<\/p>\n
The English teacher at my secondary modern thought my form was too stupid to do English literature; he decided for us that we should only take English Language. For many years I believed his assessment but continued to write privately. Words have periodically surfaced on my artwork along with other symbols but (perhaps as a result of the early knock-back) rather hesitantly. There is in any case something of a resistance to mixing visual and written languages in visual art. You may illustrate stories but not paint words.<\/p>\n
For my solo show \u2018Unstill Lives<\/a>\u2019 which dealt with my experience of AIDS I decided for the first time to exhibited extracts from my journals and sketch books along side the pictures. These were snapshots of what I was feeling on the death of friends and, for instance, the day of my own diagnosis. The reaction to the show was very powerful and included a lot of positive encouragement about the writing. So I started to think seriously about pursuing (and perhaps publishing) more.<\/p>\n I attended two courses facilitated by Patrick Gale<\/a> in France for gay writers at the Lotus Tree<\/a> run by Lance Price & James Proctor. As a result of this I began a children\u2019s novel but also to write nonfiction. As a \u2018late\u2019 entry into writing professionally it can be difficult to be accepted and I decided to pursue a specialist interest I have had for many years: collecting antique packaging – in particular antique bottles. At first writing as an amateur I forged a link to the collectables auction house BBR<\/a> but was then invited by the owner to edit their quarterly magazine. This led to researching and writing books on the subject. Both \u2018Deadly Pleasures<\/a>\u2019 and \u2018Blakeman\u2019s Bygones Review<\/a>\u2019 are now standard reference works; another, a \u2018Collectors Guide to Inks, Glue Pots & Blacking Bottles 1750-1920\u2019, is due out shortly.\u00a0<\/p>\n Writing about art has most recently included \u2018Brixton Calling!\u2019, the publication that accompanied a Heritage Lottery and Arts Council funded project to recall and preserve a record of Brixton Art Gallery<\/a> and the Brixton Artists Collection 1983-1993. Also as part of that project I was paid to curate and collate material about the ground breaking Lesbian & Gay Artists group based at the Gallery and to construct a Timeline of significant LGBT events leading up to, during, and after that timeframe. This was deposited with the collected material relating to the Gallery at Tate<\/a> Archive. I realised two things in doing so. The strong political \u2018protest\u2019 element to the Collectives\u2019 shows, particularly the galleries cut-and-paste, punk graphics and LGBT activism of Pride and AIDS marches, was ingrained in my use of words along with a love of the possible ambiguity of words as visual triggers, what Patrick Gale called \u2018memory triggers\u2019. My latest work much more deliberately, and I hope more confidently, incorporates words and phrases as integral to the design.<\/p>\n I am also pursuing writing about art by concentrating on a subject that motivates me; as with old bottles I\u2019m following an idiosyncratic passion. For many people LGBT arts are a subject that relates to \u2018old\u2019 battles. As with the attitude towards Feminist Art, it is often considered a dead topic. I attended a seminar at the Tate Gallery last year in which both topics were linked. Entitled \u2018Civil Partnerships\u2019 it was very clear that although progress has been made both topics are still denigrated by mainstream museums, historians and curators. There are honourable exceptions but by and large both are regarded still as somehow peripheral at best to assessing artists work. <\/p>\n In the 1990s I was involved in preserving the studios of several artists who had died of AIDS. Those of my friends Mario Dubsky<\/a> and Nick Balaban and that of British gay erotic comic artist and illustrator of Drummer Magazine<\/a>, Bill Ward<\/a> (died 1996). Bill led me to research photography and illustration from the Physique era, roughly 1930-1970 particularly the European and British practitioners like Tom Nicholl (\u2018Scott of London) and Pete Dobbing. Somewhere amongst these threads are stories waiting to be written.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The English teacher at my secondary modern thought my form was too stupid to do English literature; he decided for us that we should only take English Language. For many years I believed his assessment but continued to write privately. Words have periodically surfaced on my artwork along with other symbols but (perhaps as a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2647,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[110],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2645","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-my-work","has-post-title","has-post-date","has-post-category","has-post-tag","has-post-comment","has-post-author",""],"builder_content":" The English teacher at my secondary modern thought my form was too stupid to do English literature; he decided for us that we should only take English Language. For many years I believed his assessment but continued to write privately. Words have periodically surfaced on my artwork along with other symbols but (perhaps as a result of the early knock-back) rather hesitantly. There is in any case something of a resistance to mixing visual and written languages in visual art. You may illustrate stories but not paint words.<\/p> For my solo show \u2018Unstill Lives<\/a>\u2019 which dealt with my experience of AIDS I decided for the first time to exhibited extracts from my journals and sketch books along side the pictures. These were snapshots of what I was feeling on the death of friends and, for instance, the day of my own diagnosis. The reaction to the show was very powerful and included a lot of positive encouragement about the writing. So I started to think seriously about pursuing (and perhaps publishing) more.<\/p> I attended two courses facilitated by Patrick Gale<\/a> in France for gay writers at the Lotus Tree<\/a> run by Lance Price & James Proctor. As a result of this I began a children\u2019s novel but also to write nonfiction. As a \u2018late\u2019 entry into writing professionally it can be difficult to be accepted and I decided to pursue a specialist interest I have had for many years: collecting antique packaging - in particular antique bottles. At first writing as an amateur I forged a link to the collectables auction house BBR<\/a> but was then invited by the owner to edit their quarterly magazine. This led to researching and writing books on the subject. Both \u2018Deadly Pleasures<\/a>\u2019 and \u2018Blakeman\u2019s Bygones Review<\/a>\u2019 are now standard reference works; another, a \u2018Collectors Guide to Inks, Glue Pots & Blacking Bottles 1750-1920\u2019, is due out shortly.\u00a0<\/p> Writing about art has most recently included \u2018Brixton Calling!\u2019, the publication that accompanied a Heritage Lottery and Arts Council funded project to recall and preserve a record of Brixton Art Gallery<\/a> and the Brixton Artists Collection 1983-1993. Also as part of that project I was paid to curate and collate material about the ground breaking Lesbian & Gay Artists group based at the Gallery and to construct a Timeline of significant LGBT events leading up to, during, and after that timeframe. This was deposited with the collected material relating to the Gallery at Tate<\/a> Archive. I realised two things in doing so. The strong political \u2018protest\u2019 element to the Collectives\u2019 shows, particularly the galleries cut-and-paste, punk graphics and LGBT activism of Pride and AIDS marches, was ingrained in my use of words along with a love of the possible ambiguity of words as visual triggers, what Patrick Gale called \u2018memory triggers\u2019. My latest work much more deliberately, and I hope more confidently, incorporates words and phrases as integral to the design.<\/p> I am also pursuing writing about art by concentrating on a subject that motivates me; as with old bottles I\u2019m following an idiosyncratic passion. For many people LGBT arts are a subject that relates to \u2018old\u2019 battles. As with the attitude towards Feminist Art, it is often considered a dead topic. I attended a seminar at the Tate Gallery last year in which both topics were linked. Entitled \u2018Civil Partnerships\u2019 it was very clear that although progress has been made both topics are still denigrated by mainstream museums, historians and curators. There are honourable exceptions but by and large both are regarded still as somehow peripheral at best to assessing artists work.
In the 1990s I was involved in preserving the studios of several artists who had died of AIDS. Those of my friends Mario Dubsky<\/a> and Nick Balaban and that of British gay erotic comic artist and illustrator of Drummer Magazine<\/a>, Bill Ward<\/a> (died 1996). Bill led me to research photography and illustration from the Physique era, roughly 1930-1970 particularly the European and British practitioners like Tom Nicholl (\u2018Scott of London) and Pete Dobbing. Somewhere amongst these threads are stories waiting to be written.<\/p>","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.guyburch.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2645","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.guyburch.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.guyburch.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.guyburch.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.guyburch.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2645"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.guyburch.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2645\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5297,"href":"https:\/\/www.guyburch.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2645\/revisions\/5297"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.guyburch.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2647"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.guyburch.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2645"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.guyburch.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2645"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.guyburch.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2645"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}