John Allen Wall Carpets Exhibition Highlights - GOLDMARK - YouTube

The world is full of stuff and most stuff is mediocre at best. Some stuff is better than that. There are few people in this world who make things which are remarkable. Way, way over what one would normally be able to see and we are privileged to be able to have world-class things in this room and having been able to work with this extraordinary man here. We won't talk for very long because we've got combined ages of nearly 170. So let's have a little chat, shall we, about this and about how you do it and what you do. How long has this set of carpets, how long have you been working on this lot? It takes me, I think, around two years to go from the thinking to actually the doing and then I go over to Nepal and take the actual graphs which are the same size as the carpets to the weavers, discuss with them all the technical difficulties because there's difficulties on my side and theirs and we have to meet somewhere in the centre and then they start weaving them and then there's another year. So it's about a four-year cycle. I was just looking at this piece and finding it absolutely fascinating and how you have just put that one remarkable line in there which makes the whole thing work. I've always wanted to do a moonlight cliff scene and I'd never had the guts to do a Black Sea because there seems something a bit evil about a Black Sea and then I was taken on a boat down the coast of Barcelona and we were coming back towards Sigis five o'clock in the evening and as I looked out of the boat towards the land the sea was black and I thought, the Black Sea, that's my Black Sea. I just knew the colour was so dark that it needed lighting up so I put the moon in and then I realised the moon and the rocks and the black weren't enough and so that's why I put the orange stripe right across it. I'm driving down a place called Chesham Bias and it's two forests on both sides and a road goes down and I'm driving and obviously when you're driving you just get flashes and they're beech trees and you get this flash of orange and reds and yellows and I just thought I've got to capture that and I'd been walking in a lot of small woods and so I put the two things together this carpet here if you notice the grey and the pink are silk the rest is wool so when you walk past it it changes colour as you walk past and if I do this to it you can see it changes colour and I just like that idea too so people can walk past and stroke it and it's actually changed all the colours slightly but they still work. What an extraordinary thing that a career which takes you to this standard where I truly believe you have no equal and it starts after you've retired. Well when I retired I suddenly thought I could go back to my first love and my incredible knowledge of weaving so that's what I did and really it's made my retirement more exciting my working life was. I wanted to ask how much of this is a photographic representation and how much of it is your own manipulation of the scene for artistic purposes? These were all born out of really memories of lockdown because I was locked in the house basically I had a man who delivered food every week and when I was allowed out I went to this little wood and saw these trees and it was it's my feeling of walking through those trees on my own and how magical trees are and how watching them change from autumn, winter, spring and summer how incredible emotional it is and it's like this this is my childhood really because I was brought up in Matlock in Derbyshire the Peak District and I've always been an admirer of 30s posters all those great English painters who did them and I wanted to get that feel of a poster but not the flatness I wanted to get what I felt when I stand on the top up here and look down at that viaduct and the valley and and that's what I was aiming to do and so really that feeling dictates how realistic it is or how abstract it becomes. Do you know how the weavers feel because these are alien? Good question they're totally alien to the weavers the colours are only numbered so they have no idea because most of them are illiterate so they see this black and white drawing they know how to weave it but they don't know what it is well you can imagine what happened when they were doing the abyss man I mean that was a terrible shock and and sort of so if you're doing this that's all they can see they've no idea until it gets right up to here and they suddenly realise it's a wood so they they actually love it from that point of view but they hate it because I used too many colours and so I discovered also when I give them a graph like this I've got say 30 colours so they're 1 to 30 and Jigme who's the Tibetan who runs the business said to me oh John when you do your graphs next time do you think you could number it differently so I said yes of course I can how do you want me to number them so he says well it would really help if you do 1 to 10 then 1a to 10 and then 1b to 10 so what do you mean why do you want me to do that that sounds crazy he said well the weavers can only count 1 to 10 so if you put a and b before it they can do 30 colours without us having to do anything so I said well what have you been doing all these years because I've been working them with them 25 years and he said well when you go we number them all again and they've been doing that for all these years all these signatures here should be in rust and indigo blue I have never had a rust and indigo blue signature yet in fact I don't tell this to any of you but you're all hearing now you never get the same carpet because they put it there but I bet you the next one is down here so there's never three carpets exactly the same but luckily only I know that John I really want to thank you we had someone in the other day whose wife is a weaver and he spent an hour in here looking and then he said one short sentence the man is a genius and how lucky are we that in this room we can have the first showing of something which is world class it's very special thank you