Edgware – ARKS, ADAM AND AXARQUIA

PROJECT EDGWARE

December 28, 2021December 28, 2021 by adamhalevi, posted in Adam Green, Edgware, Felt tip drawing, North London, North London Suburbia, Suburbia, United Synagogue

Occasionally, our teachers at my boarding school would give us projects to do during the holidays, and although these were never arduous tasks, I always resented them as intrusions into our precious time at home. Nevertheless, being the conscientious little chap I was, I always did them as best I could, as the one presented here bears testimony.

As far as I recall, this was the very first such project I was assigned, back in the Christmas new year break of 1971/72, making me 11 at the time. Certainly, my use of felt tip pens would be consistent with that dating, making these pictures exactly, an incredible 50 years old.

Looking at them now raises a mixture of emotions; of nostalgia for a happy and safe childhood on the one hand, and a reminder of the sense of relief I felt a few years later at escaping from dreary, peripheral suburbia into the city itself.

In any event, for better or for worse, here is Edgware; famous for it’s eponymous Roman road; boasting one of the oldest avenues of sequoias in Europe, being the home of George Fredrick Handel, and indisputably, “My Home Town…”

*The closest Edgware had to a cooperate skyscraper was the UK Green Shield HQ*.

*Edgware had one of the UK’s biggest Jewish communities, and consequently, several synagogues, including this – The United Synagogue – the largest synagogue in Europe at the time.*

*The parish church of Saint Margaret’s is one of the few reminders of Edgware’s picturesque village past.*

*My old primary school, Rosh Pinah, since moved to a new site, and more evidence of Edgware’s then-thriving Jewish community.*

Most of houses in Edgware (in common with several other outer-London suburbs) were built to one of two architectural “formulae” laid down in the 1930’s. This was a typical “mock Tudor” house by the building company Curtain…

*…and this, more appropriately deco style house by the Laing company.*

GOLDEN MEMORIES in black and white

October 14, 2021October 14, 2021 by adamhalevi, posted in Adam Green, Ansell Adams, Black and White Photography, Childhood Memories, Edgware, George Lazenby, London Transport Museum, Sidney Pizan

a monochrome glance at my childhood

I’ve talked about the distinctive qualities of black and white photography before on these pages, and how it has an uncanny ability to capture the spirit and mood of a subject far more intensely than colour. It’s something the greats of the genre understood and exploited brilliantly; from the epic landscapes of Adams, and the deeply personal portraiture of Karsh to the lyrical life observations of Bresson; they all utilised the cleansing distillation of grey-scale-monochrome to the ultimate dramatic effect.

However, while the great masters took black and white photography to the level of high-art, equally nostalgic monochrome images were being snapped countless millions of times by less gifted photographers across the globe. And while their results might not classify as works of art, they nevertheless rarely fail to evoke and to entertain.

The images presented here are intended as a case in point and offer a small glimpse into my childhood, growing up in suburban London, which for all its fatherless challenges was almost as idyllic as it looks…

*Summer , Edgware, 1963-ish, our back garden “pool”, with me and my big brother Michael and our lovely neighbours, Peter and Susan Gerard*…

*Same garden, different amusements, summer 1966, with Michael again, and assorted neighbours and school friends…*

Edgware, Spring, 1967, in the kitchen, Michael and I using our baking sets. We both developed a keen interest in food and cooking from an early age, although I seem to recall that the results of this particular session ended up being fed to the birds…

London Transport Museum, Covent Garden, London, 1968; Being the nephew of Sidney Pizan, one of London’s top fashion photographers had all sorts of perks, like having the run of a fabulous steam locomotive during a shoot for Burberry. That’s Peter Morgan, one of Sidney’s assistants/apprentices setting up a shot with the Polaroid. Incidentally, the legs of the male model standing on the footplate above me belonged to soon-to-be-007, George Lazenby, who began filming On Her Majesty’s Secret Service a few weeks after this photo was taken.

YEARNING FOR THE TUBE…

June 14, 2020June 15, 2020 by adamhalevi, posted in Adam Green, Art, Biro drawing, Charcoal Sketches, Edgware, Saint Martin's School of Art, Sketchbook art, Uncategorized

…and a nostalgia for drab normality

A fact of the current restrictions upon our normal lives is at once curious, obvious and virtually universal; that being the loss of, and consequent longing for, normal, boring, and even tedious everyday experience. Missing erstwhile unremarkable pleasures of life, like going to the pub, restaurants and concerts is bad enough, but when one starts to get nostalgic over things like hopping on and off buses and even journeys on the tube, it’s apparent that the present regime is really starting to bite.

This nostalgia struck me keenly the other day when I was trawling through slides of old sketchpads dating from the time of my commutes to art school (an incredible forty-plus years ago). And, as an artist’s sketchbook is often a tool for magnifying the seemingly mundane into something more meaningful, it occurred to me that the drawings from those old books might provide a peculiarly apposite reminder, for all its apparent dinginess and dreariness, of the glory of normality…

**Buses – 1978 –** (blue) **pastel on paper** This and the drawing below date from toward the end of my two years foundation course at Harrow School of Art when I travelled from my home North London suburb of Edgware to Harrow on the 288 bus. I rarely sketched on the buses as it was mostly impractical and nausea-inducing…

*Friday’s Bus* – 1978 – Charcoal on Paper …Judging by the folio case between his legs, I’m guessing that this guy might have been going to the same place as me…

**Person in a Paddington Bear Hat – 1979 – Felt-tip on Paper** (Gouache hat paint, added later) …Following my foundation course at Harrow, I began Saint Martin’s in the autumn of 1978. I swapped from the bus to the Northern Line tube for the journey from Edgware to Charring Cross Road (I can’t recall why I did what I did with the hat, or when)…

**Spectacled Reader – c1980 – Charcoal on Paper** *…Although I was never as prolific a sketcher as I ought to have been, I did a relatively large amount of drawing on the tube.*..

**Scarf with a Lady – c1980 – Charcoal on Paper** …By going into school early and returning late (usually after a few pints and a frame or two of snooker at the Cambridge Pub), I managed to avoid the crush and could observe and draw in relative comfort…

**Lady with Earring – c1981** – **Biro** (ballpoint pen) **on Paper** …I generally used whatever drawing implement I had to hand for sketching and I particularly enjoyed using a Biro. I think it was because a Biro is so unforgiving and tests an artist’s confidence and instinct to the ultimate degree…

**Girl with “Two Mouths” – c1981 – Conte on Paper** …Having said that, Conte sticks could also prove somewhat committing, as seen here. Of course, the girl only had one mouth! Unless my memory deceives me…

**Girl with Large Book – c1981 – Biro on Paper** …One of the paradoxes of using Biro was how one generally ended up with a strong likeness of the subject – again, most probably something to do with the way the limited medium forces the issue…

**Lady with Large Bag – c1981 – Charcoal on Paper** …The complete opposite of charcoal, where gesture and mood takes over from technically clean drawing, resulting in more drama, if less refinement.

WALKING AWAY – or the ephemeral nature of being

February 14, 2017February 1, 2021 by adamhalevi, posted in Adam and Dido, Art, Art Photography, Digital Art, Edgware, Ein Kerem, Hampstead, Hampstead Heath, Israel, Little Rock, Oxford, Tel Hai

The image of someone walking away into the distance has stirred my artistic sensibilities since early adulthood. I’ve returned to the subject photographically and in paint pretty regularly since about 1979, from when the first picture presented here dates (Astrud at Tel Hai).

Several of these pictures are of loved ones, past and current, walking into a variety of landscapes, urban and open, and I guess that with them in particular, powerful feelings of vulnerability, both as partners and individuals are aroused.

Two of the photos here have special poignancy: The one of my mother Hannah with my grandfather Harry was taken on a stroll in my home town of Edgware in the early 80’s when they both still had many years to live. I took the photo on my old Cannonette camera by accident. I was meaning to line up a shot of the lake we were passing when I must have clicked the shutter too early. It was only when the film came back from the developers that I saw the photo, and even then I instantly realised that it was a happy accident in that it had somehow captured the essence of them and their relationship in a way that no face-on portrait ever could have matched. The fact they are both now dead has made this image increasingly precious to me as the years have passed. The picture of my wife Dido walking her old and frail father into his house in Little Rock is even more poignant in that it represents the last photo of them ever taken together. About an hour later we returned to the airport, never to see him again.

All the pictures here, even those of total strangers, like the chap on Hampstead Heath, have a quiet melancholia about them in that they share a sense of our human transience.