No prizes for guessing what I'm up to this weekend... if you're in the area you might want to get up to it too!

1/2

The boy hits 6 months this weekend. I know people don't generally celebrate half birthdays but we're told it's a significant milestone on the journey of parenthood... it's also an excellent excuse to thank friends and family for some of their beautiful gifts. Keep 'em coming!

  

Svalbard

So saddening to see the probable fate of the UK's Ash trees turn ever more certain with steady spread of Chalara fraxinea, or Ash Dieback. Maybe it's because trees occupy that time-frame somewhere between the human life-span and deep geological time that we imbue the landscape they create with something like permanence.

When Charles Raymond (of Joy of Sex fame) completed these illustrations in 1973 the Elm was falling prey to the disease that decimated their population. Still, it's heartening to know, irrespective of our blunders here on the surface, all known horticultural specimens form part of Svalbard Global Seed Vault, interned 120 meters beneath a Norwegian sandstone mountain.

Radio On

The BBC celebrate 90 years of radio this week and, given the choice, we'd all be listening in on Jacob Jensen's colourful old Beolit 707 while we print... shame they're either all busted-up or bucket-loads of money!

Yay

I do enjoy a topical post, no matter how tenuous, so when it came time to congratulate the US on Obama's second term, where better to look than The Museum of American Folk Art's 1983 book, Expressions of a New Spirit? As you might expect, there's a heap of beautiful quilts and these lovely newspaper patterns for a Bird of Paradise bridal piece (1858-63).

The 5th

Remember, remember the Fifth of November? In the little town of Lewes it's impossible to forget. Shop fronts are boarded up, folk test the fireworks months in advance and take their Bonfire processions so seriously that it's nearly no fun at all. 

• Musical nightscapes from Images qui Chantent, Edition Fleurus, 1969/1971

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!

Puzzled

Though we're all out of wall space, I'm still thinking these dozen polygons should look well framed up for the kid. Let's just hope he never asks me to solve any of 'em, it's tough enough orientating the bits back in the box!   

Idling through an advertising annual from 1959, I was struck by this Leonard Baskin (1922-2000) carving, its downbeat countenance and the similarity to the countless characters of Barry McGee. If you've not seen McGee's work or that of his late wife, Margaret Kilgallen, you could always watch this or this. My hipster tolerance is set way too low to watch Beautiful Losers though.

• from 38th Annual of Advertising/Editorial Art/Design, Farrar, Straus & Cudahy

Really?

Most Eksellent

Sköna Skämt is an international survey of cartoonists and, while its contents are broadly mired in the politics of the period (1985), the alphabetised chapter headings by Swedish designer, Olle Eksell, have aged with exceptional grace. I know it's wrong to destroy a book, but they'll make the greatest children's wall frieze. And how did I choose which letters to scan here? They all appear in Lisa Jones Studio, of course. Yep, I really am that childish!

C

The centennial birthday of 20th century giant of no-music (and mycology), John Cage, is a good reason to re-post this picture I've had sitting on my desktop for who-knows-how-long. As unassuming as ever, I'm guessing that carrier bag's just full of fungi.

Kiosk

We've been selling this card for over a year now, but every time it went onto screen some aspect of the artwork was missing; once the heart, then the poodle's bow! Finally printing off a few hundred, I got to thinking about the telephone box (the K2 in particular) and how the curve of the roof is based on Sir John Soane's family tomb. Part of his own architectural vernacular, you can see the domed-square especially clearly on The Dulwich Picture Gallery. This seemed like the kind of trivia you might pick up watching The London Nobody Knows (1969) or, even better, Patrick Kellior's elegiac London (1994).

Of all paeans to London though, Patrick Hamilton's Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky (1935) steals the best title, suggesting the manifold intertwining narratives of millions, humbled by the city's scale. But then I accidentally read Wordsworth's Upon Westminster Bridge (1802) while searching for something in an entirely different emotional key. Just beautiful.

Earth has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This City now doth like a garment wear

The beauty of the morning: silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky,
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.

Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour valley, rock, or hill;
Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!

The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!

x

I've been wanting to write something about my mum, who died without warning in June (a fortnight after the boy's arrival), but I figured a gift illustrator's blog wasn't the best forum for unchecked grief and the raw pain of loss. Profoundly felt emotions may seem vulgar when expressed and I worried that, once begun, I'd not want to to stop. Healthy for me perhaps, but awkward for everybody else.

So, more simply, I'd post a few photos of her antics and more outré outfits over the decades (especially the 1980s, my mum's middle age was an absolute renaissance) but I suspect —as an awe-struck son— I'd make a too subjective selection right now. Maybe next year.

Then, last week I noticed 'August Bank Holiday 1957' written on the back of a b/w snap of the folks. 55 years ago today. At the end of her eighteenth summer, believe me, this girl was just getting started.

• Rita Joyce Underwood, 1938-2012

50 Years

No need for anniversaries, back at our yard we celebrate Jamaican independence constantly; like this, this, this, this, this, this or even this.

The Well-Tempered Garden

With the UK seasons seeming to switch daily, we were grateful for a clement couple of hours in a Sussex garden. Great Dixter is pretty much the life's work of the hugely influential horticulturist, Christopher Lloyd, whose riotous and ramshackle ethic is aptly illustrated in mixed herbaceous borders.

Nothing at Dixter is planned on paper but rather intuited annually by Lloyd's successor Fergus Garrett and a team of eager gardeners (with a few languorous cats)... none of whom seemed to mind my ploughing a pram through the place. There's a bit of a doggy theme with a wonderful mosaic of two top-to-toe dachshunds in the walled garden, continuing inside with a collection of sausage dogs; from one-off sculptures to the Slinky tie-in from Toy Story. While the medieval house also holds a fair few ceramics and heap of great rugs, it was the proportions of the vegetable beds outside that truly earned my envy.

Un/fortunately, Great Dixter has an exemplary nursery too, meaning a trip may cost more dearly than entrance fee alone. Binomial Latin usually sounds a bit rude to me, but —for those of you who understand this stuff— here's my shopping list:

Cyperus vegetus
Seslaria nitida
Erigeron karvinskianus
Euphorbia stygiana
Cynara cardunculus (dwarf)
Forniculum vulgare Purpureu
Macleaya m. Kelways Coral Plume

N.B. Post title taken from Lloyd's 1970 book, itself a skit on J.S.Bach's The Well-Tempered Clavier, the preludes and fugues that eccentric pianist, Glenn Gould, so famously interpreted. Even if you hate Baroque music, it's always good to watch him in action... I swear he thought in algebra and algorithms!

Since its unveiling a few years back, designers have done such a good job of shoehorning 2012's awkward logo into layouts that I've actually grown to like it. I also like the idea behind the Olympic mascots, it's just that Wenlock & Mandeville have a shared look of shame in their one big eye; as though they know they're next month's charity shop stock.



That brand of in-built obsolescence puts me in mind of a million other misfired advertising opportunities, designed by committee and deeply patronising, from graffiti logos to 'totally wicked' Weetabix characters. I'm old enough to remember too many Olympic mascots, some cute and others so-so, but my favourite's still 1992's Cobi, the cubist sheepdog from playful post-modern designer Javier Mariscal.