Denis Pratt
Who was Denis Pratt? You’ll find out at the bottom of this Substack. He fashioned one of the loveliest uses of language I know. A simple little twist which can be a daily inspiration for your writing.
There’s *such* a mish-mash of readers to this Substack. But most of us – as far as I can tell – make things. So I have an idea for December. An end of year celebration of our projects. I’ll do it if enough people respond.
Just email and tell me of a thing you’ve made in 2023 that you’re happy about and you’d like the others to see. Could be a piece of writing, a commercial project, a painting, anything full of human ingenuity, invention and soul. Be shameless. Give me a link to send people to. There are about 560 readers right now.
I’ll put out a December Substack full of your interesting courage.
That’s Ionel Talpazan who sold his UFO paintings from a folding table in lower Manhattan during the late 1990s. He died in 2015 and now collectors collect him. Here are some of his works. I share to emphasise that my tolerance of the bizarre is exospheric, but also that public taste is an ever morphing phenomenon … so please push forward the works you make without self-censoring.
There is one week to go before my TypoCircle talk in London on November 30th. An hour of me speaking about adventures in writing. It’s very rare for writers to be invited to give a TypoCircle lecture so I’m gratified to hear that tickets are selling uncommonly quickly. 120 spots. Get yours here.
Below is the official poster, which every attendee to the talk receives. Isn’t it a gorgeous thing? Created by Jim Sutherland of Studio Sutherl&.
Here’s some recent work I made for the Henry Moore Foundation. Again, a collaboration with the wonders at Studio Sutherl&. These posters are part of a wider campaign promoting the Henry Moore Studios & Gardens.
The Hertfordshire studios and gardens are where sculptor Henry Moore lived and worked for over forty years, converting barns and land into workshops and an outdoor gallery, whilst slowly becoming one of the world’s highest paid living artists. You can explore his home, exact recreations of his artistic spaces and the landscape.
The insight I had whilst developing the adverts was that we so often visit cultural and historic houses to inform our own lifestyle. Yes, it’s nice to look at well decorated places or the artistic objects, but deeper than that I think we seek the inspiration of others’ ways of being.
And so the line ‘Henry Moore knew how to live’ as the core message of the campaign.
Because he really did. He lived his life for art, he was always *making* something or exploring some aspect of form. He earned a fortune but lived frugally. Turned down a knighthood. Wrote to Margaret Thatcher, UK Prime Minister in the 1980s, asking that his income tax (which was second only to The Beatles) was given to the arts. Co-founded the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Believed in shapes, nature, sky, family. The more I worked with the foundation, the harder I fell for him. He knew how to live.
Then there’s the second bit of language business I introduced – ‘Seventy acres of Hertfordshire sky above seventy acres of studios, workshops, art and family home.’
It's a pretty functional sentence, packing in a description of what to expect, but that little initial mention of the acreage of sky offers, I hope, a sense that this is truly an artistic space – boundless and different.
One joyful and terrifying aspect of this project was presenting my concept to Mary Moore, Henry Moore’s daughter and fearsome protector of his legacy. I’m not sure anyone had previously suggested an ad campaign based so much on Moore’s character … so, oh, I was nervous pitching this to Mary. She approved though.
‘Denis Pratt, as my name was before I dyed it’ said the heroic and glorious Quentin Crisp.
Isn’t that just *magnificent*.
‘Before I dyed it.’
What a twist of language. The psychedelic effect of swapping one verb for another. Try it. Pick a verb in a sentence in an email today and substitute it for another that makes no sense, whilst trusting that your reader will make it make sense. They always do.
The still is from Orlando, Quentin as Queen Elizabeth, Tilda as Orlando. Here’s the trailer.
How to live, that’s always the question really isn’t it? How to live with courage in our making. Slipping from language to romance, gender to gender, appearance to appearance. For art. For skies. That’s what all the above is about and it’s what the below retired detective is thinking about as well.
The detective
Mysteries, like missed days, keep sporing
but I walked from the mysteries
(whisper it, not all of them)
into this neverlair of retiring –
this thought-paneled room,
this shutmouthed, wishrich yawning.
All police are corrupt.
On my part I bagged up
certainty as evidence,
but pocketed a little
ambiguity for myself.
And I remember,
as sure as the taste
of canteen grapefruit,
I remember.
The Case of the Five Sarahs,
(we don’t know who we are
until we pretend to be ourselves).
The Piano Shop Murder,
(everything is either
music or code,
never both).
The Jubilee Witch,
(ritual hides beneath ritual).
The Time of the Talking Honeybee,
(love is quiet and has its season).