On Tuesday I went to record James's guitar part for our guitar-duo version of 24 Hours. I'd set up a guitar project on my laptop for the first time, and we managed to get it done fairly quickly, which was good. It's the most difficult of the four songs we've been recording, for some reason. Responsibility, perhaps.
Afterwards, I went for a walk along the South Bank in the sunshine, with everyone else. I sat on a bench to read the newspaper for a while and two women approached me asking if they could do a video interview. They asked me about what makes me feel beautiful, which was a completely perplexing question. I realised that nothing makes me feel beautiful, and that's what I said. It's not in my vocabulary at all. They didn't seem to mind. They asked me something about love as well, which was an equally difficult question to answer, and they didn't seem to mind that either.
After I'd killed a bit of time by the river, I headed off to West Kensington and the third artist-in-residence, Kimberley Gundle's, first art workshop. It was great to see everyone again and the workshop was fun. We had to pretend that we were on a tube train and observe the people sitting opposite us. What I found hard was not wanting to make unflattering portraits of people, but nobody seemed offended by any of the portraits. It was very interesting to see how some people made likenesses with very few lines, and sometimes with a lot of similarity between their portraits. It's always so good to draw, and it's fun to be challenged to draw real people in real time- I've spent a lot of time drawing people from photographs, and this was a real change.
Yesterday, I took my friend Joan-the-filmmaker on a magical mystery tour to Dennis Severs' house in Folgate Street, east London. It's a charming fossil of a house, originally built in 1724, part ancient and part craftily restored, and there was an exhibition of Delft-inspired pottery made by his boyfriend Simon Pettit, who was a ceramics student when they met. There was a strong smell of wood and candles (it's totally candlelit), and it was dark and peculiar. Oddities were everywhere: three clay pipes embedded in floorboards in the Smoking Room, plastic roses at junctions in the hand-painted panels on the walls. The best thing Pettit did was Delft-inspired tiles in one of the fireplaces, some of which depicted characters like Gilbert and George.
Afterwards we had custard tarts and cheese straws. Rather nice couple of days, I have to say.
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