Tag archives for Nick Pelling - Page 2
Rolling With Colden
By Helen Murphy and Nick Pelling The art world is a pretty baffling place: one person’s absurd joke is another person’s profundity. At one end you have chancers, grifters and…
Playing in the Potholes of Your Mind
By Helen Murphy and Nick Pelling The sheer number of potholes in the road fabric of this town is, let’s face it, bloody annoying. In this town you can basically go…
Flying with the C-Bombers
By Helen Murphy and Nick Pelling Here’s a tip: if you have ever had that feeling that maybe you could write a song, just do it. Do it while you…
Norman Road Goes Rogue
By Helen Murphy and Nick Pelling If dear old Noel Coward were still alive and, by some very odd twist, he was the Chancellor of the Exchequer, he would doubtless introduce…
Trouble is Her Business
By Helen Murphy and Nick Pelling Raymond Chandler is surely the king of 1940s crime noir fiction, and his novels, such as The Big Sleep, have led to some iconic…
Eyes to Die For
Nick Pelling on Natalie Haynes and the Myth of Medusa. Natalie Haynes is like a really passionate, erudite and gifted teacher who has accidentally imbibed way too many amphetamines. As…
A Dream of Escape
By Helen Murphy and Nick Pelling Who hasn’t dreamed of getting on a motorbike and hurdling the barbed wire at Stalag Luft III to freedom? The dream of some form…
D is for Demonology
A rare solo exhibition by Sexton Ming By Helen Murphy and Nick Pelling I think it was the recent Royal Jubilee that prompted the question, where has the old punk…
Love and Paint, Actually
By Helen Murphy and Nick Pelling There are some exhibitions that just seem to come and go, but occasionally an exhibition comes along that feels like an important cultural…
The Art of Memory – The work of Ian Baker
By Helen Murphy and Nick Pelling Is it possible to paint a memory? It’s difficult: memories don’t keep still. They slip and slide and mutate. It is a bit like…
When is a Tree not a Tree?
By Helen Murphy and Nick Pelling Just beyond the now scorched grass at the old swimming pool site, along Seaside Road, can be found the quietly impressive Electro Studios Project…
All That is Lost
By Nick Pelling It is a sad fact of life that today’s heartbreaking news is all too rapidly supplanted by tomorrow’s heartbreaking news. A combination perhaps of compassion fatigue and…
Stars in the Gloom
By Helen Murphy and Nick Pelling In the sepia depths of ‘The Horse and Groom,’ in Mercatoria, one can often find two of the brightest stars in the St Leonards’ art…
Riding the Zig-Zag Horse into Town
By Helen Murphy and Nick Pelling What is it that attracts so many creative people to Hastings? Is it the long arc of white sandy beach, the soft impressionist light…
Twitching the Veils of Normality
By Helen Murphy and Nick Pelling It is an odd thing but sometimes a familiar scene can suddenly seem strange. The banal momentarily flips itself and appears quite disturbing. The artist…
The Serious Business of Falling Over
By Nick Pelling Arguably, Samuel Beckett’s absurdist masterpiece, Waiting for Godot, has come to be, in thelast few decades, somewhat overgrown with intellectual weeds, shrivelling it into some sort of…
Who is your Queen?
By Helen Murphy and Nick Pelling Celebrating the royal family can be a bit divisive. We are not all monarchists, so the Jubilee may bring some people out in republican…
We all Stand on Common Ground
By Nick Pelling and Helen Murphy Something weird and wonderful just happened in Gotham City. Gotham Alley, I mean. There was no Penguin, but there was plenty of Zap! And…
Neither Here Nor There
By Helen Murphy and Nick Pelling If you have ever stood at the shore’s edge and stared at the waves and the endless grey sea, you might appreciate Seamus Heaney’s thought…
Blue Magic
By Nick Pelling I have to admit that when I first read that India Blue described herself as a ‘faerie-folk musician’ I could not help but feel that this was,…
Diamond Life
By Helen Murphy and Nick Pelling I think it was the naked, blue alien woman sitting on a skyscraper that prompted our interest. So, we headed for the Bare Bone…
Next Stop Utopia
By Nick Pelling Have you ever thought that you were living a shallow and rather selfish life? Worse still, that this was all just a reflection of your horribly flawed…
When Piglets Write the History
By Nick Pelling At what point does one know that someone is a liar? Occasionally there are helpful clues. Connie Francis had it sussed when she saw the ‘lipstick on…
BOOK REVIEW
Mister Hastings By Nick Pelling The eighteenth century is an unloved sort of century. Certainly, British history in that era is hardly taught in school at all. Instead, students are…
Art for HIP’s Sake
By Nick Pelling Sometimes artists get a bad press. They are occasionally depicted as narcissistic types obsessed with their own ideas and neurotic about reviews and, of course, sales. But…
January blues
By Nick Pelling If April is supposedly “the cruellest month”, surely January is the glummest? No one has any money, our wilting Christmas décor mocks us and we still find…
The Real Deal
By Nick Pelling Many of us have no doubt dreamt of being an artist; breaking the digital chains that now ensnare us all. But reality, in the form of needing…
Magnificent Madness?
Nick Pelling attends the St Leonards’ premiere of a documentary about the making of a film by the former Monty Python star Terry Gilliam. Have you ever thought that a…
Big Sparks at The Electro
Nick Pelling looks forward to a special exhibition. The current exhibition at the Electro Studios looks set to be quite something. It carries the title A Sense of Place, but…
Will You Stay in a Lovers Story?
By Nick Pelling I have to admit that I tend to regard The Crown Pub in Old Town as somewhere to get a pint of stout. Forgetting that it is…
Magpie Logic
Nick Pelling meets local artist Daisy Clarke and finds in her work gardens of earthly delight – just round the corner from Lidl. Imagine a magical world without men. A…
It’s a Kind of Magic
By Nick Pelling Some people say that working with clay is addictive. They have got a point but at least it is one of the few addictions that is actually…
Listen to What the Man Said
By Nick Pelling Hastings and St Leonards is home to many ordinary people who are not ordinary at all. If you listen. One such is Reggie Hendrickse. Reggie has been…
Taking Shots at Reality
By Nick Pelling Werner Herzog once said that “the documentary film is simply fiction films in disguise.” Certainly, the recent Kino Documentary Film Festival showed that the genre can unspool…
And the Winner is?
By Nick Pelling By now, anyone with a vague interest in the art world, probably knows that our local art collective, Project Artworks, has been short-listed for the national Turner…
From Skater to Curator
By Nick Pelling Street Art has come a long way – from Manhattan’s lower East Side via Shoreditch to Norman Road St Leonards. It has also become a rather more…
Zooming in on the Asylum Debate
By Nick Pelling In the wake of the recent Sanctuary festival, two online meetings have been organised, in order to allow people in Hastings to get a fuller understanding of…
And Now for Something Completely Different
By Nick Pelling It is surely one of the most tired cliches about music that Opera is just for ‘toffs’ who like to dress up ‘posh’ and listen to fat…
Absence Makes the Art Grow Stranger
By Nick Pelling It’s an old art teaching maxim – look closely at what is not there. At the shape of spaces. Tom Banks has been staring at St Leonards…
Journey Into Artier Space
By Nick Pelling West Street, in Old Town, has always been somewhat eclipsed by its popular, parallel partner, George Street. But, nestled in at 31a West Street, is the fabulous…