Ideas for Christmas Video

 

Above: Absent Friends

Above: Raise a toast

Above: Lords a Leaping

Above: Partridge in a pear tree

Above: Snowman

Above: Snowball fight

Above: the bells are ringing

Above: Christmas cards arrive

Above: Sleighrides

Nature: 10 Artists From London

Come to Kadrioru Galerii (in Kadrioru Plaza) Vesivärava  50, Tallinn (entrance on Gonsiori Street) on Tuesday 16th September to experience 'Nature: 10 Artists From London' The artists whose work will be exhibited in Estonia have previously participated in or curated shows in institutions including The Saatchi Gallery, The Royal Academy, Deptford X, The Institute of Contemporary Art, Fitzrovia Chapel, and The Chelsea Arts Club, taught at the best schools, and organised events at both Tate Britain and Tate Modern. This show is a snap shot of what’s currently happening in the London art scene. Visitors to the Nature show will hopefully delight in seeing both the similarities and contrasts in the work of these artists all united by their love of nature.

*****

Above: 'Swan Pylon' (2024) by Harry Adams 122cm x 92cm. Household paint on Plywood panels.

Harry Adams makes paintings of the natural world vs the constructs and machinations of man in all their awe, terror and incalculable beauty.

*****

Above: 'As The Seed Waits For Sunlight' (2025) by Gordon Beswick 273cm by 122cm

Gordon Beswick is an artist and a freelance film maker. His paintings are informed by the lines, colour and geometric shapes visible in our environment. For this show he will be exhibiting a series of new paintings that began as painterly abstract works which he developed intuitively into imaginary landscapes.

*****

Above: 'Black Swan' by Edie Flowers (framed charcoal drawing 45cm x 60cm)

Edie Flowers works in sculpture and drawings to examine the fragility and contradictions of human nature. Drawing and redrawing from life, memory, books, music and the imagination, Edie creates theatrical moments.

*****

Above: 'Filming in the Rain Forest' (2019) by Georgia Hayes (Oil on canvas 180cm x 180cm)

Georgia Hayes says "I am committed to the abstract and formal qualities of painting whilst wanting to find likeness and  meaning by focusing on a subject that has moved me.  I am interested in our position in nature and how we appear to live outside of it”.

*****

Above: 'On The Banks of the Yuba' by Huddie Hamper (2025) Oil on linen, 100cm by 80cm

Huddie Hamper says he finds painting a pleasure. “My work is intuitive by nature, expressing aspects of my current life and psychological state. I have an urge to create and describing forms in paint feels natural to me. I aim to communicate the beauty – and sometimes darkness – that is in the world around us.”

*****

Above: Detail from 'Awoken' (2018 - 2025) by Corin Johnson

102cm wide, 55cm deep, and 162cm high.

Corin Johnson hopes his work speaks for itself. He likes to make work about things that excite him sometimes they contain an element of the unseen. Often his sculptures represent human figures and animals but he likes there to be a twist.

*****

Above: Untitled wood cut (2021) by Cedar Lewisohn unique framed edition 32cm by 40cm

Cedar Lewisohn makes drawings and prints as well as curates and writes. For this exhibition he has made a series of images based on nature and abstraction.

*****

Above: 'Vishnu's Head' (2011) by Raksha Patel oil on canvas 93cm x 76cm

Raksha Patel’s paintings explore the imagined landscape where notions of identity merge the natural environment creating spaces that are fantastical,  illusionary and occasionally dystopian. Raksha also works as a lecturer and writer. 

*****

Above: 'Cleese and Chapman Diptych' (2025) by Harry Pye and Rowland Smith (acrylic paint on canvas 90cm x 130cm)

Harry Pye makes paintings about people and things he loves to cheer himself up and create a new world to escape into. Often his work is made in collaboration with friends. For the last year he has been making paintings of cows - creatures that some people see as being comic, some see as food, and other people see as sacred.

*****

Above: 'Their World Is What Angels With Black Halos Think' (2025) by Suzanne Spiro 66cm x 46cm mixed media on canvas.

Suzanne Spiro uses mixed media including embroidery to express her ideas and feelings about the nature of our relationship with the world around us.

*****

Nature: 10 Artists From London opens on Tuesday 16th of September and will run until Saturday 18th Oct, 2025 On the opening night of the show there will be music from the DJ Rhythm Doctor - The opening party is from 5pm till 8pm. Please note also that there will be a guided tour of the show on Wednesday the 17th of Sept starting at 5pm.

*****

The artworks in The Nature Show range in style from the intensely felt, drawn from the depth of the psyche to the joyful and pure depictions of the wonders of life. The 10 artists’ voices blend together like music conveying a variety of experiences and emotions, each representing a personal view of the world and of life.

The Nature Show takes the viewer on a journey from deserted industrial sites where nature has reclaimed its powerful wildness, to the silent, mystic universe of a single flower. It explores the rich world of animals and insects, and the abstract expressions of colour where nature is a state of mind.

Does art make you happy? The artists all have strong roots in art history and a passion for the great masters that came before them, as they have a love and admiration for their contemporary fellow artists. Most of the artists in the show will say yes – making art and viewing art makes you happy. Art is a way to feel alive, to connect with oneself and remember who you are. Art can be frustrating and hard to express, but satisfying when overcome. Art can be a cure for craziness.

Art is a drive. It’s a natural force that wants to be expressed. Art and nature have this essence in common. The beauty of nature is overwhelming, it is a connection to a parallel life of drifting clouds, of ocean waves, rolling hillsides, of birds flying, animals moving, plants growing - a parallel life of harmony and mystery that is always present and alive.

Nature holds a silent intelligence – entelechy. As the artist follows his or her instinct, the work unfolds to its full expression. As the seed grows and becomes a flower it unfolds to its full potential. The design is in the seed, the artwork is in the artist – the process is a force of nature.

The Nature Show explores themes of nature, joy, grief and memory. Nature = life. “Life = God!” (Text by Tine Frellesen)

*****

The artists would like to thank August Kunnapu and everyone of the supprters and sponsors who made the project happen.

Dr Mikey Georgeson reviews Ripped Backsides

 At 7pm on the 30th of July 2025, the new book 'Ripped Backsides' by Richard Cabut was being launched at Dash the Henge, 348 Camberwell New Road, SE5 0RW

Mikey Georgeson, who is an artist and senior lecturer UEL and also singer with David Devant & His Spirit Wife, read 'Ripped Backsides' and wrote the folowing review...

Death by Author. A review of Ripped Backsides by Richard Cabut

There is no entry for Athens in Ripped Backsides. I find this to be a significant omission on the part of the author. What’s his name? Am I expected to believe they never got lost in Attiki, stumbling as I did on a shop presenting itself as a high street chain in which all the apparently mass-produced clothes were in fact made by the owner who stood at the till with his mother smiling benignly beside him in an armchair? Of course I am not. It is an entirely intentional omission.

On my second trip to Athens the previous year I had decided to take my copy of Twilight of the Idols, a book lent to me by The Professor who was presumably trying to impress me (he did) and which I was now finally reading thirty years later. Returning briefly to the present, someone recently told me about a woman who reads a part of Ripped Backsides every day. Why would they do that I wondered until I began reading it and immediately made the connection with Twilight of the Idols – namely the Maxims and Arrows from which we take the words of aphorism number 8 “What does not kill me makes me stronger” (It sounds better in German: Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich stärker). RB uses a comparable detournement of a certain self-help vernacular that will hopefully poison its well or at the very least drip LSD into the city’s water system. Afterall as Cabut explains, “the city is the snake’s camouflaged coil”.

What is the attraction of existentialism? Asks the writer of Ripped Backsides. To answer this question it might help to return immediately to Nietzsche’s beef with Socrates in Twilight of the Idols. There I was in Athens and suddenly I understood how Socrates needed to die because their introduction of the oppositional thinking baked into the dialectic made life absurdly rational and ushered the dying Lyric civilisation into the void of nothing. I simply had to visit his prison, a short walk up the hill and opposite the acropolis over which dialectical thinkers swarmed like ants. Waking up and smelling the pines on the mount I felt something. It was the resonances of a longing song Socrates sung to himself because he knew he must die. Cabut returns again and again to song (that song?) and their system of delivery prevents their book from straying outside the region of the lyric voice, so that its refrains endure as images instead of dictates. In their defence I always like to remind folk that Socrates consulted clairvoyants and was not selling us a roadmap. Nevertheless, we have taken him at his word and we Believe in the rational, forgetting as the creator of RB suggests that, “The tune never mediates without an image. Imagination is the vernacular of the song. Of the soul, some say.”

Like Cabut (or the Cabut who wrote Ripped Backsides) I too believe that it is the Act of living the life of an auteur that makes me an artist rather than the films I make. That most hyper-modern fuddy-duddy, son of Ramsgate A N Whitehead called this Act of belief in the emergent fiction of living “concrescence”. By curious coincidence the reviewer recently acquired a copy of Rubayait of Omar Khayyam in Ramsgate for ten pence.

 What R. Cabut’s “shuffled” and overtly esoteric lyric prose does is allow the regrets of the past to become the present sprouting into a made-up future. Concrescence reverses Descartes’s error - I think blah dee blah (are you listening at the back?). Instead of our existential anaesthesia, staring Gatsby-like at the perfect eternal forms of plot, the abject ephemera of our failure becomes the beautiful mulch of transcendence. I love the chapter of “I Believe” aphorisms in Ripped Backsides and I believe them all when I read them. Belief is an emergent act of believing myself via the Stanislavsky method into the new. I believe this lyric story to be a quantum fact. What’s your real name?

Kushim – it is finished

Carl Webb

Omar Khayyam

Tammam Shud

(See also History of Accounting)

Watson and Crick found

A hair in the plaster of my death mask

We get confused by having to have a name. R. Cabut!

Sure, I like numerology… it has its uses.

I like to feel the orgones passing between my retina and the page.

Life presents itself to my airdried eyeballs in order - in order

To become part of my emergent destiny.

Perhaps like Richard Cabut we are all unidentified bodies spotted on the beach

by couples out for an evening stroll.

Once the authorities have our real names all will be revealed.

Except as Richard North points out in his latest book “Ripped Backsides”

we are really our torn-out asides,

The stubbs,

The rebus cuneiform records of everything we decided to leave out of ‘What I did in my summer holidays.’

Warning: This book contains pictures.

When I need to do my accounting I look at my photos.

Dracula is all about the legal documentation. No title deed ergo no sensual blood imbibement.

My Headmaster knew my name when he told the class I was the laziest boy in school.

There are two schools of thought here.

Myself and Richard (whose book is a source of strength and worth every penny) are too lazy to fall in line with chrono-normative taxonomies and to apply serious conviction to developing what you might call the secretarial skills of writing efficient prose. This requires mastery of the Socratic dialectic and arguably puts weaker minds at an advantage.

The other school of thought is that we both feel this convenient and optimised calculus of knowledge exchange is a poisonous lie, which is fine unless you forget it’s a lie. The task then is that because as a writer you also like the feeling of writing you must devise a way to reclaim it as a real thing e.g. casting spells, imbibing the melodies of sex dirges and sometimes invoicing your publisher.

If the really real is the (radical) experience, how do we awkwardly reweave its mildewed paperwork into the majestic tapestry of the region? We all keep a scrap of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam rolled up inside a secret pocket. It is finished.  We all carry the lyric truth of our demise on our person. I believe that is what Richard’s Ripped Backsides is saying. Shrouded in the fog of dust motes serenely hanging in the air of our individual disappointments, transmitting an oratorio of our instant demise rebirth we find ourselves back inside the Event. Regrets I’ve had a few - they always open into the powerful immanence of possibilities. This is possibly why many photos of R. Cabut show him smoking (did I imagine this?) - while smoking you get to regret and enjoy at the same time. What does not kill me makes me stronger. Happiness, as the song goes is a whiter shade of pale.

Reviewer: What I’m saying and simultaneously realising is impossible to say is that the records and annotated memories are not oppositional errors but part of the stuff we make the present from. In order to perform this we might forget what any of it is called or even means and so a newspaper becomes a masticated wasps nest rather than an abject reminder of the absurd rationality of human idiocy. It is finished. I sometimes see myself as the writer of the kind of stories who has a friend with far more bravado and the fucking sense of living a visceral life. Richard Cabut is that friend except (unlike the Grand Meaulnes of the Lost Estate) he has somehow lived to tell the tale in the present. Alchemist Golem Cabut is a natural for daring to use printed words to say what they can’t. We open that door in Bluebeard’s Castle and find he has been there centuries building intricate rope bridges from cassette tape innards, reading Rimbaud and drinking a cool aid of salivary secretions immune to it all. He chews and spits and lures us into prodding this wasps nest so he may justifiably swarm ubiquitous optimistic nihilism in our faces consigning facial recognition to the abyss history.

Mikey Georgeson July 2025

Instinct is a higher form of IQ than rationality. (my unashamed over-simplification of Ripped Backsides)

By Instinct we may infer elegant, embodied intuition with pragmatic conviction to improvised magic.

The reviewer is the animal-artist to the author’s poison quaffing Derrida discuss (show your workings)

(Dissertation is the solitary confinement of the middle class) – Fred Moten

 

Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich stärker

Text by Mikey Georgeson

Ripped Backsides is published globally by @farwestpress and is available at all the best bookshops in UK/Europe (distribution @public_knowledge_books ) and USA, and online worldwide – Linktree/profile.

http://richardcabut.com

Intro to Specialized Project's Femme Her Anthem CD which includes Nigel Planer & The Values performing Femme Fatale

 The legendary singer Nico died on this day (July 18th) in 1988 she was just 49 years old. Nico was a hero to many including Siouxsie & The Banshees, Marc Almond, and Morrissey. Team Beswick and Pye have begun work on a mini documentary about Nico's life that will be named after her most famous song 'Femme Fatale'. The documentary wont be out till next year however, in October of this year a compilation CD called 'Femme Her Anthem' will be released that includes a tribute to Nico recorded by Nigel Planer & The Values featuring Johnny Turnbull. 

'Femme Her Anthem' has been described as "A vibrant celebration of legendary female songwriters, reimagined through the energetic and rhythmic lens of Ska. It is the 14^th charity album by The Specialized Project. This You Tube promo tells you a bit about the project you also get to hear a little clip of Nigel singing 'Femme Fatale' and see an extract of the accompanying video which features work by esteemed visual artists including Sarah Doyle... 

Alice Herrick, Julie Bennett, Jonas Ranson, Julia Maddison, Ritchie Lamy, Michael Coles...

Pierre Julien, Sandra Turnbull, Francis Macdonald, Daisy de Villeneuve, Hugh Mendes...

 Colin Gibson, John Heywood-Waddington, Charlotte Bracegirdle, Marie-Louise Plum, Adam Kinrade, Emma Coleman, Rowland Smith, and Harry Pye!

Click: HERE  to see the promo

The musicians featured on 'Femme Fatale' are

Julian Wakeling (Harmonica), Paul Speare (Sax), Clare Kenny (Bass) Francis Macdonald (Keyboard, Percussion, Melodica and backing vocals), Hugh Macdonald (backing vocals) James Lawson (Drums), and special guest star Johnny Turnbull (Lead Guitar). The track was mixed by Francis Macdonald. Thanks to Colin Gibson and Chris Tosic.

POP ART

"Ramsgate, New York, Paris, Munich - everyone's talkin' bout Pop Music"

 Above: "Picture This" (Blondie by Harry Pye and Rowland Smith) 20 inches by 16 inches.

Above: "Whenever You're Ready" (Roddy Frame and Edwyn Collins by Harry Pye and Rowland Smith)

20 inches by 16 inches

4 Ideas

1) Originally my idea was to write a lyric called 'Pablo's Weeping Women' and have a verse about each significate partner he had. I was thinking the track would be an answer song to Jonathan Richman's song "Pablo Picasso Never Got Called An Asshole" I think it would be fun to have an accompnying video where we had lots of animated fake Picassos. In my head this would be a funky Blockheads number.

Pablo's True Colours

When you were young - Your art got you attention

Your talents won you compliments - your name was always mentioned

Matisse gave you a painting of his daughter Marguerite -

you hung his painting on your wall and then threw darts at it!

Oh Pablo - No Pablo!

Why do you do the things you do?

Oh Pablo - No Pablo!

Why do you do the things you do?

The Parisian dealers were all baffled by your art

they couldn't see the beauty in 5 sex workers wearing masks

At home in Sunny Spain everyone adored all your creations

Maybe in Gay Paree something got lost in the translation?

Oh Pablo - No Pablo!

Why do you do the things you do?

Oh Pablo - No Pablo!

Why do you do the things you do?

You had a  tempestuous love affair

with (Madame) Fernande Olivier

when she needed a break and wanted a holiday

you bullied her and used her face as your ash tray

Oh Pablo - No Pablo!

Why do you do the things you do?

Oh Pablo - No Pablo!

Why do you do the things you do?

When you first met Marie Therese outside a gallery

You were nearly 50 she was barely 17

She gave you her youth and became your lover and your muse

You gave her attention but also abuse

Oh Pablo - No Pablo!

Why do you do the things you do?

Oh Pablo - No Pablo!

Why do you do the things you do?

Can I ask you Señor Picasso - what's it like to be such an asshole?

Can I ask you Señor Picasso - what's it like to be such an asshole?

Can I ask you Señor Picasso - what's it like to be such an asshole?

********************************************************************************

2) 'Happiness Is A Dog Called Hamlet' or 'Rick Danko's 113 Dream'. I thought it could be a tribute to  Dylan & The Band. Johnny Turnbull saw these lyrics and said they were good. I think there's potential. I wrote them after reading about Bob Dylan giving Rick Danko a poodle (that was as large as a bear) as a present. The dog was called Hamlet and in theory he would have heard them record their debut album (Music From The Big Pink)

Deep in the heart of the land of Coca Cola 

Rick Danko found a place that his friends could stay over

In their salmon pink house - not that far from Woodstock

The Band could bolt the door and rock around the clock

and

Every word that The Band sang - they made it sound like they believed it

Every target that The Band had - they always achieved it

Ohhhhhh - oh - I love their Country Soooooul

Zimmerman arrived in a corduroy bomber jacket

he gave Rick Danko a poodle called Hamlet

At the drum kit there sat a paw boy from Ar-carn-saw

Hamlet saw Levon as like a piece of the jigsaw

and

Every word The Band sang - they made it sound like they believed it

Every target The Band had - they always achieved it

Ohhhhhh - oh - I love their Country Soooooul

Hamlet's ears pricked up at Garth Hudson's Lowrey keyboard

His merry go round music vibrated through the floorboards

He thought Richard Manuel's falsetto sounded haunting and tragic

and Robbie Robertson's Fender must be made out of magic 

and

Every word The Band sang - they made it sound like they believed it

Every target The Band had - they always achieved it

Ohhhhhh - oh - I love their Country Soooooul

Dylan and The Band were like a match made in heaven

They both sang about whatever was burning up inside them

The Band to The Big Zim were just like a fountain of knowledge

He learnt more from them than he would have done at college

and

Every word The Band sang - they made it sound like they believed it

Every target they had - they always achieved it

Ohhhhhh - oh - I love their Country Soooooul

but what did Hamlet think

when he lived in Pig Pink?

(Did they make him wag his tail?)

Yes what did Hamlet think

when he lived in Pig Pink?

How did if feel?

To Be Hamlet?

How did it feel?

To Be Hamlet?

To be or not to be.....that is the question: WOOF WOOF!

***********************************************************************************

3) Send In The Clowns / Life's a Tragedy To Those Who Feel  (I was thinking of the Lou Reed song 'Hanging Around' and the Ian Dury song 'This Is What We Find' - where  we are introduced to different characters.

When Cuddly Dudley used to play the piano

All the ladies went wild in the aisles

they were bedazzled by his dexterity

And enchanted by the warmth of his smile

But four marriages ended in sorrow

And his last wife was bad for his health

He could make everyone happy

Everyone apart from himself

 

Kenneth could have been a great actor

But his Daddy was less than impressed

He hated his namby-pamby manner

and felt threatened by fame and success

Every night Ken wrote in his diary

About his feeling of loneliness

He never found love or got the parts he desired

Making comedies made him depressed

 

Our Francis was a little bit saucy,

his innuendos were a tiny bit rude.

He'd make us all laugh with his oohs and his ahhs.

His way with words would always keep us amused.

Frankie was known to own a toupee or two

He thought a wig made him attractive to men

In his dreams they’d all fall for his charms

And he’d seduce and then abandon them

(Chorus would be something like: "Life's a tragedy to those who feel, life's not all ha ha he hee, when we feel down, we have to send in the clowns" 

***********************************************************************************

4) I'm So Glad That We Were Friends

I've tried tweaking lyrics to this one. Paul Speare's flute playing on the demo of this is great. The new lines are in bold.

I’m So Glad That We Were Friends

Being with you was good for my health

I could let my guard down and just be myself

You made me happy and feel so carefree

My inspiration and salvation

Only you knew that there was good inside me

(instead of "You meant the world to me")

I had no confidence but now I do

(instead of "No one can do the things you do")

And It's all because of you

(instead of "I feel so very proud of you"

You lifted my spirits again and again

And I’m so glad that we were friends

I’m so glad, I’m so glad, I’m so glad that we were friends

I used to feel hurt, sad and lost and lonely

But you came around and brought about a change in me

You've been blessed with a gift (instead of "I finally learned what happiness is")

 You make people want to live (instead of "You were my hero, my reason to live")

I had no faith but now I do (instead of "No one can do the things you do")

I am so in debt to you(instead of "I feel so very proud of you"

You lifted my spirits again and again

And I’m so glad that we were friends

I’m so glad, I’m so glad, I’m so glad that we were friends

 “I’m so glad”