The Life and Times of Anthony Samuelson

Wednesday 14 March 2007

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I spent the weekend drafting the catalogue entry for the Chelsea show, getting up a sponsorship proposal for Chelsea (probably too late) and drafting the Home page for this web site (may be too long and too many links). Decisions decisions decisions. One is not to mention most members of my family by name until we see how all this plays out. So with Nc-1’s help I assign a code name to everyone with a place on the family tree. It turns out that there are 70 of us. Everyone is ranked by age so with Nc-1’s list comes everyone’s birthdays which I shall continue not to remember. Nc-1 is my eldest niece.

On Friday Nc-1 (my eldest niece as previously stated) phoned very excited to say that the Car Boot sale season after its long winter hibernation was about to wake up and was I up for going to Hatfield on Sunday morning? I did not say Yes straight away because I was not sure how much progress I would make with the other stuff, but in the end went. Nc-1 collected me from home in her merc and soon after we arrived at Hatfield, Nc-1’s sister Nc-3 turned up with husband and a mob of children, in tow. Ncs-1 and -3 are car boot sale addicts. To enjoy car boot sales as a buyer you have to have a Purpose. Nc-1’s Purpose is to find bits and pieces around which to arrange flowers, which is what she does, and Nc-3 hunts for stuff to sell at a profit on ebay. She is a real shrewdy and can spot a Steiff teddy bear at two miles.

A “garden with found objects” feeds off car boot sales and so this is my Purpose for going although I have not been doing it long enough to get withdrawal symptoms in the winter months. There is a lot of stuff that I still need, notwithstanding numerous feeding frenzies last year. The shortfall in Found Objects arises for a number of reasons: 1) I am not sure whether the weathered look will look right for Chelsea. 2) The imagined bachelor theme makes it necessary to find objects suited to a bachelor lifestyle. 3) The policy of choosing the best of the best for Chelsea requires a multiplicity of found objects as well as plants.

As to 1) (whether the weathered) it has always been my view that, regardless of how distressed a Found Object gets, you should let the weather take its course. Since a lot of what I do consists of covering conventional containers with fashion items such as pullovers and skirts, or using them as plant containers of themselves (ladies’ hats, handbags, boots) the effect of a winter spent out of doors is very striking. More striking, I have to admit, than I had anticipated.

The word “patio” has only come into widespread use in my lifetime and its usage is a product of popular air-travel leading to package holidays leading to second homes in Sunny Spain whence it is from. Sunny Spain does not have our kind of winter.

I hear you asking how come I had not anticipated what our kind of winter, which includes rain, wind and frost, would do to a mini skirt or a bustier draped round a plastic pot? You have to understand that I only started my experiments with Patio Povera in the summer of 2006. Less than a year ago. Using found objects as plant containers in patios or anywhere else is nothing new. (I always use the mantra “traditional pots, troughs and trugs” to describe what patent layers call “the prior art” because it is at least partially alliterative.) But hats and handbags and items of apparel push the boundaries further than ever before. Nothing much happened to their appearance in the course of the summer. At the onset of winter everything was pushed into a sort of yard between two bays of my house (next to where the Worm-ridden Hole once stood, demolished thirty years ago to make way for a bathroom at first floor level). With Steve my gardener giving me only two days a week, there has been no time to have a tidy up and it looks a terrible mess. The fact that we have not got round to moving the dead plants adds nothing to the ambiance – a fact that comes as a disappointment seeing that the sunflowers in the National Gallery’s van Gogh Sunflowers are well past their sale-by-date and the going rate for such paintings (if genuine, which the NG’s most likely isn’t) is £50 million. This part of my garden (the bit between the two bays) which used to be called “where the worm-ridden hole used to be” with a degree of geographical licence is now called “the Body Farm” after those programmes on Discovery Channel about forensic etymologists who dot donated cadavers around a few acres of forest to see what happens under various conditions – lying in water, buried under leaves, hanging from trees – etc.. (There ought to be a Body Farm based under an M25 flyover.)

Anyway, the decision here is whether or not to draw Found Objects for Chelsea from their winter quarters on the Body Farm in my back garden or to go for a less weathered look which will mean finding replacements. As the garden at Chelsea is in theory an outdoor garden (being on a roof) but in practice indoors (being in a gigantic tent) there is a value judgement to be made here. Not one that I am ready to make yet and hence the need for further expeditions into car boot sale country.

A factor to be born in mind is that everything that I am doing relates back to themes to be found in the world of Art. The imagined bachelor creator of the garden has studied the History of Art and is carving out a career in the creative media and so it all stacks up. This is “art” not just as in art galleries but in architecture and, of course, Arte Povera. Arte Povera was an anarchical movement in Italy in the 1970’s and today mostly exists in the pages of books in which photographs are interposed between pages of opaque art-speak. [More about Arte Povera Here]. In art one often finds themes of decay and if it were anywhere else but Chelsea (the Royal Horticultural Society itself uses the word “theatre”) I would probably not think twice. But Chelsea (once you are there) is about getting a gold medal and whatever shortens the odds needs to be carefully thought about.

As to 2) The young “twenty-something” bachelor theme, I take the view that anything smacking of a car boot sale will sit uncomfortably with the imaginary scenario. Nc-1’s favourite word for what one finds at car boot sales is “toot” and car boot sales are not places where young singles go networking. So replacement F.O.s suitable to a young man’s lifestyle have to be found and biddy hats and handbags are out. Both of these last were included in my Chelsea Garden’s water feature, which comprises three plant containers, one under the other. In their place I am proposing to use a laptop computer case, a football fan’s hat and a crash-helmet. I already had the laptop case, I bought a football fan’s hat when Carol and I went to Cardiff for a torture session when Arsenal played Chelsea in the Carling Cup final [Fort Gooner Here] and I found a crash helmet on Sunday at the car boot sale. Actually I bought two fan’s hats so that I could do a bit of experimental weathering on one of them. And funnily enough an Irish Guinness sports fan’s hat (the sort that ought to have a big buckle which this one doesn’t though it does have a head of foam) which would make a super planter, but not suitable for Chelsea, came my way at the car boot sale. (I shall wear the Guinness hat when I am next skyping my youngest son S-4 who is at law school in America. For last night’s skype I wore a Confederate Army Civil War kepi.)

Regarding 3) The best of the best, (Remember Topgun? My favourite movie. Along with others.) I found two more toolboxes to add to my existing toolbox which is featured in the drawing accompanying my Chelsea application. The idea is that it will be planted with succulents which need only a shallow container (which a toolbox is very) and my plan is to give all three to Julie and Rick who are experts in the field and see what they come up with. There company is called Divine Cactus and I found them after making a thousand telephone calls looking for a decent sized Prickly Pear for my Cow Girl Found Object plant container. The question, as ever, is how rusty should the toolboxes be allowed to get? My existing toolbox is very rusty. Rust, I recall, was highlighted in an illustrated article on a recent Chelsea Flower Show garden in which big rust coloured metal objects (can’t remember what) were juxtaposed with rust colour plants. Anything to get an edge with the judges.

Rust is a not too bad colour, being earthy and fundamental, in a patio context. But the panties that I have on a conventional B&Q woven wicker plant basket, currently residing in the Body Farm, have gone a green shade around the crotch. You might say that this look is also earthy and fundamental but nevertheless I am thinking of getting a replacement pair of pristine white panties - which these were before being put on the wicker basket. I am certainly going to have panties at Chelsea because they strike me as something that a young bachelor might very likely have found lying around close to his double hammock and they are in the drawing accompanying the application.

In art, when an artist alters a found object in some way, it is sometimes referred to in the blurb in the catalogue and on a nearby wall in the gallery as a “found object composed”. Not a lot of people know this. I would not have known but for the entry for “Found Object (Objet trouvé)” in the Always Dependable Dictionary of Art and Artists by Peter and Linda Murray. Re-reading it just now I noticed that what they actually say is:

In Surrealist theory an object of any kind such as a shell found on a walk, can be a work of art, and such “Found Objects” have been exhibited. If a little judicious touching-up has been indulged in, the object is known technically as a “Found Object Composed”.

On which note, I end today’s account of the Life and Times of yours truly, Anthony Samuelson. The first of many, hopefully. This web site is as much for you as it is for me and there are Blogs throbbing in anticipation as they wait for your input. There is a Gardener’s Blog for gardening stuff and an Art Blog for art stuff. Also a This ‘n’ That Blog for general stuff. I will not be slow to put in my two penn’orth.

Link here to photograph page