Monday 9 November 2015

My 500 Friends

My 500 Friends who I've known so long.
You are all so dear.
Let me sing you this song.
You can imagine it as a tune.
You can listen to u-tube while you read it.

Add Friend and Unfriend
We laugh, we cry, the end.
Twas a short and sweet
Emotional spend
as tidy as a tweet.

Spell me wrong words that make me feel right.
I'll look over them again tonight.
U an I

We follow and unfollow
Though we walk no where together
It's a place we've both been
Though you don't have to be there
to be seen.

Down country lanes
And under trees
Will you text me please?
I'll google the location
I'll meet you at the station.
Just send me a pic of that meadow.
No need to pack a picnic.
Let's pretend.
We had a sandwich there.
Under that tree.
Of February.

If we can see the whole world by only sitting in one place,
The crashes and the bombs and the poly tickle race...
If we can know all this without moving,
How are we improving?

After all that information,
You might send a box of clothes to Greece
Or you might need to vomit or shower or go home
like the luggage check people who view 5000 suitcases an hour.

Friend and unfriend, send and unsend
Our social verbs.
Our exercise with limited muscle movement.
The less muscle movement required, the more you get done, the more you can type.
The more you type, the more grief you have....no no no.
The more friends you have....sorry...correction.
More typing equals more friends.

We are socializing without even having to step out the door.
What's more convenient than staring at a screen
And thinking that you are on the scene?

There are pictures of far away places that we'll never go to.
I was in Antarctica today followed by twenty facts.  I didn't notice the weather.
There wasn't much change. There was an Argentinian boy born there in 1979.

The lifespan of a social spend. Not a coffee. Not a friend.
Sober Pretender
Grab your friends by the hand.....all 500 of them.
I challenge you to recall even 50 of their names.

Our moods are tracked by graphs that say
How many people were here today.
Here today? But they were at home.
I have no doorbell anyway...Just wires.
If you know how to hotwire a car,
you can rub the two ends together
And my bell will go off.
Or just knock.

U and I
Only two letters
Better and more better.


Thursday 29 October 2015

Forty Five Lives now available as a print on Etsy



This one is the first in a series of mass portraits detailing the lives of a few people I have met.



To see Etsy Shop

Tuesday 27 October 2015

Bloomsbury Festival

Here's Ben at Light Up Store Street on Friday evening. The fire and water fountains were amazing. The Bloomsbury Festival 2015 came with a few problems....the main one being that The Mary Ward House who had promised rooms to several artists in June cancelled their offer only a few days before the festival. I was moved to Senate House, but the hundreds of programs that were printed up had specified me and other artists being elsewhere. At seven o'clock on Friday evening, the boards arrived to hang the work up, but there was no one to assemble the boards, so I returned at ten in the morning on Saturday just two hours before the opening to hang the work. I would not wish to repeat that. The next day, I took the paintings to Brunswick Square to show them in a tent. Still, I met a few nice people and sold a few works. 

Saxophone in a Smokey Room


Saxophone in a smokey room sipping dark red cocktails....smooches between sets. Seated around little round tables, the couples cross-legged quietly confide in the music. 

Monday 26 October 2015

Berlin Summer 2015

We had a fabulous time in Berlin. We had a rough list of museums to pop into and cultural stopping points, but all I really wanted was to meet some friendly people....and that's what we found.  That was the best part. It was the groovy day that we walked from Alexander Platz to Gorlitzer Park. First, the computer museum....Ben was in Heaven. I was in Hell. a pixelated funeral of retro games back in the days of monotone table tennis. I looked at a map of the world that corresponded with cities that offer degrees in game design. Interesting.
We strolled on to Karl Marx Allee and marveled at the grand buildings. From there, a tram to Freidrichshain. A cool hotel with lampshades made of shredded magazines.  A suicide circus nightclub that looked like a jazzed-up outdoor climbing park. The East Side Gallery teaming with people and their cameras. We took a breather ducking out towards the river Spree and found a floating youth hostel boat. They had a sign outside that eloquently meant "Piss off if you aren't staying here. " And there was the Red Castle Bridge....Oberbaum Bridge. Beautiful and whimsical. We crossed the bridge and listened to the buskers strumming with their hats out. A young girl was in tears having some kind of drug induced crisis. And then, we found a big bag of spray paint just sitting there. For a moment, I thought," It's meant for us." But then, a guy came down a big ladder. As it happened, he was painting a four story mural for Nike. A professional graffiti artist. Then a ping pong beer garden. An Indian meal, a kiwi popsicle and Gorlitzer Park where we met Franzi and Hendrick from The Blue Ones. Ben was in raptures as the place where they play frisbee is a bowl and he thought that a spaceship had landed there to create it. He was commenting on the frisbee players...."That guy is a jelly belly. How did he catch that?....That guy has been playing since birth...." And he was right. There is a guy in Gorlitzer Park who plays Frisbee everyday rain, snow, or shine. We joined in and chatted with our new friends until past midnight. Hendrick was punctuating his paragraphs with  a set of sit ups every five minutes. My first taste of Club Mate Soda. Good stuff. 

Friday 17 July 2015

Something for You....The Faces

Pen, ink, watercolour, collage on paper currently on show at The Seven Dials Club 42 Earlham Street, Covent Garden, London. These faces are somewhere between caricatures and real life. I like drawing faces. It might be from living in a city with so many anonymous faces passing everyday.

This painting is also available as a fine art giclee print in a limited edition of fifty.

This was an accidental solo show. It did not start out that way. I am part of a group international collaborative show of small works called Unsend. It began with about 40 artists from around the world collaborating on postcards. The project had its first show in Spain in May of 2015. It then went on the Mississippi Museum in Denmark in June. It was then supposed to come to the Seven Dials Club in July. Due to complications, I put my work up instead. The Unsend show continues and is in Massachusetts in October of 2015. 

Collage on Canvas of faces


Monday 6 July 2015

Seven Dials Club, London

Thank you for coming to the show at Seven Dials and viewing my work. There was a last minute cancellation of the group show that I arranged. I have put my own work up instead.

This is part of some of the work I have done for Unsend, the collaborative group which I am part of.


The show called Unsend curated by Ivana Blanco Gross was supposed to go up at Seven Dials Club for the opening on Monday , the sixth of July. It did not happen, but here are some images from this collaboration.

 It is an interesting question.....who does this image belong to if two people worked on it?


This is another collaboration. I did the drawing on the left and Ivana added a little bit of text.




The opening is July 6, Monday evening from 6 to 8:30

Venice Video of my sketchbooks

It is best if you google Joanne Morgan vimeo Venice, to find this video.

Friday 22 May 2015

Back up singer for Tammy Why Not on the subject of Sex and Ageing at the Wellcome Collection

How did that happen? I was meeting some ladies from Florida to give them a tour of the Bloomsbury area some time ago. I showed them the usual haunts....Charles Dickens House, Coram Fields, Russell Square, and then I suggested that we go to the Wellcome Collection to view the current exhibition....The Institute of Sexology. It had been on my agenda for months. There was a pause and then a...No....they would rather go to Camden Town and do some thrift shopping, check out the market, and see the longboats on the canal. So, I left them to the dress stalls and telephone box key chains and headed back to the exhibition for some me time.

There, I joined a group of women including Tammy Why Not, to hear an informative commentary on the bound feet of Chinese women, a photo essay on persecuted lesbians in South Africa who risked their lives to have their portraits taken, the burning of a German lab devoted to the study of sex, and a photo essay about people in the US who had made their own sexual devices in basement workshops. Suddenly, we were in the green room discussing this topic....and today, a few members of that group joined Tammy Why Not (performance artist Lois Weaver) as back up singers and performers in her show....What Tammy Wants to Know about Sex and Ageing at The Wellcome Collection.  This show has toured worldwide since 2012 in a variety of venues.

Through this, I have met a very talented group of ladies who I will mention later.

I contributed with a monologue about one of many bad internet dates I had been on. I did this in the voice and style of Double Door Norma....the Tennessee Barfly.

My Husband.....my third husband...I killed him. I didn't mean to kill him. But he gave me a water pistol for my birthday. By the time I got up to his hip, I realised it were a real gun. And so....I have turned to the internet to find my men these days.

One particular man I will call Harry as I forget his name, but he seemed like a Harry.....he sticks in my mind as one of the worst dates I have ever been on in my life....so bad that it was good.

I knew that I would only be meeting this man one time, so I decided to meet him on his own turf as I had never been to Haslemere. I knew it was near the Devil's Punchbowl. I reckon that man has the formula for the that punch. It's probably his own recipe.

It was quite an effort to get there. I rode my bike, then took a train. When I arrived, I  saw a hand waving from a car window that was half rolled down. Would it not be more polite to step out of the vehicle and come forward to shake my hand?

He was intent on taking me to a pub that served a fine confit duck he was told. In retrospect, it is better to start out with chicken wings from KFC and work your way up.

The bartender put a few logs in the fire. The logs were not burning, trouble catching light. I suggested kindling. No...Harry the log expert said that this was birch and birch always had a hard time burning. I said that I did not think it was birch as birch has a thin white bark.....Oh....? No Harry the log expert says that it is birch. It's birch . It's not birch. It went like that. Needless to say, nothing was going to be catching fire that day.

tbc

Wednesday 28 January 2015

Postcards From New York.

The postcards have arrived from New York. There will be 200 or so by the end of it. It is the beginning of a new collaborative project involving a dozen artists spread out across the world. A little order is coming into play. For example, I have found the password to my BlogSpot. Well done. And if I can retrieve the passwords to some of my other concerns, I will be moving slowly in the right direction instead of quickly in the wrong direction. That is my only goal this year....a vague goal to move slowly in the right direction. Dropping ballast and filling up with the right fuel. A big restructure of time and priorities. Fresh oil paints....three paintings in progress....small and long.


Benjamin has taken up fencing up this semester. Apparently, his enjoyment of tennis had something to do with it. Though they offer a variety of clubs at his school, fencing is not one of them, so we must travel to Old Street for this. I have found an interesting underground soup bar in the metro station at Old Street. I also saw my first bitcoin vending machine down there. There is a book out at the LSE Waterstones about this new phenomenon....bitcoin-currency.
Ben has also found the number of his phone. We have put the correct chip in that corresponds with the phone bill. Helpful. Techno genius. This means his is in touch with me and his friends. He sounds very serious on the phone. I hardly recognise him. Pre-teen personality shining through.
Postcards have arrived for Benjamin. He is very excited to become part of an exhibition in New York.