Bit of a Blur Read Online Free PDF

liked football, too.
    I went to Paul’s space in M.B. Motors one day, the converted garage opposite the main college building. He was working on a huge grey and black abstraction. I was very impressed. He said, ‘I like this bit in the ker-corner.’ The corner was a good bit, you had to admit. It had pleasing asymmetry, it had dimensionality, I said. I was way out of my depth, but so was he, probably. Paint was all over his space like engine oil in a garage. Everyone had a space, a white cubicle. The spaces were all crammed together, so that everyone interacted. The space opposite Graham’s on the first floor had spots painted all over it, a pleasing array of dots. We all liked those spot paintings. They were easy on the eye. They were nice to look at. Graham said they were the work of a madman called Damien. Damien Hirst.
    Minds were racing everywhere. Opposite Paul, a right geezer called Jim who had been a plumber for some years was doing something with maps. He’d pasted a London A-Z together and was subverting its reality in some way that I was embarrassed not to be able to grasp. He said ‘Luvly-juvly’ quite often. By the end of the second year, he was saying ‘lubbly-bubbly’ and going out with an upper-middle-class girl from French and drama.
    Next door to Paul the space was vacant, though. I asked him what had happened and he said that the guy came in one day, didn’t paint anything, just stared at the wall and was never seen again. ‘He dried up,’ said Paul, with great foreboding. It was like a horror story: like someone had died. I could tell Paul was terrified, as if they were infantrymen and the next guy in the line had bought it. For some sad reason, the unknown artist had given up. I don’t think anyone ever stops having ideas. It’s impossible to stop having ideas. He must have lost his bottle, or realised he wasn’t good enough. It’s a struggle to make art. It was a forlorn sight, that empty space, but it soon filled up with Paul’s debris and spare ideas. Boundaries were being tested. It was a very competitive environment. A lot of discussion went into trying to say exactly what Fine Art is. It’s a hard thing to define, art. If you can say exactly what art is, then you probably are an artist.
    We went to the Tate to see the de Koonings. Paul marvelled at ‘Willem’s’ sexy pink swirly-girly abstractions. My favourite place was the British Museum, a huge castle full of treasure. They’ve got everything there from Beatles’ lyrics on the back of an envelope to mouldering pharaohs. I spent days in there, giggling at the clocks. The early clocks were mesmerising. I thought about those a lot.

Damon
    Damon’s dad is an art man. He ran the art foundation course in Colchester that Graham had attended, and he ran the art department at Essex University. I knew all this before I met him, because Graham told me. Graham had talked quite a lot about Damon. Damon is someone people talk about.
    Graham and Paul and I went to the Beat Factory, a bijou, pristine studio near King’s Cross. We were going to listen to what this band of Graham’s had been doing. They’d just finished recording some new songs. We didn’t hit it off straight away, Damon and I. He was wearing a necklace and he still had ‘up’ hair. No one at college was doing the ‘up’ hair thing any more. Hair spent most of the eighties going in the wrong direction, but things were getting back to normal again.
    The first thing I can remember Damon asking me was whether I’d been in a recording studio before. I had to admit I hadn’t. They played the songs, which were a bit cheesy. I was very relieved about that. We went off to Eddy’s house to drink poitin, Irish moonshine made from potatoes. It’s really nasty stuff. Eddy was Damon’s friend. They had been to drama college together. Eddy was a huge personality squeezed into a fairly large body. He played the guitar in the band and his little mate played bass; it was a