Having had such a positive response to my earlier post “The Morning After…” I’m now following that up with another series of images which have done well for me in the past, having given them a similar treatment to the nudes.
These originate from studies I did of my wife Dido and a girlfriend of hers – another ex-Royal ballerina – as they kindly posed and pranced around for me one evening here on our terrace in southern Spain many exotic moons ago.
Enjoy…
Yesterday afternoon I was pouring through my collection of Indian cookery books looking for something different to do with a chicken breast languishing in my fridge. As often happens on these occasions, after ten minutes or so of not finding quite what I was looking for, I was about to revert to my trusty old Madhur Jaffrey butter chicken when a piece of paper being used as a bookmark caught my attention. Frayed and food-stained, it turned out to contain a barely legible biro-scrawled recipe for a chicken curry. After further examination, I noted that it contained some unusual culinary bedfellows for an Indian chicken dish – things like olive oil, ground caraway seed, lime juice, and most particularly, both bay and curry leaves. Then suddenly I remembered a swelteringly hot and sticky afternoon spent in a hotel kitchen in southern India in the autumn of 2003.
We were guests at the aptly named Ideal Beach Resort, in Mahabalipuram, on India’s Tamil coast, resting up for a few days before travelling inland to Coimbatore (where my wife Dido was to help in the establishment of a clinical education centre for children with autism).
I think it was on our first evening there, during supper, we got chatting with a very affable American couple at the next table who turned out to share our enthusiasm for the delicious local cuisine. At some point during the meal the four of us were invited by the maître d to visit the kitchen the following lunchtime to watch our food being prepared. Cathy – the lady of the American couple and a veteran of the Ideal Beach Hotel – chose the menu, including the lime chicken curry which turned out to be as delicious as it was unusual.
The rare blend of ingredients and spices was explained by the fact that our young head chef, although a Tamil, had been trained in Bengal and enjoyed fusing the two distinct culinary traditions.
Fortunately Dido had the presence of mind to record the preparation of the curry and – albeit thirteen years late – I was able to decipher the recipe and apply it to the chicken breast in my fridge. And, it was absolutely delicious! The caraway, lime, bay and curry leaf are a group marriage made in heaven – a complex and unctuous harmony of savoury, fragrant bitter sweetness that transforms humble white chicken meat into a thing of olfactory delight.
There are two ways to sample this fabulous curry – either follow the recipe below, or better still, go and visit the Ideal Beach Hotel. I can recommend both.
(Chapatis and a hot lime pickle are excellent with this curry also, if using fresh curry leaves, add at the same time as the lime juice.)
RECIPE Ingredients ¼ cup: olive or coconut oil 200gm / 8oz: diced chicken breast SPICE MASALA I 5cm / 2” stick: cinnamon 2 – 3: cloves 2 - 3: cardamom pods 1: bay leaf 1: onion – finely grated 5cm / 2” piece: ginger – peeled and coarsely chopped 6 cloves: garlic – peeled and coarsely chopped 2 tbsp: water 1: large, ripe tomato chopped SPICE MASALA II ½ tsp: turmeric 1 tsp: chili powder 1½ tsp: ground coriander seed 1 tsp: groud cumin 1 tsp: garam masala 1 tsp: ground caraway seed 1 tsp: whole fennel seed 1 tsp: salt 3: curry leaves ½ ltr / 1 pint: water To taste: salt ¼ cup: lime juice METHOD
Blend the ginger, garlic and water into a paste
Heat the oil in a kadai or a heavy skillet on a medium high heat
Brown the diced chicken thoroughly, then remove from kadai and put aside (retaining the juices)
Add masala I to the kadai and sweat for 5 minutes, stirring constantly until well browned
Add onion to kadai and stir-fry until browned
Add the tomato to the kadai and fry for 2 minutes until oil separates from the masala, onion and tomato paste
Add the ginger and garlic puree to the kadai and stir for 1 minute
Return the chicken and its juices to the kadai and stir well
Add masala II and the curry leaves to the kadai and stir well, making certain the chicken is well coated
Add the water, making sure to deglaze (scrape) the bottom of the kadai
Bring to the boil, then cover and simmer for half hour
Remove cover and cook over a high heat for about 10 minutes, until the sauce begins to thicken
Add more salt (if necessary) and the lime juice, stir well and remove from heat
Remove cinnamon, cloves and cardamom pods before serving
A while back I posted a gallery of images of a lovely girl from Toulouse who posed for me after a night of love-making.
In the decades since that wonderful night and thrilling morning-after I have returned to these images many times, in different media; from charcoal and coloured inks, to pastels, oils and most successfully – from a commercial standpoint – in gouache. In fact, it was the gouache originals that inspired the pictures in that earlier post.
However, I’ve long thought that a Matisse-esque, colour block / cut-out technique would most suit this subject – an uninhibited French inspired method for an uninhibited French subject.
After many long hours of honing my Photoshop skills I think I’ve achieved my aim of making fun, jazzy and – in this case at least – sexy images. The several people who have seen them in preview have universally approved and now I’d be most interested to know what you, my followers and other viewers make of them?
In an earlier post I promised to reveal the fruits of my hours spent in the life room at St. Martins.
I always try to keep my promises, so here are the contents of my sketchbook dated 1979.
Looking at these drawings now after so many years hidden away in a drawer in my old plan-chest, what strikes me is their raw honesty. How good or bad they are I’m not the one to judge (although I’ve seen worse), but whatever else, they are truthful, even to the point of portraying how terribly bored the models were in most of the poses. I can also perceive the instinctive cartoonist in me trying to break out, especially in F&M 1.
I referenced several of these in my biblical themed paintings later that same year, especially the Adam and Eve series, and then in 1980, a couple of them were very useful for my “Wanderers” pictures.
I guess it was those repeated boxing -day viewings of John Wayne’s “The Alamo” throughout my early childhood, which formed my earliest imaginings of San Antonio. So much so, that all the travel books and all the Googling and all the acquired knowledge from numerous TV documentaries about the great modern-day city it has subsequently become could not erase those preconceptions. As ever, it was only by actually visiting the place that reality could finally trump the Hollywood representation in my mind’s eye.
Unlike most of its “fellow” mission station at Rorke’s Drift – the scene of an equally heroic-if-more-successful stand against vastly superior numbers – the original Alamo mission building is still standing, and remains the city’s main tourist attraction. But equally, in stark contrast to its South African equivalent where the scene of the battle has barely changed since 1879, the Alamo building, now stranded in the middle of a thriving, colourful modern city – rather like an old man at a rave – evokes little of its historical connection to the conflict of 1836.
For me at least, this did not prove a disappointment, as the city itself has so much more to offer the contemporary traveller than the murky history of Davy Crockett’s doomed and vainglorious encounter with Santa Anna.
Apart from all the culture – of which there is plenty, like most American cities – and the delicious Texan, Mexican and Tex-Mex cuisine on offer, there is the beautiful “river walk”.
The river walk is an elaborately engineered system of canals and waterways by which the once lethal San Antonio River now flows harmlessly and elegantly beneath the downtown area of the city. Like a kind of sub-tropical Amsterdam-cum-London’s Regent’s Canal, the river walk by day offers a cooling and serene contrast to the stifling bustle of the commercial streets above, and at night transforms into one great waterside party. Long sections of the water walk are lined with countless numbers and endless varieties of eateries and bars, with plenty on offer for those not satisfied with merely tacos and beefsteak, from British style gastro-pubs and high-end French and Italian bistros and trattorias , to every type of Asian cafe and restaurant. It’s a simply wonderful place to while away an evening or several!
The images presented below barely do San Antonio – and in particular the water walk – justice, but they do begin to give the feel of the place.
Padua is most famous in the anglophone world at least for being the setting for Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, but its true importance lies in its role as one of the oldest and most important university cities in the world.
Arguably, the home of modern western medicine – indisputably the cradle of modern pathology – with strong associations to the likes of Galileo and Copernicus it’s legacy as a historic centre of scientific learning is only surpassed by Cambridge. (This is particularly interesting when one realises that Padua University emerged from Bologna University in a way very similar to the way Cambridge emerged from Oxford – at about the same time.)
However, as a warning to the prospective visitor to Padua, it should be noted that for all it’s academic glories (and a couple of fabulous artworks by Giotto and Donatello) it falls far short of most of its city neighbours so far as things like charm and gastronomy are concerned. Nevertheless, like all Italian towns, it finds a way to smile back when one points a camera at it.
Presented here are a series of enhanced photographic images through which I make an attempt to transmit the feeling of a stroll through Padua’s cobbled streets and along her narrow waterways…
I thought that a lifetime of watching movies and TV series based in New York would have prepared me for my first visit to Central Park. But all the Kojak, all the Law and Order and all the Sex in the City in the universe could not have anticipated the blizzard of January 2016 and its magical transforming effect.
So, instead of a stroll through one of the world’s most famous urban “green” spaces, we found ourselves trecking through a pristine winter landscape.
Fortunately, unlike the evening before when I had left my camera in the hotel (see previous post “The Big White Apple“), this time I was prepared and here are some of the results…
If Claude Monet had been walking through Manhattan during the second greatest blizzard in history to hit the city – with only an old Nokia phone camera to record what he saw, then perhaps – with just a little help from Photoshop – he might have ended up with a set of pictures like those displayed below.
These photos were taken by my wife Dido, on her aforementioned Nokia, on the evening of Saturday 23rd January during our walk back from Madison Avenue to Broadway.
We were in NYC to celebrate our silver wedding, and although the snow disrupted much of our planned itinerary for the trip, this walk, down the middle of almost-deserted, iconic streets, blanketed in powder snow turned out to be one of the most enchanting experiences of all our years together.
I think that these images get some of the magic across…
I’ve been making greetings card designs and images for decades now – initially doing freelance work for greetings card companies and poster publishers and more recently producing images for my own Moody By Nature label. Over the years I’ve done everything from cartoon smut (professionally referred to as “erotic humour”) to soppy Christmas and birthday penguins and polar bears (yes, you can probably blame me for the proliferation of penguin cards from the 90’s onward). Lately though, I’ve been busy with more photographic based themes and images.
Here is a small selection from a series I somewhat blandly titled curiosities, for obvious reasons.
“Bolt Masala” is from a photo I took in a metal engineering factory reception office in Coimbatore in southern India – hence the “masala” connotation.
I spotted the old boots suspended by their laces for “Good Use” in the delightful artists village of Ein Hod on Israel’s Mediterranean coast. It’s proven popular both as a retirement and as an anniversary card…
…as has “Growing Old Together Gracefully” (as an anniversary card that is!) which displays two venerable phone boxes in Hampstead.
“Pond Life” was snapped in the exquisite Alcazar gardens in Seville.
I was struck by the image of “The Blue Cup” in the unlikely setting of Sherwood Forrest – more famous for hosting the “merry men” in Lincoln Green.
Finally, I saw the yellow balloon languishing in a puddle on the Regent’s Canal towpath (north London) on “New Years Day” 2011 – having lost my dear mother barely three months before it seemed like a poignant metaphor for the past year…
For a while during the late 1980’s and early 90’s there was a resurgence of classic poster design in British commercial illustration. For about ten years add agencies got a nostalgia pang for the poster images of the early half of the century—especially the great travel posters of companies like Cunard and P&O.
Photo-sourced images, distilled into simple, screen-print-like blocks of colour were once again all the rage which meant for me, as a keen exponent of the form, a fairly regular stream of commissions.
One of these days, when I’ve completed the transfer of all my old work copy onto a digital platform I’ll put up one or two gallery posts showing the sort of stuff I did for the likes of Thomas Cook and Legal & General.
For now, here is a small gallery of highly disparate images I made for my own pleasure and exhibition.
They comprise a truly odd bunch, including as they do some kind of anti-communist poster (can’t recall if it’s aimed at Russia or China?) and a slightly weird self-portrait of me looking very miserable (suffering with heat-stroke) at a bus stop in Israel. Somewhere, I have dozens of colour slides of many more, less quirky; mostly travel related images which are now all happily sold. They too await digital conversion.
Meanwhile, these are fun—I think!
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