Mark Haddon's Blog, page 23

new artwork page

see link on the left. it contains more new stuff and less old stuff and it makes a lot more sense.

 

sarah wiseman

i have a show at sarah wiseman in oxford. paintings, prints, photographs and sculptures. it starts tomorrow and ends on 22 may.

http://www.wisegal.com/menus/main.asp 

accidental

some of my favourite paintings happen by accident. these are a few of the boards i use to protect the floor of my workroom, to clean brushes, test colours... as soon as i start thinking of them as pictures and consciously adding to the design they no longer work. but as long as i can see them only out of the corner of my eye...

    

    

april

    

    

polar bears 4

I’ve written very little here over the past few weeks because most my energy has been taken up by polar bears and the forthcoming art exhibition (of which more later).

it seems odd to mention polar bears without saying how amazing the director, Jamie Lloyd, and the cast are, and how working with them has been of the most instructive and enjoyable experiences of my writing life. but it’s also slightly emetic. so, enough. some things I’ve learnt over the past few weeks:

there is a...

paul farley

i recently did an interview with the poet paul farley. it's in the guardian this weekend. i really do think you should read it and then go the nearest good bookshop and buy a volume or two of his poetry.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/apr/03/mark-haddon-paul-farley-conversation

actually, i think you should buy more poetry of all kinds. i think we should all buy more poetry of all kinds. i've been commuting to rehearsals of polar bears recently and it's struck me, once again, that i have n...

polar bears 3

it seems odd not to have written anything about polar bears over the last two week. the reason is that i've been in rehearsals, which has a been a fantastic experience, but also a tiring and time-consuming one. here's an interview from today's observer. i dislike doing interviews (it's hard having a pleasant, relaxed conversation whilst not forgetting that you're also simultaneously talking to ten thousand strangers). i don't much like reading them either. but a copying link to this is...

popular science

this is rather fantastic. popular science magazine is now archived online. 137 years of it. the interface is ugly and the google reader clumsy but the content is fascinating and funny and addictive and edifying. from articles by darwin and pasteur to, well, stuff like this...

 

http://www.popsci.com/archives

 

 

mark linkous

here come the painbirds... sad, sad news. mark linkous of sparklehorse committed suicide at the weekend. he was a genius. i've played vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot, good morning spider and it's a wonderful life over and over and i have never, ever grown tired of them. exquisite melancholy tunes that burnt little tracks inside my head and lyrics that always seemed to have been plucked straight out of some weird faerie darkness. we used a couple of his songs on the soundtrack for coming...

identity

a wonderful exhibition at the wellcome collection. 8 rooms about 8 lives (samuel pepys, the groundbreaking transexual april ashley, the artist claude cahun, the scientist francis galton, fiona shaw...) each of them examining the question of who we are from a variety of different perspectives and all of them a revelation in some way (i'd never seen fiona shaw's astonishing performance of the wasteland; i'd never considered what it might be like to be one of a pair of identical twins, born...