The Last Films Which Couldn’t Lean on their Effects

Blade Runner and Alien have great effects, but they’re also great films: they were made before a movie could rely on the effects work to pull it through.

Visual effects of some kind had been a core part of the movies almost since their inception (though one seriously suggests that maybe having them around before Buster Keaton did his famous window and collapsing building stunt might have increased his personal safety. Any fan of classic science fiction has enjoyed time and again Lock Martin in a rubber suit as Gort vaporising things in The Day The Earth Stood Still at the behest of Michael Rennie or the ID creature illuminated in the force field in Forbidden Planet, or the ants in Them! and not cared about the fact there are minimal effects (and by modern standards) quite primitive ones. Actually, I’m going to put the caveat there for the ID creature because that’s both actually really effective and and holds up bloody well (clip on Youtube), the same cannot unfortunately be said for the giant ants, though the opening sequences with the little girl in the desert are some of the best ever made for atmosphere and sense of impending danger. One could easily come up with hundreds of other examples, both in the SF and Fantasy Genre but also other films which relied on Matte Painting and other techniques to augment the reality. But the point is that, ultimately, they were hung around the script and the plot, not the effects.

We love riding with Luke as he makes his final run to attack the death star, and the effects are believable enough, but at the end of the day even in 1977 nobody thought more a moment he was going to miss, the bit we enjoy is when Obi Wan tells him to turn off the computer and use the force, at the end of the day what matters has nothing to do with the effects, nothing to do with how it all looks, it’s the way they hook us with that plot moment. The effects team for Blade Runner created the archetype modern high tech slightly dystopian environment, it’s immersive and totally enjoyable, but what do we remember? We remember Roy Batty proving how human he is just before he dies (I won’t mind if you stop reading and go and watch it, I’ll even provide the link). Alien took the grand old plot of putting a small number of people in a country house with a murderer and updated it, let’s face it, the Xenomorph is really, really scary but it’s the tension which makes the film work; for an interesting comparison, think how alike it is to Jaws with the three of them on that small boat being menaced by the shark, the VFX shark is good for it’s day but it’s nothing special by modern standards. As an aside, the best description of Alien I’ve heard is “the film where everybody ignores the smart woman, and then everybody dies except the smart woman and her cat”.

What I think happens now is that effects are stunningly, amazingly good – these days when you watch the special features on the DVD you find that entire scenes actually consist of the key actors on a small set, with the ennviroment and lots of the people in the background put in with CGI – the days of Cecil B DeMille and the casts of thousands are long gone, why bother kitting out all those extras when you can generate them digitally and procedurally animate them? Now, let’s not pretend modern effects aren’t good, because they are, it comes down to what purpose they’re serving in the film (or equally to be honest these days in a TV series), are they enhancing our enjoyment of the story, or are they covering up for the lack of one? Are they there because they’re necessary or are they there because they can be? Do we actually need to see the monster? Close Encounters only shows us the aliens right at the end (and in a way I think they could almost have got away without so doing at all), we do need to see the Xenomorph, but a lot of the time it’s the way the steadily diminishing crew react to knowing they’re trapped in that ship with something they can’t beat which really makes the movie.

I sense that these days sometimes the film or series is to a degree about the effects, audiences expect the breathtaking and believable and so long as the production company can throw enough money at the effects studio they can have it. The Guardian review of Avatar two called it a ‘trillion dollar screensaver’; frankly I couldn’t see the point of the original movie, whoever coined the phrase ‘Dances with Smurfs’ to point out that the plot had been done in a more realistic, socially relevant, context without a vast effects budget was pretty much right. Movies and quality tv must first of all be about people, plot and script, then when you’ve nailed that you can add the minimum of effects you need. Currently I’m enjoying two great shows on Netflix: Black Spot / Zone Blanche, and Wednesday – in both the effects when they happen, are good but they only support what are essentially good, character driven stories.

Why do we need ‘Creatives’?

Seriously, what do we gain from having this term in the English language? Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for new coinages and for enriching the language by adding new words or new uses for all words (‘clusterfuck’, now that was a word we all definitely needed) but only if the do enrich, clarify or otherwise add to things.

So ‘creatives’ means what exactly?

According to the Cambridge Dictionary a creative is “a person whose job involves producing original ideas or doing artistic work”. At the other end of the age scale, the Urban Dictionary is going for “A person with a never-ending, intense desire to produce based on originality of thought, expression, etc. that impacts nearly every aspect of their life, both in negative and positive ways.” which at least doesn’t limit it to people’s employment, which is a good thing because lots of people are seriously creative in their spare time. To go back to the Cambridge definition, ‘producing original ideas’ can cover everything: you could spend your time coming up with original ideas of how to pump out a sewage farm or grow carrots, and both of those are vital things, but no wheatgrass sipping hipster in some former warehouse is going to include you as one of their friends who are ‘creatives’. One might be impressed with the ‘never-ending desire to produce’ in the Urban Dictionary till we remember somebody like the amazingly creative Francis Bacon who was mainly possessed of a never ending desire to get rat-arsed in the Groucho Club rather than producing painting. Though to be honest I’m not sure he’s be welcome among the organic quinoa tea and fringe beard set either.

Let’s look at alternative, equally good and frankly in my opinion superior things which could replace ‘creatives’

• Person who does creative things
• Person who produces things in the field of art, photography design or music
• Or for that matter we could just say ‘artist’ ‘designer’ ‘photographer’ ‘musician’ etc

The first two clearly have a major difference from the single word term: yes you’ve worked it out, they’re longer, but the first one is really only four times as long and they’re not difficult words are they? Are people just sacrificing clarity for brevity, or possibly laziness? I doubt it given the ability of the Youtube generation to generally use a thousand words where one will do; you doubt that’s the case? Just remember the number of times you’ve waded through a 20 minute video to realise it could have been half the length and still packed the same content.

Think back in the good old days, say the 60s. Can you imagine the aforementioned Francis Bacon calling himself ‘a creative’? Or Bailey? Or Jim Morrison? Back in the day you were an artist, a photographer or a musician. You didn’t need some umbrella term for yourself which added nothing to your life.

One Trick Ponies of the Internet

One of the worst failings of creative social media platform advice is that you need a consistent feed. Okay, from a creative point of view there is an extent to which you probably do, but not for the reasons that are frequently touted.

What, actually, does ‘consistent feed’ mean? What it means is that when your work is scrolled through there is an overall look and feel, that no photo makes you wonder why it’s there. That there is an overall look and feel, a style, which marks out the content. Taken from the creative standpoint that means that you’ve developed a style, that you’ve got an idea and you’re exploring and developing it. That people might even be able to look at an image and recognise it as yours. Over time it is quite probable that the work changes, that looking back a few years one could detect both an increasing confidence but also a sense of progression which comes from that development and exploration. That’s artistic growth people, it’s a good thing. However what actually happens all too often is that ‘consistent feed’ amounts to taking what is essentially the same photo every day, or sometimes more than once a day, day in day out, because that’s what gets you clicks on the thumb. That’s not artistic growth, that’s chasing eyeballs, and it makes your work very, very dull indeed.

There is somebody out there in the world of social media, I’m not going to name names because it would be unfair, but also there are any number of similar examples I could pick. The woman in question has been around for ages, and I used to love her content, she was a college student in the US who used to go out, buy clothes she liked in thrift stores, then go and take photos of herself wearing them accompanied by a bit of text. There wasn’t really a style, she just bought stuff she liked. Sometimes she’d do stuff like chop all her hair off or some such. She was a twenty something young woman and we were along for the ride on her trip through fashion exploration. Then she got big, got older, started to get sponsorship and ‘partner with brands’ as they say and all of a sudden her feed got very, very consistent. But there wasn’t any growth to it, there was just a feeling that you’d seen it before. I still check her feed now and again, it’s the same old stuff and it’s all very, very dull and uninspiring. Picasso would never have made it on social media, all those ‘periods’ would have had his follow base unfollowing in droves..

The real marvel is the people who when they can’t produce something just repost something they did a few months back, hell they can even admit they’ve done that, and it still gets likes even though most of the people have liked it once already. It goes to show that the world of social media creation is very, very different to how things have been since somebody crawled down a cave and blew red ochre mud over their hands prior to drawing a bison. For decades, or in the case of painters, centuries, you did one of two things; you created work which came from an internal vision and then you tried to persuade somebody to buy it (unless of course you were a person of independent means in which case it didn’t matter) or you created work to a brief for a client (or in the case of our coo-magnon forebears, the gods) and hoped in the end they paid for it either in cash or a successful hunt. Creating work for social media is subtly different in that the aim is to create work which people on the Internet will like enough to bounce a thumb off the like button and that is a seriously trivial outlay of time and effort, and no outlay of capital, on their part. The social media creator doesn’t need to deliver to a brief, and frankly I think very few of them could, nor do they need to persuade somebody to actually hand over money for the product. Suppose billing at even micro rates was the case, say 1p per image you liked, how many images would we like as opposed to the zero cost option we have now? I sense very few. I’ve just looked at the top image in the Instagram page which shows you people you may like – it has 7,116 likes so at 1p per like that photo alone would have netted her over £70 and there is no universe in which that photo is worth that sort of money; frankly at a local craft fair it might be worth a fiver as a print.

It’s a truism that no advice page on how to succeed on Instagram says ‘become a better photographer’ because that doesn’t matter, what matters initially is the number of people who will actually see your image, after that it just has to be good enough to persuade them to like it and to follow you, then you just need to keep throwing at them content which they’ll continue to like and stay following. You don’t have to be individual or imaginative, you just need to catch the eye of somebody with something with which they’re prepared to engage for less than five seconds and you’ve succeeded in stage one. Then you need to do it again as many times as you can after that. The platform will do the rest by subtly promoting your work to other people who might engage for five seconds. In reality the social media platforms are completely indifferent to the quality of your work or your development as a creator. Their only goal is to make money. Youtube is not an impresario; Instagram is not a patron.

Want to try an interesting experiment? Okay, here’s what you do. For two weeks (you probably won’t keep this up for that long but hey) promise yourself that every time you like an image, you’ll also post a comment explaining why you liked it, and that doesn’t mean “cool image” or “that’s awesome” or ‘that’s so pretty”, you have to post considered meaningful feedback like “I really like the way you’ve picked that background to contrast with the dress you’re wearing” or “that’s a clever use of colour contrast between the colour of the door of the house and the hedge”. You’ll like a hell of lot fewer things for two reasons, one is that you can’t be bothered with that level of investment but the other is the more interesting one that you can’t actually come up with what it is that you liked about it You were going to just hit the like button because it gave you a quick dopamine hit, not because you’d bothered to actually look.

So, do social media artists have a limited lifespan? I’d say yes so long as their social media artists because everything about social media works against change and growth because you know that the number of views you get is linked to the number of likes and the frequency of content production, and both of those are hampered by the exploration of new directions. For artists who are mainly about the art, and for whom revenue or self-worth does not depend on the options of random strangers on the internet, and who can therefore embrace change and growth, then not.

PRB Drawings and Watercolours – Ashmolean Museum

Ashmolean Museum, Autumn 2022

This may be an heretical viewpoint, but frankly I’ve often thought that many of the Pre-Raphaelites could draw better than they could paint. Not that I’m suggesting that they couldn’t do a bang up job of getting paint onto canvas, they certainly could do that without any problem at all. What they found a lot more problematic I think was doing so and retaining much in the way of life and spontaneity. What this exhibition demonstrates, in spades, is that give them a pencil or a bit of chalk and the back of an envelope (literally, in once case which we’ll come to later) and they were so much lighter and lifelike.

Naturally, I’m not (before you hit the comments section) saying ALL paintings by the Pre-Raphaelites are wooden and lifeless, of course they’re not. But many of them, in their way, are. The young couple in The Hireling Shepard are just wooden, the couple in Last of England look constipated and pretty much any Rossetti heroine looks about as believable as human being as somebody who makes their money as an Instagram influencer. When you consider that the espoused aim of the group was to achieve a more natural and genuine style. So, before we go further, let’s take aim with something pretty high calibre at one of the greats: Ophelia is about as unrealistic as it gets. Go on, take a look at it, enjoy the whole thing because it’s a great painting…then pop online and search for images of drowning victims (or not, it’s pretty dire). Millais Ophelia does not look like somebody who has been driven mad, hurls herself in a river and drowns. She looks like a cute girl who’s been paid to lie in a bath.

A trip round this exhibition though will show that these were folks who could draw easily and fluently, and whose drawings are full of life and realism. One thing which strikes the viewer is actually how small they are, while they’re beautifully done they’re very much thumbnail sketches of friends and family clearly done spontaneously and for fun, these are not drawings for posterity or the market, they’re drawings for the sake of drawings. Along with these you get to see a lot of the preparatory sketches for the big oil paintings: yes the Light of the World really did start out, literally, on the back of an envelope. You can see them thinking their way to the final compositions. Ruskin by his waterfall is there in preparatory sketch form, for which the caption writer has commented that he looks more relaxed and happy. Probably at that point he didn’t realise quite what was going on between Millais and Effie, though I’m tempted to suggest that Millais could easily have painted Ruskin as a more relaxed figure the way he sketched him and just maybe the painting says more about Millais’ feelings towards him (one assumes that Millais, if nobody else, knew the truth about what freaked Ruskin out when Effie peeled off) than it does about Ruskin’s feelings towards Millais

Nice also to see some of Lizzie Siddal’s drawings in the show to prove that given half a chance she could have been no mean artist herself. In fact female artists were quite well represented – though as my wife pointed out of one (the name of whom I’ve unforgivably failed to write down) while the blokes were painting she was having a large number of children AND campaigning for a number of social reform causes AND painting!

Do Social Networking People Actually Want To Know?

I’m sure everybody has done this, we’re scrolling through our Instagram feeds enjoying the work of people we follow (largely), double-tapping to like, maybe reading the captions. Nobody reads all the captions. Then we find one which says something like “really enjoying the autumn weather on the beach, what are you all doing today?” and perhaps typed a comment saying what we’re doing.

Really though, do they actually give a shit what you’re doing? I don’t mean that maliciously, I don’t think they think enough about you to care or not. They have thousands of followers, if a tenth of them reply that’s hundreds of people telling them they’re on the beach too (!!!!!!!), or walking the dog, or painting fir cones or whatever they’re doing. Do they have time to read these? Or actually take any interest in what somebody is doing? So I’ve got two theories about what’s going on here.

The theory from The Good Place

They’re genuinely asking, because they’re that sort of person. They’re the person who chats to you on the bus about stuff, who works in a shop and makes you feel happy to be there when they ask how you are. Okay, so they then forget you instantly the moment you’re out of sight, but they’re sort of reflexively social.

The theory from The Bad Place

They genuinely don’t give a shit about you, but they’ve internalised that Zuckerberg and his algorithm pixies really like ‘engagement’, and comments count more than likes, so the more people they can get to actually write something the higher their post ranks.

I suspect it’s both / either of them – but I do know that when I have posted something in all but one occasion there was no reply or follow up. The only time I did get an acknowledgement was a blog post where this woman wrote a long post about how her method for creating engaging blog posts was the finest thing since soft loo paper and what did ‘we all do to plan our blog posts’. Well my method had some similarities to hers, but included software she didn’t mention, so I bothered to write a reply explaining this and why….and got a follow up saying she was glad I’d used the same things as her. I’m definitely going for The Bad Place on that one.

Creative Pursuits in Pursuit of Time

There is an episode of Frasier where Frasier and Niles are talking about age.  Frasier says that he’s only middle aged, to which Niles quips that would only be true were he planning on living to 110 (or some such, I don’t have the exact quote).  From my vantage point in my mid 50s it’s clear that there just isn’t time to fit in everything I’d like to do, especially as I’ve got a job to fit in as well. So…

• I’m never going to go to art school
• I’m not going to have an artistic career
• I’m not going to be one of the people you see in gallery cafes clearly talking to other arts people about arts things
• I’m not going to work on cool digital graphics projects for movies
• I’m not going to…

Well you get the idea. There are lots of things it would be great to do, and if I was having my time over again knowing what I know now I’d probably do them. But I’ve got to face the fact that I’m not and in a way I’m sort of okay with that because I’ve accepted that in a way I can do all of the above as a hobby without the pressure of making a living off them. So my creative endeavours are really one vast personal project, with no pressure to please customers, art directors, critics or pay the mortgage.

What would Wren do

So, the battle lines are being drawn over the fate of the Mackintosh Library at the Glasgow School of Art after it fell victim to another and it seems even more calamitous fire. It’s restore v something new v something which is a bit of both according to the Guardian

It’s the curse of the modern age, the desire to preserve things in cultural aspic, or even worse to build a replica of something and then preserve that in cultural aspic. I remember the great fire at Hampton Court Palace, followed by the creation stone by stone of an exact replica of what had been burned down. Wren didn’t look at the smouldering ashes of Old St Pauls and say that it would be possible to rebuild it stone by stone, he cleared the site and put up something new and exciting in it’s place. After the old houses of parliament burn down we didn’t get a replica, we got (love it or loathe it) the gothic pile we have now. In the past it was accepted that buildings, even great and important ones, decay, fall apart or quite frequently burn down and you replaced them with something new and original. Coventry got it’s new cathedral at the end of the blitz, and it’s a city landmark in it’s own right. This is what for most of history, you did.

But now, in a UK terrified of both modernity and change, that thought process is an anathema. Now you have to create a replica of what was lost, which is not preserving our heritage at all of course. Nowadays there would be a ‘preserve old St Pauls society’, probably headed by the Prince of Wales, campaigning against the idea of a small version of St Peters in central London (so modern, so foreign) causing Wren to bugger off to seek clients in more forward thinking realms than this. Change is necessary, it’s part of life and of society. We have, sometimes, to let go of our vision of the past and not vote leave, sorry not seek to rebuild stuff.

The National Trust is seeking in the wake of the great fire at Clandon Park to ‘rebuild and reimagine’ and have invited various teams to make proposals. Some of these look more exciting and imaginative than others to my mind and it will be interesting to see which wins out. But what is not being proposed is just a slavish rebuilding. Personally I’d like to see something which stabilises the ruin and re-purposes the space as an arts venue in which not only will it be possible to see great contemporary art but also enjoy what is left of the original building. The country is awash with country houses, but few where you can see under the skin, so it’s a win win.

So, what about the Mackintosh library? Seriously? The building was gutted by fire and rebuilt, only to be gutted by fire again. So rebuilding wouldn’t be rebuilding the library, it would be rebuilding the rebuilt library. How about a solution which keeps the facade and then uses the rest of the space for an arts library for the 21st Century. For heaven’s sake, students weren’t even allowed to use the original one, give them one the next generation of Mackintoshes can use to learn how to be great architects and designers of the future.

Why Can’t We Have Rural ‘Cultural Hubs’?

Time for a polemic.

Seems to me that these days it’s common for depressed urban areas to re-invigorate themselves as cultural hubs (or whatever version of that phrase the people writing the bid documents and the press releases opt to use). Now, let me be clear on this, I’m not knocking this one little bit, I’m all for places focussing more on the arts, culture and creativity. Good for Hull, good for Stoke on Trent, good for anywhere which does it.

But, in this rush to re-invigorate city centres, we’re missing important places; we aren’t creating cultural hubs in our market towns and rural locations. When did you last seen creative companies with offices in Vancouver and Bandford Forum, or Shanghai and Bridport, or Berlin and Shrewsbury? Why is it always London, or Edinburgh, or Bristol, or Liverpool? Just doesn’t happen does it? I think it’s time that, as a nation, we seriously looked at tapping into the vast creative resources of what is, after all, the biggest part of the country. For all that cities are big, the part of the UK which isn’t cities is much bigger. This isn’t just a creativity blind spot, it’s an everything blind spot. For all the politicians of every flavour play lip service to the importance of rural britain, it’s rural britain which gets neglected. Go to London, or Bristol, or some such and you can see more than one bus at one time: go into the country and you’re lucky to see more than one bus a week. Libraries close. Schools get less money. Services get cut and people with money from the cities either retire here or just buy up properties as second homes at prices which prevent locals buying (or even in many cases, renting) which pushes up migration from the country and rural homelessness. So the fact that it’s cities which become creative hubs is just one projecting bit of a huge iceberg. Walk round any market town and you’ll see loads of premises for rent, shops which have closed down because the supermarkets have taken their trade, offices above shops, small manufacturing companies which have closed; look behind the pretty pretty tourist facade and you see market towns in something of a crisis. These premises would of course still make great shops, or small manufacturing units, but they’d also make great locations for creative businesses.

Not only do we have premises, we have people. Lots and lots of talented people, and especially young people. One of the big issues is the lack of opportunity for young people, there aren’t a lot of jobs and if you can’t drive then is pretty much there aren’t any jobs. Particularly, there isn’t a great variety of jobs. School leavers here often go off to college, and then don’t come back because to work in the field they want they need the employment tonnage of the big cities where they have to not only pay off their student loans but shell out for expensive accommodation.

Of course, the majority of the UK (and I’m going to now rather acidly call the bits which aren’t cities) has loads of creative businesses of all kinds. Small and successful design firms abound (a couple of friends of mine own one), and there are craft workshops of all kinds doing very well thank you. What’s more the Internet has allowed these small businesses access to a national, if not global, marketplace so they’re not just trying to sell to people in the same town. The very existence of all these creative firms shows how much talent and will we have once you find yourself in the land where every road has neither a pavement nor streetlights. So what’s my problem?

My problem is that this pool of creative talent isn’t recognised and it’s not supported in growing. These are self employed people and small firms operating often on tight margins. I’m sure they’d love to be able to offer places for apprentices and internships for the creatively motivated young people leaving schools and colleges but it’s not really an option for them. What if there was financial support for businesses to expand, with grants for premises and equipment, and adequate public transport to allow for young people to take up the apprenticeships and internships? What if not only did we attract production companies to do their locations shoots for tv and movies in small towns, but to base themselves here as well? Then we’d also attract the companies who provide support for them as well and then there would be opportunities for local people to work in them without moving away. If we were serious about affordable housing (rather than putting a token few homes on an another domitory executive housing project) people leaving university who wanted to work in the creative industries could move back home out of the cities instead of them. With all these folks the town centres could become thriving places in the evening with all the jobs in bars, restaurants, theatres and cinemas that would create.

You could well say my dream of seeing a feature in a magazine where they visit a major digital effects company based in Bridport, or an international design studio based in Fakenham. or hearing about the Sussex Cultural Hub is just dream. But then again, 20 years ago you’d have laughed at the idea that you’d have trendy cafes in Shoreditch or that one of the big players in the film industry could be New Zealand…..

Decorating: Small Changes and Big Ones

My 18 year old has decided that he wants to redecorate his room. Not that it was in any way childish before, it has two blue walls and two green walls which was the colour he picked before our major house remodel when he was 3 and just had done again after the builders left when he was about 10. It was a courageous colour choice but it really worked. Well he was sitting there the other day and decided he wanted a change; the new scheme is going to have the wall opposite the windows brilliant white (none of this ‘white, not quite’ stuff) and then a dark Oxford blue on the two side walls. Again, it’s really dramatic but based on the early look with the tester pots it’s going to be impressive. Given that he likes a really minimalist look to his room (he’s not big into teenage clutter) it may be the most stylish and ‘homes and gardens’ room in the house. When it’s done I’ll see if I’m allowed before and after photos to post. Big changes, massive impact

At the other end of the scale, I re-mastic sealed the edge of the bath. Now this is a really small change, but given that the old mastic was clear and the new stuff is white it’s a difference which shrieks out every time I go in there (and not just because I did a somewhat ropey job). I wasn’t ready for how much of a change not being able to see the line where the tiles meet the bath was going to be. Small changes, big impact.

On the profusion of artistic braiding accounts

There are a lot of instagram accounts devoted to braiding, and otherwise styling, hair; an awful lot of them. I follow a lot of them, though not all as I want some balance in my feed, though I could easily find several more to follow if I so chose. Many are Scandanavian, which seems to have become the spiritual home of braiding. We’re not talking your bog standard left over centre, right over centre and repeat here, nor the French braid which seemed to take the planet by storm in the 80s. No we’re talking Dutch Braids, Waterfall Braids, Fishtail Braids, Lace Braids, braids with any odd number of strands (I’ve seen a youtube video with 11 strand braiding), and indeed with four strands. We’re talking combination braids, braids with updos, combinations of the above…

And you know what, it’s art. It goes way above finding a way to keep your hair out of the way for school or sports. It’s creative, imaginative technically skilled and visually stunning. It’s everything that painting or sculpture or architecture has, but done by young women at home and it looks different every day.

And maybe that’s why we don’t call it art. I’m not riding a gender hobby horse over this, much as I think the Riot Girls had point, and possibly still do, I don’t think that the reason braiding on this level isn’t thought of as art is because women do it, or even that women so young do it so brilliantly. I think we don’t think of it as art because doing your hair is fundamentally a domestic act done for fun. It’s the same way that nobody would deny that high fashion design is art, but when somebody brings a pattern and some fabric home from the shop, alters it to suit their idea we call it ‘dressmaking’.

So next time you’re behind somebody in the shop, with braided hair, just remember, either her, or one of her friends and family, is an artist.