pete mcgovern

Retired fisherman and labourer Alfred Wallis took up painting at the age of 67 'for company' after his wife had died, using household paint on scraps of cardboard. His naive style was recognised by modernist Brit artists Ben Nicholson and Christopher wood, who were on a day out to St. Ives and had looked in an open doorway to see walls full of paintings. Not only did they purchase some but they (and their contemporaries) were influenced by them. Britain's modernist artists would go on to form a home at St. Ives. Despite their acclaim Wallis made next to nothing from his art and spent the last year of his life destitute in a workhouse. St. Ives Harbour, Cornwall, (undated).

Yesterday I sent a list to a local vinyl records store of the 80s albums and 12" singles I had dug out of storage and they said bring them in.  It's the usual indie stuff; Velvet Underground, Joy Division, New Order, Associates etc.  Either I didn't sleep all that well last night because of a late cup of tea or it was an ache at the thought of handing these records over.  Hm. A few of the disks required a gentle soft wash today, and I let them dry on the dishes rack.  Just handling them and poring over the faded sleeves put those days on the turntable of memory and carefully lowered the stylus; the people, situations, feelings, and rooms from back then, springing clearly to life once more without the records even being played.  

Having pledged at least a year ago that I would stop buying photography and art monographs I somehow lost concentration two nights ago and found myself splurging all over my chromebook. I don't even know how I came to be on eBay looking at a fine hardback copy of the Cy Twombly 2016-17 Pompidou show book, let alone why I started reading reviews and becoming aware that this was already a fairly rare book. Softcover copies are still readily available, being pumped out for the masses, and Amazon has  9 left in stock (more on the way). They are mute on hardcover provision, as if embarrassed. None left, no more on the way , is what they mean. I can identify the critical moment when I crumbled and paid up for the eBay one. It was immediately after reading a line in a review by an Amazon buyer who sounded like he knew what he was on about: Twombly is the best maker of free marks in the history of art, in my opinion. Beside him, Basquiat, who acknowledged his influence, looks stiff. ...

For months I've slowly been working through seasons of medical drama House , a few eps per week, and am currently well into season 6. The producers ran out of ideas a long way back and the writing increasingly dabbles with increasingly misanthropic behaviour by Greg House, that are supposed to be amusing but are quite horrible, alongisde the weary formula of the differential struggle to a genius diagnosis. But I keep watching. As I sometimes falter on abandoning the show there usually comes along an episode that delivers a moment of drama that haunts one for days afterwards. The Down Low: Season 6, Episode 11 The entire plot is of little consequence. The guest appearance patient is by actor Ethan Embry, as an undercover cop admitted after fainting, and unexpectedly ends with one of the rare failure to save a life denouements. The last minutes show his path to death and Embry gives a highly convincing intensity to a performance that has been flat to this point; through a face expres...

the park where I go to read sometimes of an evening has donned the snowiness of an infrared photograph 

solar eclipse: photocopier box camera obscura positioned in sock drawer

After watching an Aperture online conversation on the book Ground Rules , a mid-career monograph for photographer Alejandro Cartagena, I started taking pictures from a window of the oil rig cabin on the wharf half a mile away. The view was corner-on and, depending on the light, the two visible sides would often be somewhat different, tonally and in hue. But it wasn't the subject that particularly interested me. Cartagena's designer, Ricardo Báez, had made a great observation that photo books are usually little more than a catalogue of images and he had realised here was an opportunity to engage in a new way with the usually problematic gutter. It turned out to be the best part of a strong  book . For me, the cabin offered a natural division to drop into a two page spread.

Back home after three weeks helping fix up a house, with evenings spent photographing a distant jack-up oil rig moored in the harbour, from various points around the city. I believe it is the Valaris JU-291, ( Rowan Stavanger), built in 2011 and 568' tall.