📖 7 Books in 16 languages 📚 including: How To Change The World A Modest Book About How To Make An Adequate Speech.
Hampstead, mostly
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Yesterday I told you that my late father in law, Jack, could distinguish between 50 to 60 industrial grades of paper. That got me thinking. Recently, on LinkedIn, I mentioned that printed newspapers still seem wonderful to me - even accounting for stories and opinions within them that I don’t like so much. One of the people who commented on my LinkedIn post made an interesting distinction between digital media and putting something on paper. Print demonstrates a commitment, he said.
That rings true, I suppose, of my art. Most of the images I make on my iPad never get printed. The ones I DO get printed, at a specialist in east London, far from my home, are obviously more important to me for some reason. ​ Why Am I Telling You This?I promised yesterday to send information about some art I’m making available for sale. You didn’t ask me to do that, but it had been part of my plan, and I’m trying to stick to the plan. What with everything that’s been going on recently, it would have been so easy not to bother. Several times, today, I thought what’s the point?, and nearly gave up. So: thank you, even if you don’t give a hoot about my art, for holding me accountable to myself. ​ I went around the house, looking for pictures with a Hampstead theme. Why Hampstead? Because Jack was brought up in Hampstead, had chickens in the garden on Haverstock Hill, and in WW2 he watched the RAF v the Luftwaffe in aerial dogfights. After spending years in Somerset he came back. Oh, and the art gallery that lent us that sculpture I mentioned yesterday, by Mary Spencer Watson, is located in Hampstead. Most of the pics (below) are wintry. They play with light and shade because during 2022 and 2023 I had quite a thing for streetlights and car headlamps. I added brighter pics to the selection too - just because - including a view of the City of London from Hampstead Heath, a picture of a monstera (houseplant) and a still life with teapot. ​ About These PrintsThey're unframed A4 Giclée prints on textured, archival Hahnemuhle 300gsm paper. They have a dusty quality, a bit like gouache paint. As indicated above, they’re prints I got done for myself, to check how they looked. Technically, that makes them Artist’s Prints (you can see I’ve written AP on some of them) which makes them rarer even than numbered prints in a limited edition. The price for each A4 print is £100, plus VAT and postage. To buy one, please send me an email letting me know which one you would like within the next 48 hours. (I’m finding this a bit overwhelming and need to set a time limit.) Here they are: ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ I hope you DO like them, and I hope you DO buy one. I hope the one you like hasn’t gone already. Thank you for looking.
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John-Paul Flintoff
📖 7 Books in 16 languages 📚 including: How To Change The World A Modest Book About How To Make An Adequate Speech.
Hello Reader A building in Hampstead, on the corner of Heath Street and the High Street: You have two choices. If you take the road on the left, which slopes downhill, you’ll end up at Waterstones bookshop, assuming that you aren’t previously lured into (say) Gail’s Bakery or the Vencchi ice cream shop. If you don’t stop at any of those places and keep walking down the hill you’ll pass Belsize Park, Chalk Farm, Camden Town, Euston, the River Thames, Sussex, the English Channel, France, Africa...
Hello Reader It’s three weeks since the 'Magnolias of Hampstead' exhibition at Burgh House. (Hello Reader. This is my newsletter.) Been a bit of a whirlwind, wrapping paintings very carefully, arranging couriers: and... . . . [ after an agonising wait ] . . . ...receiving confirmation that the deliveries arrived in one piece: There's something extremely satisfying about seeing these magnolias settling into their new homes. *** The exhibition itself feels like a bit of a dream now. I keep...
This woman, in this room? Unimaginable just four years ago. She was in prison, in Iran. And - more trivially - I couldn’t have dreamed that I would be doing a solo show of my art. (Hello Reader. This is my newsletter.) You may recall that in 2021 Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s husband Richard went on hunger strike outside the Foreign Office in London. He was protesting at the UK government’s failure to get his wife released. I went to see him. I wasn’t on assignment or anything. It was just me,...