Artist in residence ...

The artist at work

 

It’s strange how some roles define actors and others don’t.  On the one hand, Daniel Ratcliffe will always struggle to offload the mantle of Harry Potter (this burden perhaps also applies to Emma Watson and Hermione Grainger). But Ralph Fiennes, on the other hand, isn’t really forever tagged as Lord Voldermort, at least not for me. The reason for my musing is that the other night Cath and I watched the movie Mrs Lowry and Son in which the incomparable Vanessa Redgrave is cast as the bedridden mother of the famous British artist, LS Lowry, played by Timothy Spall. Redgrave managed to morph completely into the role of the demanding and rather unkind mother, but I just could not shake the image of Timothy Spall as Peter Pettigrew!  Now to be completely fair, Vanessa Redgrave holds a special place in my affection as I saw her on stage in the West End in Anton Chekhov’s play The Seagull, way back in 1985 (and, yes, you’ve guessed correctly it was my fellow chess junkie, the mathematician, that suggested we go to London and be thoroughly depressed by Russian literature). That said, the Lowry biopic was a good movie but like Russian literature, not exactly uplifting.

Why this digression you ask? Well on one of our trips up to see Cath’s mum in Devonport, Cath found three LS Lowry prints hidden in a cupboard in the spare bedroom. This was a strange discovery because exactly the same three prints are framed and hang on the wall in the passageway of her mum’s house. So we took the spares back south with us, had them framed (together with an old map of Van-Diemen’s Land) and collected them the other day. They all look pretty amazing. The problem then became one of where to put them. 

At this point the artist in residence, Cath, stepped up to the plate. She saw that by removing a rather large white melamine contraption from the laundry and moving some slightly smaller shelving out of the hall into the laundry would create a space in the entrance hall worth of the Lowry prints. So she got to work! It turned out to be a pretty large undertaking. Getting the white melamine cupboards out of the laundry (and into the shed) was easy – it was repairing the damaged plasterboard and replacing the skirting boards that was the difficult bit. But armed with her trusty jig saw, some fibreglass tape and renovators plaster she not only patched everything up but did some rather fancy joinery in the process. This rather amazing bit of work was then followed by a couple of days of furious painting so that today we were able to dismantle the shelving in the hall and place it in the laundry. 

Some fancy joinery

The result is absolutely first class. The hall is now a big airy welcome to anyone coming to visit. The Lowry prints are on your right as you enter and the map of Van-Diemen’s Land is straight ahead. In fact, all that is now needed to complete the area is an extremely expensive, custom-built hall table in Tasmanian black-heart sassafras, but that will perhaps be another story!

An evening view of the entrance hall

Now you are probably wondering with some justification what I was doing while this transformation was taking place. Well I was blundering around carrying rocks from one place to another and generally being my usual incompetent academic self – although I did pull a few better-than-reasonable shots of espresso for the artist every now and then …