Danse Macabre

Wonderful Halloween themed drawings by Ub Iwerks for early Disney animation Skeleton Dance, 1929. In the intervening years our collective attention span has become so worn that this so-called short now seems interminable.

  

We Say Meow

So nice to be featured on the cat-tastic We Say Meow. Seems there's not just a correlation between Felis domesticus and eccentric spinsterhood but with illustrators too! You can paw over some of our stuff alongside some amazing artists and their furry feline friends. It's also great excuse for me to post this whiskered wonder from 1966 by Arnold Varga.

Hubbub

Spent last weekend staying with pals in London's bright autumnal sunlight. We felt like just-landed aliens from a US film, eyeing the human hubbub and sudden wealth of stuff with a too naked curiosity, putting away pastries like we'd never tasted your Earth food.

The baby went to his first private view too, Hannah Sawtell's crisply coherent Vendor at the Bloomberg Space but like good parents we swerved the after-show party for some more of your Earth food. And, though we'd missed the opening of Simon Martin's UR Feeling at The Camden Arts Centre, we caught up with him after the Sunday talk from Frieze's Dan Fox.

Simon's work may look like a dour museological re-presentation of the C20th anthropological artefact but plays-out like an ultra-hip cultural studies lecture. Neither entirely canonical nor wholly obscure, works selected here seem to operate on the boundaries of this-or-that discipline. This sharp curatorial collection forms the research for a forthcoming film and includes pieces from Sottsass, Burton and Shore, alongside his own open-edition poster, a knowing skit on the structural exposé of New Wave marketing. 

from top: Richard Artschwager, Chair, edition of 6, 1965-2000 // Storm Thorgerson/Hipgnosis, LP cover for XTC's Go2, 1978 // Ettore Sottsass/Memphis, Malabar room divider, 1982 // Stephen Shore, Twenty-First and Spruce Street, 1974

0.99

This Liberty Bauhaus fabric cost 99p from Oxfam, I hoped the muted palette might suit this tiny cane rocking chair. I've always been game for a bit of ad hoc upholstery but this is my first attempt at piping. I'm thinking it looks pretty good... from a distance!