It was dark. Cold. And very red. There seemed to be no light inside. I searched for some way of guiding myself around this vacuous space.
In 1936 I first arrived; I had been travelling for sixteen years. It was relieving to have made it. I thought I was going to die. I had never imagined ever finding it, on the fifteenth year I got so ill I thought about going back.
No flowers grew, I had not seen a single one, it was only when I found a purple rose growing at the top of the stream, I made a promise there and then that I would never go back until I found it. Focusing on the red stream made time dissolve and soon it passed when more purple roses grew. It was the most beautiful embodiment of nature’s true magic. How could no one have witnessed this before I pondered? At times, I compared myself to Columbus discovering America, but knew this was a secret that couldn’t compare even with that.
Somewhere inside me, energy was depleting. I carried with me, a piece of stone and whenever I focused on it, I instantly felt revitalised, however, sadness remained. My mind was about to explode, I envisaged my cerebral cortex splattered on the walls. My own heart was beating so hard I could hear it. It was wondrous as it was sick. Life in all its various forms was creating before my very eyes, it was such a cliché, but, it was real.
Taken from my own eyes, I watched the stars every night and on the final night I had a conversation with them so I knew I was nearby now; I combed my hair and put some lipstick on. The crisp light air was almost visible, trying to use my senses to taste, smell and even touch it. It seemed so dense, I was ninety eight percent certain the particles had ceased to vibrate so vigorously against one another that it was now a solid. And although it was dark at the centre, it was comfortable, something was warming.
Its power was insatiable; it was not supposed to be forever though. He gave me a ring and said, ‘till death do us part’, but even after death it wasn’t the end. As far as I could remember him, he existed. I couldn’t find him anywhere but my constant reminders seemed to create a reality.
Right, at the Atrium, then a left and I was there. It was so bright it hurt my eyes, especially after how they had adjusted to the darkness. I touched the walls and smelt the ground, the cavity was hollow, seemingly endless in space. But he was here. Then I heard him say my name once.
‘Laura’, he repeated softly.
It sounded like it always had, but it came from somewhere above my head. Looking up, I saw where I was. I was inside his chest. That was it. The lights then switched off.
Monday, 6 December 2010
Saturday, 13 November 2010
Drawing Life
On a Saturday morning the first thing I like to do is read the papers, decide what vegetables I am going to buy from Portobello market and drink at least five cups of coffee before even venturing outside.
Today is different. Well, the coffee part stays constant but I have replaced reading papers with drawing. Why?...
Because Wednesday 17th November at 7.30pm I will be holding a special Life Drawing class at The Tabernacle in Notting Hill.
The fears of those of you who 'can't draw' or are 'rusty' must be displaced because, I shall be there in all my crazy glory to assist all levels and I really must stress that this is something fun, it is a chance to do something else, learn a few new things or brush up on old things along the way and interact and mingle with others.
Moreover, I will be baking with an extremely helpful friend, so there is going to be a selection of cakes and also champagne cocktails to loosen up the stiffest of limbs.
So, for enquiries or bookings, email cogoni.laura@gmail.com
Big Kisses.
'A work of art is the
unique result of a unique temperament' Oscar Wilde
L XXX
Tuesday, 24 November 2009
Rob Goodwin, Freaky Sexy Mask Couture, In British And Italian Vogue November '09
British Vogue (November '09)
Italian Vogue (November '09)
House of BlueEyes; (Designer, Johnny BlueEyes wearing the 'Crowhead' mask.
'Lord Dandilock' - £4,000
'Lord Dandilock' was one of the pieces he was showing at the House of Fairy Tales show at Theatre 34 on Westbourne Grove.
This is an evolution of the previous theme, whereby Goodwin was commissioned to create a couture fashion item for the House of Blue Eyes London Fashion Week Show.
This piece - a crow-like mask - was worn by the label owner Johnny Blue Eyes as he strutted the catwalk to launch the show.
As a result of the publicity this show received he was commissioned to create another bird-like mask for a beauty shoot for Vogue Italia (September '09 issue).
Goodwin is now working on a new collection which combines shoes, boots and masks/headdresses (the theme: A decadent Venetian masked Ball relocated to the dark depths of the Congo).
Tuesday, 11 August 2009
Poetic Luminosity - Sapphire Mccullough
'One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words'. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 - 1832)
Below is a poem written by the wonderful Sapphire Mccullough.
We shall soon be collaborating on a marvellous piece, whereby I will illustrate one of her poems, but not in the ordinary sense, that we have seen already done. Looking forward to this immensely.
I think how she writes is sheer brilliance, and this is just one of my favourite pieces. XXX
------------------------>
Feel your thoughts. Thoughts that penetrate my mind, and make me feel we are closer.
Closeness never seems more apparent, than when you smile softly.
Softly I approach you, so that I do not disturb the quiet concentration, Concentration of thoughts provoke you, to whisper them compellingly.
Compelling me, I find myself wanting to turn your chin, to search deeper. Deep in my memory, I escape reconciling only gentle needs, that linger.
Lingering pathways, that hold such moments in their cooling narrow pass. Passing by again, and if ever, I would never let you go so far away.
Away in some place, that I felt compelled to seek you out, suffering softly. Soft smile, and then fiercely is this the way, that you always look in pain.
Pain that fills the entire room, when you are absent from such special times. Timing each move again, I surrender the source of my thought process.
Processing each idea, and then let it go to a place where you are very still. Still I hope and wonder if you can be persuaded to say something now.
Now you are still quiet, and peacefully tranquil in your own private dreams. Dreams from which only I in wakefullness find your every move fascinating.
Fascinating touches of colour and hues that blend across your body of work. Work that never has an end even when it appears tedious to pretenders.
Pretences have no place in what you would call your creative space. Space that widens with the misunderstandings that others have of you.
You always place me in a special way a little too high to reach or fall. Falling, I wonder if you would move fast enough to catch me or never to.
To carry a small tray of delicacies, star-fruit, fancifull sweetmeats to share. Sharing, only this morsel of figs, and sip this mead cup sweet with honey.
Honey shaded eyelashes that flicker when caught by the winds cold breath. Breath that is only icy when the window is open and our body heat is all.
All that I am holds you now in such a conceptual place as only art can. Can art lead you back to where we commanded truthfulness in silence.
Silent gestures leave us both to ponder our knowing smiles, sans fatality.
Below is a poem written by the wonderful Sapphire Mccullough.
We shall soon be collaborating on a marvellous piece, whereby I will illustrate one of her poems, but not in the ordinary sense, that we have seen already done. Looking forward to this immensely.
I think how she writes is sheer brilliance, and this is just one of my favourite pieces. XXX
------------------------>
Feel your thoughts. Thoughts that penetrate my mind, and make me feel we are closer.
Closeness never seems more apparent, than when you smile softly.
Softly I approach you, so that I do not disturb the quiet concentration, Concentration of thoughts provoke you, to whisper them compellingly.
Compelling me, I find myself wanting to turn your chin, to search deeper. Deep in my memory, I escape reconciling only gentle needs, that linger.
Lingering pathways, that hold such moments in their cooling narrow pass. Passing by again, and if ever, I would never let you go so far away.
Away in some place, that I felt compelled to seek you out, suffering softly. Soft smile, and then fiercely is this the way, that you always look in pain.
Pain that fills the entire room, when you are absent from such special times. Timing each move again, I surrender the source of my thought process.
Processing each idea, and then let it go to a place where you are very still. Still I hope and wonder if you can be persuaded to say something now.
Now you are still quiet, and peacefully tranquil in your own private dreams. Dreams from which only I in wakefullness find your every move fascinating.
Fascinating touches of colour and hues that blend across your body of work. Work that never has an end even when it appears tedious to pretenders.
Pretences have no place in what you would call your creative space. Space that widens with the misunderstandings that others have of you.
You always place me in a special way a little too high to reach or fall. Falling, I wonder if you would move fast enough to catch me or never to.
To carry a small tray of delicacies, star-fruit, fancifull sweetmeats to share. Sharing, only this morsel of figs, and sip this mead cup sweet with honey.
Honey shaded eyelashes that flicker when caught by the winds cold breath. Breath that is only icy when the window is open and our body heat is all.
All that I am holds you now in such a conceptual place as only art can. Can art lead you back to where we commanded truthfulness in silence.
Silent gestures leave us both to ponder our knowing smiles, sans fatality.
Monday, 10 August 2009
Internationally Renowned Video Artist...TONY OURSLER.
The pioneering video artist talks about the pernicious influence of TV, society's "emblems of need", and the fragment of madness in all of us.
Ouuurrrrrsler Studio" - as Tony Oursler's answering machine intones with gravelly drama - is a frenetic place. As I arrive, its abiding presence is padding about in shorts and T-shirt, trying to make travel plans whilst also readying a metre-high white model light bulb to be sent off in the mail. He seems harried. That may be because it's nearing 100 degrees outside, but it may also be because he'd rather be doing things at a slower pace. He sometimes likes to spend a part of the day drawing. Sometimes, he likes to write. And sometimes, he tells me, he just needs to get out and gather his thoughts, "to read and snoop around". It makes you wonder if he'd rather do without a traditional studio. After all, so much of what lends his work its vitality is almost phantasmal, ghostly, televisual.
But Oursler likes a perch, and since he arrived in New York back in 1983 his have been at various places in downtown Manhattan. For a time he lived on Fulton Street, close to the World Trade Center. (He made a memorable free-form documentary about the morning the twin towers collapsed, when he ran around the area frantically with a camera, recording his own confusion as much as the city's.) But a few years ago he and his wife, the abstract painter Jacqueline Humphries, moved to a 19th-century brownstone on Henry Street in the Lower East Side, once home to a synagogue.
He works from two of its downstairs floors. The upper one holds relatively peaceful offices and places to lounge about, the lower is the grimy pithead, where assistants carve the white, sculptural components of his installations, and where Oursler tinkers with arrangements of objects and backdrops and projections to create his finished work. The latter is a process almost like the composition of a sentence: recently, he even started to assemble a library of motifs to give him more range, but he has been finding the process difficult. "For a while I was trying to shoot another element every day," he says. "A burning dollar bill, or a spinning penny, maybe someone dialling a cell-phone. But then I realised that all these small tasks are actually big tasks. How do you shoot these things?"
It's enough to make one a little neurotic, although Oursler firmly believes we all have a little fragment of madness lodged within us. It's simply the modern condition, he says. Yet as he hopes to demonstrate in a new series of work on show at London's Lisson Gallery in September, the triggers of neurosis are spreading and multiplying. He explains the new work. "It's a suite on the subject of filling a void in someone's personality, or vice-versa, like a personality extending out as an appendage. So there are images of chronic gambling, compulsive cleanliness, over-eating. They're all linked by this idea of a need, a desire to complete a missing part of the person."
Thus, Oursler has given each "need" its own inflated emblem. There are giant scratchcards, a mobile-phone whose screen pulsates with dancing girls, a cluster of towering cigarettes which burn down - and miraculously reform - to the sound of sucking breath, and a £20 note with a talking Queen (Oursler was still working on her lines when we met).
It is, if you like, a tour of the seven vices. "Thing is," he says, "I don't know if we're going to have enough room to have all the vices in one gallery show!"
Ouuurrrrrsler Studio" - as Tony Oursler's answering machine intones with gravelly drama - is a frenetic place. As I arrive, its abiding presence is padding about in shorts and T-shirt, trying to make travel plans whilst also readying a metre-high white model light bulb to be sent off in the mail. He seems harried. That may be because it's nearing 100 degrees outside, but it may also be because he'd rather be doing things at a slower pace. He sometimes likes to spend a part of the day drawing. Sometimes, he likes to write. And sometimes, he tells me, he just needs to get out and gather his thoughts, "to read and snoop around". It makes you wonder if he'd rather do without a traditional studio. After all, so much of what lends his work its vitality is almost phantasmal, ghostly, televisual.
But Oursler likes a perch, and since he arrived in New York back in 1983 his have been at various places in downtown Manhattan. For a time he lived on Fulton Street, close to the World Trade Center. (He made a memorable free-form documentary about the morning the twin towers collapsed, when he ran around the area frantically with a camera, recording his own confusion as much as the city's.) But a few years ago he and his wife, the abstract painter Jacqueline Humphries, moved to a 19th-century brownstone on Henry Street in the Lower East Side, once home to a synagogue.
He works from two of its downstairs floors. The upper one holds relatively peaceful offices and places to lounge about, the lower is the grimy pithead, where assistants carve the white, sculptural components of his installations, and where Oursler tinkers with arrangements of objects and backdrops and projections to create his finished work. The latter is a process almost like the composition of a sentence: recently, he even started to assemble a library of motifs to give him more range, but he has been finding the process difficult. "For a while I was trying to shoot another element every day," he says. "A burning dollar bill, or a spinning penny, maybe someone dialling a cell-phone. But then I realised that all these small tasks are actually big tasks. How do you shoot these things?"
It's enough to make one a little neurotic, although Oursler firmly believes we all have a little fragment of madness lodged within us. It's simply the modern condition, he says. Yet as he hopes to demonstrate in a new series of work on show at London's Lisson Gallery in September, the triggers of neurosis are spreading and multiplying. He explains the new work. "It's a suite on the subject of filling a void in someone's personality, or vice-versa, like a personality extending out as an appendage. So there are images of chronic gambling, compulsive cleanliness, over-eating. They're all linked by this idea of a need, a desire to complete a missing part of the person."
Thus, Oursler has given each "need" its own inflated emblem. There are giant scratchcards, a mobile-phone whose screen pulsates with dancing girls, a cluster of towering cigarettes which burn down - and miraculously reform - to the sound of sucking breath, and a £20 note with a talking Queen (Oursler was still working on her lines when we met).
It is, if you like, a tour of the seven vices. "Thing is," he says, "I don't know if we're going to have enough room to have all the vices in one gallery show!"
Saturday, 11 July 2009
Nate Van Dyke At Upper Playground, Kingly Street
Nate (N8) Van Dyke ----> Original Sketch - £800His work has been featured in several magazines such as JUXTAPOZ, XBox, PlayStation and Heavy Metal. Over the years N8 has attracted clients such as Converse, Levi Strauss, Scion, EMI Records, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Burton Snowboards, Slayer and Wired.
There is no point me banging on about all his marvellous talent, because its easier to just check his blog.
http://www.n8vandyke.com/
But this did get me salivating all over my hombres from home, Amar Stewart's Shop; Upper Playground, London. 31 Kingly St, London, W1B 5BQ.
http://upperplayground.com/
XXX
Wednesday, 8 July 2009
Annette Olivieri - Fashion Designer
I adore this jacket. My Absolute favourite! Handmade, sculpted, bright (pink, blue, yellow), and immaculately embroidered. £2,000. Delicious.
This was one big piece of material that I wrapped around my head and body. (designed and made by Annette Olivieri)
Annette Olivieri - Italian Fashion Designer.
Many words would be needed to describe something that was not obvious for our own eyes to see.....
She is a woman that embraces individuality, creativity and vision.
Above is a shoot that took place on Portobello Road and at her store, Euforia Space Ship, No7 Portobello Green Arcade. 281 Portobello Road. W10 5TZ.
Annette is such a sweetie because she encourages me to waltz into her store, grab all the clothes I can get my beady eyes and sticky paws on, and straight away put them on or take them away (which is a regular occurrance, to which I am very grateful for). She likes people to feel inspired by her work, and wear them with pride and individuality.
Annette is not afraid to experiment and embellish, sometimes mixing very futuristic prints with tribal jewellery or antique accessories.
What a fabulous woman! She designs and makes all her own material, at her digital studio, and creates one-off pieces that look like sculptures that one can wear.
I love her! She is super fabulous. Check out---> http://annetteolivieri.co.uk/ for more stuff to make your mouths water, eyes fall out and jaws drop to the floor...Bacio xxx
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