Here is a place I often come to visit, the V&A glass displays on the upper floors by the members room. These floors are often deserted even when the lower galleries are full so I have lots of time to study every technique used through the ages. Colour and pattern, overlays, layering, reflections and distortions, all of these things exist in all of the applied arts but add the dimension of transparency and a whole new vocabulary transcends. The glass object is a three dimensional form that sucks in its surroundings and re-presents them as distortion and reflection. Each object offers its own subjective re-interpretation of its context. A story re-told as the light or viewer shifts position in an endless conversation. Aspects remind me of Romeo Gigli’s ghost collection.

Project research, explorations in Henri Matisse paper cut period Henri’s ‘second life’. Screen shots unedited.

I have been invited by friends to the Ascot King George Weekend on a day filled with blue skies and sunshine. In a box on the 6^th floor, the canopy overhang and air conditioning made for a relaxed and pleasant day. As someone who has no idea about horse racing (apart from the weekly riding classes when young) and a non-gambler, I relied on the help of an expert via a quick phone call and placed my bet. The main race of the day King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Stakes was won by Taghrooda.

Image – George Stubbs, variations on - Mares and Foals Without Background.

Whilst in Glasgow I pass the Charles Rennie Mackintosh School Of Art and I am reminded of the recent fire of May 2014. I last saw this building when I was a student. Sadly the damage is considerable and will require a lot of work to repair.

Images - Glasgow School Of Art, 1897-1909

Today my work takes me to Glasgow. The interior of the hotel room for my stay looking and feeling very much like an interior of Kisho Kurokawa’s Tokyo Nakagin Capsule Hotel of 1972 or a one hour love hotel of recent decades. The bed abuts the view of Glasgow from my window wall.

Japanese Metabolism addressed the fiscal and land availability issues of 1970’s Tokyo. The target market for each capsule was the ‘bachelor salary man’. In todays society we are all ‘bachelor salary men’, unable to buy and fed up of renting. Sadly the recent resurgence of interest in micro homes is market led and yield driven, this is a shame as the Capsule Hotel is an archetype that is very relevant to todays congested inner city urban life.

Work today leads to the researching of textures for use as a framing device and where better to start than the vegetables in the oil paintings of Sir Nathaniel Bacon’s Cookmaid.

In the 17^th Century the aesthetic excess of the Baroque and Rococo were an expression equally of the excess of the Catholic Church and Divine Sovereign. The Baroque came to represent the abuse of power and consolidation of national wealth into the hands of a corrupt few. Painting the ordinary was a Liberal and Protestant protest to this excess and with this the genre of the still life was born. So these are some of the numerous vegetable revolutionaries.

I start a new job today at Vivienne Westwood’s as Visual Merchandising Manager. This will be a change following the large corporate structure of my previous job.