Hope

This image has self-selected and the text is self centering And underlining itself.   I shall choose my words with care so as not to waste any.  This is Liverpool. The field of Hope in Sefton Park. I have hope.

Another Journey

The book that is yet to be

Once more I am keeping vigil thorugh the early hours. Although I am many miles away I am conscious that later today Peter's archive starts its journey from Kent to Beirut and that in some strange way he will be travelling with it.

How could he not be?  Life for him was an ongoing journey - the imagery runs throughout his work. He collected ideas, information and inspiration from around the world, even sending himself a postcard from China with his thoughts and observations.

Early journey - 10 years old.

The fascination with travel and transport started early and stayed with him. The little blue truck with the sign "Rea's Contractors" in his early painting is almost empty.  He spent his life making sure his truck would stay full and he trundled the tools of his trade - books, pens, computers and large quantities of paper - from place to place.  He kept every sketch, tracing, rough, proof and spare copy.  He brought back his teaching plans, magazines, examples of his students' work and many hundreds of photo transparencies.

In his final doodle he described himself as the journey man on the road, an apt pun as he was not ony an international traveller, but a journey man artist - available for hire by the day.  While at the Edinburgh Fringe in 1960 with "The Circus"a show he devised and wrote with Mary, he managed to pick up some additional work for Edinburgh Gateway Theatre designing their posters and programmes.

Alongside his design work ran his career as a teacher and   writer.  There are articles in books, journals, reviews in newspapers, papers for universities.  He coined the phrase Advanced Typographical Design and used typography as a medium for stunning artwork.

In the twelve years of Windows on Design and the Profile Intermedia conferences he relentlessly argued the case and place for graphic design in the new digital world, conscious that with the advent of desktop publishing and computer technology, the skills of the typographer could become redundant. He did not have the answers but he brought together a dazzling array of exciting and influential designers to inspire the next generation



In the Pickford's container with his life's work will go a box of Letraset, his set square and rulers, a small cardboard box of cars, trucks and trains, a series of typewriters, the ARD sound system that he designed, a music system and some of his favourite jazz LPs.
But the VW Campervan is staying with me, right here on my mantlepiece.
And his Amerikarma book is still on the list of things to do...

A winter postcard

I have been having a winter break. No hazardous sporting adventure for me though - I am of the opinion that extreme exercise can be very bad for your health.  I am happy to be a spectator. And it is not everyday that you see a lot of small people with large ears, long beards and wearing pointy hats ski-ing down a roof top, Here in Cologne the poor things are frozen mid-stride.

At first I thought these were Snow White's friends - they look similar but there are eleven, Then I realised that these could the celebrated Heinzelmännchen of old Cologne who once dedicated their nights to aiding the good citizens in their chores until a curious tailor's wife tripped them up by scattering peas and so offended them that they deserted the town and never agin returned to help.  So whilst this year the citizens of Cologne struggled to prepare for Christmas these rascals must have been having a great time ski-ing over the rooftops.  I will create a comfy corner in my kitchen and go to bed early in the hope that a Heinzelmännchen or two, or even a few Brownies, will take up residence.

I was staying with Sue and Klaus whose home is so beautiful and hospitality so perfect that they must surely have a team of secret helpers. Smiling Sue is my second cousin.  Our George grandparents were brother and sister, but we would never have known each other were it not for our shared obsession with family history and the steaming search engines of Genes Reunited.

Our current project is to discover whether our four times great grandmother, Mary Lodge was related to the Williams family of Aberpergwm. There is a well-argued theory that this branch of the Williams family was not only descended from a number of difficult to pronounce Welsh princes, but also from one of the main contenders for the very personage of King Arthur. Now that would be an interesting addition to our family tree.

And - Sue has now found me the name of another living cousin on the Rea side of my family.  I am still having a little trouble tracking him down but it is just a matter of time... What a delight he has in store when he discovers his new family...

Sue and Klaus live by The Rhine, This used to be the diplomatic quarter of the capital of West Germany.  Imposing buildings face out on to the riverside and look over to a fairy tale landscape on the other bank which is a popular destination for tourists from the Netherlands who come searching for hills. Chamberlain once met with Hitler in the white hotel at the top of the hill.  At night the illuminated building floats eerily in the darkness, looking so close.

Klaus's daughter Ana is a secondary teacher and gave me an excellent  detailed commentary on our tour.  A highlight, she promises, is the Carnival season which runs through the winter and culminates in an intoxicated frenzy on Shrove Tuesday.  One for the diary.

 But for now - it is still the Christmas season and in the great cathedral of Cologne light studded Christmas trees stand behind the altar and visitors peer with curiosity at the Shrine of the Wise Men where the bones of all three are said to be entombed. What mishap befell them that they all perished at once and how their remains ended up in Cologne can only be imagined.  I do not recall any account of a final show down with Herod or tale of a further expedition to the West where some boating  accident on the Rhine may have occurred.  However, the spectacular gold casket shines with a brilliance that brings warmth to the cold stone space and one can quite see why Midas wanted more of the stuff.

At the opposite end of the long nave visitors crane their necks to peer at the imaginative, interpretation of the traditional Nativity Crib  The  question is posed "Where are you in this scene ? If Christmas came again, what would you do? - Football fan, council worker, school child? "

But for me, best of all, was the Nativity centre piece of the Market Square the local town of Bad Godesberg. On New Year's Eve passers by were still stopping to gaze in at the fabulously detailed figures, recreated with care and arranged with a compelling dramatic artistry that keeps you walking round the entire installation to find out what happens next.  And then round again, just to make sure.

 

And so back home to England, to my own festive display of the many Christmas greeting cards from my friends near and far.  Each year they arrive they remind me that my virtual world is full with so many family and friends that we could fill a village as busy as the Bethlehem of Bad Godesberg. Little angels everywhere bring hope for the future.   Peace and joy to all.  Penny x

Now

10 seconds to Midnight 

In the secret hour between Midnight 2014 in Germany and the first minute of 2015 in England I began to collect my thoughts on the events of this year which has given me cause to pause and reflect: how fast turn the hands of the clock that measures my life. Once I was the youngest, always a child, but now I am grown up and soon will be grown old. I stand on the threshold and look both ways - back into the old year and forward to the new, forward to the rest of my life.

The first of 300 dusty boxes of paperwork

Like the Spirit of Christmas Future my big brother Peter shone a light on my future life. Seventeen years my senior, he reached a crisis and was forced to open the boxes he had been filling and storing throughout his long life. And as I watched him fall deeper into reverie with each paper he removed and page he turned I felt the leaden pull of my own treasure.

Others grew impatient because he would not, could not recognise his hoard as a pointless stash of worthless words, but he saw it as a process caught on paper, not the end result but the journey. And every journey was of interest.


I began to feel protective for my own mountain of paper, less organised than this, waiting to be sorted and stored for the day when, for the day when, for the day.  For Peter that day did not come.  The paper is still there and Peter is gone. And now another few, new, pages have been added, containing the extraordinary promise that his lifetime collection of the printed word in its many forms, the books, the notes, the posters that formed the basis of his career through the world of the practice and teaching of graphic design, would be packaged for transit halfway across the globe to a university in Beirut.  And so it would be saved and would be of benefit to others. But at what cost and by what effort and by whom.  Will Peter be loved the more for this generous gesture or will it prove to be a curse?

Before

For me it must be a prompt to change my ways. This is my big chance to turn my life round and become someone else. I must cast off my bad habits and become organised, methodical, adopt a routine and above all go to bed early, for surely in my night owl habits and chaotic lifestyle I am slipping down the slide into a Bohemian nightmare that can only lead to a future of boxes, of unfinished projects, artwork existing only in the imagination and a list of unachievable intentions that goes on and on and on and is never complete.

After

But no... I am the Penny Rea who comes up with the goods, meets deadlines, completes tasks because I know that the Show Must Go On and that All Things Are Possible.  I can get my act together and so I did. I transformed the disaster zone into a neat and tidy bedroom for my little Lizzy. But where did the paper go?  Did it reach the bin, the tip, the fire? No, it reached my kitchen where it stayed a while, before moving on into my bedroom where it waits to be sorted and stored for the future - maybe.

Welcome 2015

I am in Bonn this New Year, staying in the home of my second cousin Sue and her lovely husband Klaus.  Their life seems calm and well ordered. Their apartment is a tranquil haven, a fascinating gallery of books, artwork and souvenirs collected during a lifetime of work around the world.

 I have had a precious few days here hiding from the world, eating healthily and sleeping at the expected times, recovering from the past year. We raised a glass to the New Year as we looked out at the crackling fireworks shimmering over the Rhine. Forget the future, forget the past. Life is the best gift this Christmas. 2015. Now.

Packaged memories

We open a random package in my brother Peter's house and a stream of memories pour out. This one brings back Industrial Image - an exhibition of British Industrial Photography from 1843 to 1986.

I remember back nearly 20 years and I am walking round the Photographers' Gallery overwhelmed by the brooding images that captured the grandeur, the smell and the sweat, the toil of a nation. And I try to remember what exactly it was that he did - designed the layout, interpretation and catalogue for the exhibition,  I think, but do not exactly know.

There are stacks of carefully preserved images from the exhibitions he organised, that must be unwrapped and identified, then dispersed.  Nothing is of great value, but everything documents a moment or period in his life in a kind of complex visual diary.

Why do we do this?  Why do we keep all these memory prompts?  Why do we feel it so important to remember?  There is too much to remember,  And soon it will be forgotten.   So I look around my own house and realise that I am keeping other people's memories, in books, in furniture, letters and pictures. Second hand memories. Do I dare to release them?

Moving on

My big brother Peter had ginger hair, just like me.  He had a drum kit.  He played in a jazz band and he went to art school.  He gave me a straw hat for my fourth birthday.  This is the family photo taken on that occasion.

Peter was the oldest and I was the youngest.  He carried me home from the nursing home where I was born.  Dad was working so Peter went to collect Mum and we came home together in a taxi. Mum always talked about the journey home - it was a picture she kept in her mind's eye until the end.  Peter remembered it too and so from their shared memory I imagined it and from this a special bond grew.

I felt connected by this imagined memory to the art student brother who moved out into a new and unknown world.  He left our mundane life behind. That is what happens when birds fly from the nest.  This is the order of things. The door was open for me to follow but I did not accept the place at art school that was offered. I chose my own path but in the end it led to the same place.

Peter became a performer, a designer, a teacher, a wanderer and a man of many homes.  I was a stage manager, an organiser, a teacher, I am a perpetual traveller with my heart in many homes. Like my big brother I don't know where I want to be.  But I am still in this world and once more he has moved on.

 

 

Penny Magazine 1832

Antony Oliver, Conservator from Sheffield Archives has fixed our Family Heirloom.  To be precise he has performed an extraordinarily delicate 21 stage repair procedure to replace the spine, repair the first eight pages with a fine Japanese tissue and replace a piece of black linen that had been used to repair a torn page with filmoplast tissue.  He has also made it a bespoke box with very smart label which read: Penny Magazine, 1832.

It is not Penny's Magazine.  It is, or was, my great, great Grandfather's book.   The inscription inside the front cover reads
"This book is the property of George William Rea, left to him by his Grandfather Thomas George, son of Squire Henery  (sic) George of Blaenavon, April 5th 1937.  Signed M. T. Rea, mother of G.W. Rea."