Sculpture / April 15, 2015 by Adrian Joyner

I have a faint but satisfactory memory from primary school involving plasticine. It seems that I had made some major work, horses in a field, cows maybe. The field was contrived by building a wall of plasticine around the edge of the plasticine board. I now realise that the board had started out as a slate for writing on with a slate pencil. These things were going out of use when I started school. I was instructed to carry my chef d’oeuvre into the other classrooms for the other children to admire. It must have been a very affirmative thing for me. ....................

Art / April 13, 2015 by Adrian Joyner

I suppose art was always my thing. At the age of nine or ten, before I passed my eleven plus exam anyway, I made a series of pencil drawings whilst sitting at the back of the class* depicting some buckskin clad hero fighting Indians or brawling in saloon bars. He wore a fringed jacket, I recall. I had developed a taste for rudimentary Mantegna style foreshortening, which I guess I must have picked up from comics. I can still remember details from these drawings that I did sixty years ago. These drawings were objects of desire for classmates, I think..............

Lidl / April 2, 2015 by Adrian Joyner

I guess there are branches of Lidl all over Europe, the world, who knows, and all pretty similar, I imagine. In and around Kalamata there are three. Some years ago, Herbert watched a guy with a machine cutting the big expanse of grass around one of these supermarkets. He went in to ask if he could take the cut grass for his sheep ...............

Herbert Loitsl / March 17, 2015 by Adrian Joyner

Herbert is our nearest neighbour. He has three olive terraces a few hundred metres down the track from our land. He has lived there for almost twenty years. For the first few years he lived on the site in a caravan until he got round to building something more substantial. What he built was a single story Tyrolean chalet with deep eaves, whose white walls I later adorned with the kind of painted baroque curlicues and floral swags favoured in his native village in Tyrol..................

The Geranos / March 13, 2015 by Adrian Joyner

Once the structure reached the first floor, it became obvious that we were in need of some kind of hoist to get material up from ground level. On the building sites in the district, of which there were many a few years ago, I saw different kinds of elevators and lifts in use, but the most common type of lifting gear was the geranaki, a small crane powered by a petrol engine, chiefly used for lifting wheelbarrow loads of mixed concrete or wheelbarrow loads of bricks or concrete blocks.................

Tiles / March 7, 2015 by Adrian Joyner

Now you might imagine when you look at the big structure, that the ceramic tiles which cover most of its external surfaces, were part of some plan. Not so. We had been constructing the thing from cast concrete and cement blocks for some time before tiles made an appearance. The dead cement greys gave it the air of a nuclear bunker or a Soviet railway station. I quite liked it..............

The Faulty Monument / February 28, 2015 by Adrian Joyner

Quite recently I spent some months working on a very large piece of sculpture, a standing figure. (a woman, obviously). My first thought was that I would make it from strips of steel, welded together. It was a little over three metres high, almost twice life sized, so it soon became quite heavy as I welded one strip to another. With the help of a family of couch surfers who were staying at the time, we wrestled it up on to the concrete plinth I had made for it beside the track about fifty metres from the house, so that I could finish it in situ.................

The Earthquake / February 28, 2015 by Adrian Joyner

Much more recently, a piece of my sculpture was destroyed in an earthquake. Well, an earth tremor. It was a biggish object, a somewhat larger than life sized torso. I made a plaster mould from a clay original and then cast it in white cement, so it was quite a substantial chunk of stuff, and heavy...............

Painting / January 28, 2015 by Adrian Joyner

I have painted easel pictures for a long time, more than fifty years I suppose, though my output has varied year to year. When I was younger, in my twenties, I took it quite seriously and exhibited stuff at the annual open exhibition at the city gallery in Hull, the Ferens Gallery. At the time we lived in Holderness, the level plain which stretches eastward from Hull to the sea. ................

Zanetos / November 27, 2009 by Adrian Joyner

We live outside the village and our social relations are patchy. Take yesterday. In the evening we walk down the track with a bottle of wine to Herbert’s house. Six o clock and Venus is bright white over the bay. Nearby in the sky, another planet, Jupiter maybe. The fire is burning in the grate of Herbert’s tiny living room and he graciously finds us an English language news channel on his TV. He usually watches Austrian stuff, naturally...............

Hoopoes / October 9, 2009 by Adrian Joyner

The other day, one of the two cats that live under the wooden house came trotting along the terrace with a Hoopoe in its mouth. Now, if you’ve never seen a Hoopoe, and they are hardly ever seen in England, it’s a pigeon sized bird with a curving bill, a long crest on its head, which it often erects on landing, and bold black and white stripes on its wings and tail; a bird such as a small child might draw, or Edward Lear...............

Homecoming / October 2, 2009 by Adrian Joyner

Now, homecoming, returning to your own place after an absence is supposed to be a rewarding experience. The first twenty minutes following our return the other day to the wooden house, after spending a few weeks in the UK, was beset by an unlikely series of incidents..................

Maniot Feuds / September 18, 2009 by Adrian Joyner

Mani, where we live, is that middle finger of Greece pointing south toward Africa, a strange country of rocky headlands and deserted tower houses. In the past, the Maniots had a reputation as brigands and bandits, and the whole peninsula used to be known as Kakovouna, the bad mountains, or the land of evil counsel. The chief occupation of the maniot families seems to have been feud, and these feuds were not merely quarrels, but shooting wars, vendettas, which could persist through generations...................

Ismini's Memories / September 18, 2009 by Adrian Joyner

Last week we spent an evening at Ismini’s house. Ismini is 66, a Greek colleague of Linda’s at her school and a native of Kalamata. She has been reorganising her house, moving furniture, going through old papers and books, and is in a mood to reminisce..............

The Odeio / July 3, 2009 by Adrian Joyner

One of my favourite buildings in Kalamata is the elegant colonaded pile which currently houses the Odeio the ‘musical conservatory’, as the new tourist guide rather grandly puts it. It lies in the old town, up a steep street of stone steps, below the castle, behind the big church of Ipapandi (one of several names for the Virgin) Big palm trees grow in its shady courtyard and from the high ceilinged rooms within, you can often hear piano scales, the sound of a soprano voice or the creak of a beginner’s violin.........................

Meligalas / June 5, 2009 by Adrian Joyner

Twenty kilometres north of Kalamata lies the town of Meligalas, a dusty rural settlement like a hundred others in Greece. The name Meligalas translates roughly as milk and honey, but in truth it’s a melancholy place. A mile outside the town stands a big concrete cross erected in the early 1970s, when Greece was being run by a military junta................

Thanasis dies / April 17, 2009 by Adrian Joyner

hanasis died a few weeks ago at eighty-odd. His dapper little figure was a familiar sight around the village. He was deaf as a post and amost always alone, an isolate. During the dark years of the German/Italian occupation (1941-44) and afterwards, it seems that Thanasis, who can only have been a very young man at the time, was an informer. The houses of suspected communists he had denounced, were burned. Our neighbour Niko says there were deaths, shootings..................

Funerals / March 20, 2009 by Adrian Joyner

Funerals in Greece are very different from funerals in England. When someone dies here, little black edged flyers go up on walls and telegraph poles, giving the name of the person who has died and the time and place of the funeral. In our village it’s always the same little cemetery. I guess these little notices must go up very quickly since burial usually follows within a day or two of death.................

Frosso dies / March 13, 2009 by Adrian Joyner

One evening, a couple of weeks ago, as I am driving into Kalamata to do my weekly stint of private teaching, I take a call on my mobile phone from Dina, our neighbour Niko’s unmarried daughter. The signal is bad so I stop the car and stand on the windswept road by the sea with spray erupting a few yards off. Dina tells me, in Greek, that her mother died at lunchtime. My Greek is limited and I am not sure I have understood properly...............

Christmas / January 28, 2009 by Adrian Joyner

I guess Christmases abroad are always going to be weird. For a start, in Greece they place a good deal less emphasis on Christmas than they do on Easter, or even New Year, though we happened to be in a big toy store in Kalamata (Jumbo) on Christmas Eve and it felt pretty much like the commodity fest we remember from the UK...................

The Art of Peter Huby