Jean Paul Aubin-Parvu meets founder of The Icecreamists Matt O’Connor – ice cream evangelist, peerless publicity maker and the man who wants to do for frozen desserts “what the Sex Pistols did for music”
Do you really eat, sleep and breathe ice cream?
I’ve never slept with an ice cream in my life – I’m a married man. I’m an entrepreneur by day, provocateur by night, and a huge ice cream aficionado. The Icecreamists are here to liberate the world one lick at a time, baby.
After years of quietly developing his style under the radar of the art world, painter Charming Baker has suddenly become one of the UK’s most popular and collectable artists. As he prepares for his Covent Garden exhibition this summer, supported by Sir Paul Smith, he talks to CGJ about success, integrity and why a nice picture of a fruit bowl is out of the question…
There’s nothing like a rags to riches story to warm the cockles. It’s a shame then that Charming Baker never really went through the whole rags phase before the riches finally arrived – instead he worked happily, if never especially lucratively, on his art for a good couple of decades before being rewarded for his maturing talent. But in a way, that makes his story even more heartwarming – in an era of the arts in which youth and newness are valued above all things, it is always reassuring to hear of an artist whose vision has been fertilised in the dark before being thrust fully formed into the limelight, especially one who works in so unfashionable a medium as paint on canvass.
Charming Baker was born and brought up in Ripon, north Yorkshire. He was christened Alan, but in Ripon everyone gets a nickname and Charming “had a reputation for being polite”. After leaving school at 15 and spending some time digging up roads, he was accepted onto a graphic design and illustration course at Central St Martin’s at the age of 21. In the decades since graduating he has been teaching part time, winning the occasional commercial commission, selling the odd painting, working from a studio in his garden and helping to raise his five children. A deeply unpretentious man, he has resolutely eschewed the shameless networking demanded by the gallery system, but without which his work always seemed destined to remain hidden from a wider audience. Then in 2006 an exhibition of his paintings was staged at the Truman Brewery on Brick Lane, and its success led to a steady burgeoning of his profile. Things began to really take off after Pat Magnarella, the manager of American rock band Green Day, was introduced to Charming’s work by one of his staff and decided to take a leap into the art world by taking over the promotion of this little known English painter. With the punch and chutzpah of a brash publicity machine behind him, the artist became a sensation in America, with thousands of New York hipsters flocking to his show, Stupid Has A New Hero. As his stock continues to rise on both sides of the water, Charming’s paintings now sell for prices that a few years ago would have seemed outrageous.
Damien Hirst and Sir Paul Smith are both enthusiastic collectors of his work, and it is as a brand ambassador for Paul Smith London that Charming finds himself in his fellow Yorkshireman’s Covent Garden fiefdom, with a major exhibition of his work running in the Mercer Street Studios in July. It is an unusual space – perfect for a man whose paintings have a strong streak of oddness running through them. “It used to be an old fruit warehouse and still has the old storage cellars underneath that smell faintly of bananas,” he says. “Not your usually gallery smell.”
Clare Finney on the rise and rise of the ballet flat, and the arrival of Pretty Ballerinas
They don’t look like the sort of shoes that would inspire controversy. In fact they almost seem designed to avoid it. Yet if there’s one emotion the soft, sweet ballet pumps being sold in St Martins Courtyard have never inspired, it’s indifference.
For one thing they’re flat, a concession to comfort that seemed almost blasphemous in the days of yore. Even now, shoe height has the power to spark controversy: witness the unions’ insistence that high heels be banned in the workplace, or the furore sparked by a former MP’s rant against flats.
Yet the gradual rise of the pump can actually be traced as far back as revolutionary French, when the Napoleonic Code of 1803 banned women from wearing high heels due to their connotations of aristocracy and pretension, which hadn’t been helped by Marie Antoinette wearing a pair to her execution. Only when the Victorians started fetishising woman’s ankles did heels become fashionable once more.
A new exhibition at the Tristan Bates Theatre explores the concept of failed relationships and their ruins through an eclectic collection of love tokens from around the world.
A garden gnome. A mobile phone. A ceramic baking bowl for making bread. On their own the tokens of relationships past are devoid of meaning, significant only to the couples who once cherished them. Put them and their story into the aptly named ‘Museum of Broken Relationships’ however, and these seemingly disparate mementos assume an extraordinary power to intrigue, amuse and disturb.
Take the Divorce Day Mad Dwarf for example: one former couple’s eerie garden gnome that became a marital missile when their relationship hit rocky ground. “It was a long loop, drawing an arc of time” writes Ljubljana, the divorcee behind the dwarf’s untimely demise, “and this short long arc defined the end of love.” That this end was a bitter one is clear enough from the dwarf’s face: his nose and ears are missing and his forehead is splitting. Yet while most of us can recall a relationship in which such violence was, if not actually executed then at least vividly imagined, The Museum of Broken Relationships is collective proof that there is more to a break up than vengeance.
A lovingly handcrafted casket topped with an old photo pays tribute to a 25-year long marriage that left Jelka with “two sons, a lot of memories and this box”. A fluorescent pair of boxers are there, alongside the label – “A size too small… but I didn’t mind at all”.
Mark Maidment, creative director of Ben Sherman, talks about shirts, suits and being first down the pub
How long have you been at Ben Sherman?
I’ve been here eight years. It’s a long time isn’t it? A brand goes through all sorts of phases and when I came on board the brand name had started dipping, which was very sad – but now I look out there and I think there’s nothing as exciting as Ben Sherman right now. We’re a brand that’s coming back up from a lull; we’re halfway back up the mountain.
You’ve certainly come a long way since the button down shirt of yore. How did you engineer the transition from shirt staple to lifestyle brand?
