost sink of film and film processing, pretty much created Garreteer photography on its own. That, and the new trend to explore the possibilities of cheap, badly-made, often “joke” cameras, but there was always one other option open to the person…
If I was asked to describe how the British saw meditation, I’d reply, “weird relaxation”: the British see it as a suspect means of getting some peace of mind that’s tied up in alien religions and general absurdity. As a result, people go to meditation in search of peace and relaxation, and when they don’t…
Learning to paint – which is often the reason behind many people initially learning to draw in fact – is a three-stage process. 1. It really does help to know how to draw, to some standard, as you’ll understand from that ideas such as relative lights and darks (values). 2. The next step is to…
Vinyl, in the end, didn’t die: the older 78rpm record was a different story. But it had the run of the land for the best part of half a century, and in that time became the medium for most of the new music of the twentieth century: most rock singles were timed to fit, not…
They’re the sort of collection that gets started completely by accident. A group of Penguin classics coalesce during a reshelving and their owner realizes that there’s the core to something there, or the green-spined early Penguin ‘tec series builds up until their sheer numbers can no longer be ignored. At any rate, high production…
In one sense it’s a mystery how something as cheap and reliable as the disposable ballpoint pen has not become a major medium in art. After all, it’s not because the ink is indelible, although it is. It shares that with all inks, and with silverpoint besides. And it’s not because the line is boring,…
One of the greatest advantages of coming from a moneyed background is that you can pursue literary or artistic achievement full-time, without having to worry about making a living. George Orwell’s experiences between the wars supporting working class writers brought home just how hard it could be to sustain long, developed artistic projects without resources….
Not for nothing are Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger the Garreteer film makers par excellence. Their battles against low budgets and wartime authorities should endear them to anyone who has had to deal with pennilessness and bureacracy at the same time, whilst their open propagandizing for less money-obsessed, equal, gentle societies puts them on the…
If you have any lingering notion that British art isn’t riven to the core with ideas of class, consider Alfred Wallis. Because Alfred Wallis, in his lifetime and in the seventy years since his death, has been the most patronised man in the country. Wallis was a Cornishman, a sailor by trade who, on…
These days, Ashington, a former mining town fifteen minutes’ drive from Newcastle, is best known for giving birth to the Charlton brothers Jack and Bobby, World Cup Winners with England in 1966. But before World War II, this place, lacking public library or art gallery, became famous for something quite different: its painters. The story…
It’s because drawing is like singing – something that, if you number yourself amongst those who can’t do it, you feel a bereavement. A bereavement that only self-deprecating humour can offset: you don’t want to hear me sing. Or, from a darker place, the oblique suggestion that the nice people, the likeable ones, can’t sing:…
Ira Glass, US radio personality and producer-host of the radio and television show This American Life perfectly sums up why so many new artists and writers give up. It’s not a perseverance problem, but something at the heart of why artists and writers enter the field in the first place: Nobody tells this to people…
