EDitorial ± 25-Nov-2019

Art & Bobby & Ed & Frank

Art must be beautiful, artist must be beautiful. So said that Marina Abramovic, Roman's aunt, furiously brushing her hair. Loves a bit of the old art, does I. About to leave a small exhibition in a scout hall at the end of November last year (2018), I made an enquiry: how do I get involved with this next year? Just give us your email address, they said, which I did, and forgot all about it.

Mid July, an email arrived from the 13th Ipswich Scout Group saying "We are pleased to invite you to exhibit at this year's event". Gosh. Late August, I replied with my details stating my intended number of exhibits, 4 (four). Meanwhile, actual number of art pieces sitting in Broom Acres ready to be exhibited, 0 (zero). There followed some extended teatimes of the soul while I pondered my medium. Would I paint? Would I sketch? Would I sculpt?

Realistically, only one medium was ever going to win out, one I used when I briefly became a local contemporary artist. Great. You're gonna use Lego. What exactly is it you're going to depict? Then, struggling to get back to sleep one September night, four names came to me:

  • Art -- 'cos it's that type of show, innit?
  • Bobby -- still adored by everyone round here, football lovers or not
  • Ed -- ubiquitous local boy done good: Chantry Park gigs, Yesterday, Mansion exhibition, Ketchup, GoT, Brendan Biederbecke
  • Frank -- star of this year's Being Frank doc, the incomparable Mr Sidebottom

Me being me, I kept all of this under wraps, naturlich. I bought large base plates, tried to find decent images that would translate well to no more than two colours, sprayed those bases in the shed at the bottom of the garden, and realised that even I did not have enough of the right Lego pieces. Mysterious packages began to arrive from Mr Ebay: a typical envelope might contain 50 red bricks, all 1x1, type 3005. So began many evenings sat in the loft while I contemplated the shape of Ed Sheeran's (Tom Davies) glasses. I won't go into the problem of finding frames to fit, suffice to say that a craft knife was involved.

The entry instructions were straightforward: "Friday 22nd November, delivery of work to Rushmere Road HQ between 10am and 3pm". That was me mid-morning, biking with one hand while the other struggled to hold a huge bag4life crammed with my masterworks. Van Gogh never did this. Such a relief to arrive and finally hand them over for hanging. And much fun on Saturday afternoon to suggest to G. that we pop in to a little art fair, her browsing the catalogue as walked around. Hang on, is that you?

Very pleased to have entered, and very pleased to have sold one of them -- Ed, of course -- apparently to a local optician. As Ed said, "if things go right we can frame it and put you on a wall."