What you can get for Four pounds...

Today I went to this little thing called the Vintage Jumble sale. It is not far from where I live! I was hoping to maybe pick up a bargain and I am pleased to say I did.

This lovely lady had a stall full of things selling each for mostly under £5! I found this gorgeous tea set still in its box. Dates from the 1970s I think. I don't really care I love it. I got it to use but I am not sure if I will! I am on the hunt for a a nice coffee set complete with pot now!

I also got this set of glasses still in their original box.

I am really pleased with my purchases today!

Retro heaven!

Amazing.....That's Kappa alright!

To be honest I used to think Kappa were far too loud for me! When ever I passed the Cavern Pub after leaving The Shakers at the Cavern Club I could hear the music coming up the stairs! Just those few years ago though I wasn't into bands like Led Zeppelin really. It has only been the last three or four years I've picked up on them.

Then last November I decided to check them out and BOY was I impressed! The Cavern Pub was packed as hot as Beatles Week in August. I was impressed by Paul's AMAZING guitar playing and swaying hips, Tony's drumming..I've no idea how he keeps going for 3 hours in one gig and Martin's bass playing is FAB..not to mention the hair! They certainly work great as a band together!

Not only that they managed to do another 2 hour gig across the road in the Cavern Club almost straight after!

The band not only cover; Led Zeppelin and various other rock classics. Paul also plays his own songs which intermingle perfectly with the rock classics. Even I didn't realise he had written them himself they are that good! Just goes to show how talented Paul Kappa is.

The guys certainly have a lot more stamina than I will ever have.

I've also seen them do a full Led Zeppelin tribute gig a few times which has been truly amazing. I even got dressed up for the occasion, and I was about the only one!

Sometimes they have a drummer with them called Laura who is very good too (she also plays in her own band called The Tone Junkies). Kappa are off to America in August. I hope it goes well for them.

I have really enjoyed going to see them over the last year. It has been great fun! The best thing was me and a friend Rosie doing our little tribute videos to Kappa songs!

Now I'm off for a rest..I'm all Kappa'd out! Until next week!

Kappa play the Cavern Pub every Saturday at 7pm and the Cavern Club at midnight

Shakin' All Over

I wanted to write something about one of my favourite Merseybeat bands, actually they are my FAVOURITE! I have been seeing them in their regular spot at the Cavern on a Saturdays since they started there. The date escapes me...perhaps 1963 (LOL).

I love the fact that they play nothing that hit the pop parade after 1964. I LOVE Johnny Kidd and the Pirates and Shakin' All Over it is played by them to perfection.

I just wanted to write a little bit about them as this week is the anniversary of when the Beatles played their last gig at The Cavern in 1963.

The Shakers play songs by a lot of the Merseybeat groups; Gerry and the Pacemakers, Billy J Kramer, The Mojos, even Cilla and of course The Beatles. They also do songs by the likes of Peter and Gordon, The Rolling Stones and Johnny kidd and the Pirates.

So if you are down Mathew Street in Liverpool on a Saturday afternoon about 3.30pm or a Sunday night about 9pm. Please go and have a listen. Tony, Eddie, Martin and Phil are the real deal and are as close to the REAL thing as you can get pure nostalgia.

Andy Warhol is a significant artist and influenced the decade of the 1960s. He realised and picked up on the boom time after the depression of 1930s America he was born into. The 1950s was the start of the consumer revolution. His work was a comment on the mass consumer culture going on around him. He became obsessed with the celebrity icon. The art he created was using images from supermarket brands such as: coco cola, Brillo and Campbells Soup cans. He also became incapturelated by the link between death and celebrity. He made a strong statement about the times he was living in.

He questioned the nature of art and its need to be original. The concept behind the idea was what mattered rather than the skill it took to make it. His art recycled others work and reproduced it. His work was brash, and irreverent and mass produced, just like the world around him.

His Brillo box focuses totally on the image, which jumps out.

“Warhol’s boxes have comic timing. The humour of the work is that Warhol has bothered to make an object at all- just as it may be humorous to think that we are buying things rather than refined images when we purchase commodities “.

“Despite (Brillo) being a three dimensional object, its functional as nothing more than a label. It is not a container of something else there is no Brillo pad inside it-but a sign complete in itself. “ (Kitnick, 2007, 100)

He used a technique that he would be forever associated with, silk-screen printing it was a way he could produce images many and quickly. These images were garish and brightly coloured just like the advertisements to sell to the consumers the goods they desired to make their lives better.

In his Marilyn prints the ink was layered over a black and white photograph taken by Gene Korman.

“The misprints and occasional clogging of the screen gave each face a slightly different expression. Making the point that although her face is reproduced endlessly Marilyn Monroe is not the plastic consumer good she appears to have become…” (Whiting, 1997, 176).

The Monroe image was reproduced to the point where it wasn’t clear where the movie icon ended and the real Monroe began. Warhol’s comment on at and consumer culture was making the point that everyone could produce art and anything could be art.

“..Warhol exaggerated the appearance and style of both the stars themselves and the mass-produced photographic images by which they were known. Warhol’s silk-screens are not therefore, about Taylor and Monroe as real people at all, but about their public image in its purist form.” (Whiting,1997 148).

A star’s true identity is therefore trapped beneath the public image. They became public spectacles. In the 1950s the press set out to uncover the person behind that movie icon image.

Warhol spearheaded the Pop Art movement in America. His art was a statement on the Capitalist consumer society that had exploded after the hardship of the Second World War and the end of rations in food and consumer goods that enveloped the early 1960s. He created work that reflected this and made art accessible to the masses rather that the high art bourgeois that it was before this.

“In February 1965, Life illustrated an article on Pop fashion, home appliance and advertising with a dress based on Warhol’s silk-screen prints of the Campbell’s soup cans” (Whiting. 1997, 179).

Thursday night viewing

There wasn't much on the TV tonight so I thought I would dig a pile of DVD's out and I decided on Breakfast At Tiffany's. I have never seen it before and I didn't know the story, but I've had the film sat unwatched for at least a couple of years. I am also ashamed to say I have never seen a film with Audrey Hepburn in (not that I can remember). I have only ever seen her famous image in photographs and part of Andy Warhol's prints. The film is a wash with early sixties American glamour. Audrey Hepburn's outfits are truly stunning even her little black dress. My favourite was a bright pink dress with matching shoes and tiara.

The story is of a lonely girl who calls herself Holly Golightly who is searching for a rich man to marry. Her only companion is a ginger cat, who she simply calls 'Cat". Until 'Fred" enters her life (played by actor George Peppard). they become friends and neighbours.

A touching moment is when Holly sits on the window ledge strumming a guitar singing 'Moon River" which is the backdrop throughout the whole film. Mostly it is the instrumental we hear.

She thinks she has found a husband who is going to be president of Brazil and she plans to fly there to marry him, but things take a turn for the worse and she gets rejected by him.

It ends up with her in a taxi with 'Fred' and 'Cat'. the sad bit in the film is when she chucks her beloved pet out of the taxi into the pouring rain. you see him looking from railings all rejected and wet..poor thing!

Of course the film ends happily with Fred declaring his love for Holly..and she finds her beloved Cat again...The end...

The Navy Lark

My grandad William Pratt (top left in the photo) was in the Royal Navy during the Second World War. I've got a photograph of him somewhere in his uniform. I've been looking everywhere for it but I can't find it. I also have one of him with my nan on their wedding day which I also can't find. But I did find one of him with some other chaps from his submarine crew.

He started life out as a stoker on the submarine H M Seal. This even has it's link with Liverpool as it had it's first test run on the Mersey (my grandad wasn't in the crew then though).

It was a mine clearing submarine, deep under the sea. A VERY dangerous job, one wrong move and the whole submarine could blow up and along with it all it's crew.

During 1940 they were on their way somewhere and the submarine got tangled up in somes mines and they could not go anywhere, stuck and running out of air and time.

Their only hope was to be rescued. In May 1940 they were rescued, but by some Germans Officers who captured the submarine and the crew. Prisoners for the rest of war. He was very lucky and survived.

He worked his way up to the best job according to my mum. When he left the Navy though I

have been told he spent all his money on drink. I am not surprised I think the war affected so many people.

In 1961 a book called 'Will Not We Fear' By C.E.T. Warren and James Benson. It tells the story of what happened to them. My nan had a copy so I read it, but I have my own now which I managed to source from Ebay.

My grandad was never able to tell me about what happened to him as I was only 4 years old when he died. All I can remember about him was sitting on his knee, getting piggy backs and knuckle sandwiches. I had no idea what a hero he was and what he went through.

I know he was very ill I remember before he died he looked bad. He was only 58, he died from Lung cancer, due to smoking.

Here is something I wrote for an exhibition at The Cornerstone Gallery earlier in the year.

As you walk into the Cornerstone Gallery at Hope University, the Sutton Taylor exhibition is situated in lit cabinets around the parameter walls of the ground floor exhibition space, rather than in the middle of the room. This gives the viewer the opportunity to view the pieces from different angles, and admire the lustre that glows, shines and bounces all around the spot lit glass display cabinets. They reflect light, sheer gloss, the great splendor of the shiny metallic surfaces of this pottery, which comprises a collection of oversized vessels.

From a distance, the large pieces look alluring, their heights approximately 50cm on average for the vases with the bowls being around 15x 25cm, on closer inspection they show the progression in both style and colour. The journey begins with the more pastel shades of ‘Bowl with flower pattern’ (1986) coming right up to date with the geometric style and bold colours of ‘Dark purple and green bowl’ (2010). These pieces assault the senses with such gusto; the garish bright colours look like precious stones in a jewellery shop or a part of a priceless hoard of treasure. The shine attracts the viewer to them like a magpie and from a distance the surface glistens and looks smooth, but on approaching, the tones, shades and colours change, and also the bumps and imperfections are clearly visible making them all more desirable as pieces to be ‘lusted’ after.

Taylor is a lifelong self-taught ceramicist, who is “attracted to bright and changing light conditions in expansive skies, and moving-water-to light through foliage to patterns and juxtaposition of colour in the landscape to pattern of light and shade in rock faces or individual pebbles”. (www.hartgallery.co.uk/artists/taylor ).

In the middle of the ground floor gallery space is the staircase leading up to the next level, where the first part of the other exhibition collectively called ‘Quartered, Drawn and Hung’, (a macabre pun on the proper name for a death sentence to be ‘hung. quartered and drawn) is displayed. These, unlike the Sutton Taylor pieces, are works by different artists linked to the University. At the top of the first staircase is a collection of small white pottery pieces, and sketchbooks in glass cabinets. On the back wall, various artists have explored their perception through drawing using various media. Two of the art works aren’t conventional. The first, a cross-stitch sample, by Fiona Ward (2010) is framed by its own hoop with a piece of embroidered red writing communicating the message ‘the miserable have no other medicine. But only hope’. A quote taken from Shakespeare’s Measure for measure. “I studied this at A-level and it really stayed with me; there are a good many layers to it and always something new to think about it. The line used seems to fit well with the present way of the world. I chose the medium because I’ve always enjoyed textiles and used to do a lot of sewing and I am also interested in how the use of textiles has been seen through the history of art” (Fiona Ward).

The second work approach to drawing is one which challenges our perception and approach to drawing in a traditional format using media such as charcoal, pencil and line etc., and stood out among the other mainly traditional approaches to the subject of mark making.

Tony Smith’s painterly mixed media pieces are small, brightly coloured, and experimental.

“ I like something which is formally quite under-spoken and subtle like minimalist art, and in particular how minimalist painting is displayed via something bawdy and over the top like a banner. There exists a paradox or contrast between the work and the mode of presentation” (Tony Smith).

Another set of stairs led to the final level. For this part of the exhibition accessing the works was more limited; the balcony forces the viewer to follow the drawings around one way or the other and in a certain order rather than personal choice.

The Drawing exhibition makes the viewer question what drawing is, and the title suggests that the creators of these pieces have each ripped apart this traditional form of visual expression in their own way.