Thursday Lecture - Neil Drabble

Neil Drabble is an old mate of our tutor Nigel, as are most of the guest speakers who come to Sion Hill. He teaches graphics and photography at one of the fancy art schools in London but also produces an insane amount of work in a variety of fields. There are two bits of work that Neil has done that made me really want to go to his lecture. Firstly there is this:



These beautiful geisha sculptures are made from a bunch of his kids' socks that his wife was going to throw out. There are no cuts or sticking and no other materials added, he just twists, folds and ties a sock until it looks like a geisha - really amazing! The fact that they are made from something so personal to him only adds to their beauty.

There is another side to Neil's work... Something really puerile that appeals to me hugely. Lots of his stuff includes cocks, shit and swearing. My favourite piece has to be this:



The piece is entitled Fuck Forever and he has actually gone to great lengths (fnar!) to paint this hideous scene, the likes of which can be found on those awful plates that grannies buy from ads in the Radio Times, and then he has daubed a huge comedy cock on it! I have no idea what he means by it but I really like it, partly because of the apparent destruction of a lot of painstaking work. Perhaps it isn't destruction though, as the image takes on a completely new meaning with the graffiti nob. I just don't know what it is...

After seeing this image it was obvious what I would do for the lecture poster. I simply printed the important details (who/where/when) digitally, then grabbed a brush and painted on a huge cock in his honour:



Yasmin clearly likes it. The wanger is obviously erect, suggesting that we are happy that Neil is coming to talk to us, a message that is reinforced by the crudely rendered "YAY!". Seriously though, as a poster I think it really works; it looks great, it certainly grabbed everyone's attention and it informed clearly about an event. Best of all Neil really like it and wanted a copy to take away! I told him that I made every effort to draw the cock exactly as he drew them, rather than my usual profile style where you would see only one ball. He commented that "you can tell a lot about a person by the way they draw a cock", which is something I have also always believed.

The thing is that Neil can really paint. I may be in the minority but I find that I will give a lot more time to someone's more conceptual work when I know that they have real talent and are not just a chancer with rich mates, like Emin, Hirst et al. His series of paintings for Amateur are fantastic and are based on "reader's wives" type ads from porn mags.



Must be great to be able to paint your own porn! Other projects that really stood out include the banana skin made out of plaster entitled "Andy's Dead", a reference to Warhol and the classic Velvet Underground album cover. He actually picked a banana skin up off the street, made a mould out of porridge (wtf?) and then cast it in plaster before it painting it to look exactly like the original found banana skin. Mental.

My Arsenal looks at first to be just a table covered with various weapons. Closer inspection reveals that everything is made from household packaging and food containers, sprayed black. Really, really cool:



The attention to detail is really staggering, which seems to be a bit of a pattern in Neil's work. I think I could learn an important lesson here.

A large part of Neil's work is photographic. In fact, he worked primarily as a portrait photographer when he was in his early twenties, straight out of art school. He showed us a series of portraits of his favourite contemporary composers; the likes of Philip Glass and Michael Tippett. He managed to gain access to such famous people simply by writing to them and asking! From this he ended up getting commissioned to photograph loads of legendary people, including Woody Allen, David Byrne, Jackie Chan and my all-time musical hero Arthur Lee. The photos are really intimate and unpolished, mainly because Neil set himself the constraint of never using a studio or artificial lighting. I love this one of Stephen King:



I was surprised when Neil told us that the master of horror was in fact a really nice and funny man - a natural comedian. It must be pretty cool to meet so many of your heroes, providing they don't turn out to be dicks.

Another major project that Neil showed us was My Name Is Roy - a photographic study of his friend's son growing up in the US. The "warts and all" photos are always interesting and at times slightly unsettling; I half expected to hear that Roy eventually massacred everyone at his High School. Was that the intention? What does that say about me and my perception of the suburban US? Anyway, turns out that all of the photos were constructed/posed, which adds another dimension of meaning. Neil suggested that it might be that the project was in fact a portrait of himself. I understood what he was talking about but didn't take very good notes on it, so I will leave it at that.



This write up has only scraped the surface of the vast body of work that Neil has created. He was around all day prior to the lecture and gave loads of people tutorials. I only wish that I got one as I think I would have learned so much from him.