frame 51 April 2024
Belonging Elsewhere
by Jane Rankin-Reid
In the beginning of our late 1970s downtown lives, my generation of young artists, writers and performers made many nocturnal discoveries; situational sentiment, lost innocence, gossip, mystery, objects and ideals. My New York memoir, The Colour of Night More
frame 50 March 2024
Insalata della Strada
by Flora Blissett
‘Do NOT eat the mushrooms!!’ ‘Have 999 keyed in if the girls eat the foraged omelette!!!!’ ‘Please text to let us know you’re alive after eating the mushrooms!!’ My mum has no faith in my foraging. Anxious texts and replies to my Instagram stories More
frame 49 February 2024
Revolting Women! - How I became a Neo Naturist
by Wilma Johnson
In 1981 I took a photo of Christine Binnie flashing in Soho. Forty years later, it is hanging in the Tate Britain’s exhibition Women in Revolt! Art, Activism and the Women’s Movement 1970-1990. In a way, it is ironic to be received with open arms by such a pillar of the establishment More
frame 48 February 2024
The Homeless Mind
Clare Conville in conversation with HelenA Pritchard
Clare Conville – What inspired you to call the exhibition ‘The Homeless Mind’?
HelenA Pritchard – I took the title from a book by Peter and Brigitte Berger called Anxieties in Society. More
frame 47 January 2024
Belonging
by Francis Aidoo
I have brief snatches of memories from my childhood in Accra, fragmented pieces of an unfinished puzzle laying strewn across my mind that only when looked at from a distance begin to form an image of my life. Until the age of seven, I had only known one mother, one home, one name, Kwame. More
frame 46 December 2023
Luce di Trieste
by Matilde Cerruti Quara
I rustle through the pages of a tiny poetry collection I’ve been eager to read. Flip flip flip. Words go by as if looking out the window on a train. My mind is elsewhere. It is the opening line to a title-less poem that finally catches my eye. More
frame 45 November 2023
Grandad - A tribute to Barry Cryer
by Ruby Cooper
It’s been a year and a half since I said goodbye to the funniest man in my life; my grandad, Barry Cryer.
There are so many things I could talk about but I’ll keep it short and sweet. More
frame 44 October 2023
Wells Tempest and Rita Nowak in conversation
by Maude Martel
Maude Martel: How do you define your art style and how has it evolved over time?
Rita Nowak: I work with staged photography that is painterly in its composition and creation. Initially when I left art school in 2004 I created tableaux vivants (living pictures) –with direct references to old masters. More
frame 43 September 2023
Bacon and Philosophy: The Art of Transience
by Ben Ware
Peering into Francis Bacon's oeuvre is a troubling experience.
What are we to make of the mutilated faces, the bulging and contorted bodies, and the large fields of colour which enframe the figures? More
frame 42 August 2023
Fascists
by Simon Bill
I saw a post on Facebook once that said ‘People who claim they are “not interested in politics” are, basically, neo-liberals’. I’m not interested in politics myself, but I don’t generally mention it because I know it might get that kind of response, More
frame 41 August 2023
In Conversation:
Becky Harrison with Kandace Siobhan Walker
Becky Harrison: Why did you call the collection Cowboy?
Kandace Siobhan Walker: It’s named after a poem in the collection. It’s not like a “cowboy” cowboy, it’s more a cowboy in the sense that my little sister never had to unload the dishwasher More
frame 40 July 2023
Chrysalis
Miranda Gold
Molly’s grandmother, Hazel, was congealed to the worn brown velvet armchair in the front room on Sunday evenings.
Hazel may have been as immured to the armchair as the framed moths and butterflies More
frame 39 July 2023
Hugo Hamper-Potts
An interview
Primarily self-taught, British artist Hugo Hamper-Potts was inspired by his father to paint, and has since featured in exhibitions at Cob Gallery, Studio 3 and elsewhere. In both his landscapes and his portraiture, his work is ebullient and familiar, playful and earthy, capturing the kinesis, the stillness, and the essence of life itself. More
frame 38 June 2023
Blue Eyes and a Wild Heart
Jane Wellesley on Dorothy Wellesley
In 1936 W. B. Yeats cited my grandmother as having written “perhaps the most moving philosophic poem of our time”. Yet by the time she died twenty years later, Dorothy Wellesley had become invisible to the public, and isolated from her family. More
frame 37 June 2023
The Colour of Night: Jane Rankin-Reid
An Exclusive Extract
It was a humid evening in August, late 1980s, and we couldn’t stop talking about the summer light as we made our way to David Bowe’s studio on West 29th. Our three silhouettes, inked and lengthened on the empty streets, bodies intermittently lit by blazes of streetlight, leaked then of colour in that sticky nighttime gloom. More
frame 36 April 2023
City Racing
by Keith Coventry
Around the age of nine or ten I enjoyed Saturday morning children's cinema at the art deco Odeon in Burnley. Squeezed between films of The Three Stooges and Flash Gordon I would watch another type of film showing high-spirited youngsters from the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea exploring and constructing dens inside huge boarded up houses on Exhibition Road More
frame 35 April 2023
Getting Glassy Eyed with Francis Bacon
by Travis Elborough
Francis Bacon first saw Battleship Potemkin, Sergei Eisenstein’s Soviet agitprop movie about the failed first Russian revolution, in 1935 and ‘almost’ as he later maintained to David Sylvester, ‘before’ he’d ‘started to paint.’ More
frame 34 March 2023
It’s so hard to love your neighbour, man
by William McNamara
Marseilles now is like New York in the seventies.
You can eat cheap pizza by the slice and watch rats chase each other through the trash, which is inescapable and everywhere. Parts of town are tangibly slimy underfoot. More
frame 33 December 2022
Beyond The Frame Of Reference: Richard Smith
by Sam Phillipart
I was sat quietly considering basic geometry on a chilly train from Cardiff Central to Bath Spa.
My circular glasses, the rectangular window, the triangular prism of a sandwich packet and, crucially, the broad, square pages of Richard Smith: Artworks 1954–2013 – the impetus of my trip More
frame 32 October 2022
Mary’s Scary Story
by Mary Cooper
Though Francis Bacon did not believe in God or the afterlife, he was superstitious.
And, like most of us, he was divided. As science reveals, more is concealed: flickering brain functions, the quantum realm, multiverses – what’s going on? More
frame 31 October 2022
Interview with Sophie Pretorius, archivist of the Estate of
Francis Bacon
by Ramona Pulsford
Ramona Pulsford: You’ve obviously delved deep into Bacon’s artwork, but if you were to zoom out again, how would you sum him up, as an artist, in a sentence or two?
Sophie Pretorius: Wow, going in hard immediately! More
frame 30 September 2022
The September Issue
by the CHEERIO team
In the end, dreams really can come true.
The strangest person you met at university can rise to become prime minister with no discernible charisma, competence or intellect. As Elizabeth the Second this week crowned her successor, Elizabeth the (I’ll spare your flushes), the nation seemed gripped More
frame 29 August 2022
Where The Sun Doesn’t Reach
by Dr Lisa Searle
Living underground. Not by choice.
For any of us. Nobody would choose this life.
The smell of urine, cabbage, old food, stale cigarette smoke, every now and then a whiff of perfume, somebody’s attempt to feel normal, to have a moment of pleasure, to feel like themselves, More
frame 28 August 2022
In Conversation:
Austin Collings with Ray Richardson
I first met Ray Richardson through James Ellroy of all people.
I interviewed Ellroy for the British Journal of Photography in 2015. He told me that he liked his art to be straight. That he liked what he called “good paintings”, which was shorthand for “no abstraction”. The thing had to be the thing that was painted. More
frame 27 August 2022
The Colour Storm:
Damian Dibben in conversation with Jane Rankin-Reid
Jane Rankin-Reid: Everyone of your characters’ outfits are described in beautifully observed colours. From Sybille Fugger’s creamy white satins, to the particularly rich crimson shade of her cloak. So too the surfaces of the paintings you’ve detailed. What has cultivated this acute scrutiny in you as a writer?
Damin Dibben: “The idea of someone searching for a colour was entrancing. More
frame 26 July 2022
Interview with Fahad Al-Amoudi
by Martha Sprackland
Martha Sprackland: Congratulations, first of all – you have been chosen as the winner of this year’s White Review Poet’s Prize, for a portfolio of poems I’ve been lucky enough to read, and was very impressed by. Readers of the magazine will find that full portfolio in a forthcoming issue of the White Review, but one poem, ‘The Old Justice’, has been selected for early publication More
frame 25 July 2022
The Future of Museums
by Max Lunn
A text-based installation by the Uruguayan artist Louis Camnitzer has appeared on a handful of U.S museums over the last decade, including the Guggenheim, New York.
Its message is simple: the contents of museums is not a fixed product, but an ever-evolving process which only exists with the participation of the public. Museums are not storehouses More
frame 24 June 2022
An interview with Bella Freud
by Clare Conville
Clare Conville: Francis Bacon was not traditionally good looking but as a young man he had a strange beauty which developed into a kind of irresistible glamour in later life. Do you think glamour is innate or is it something that can be acquired or accumulates?
Bella Freud: Like anything to do with style and glamour, nothing is set in stone. More
frame 23 May 2022
In Conversation:
Jasper Gibson with Johnny Flynn
Johnny Flynn: We will now start with Jasper reading a bit of the book. This is the moment where Tom, who is the hero of the book, a voice hearer and his voice, well – who’s his voice?
Jasper Gibson: Tom hears the voice of Malamock the Octopus God, and this, I guess, is the moment quite early on where he’s been trying to do a very simple thing More
frame 22 March 2022
Osman Yousefzada: The Go-Between
by Darren Biabowe Barnes
DB: Firstly, congratulations on the publication of your wonderful memoir, THE GO-BETWEEN. Can I start by asking how has, as you see it, Birmingham changed since your time growing up there in 80s/90s to now?
OY: On the surface, I think that the city has become much more dynamic. More
frame 21 March 2022
What Putin Wants
by Andrey Kurkov
I am haunted by memories.
I remember spending ten days in Croatia, during the Yugoslav war, as a writer-journalist almost thirty years ago. I wrote the first reports to Ukraine from the front line, near the Croatian city of Sisak. I remember how I participated in the Orange Revolution More
frame 20 January 2022
In Conversation:
Jason Pierce with Lenny Kaye
Jason Pierce: Did you ever feel like, ‘How the fuck did I arrive here’?
Lenny Kaye: Oh, all the time. Especially for one as untrained as I am as a musician. I always loved rock and roll - played in bands as a kid. But to still be doing what we do 50 years later – and for something as off the beaten path as Patti…? More
christmas frame December 2021
Figure Skating: Not Just for Christmas
A film by Pinkietessa
We are delighted to present this film, made especially for CHEERIO this Christmas, by artist and filmmaker, Pinkietessa. Happy Christmas! More
frame 19 December 2021
Interview with CHEERIO Scholar Roisin McAweaney
by Rebecca Harrison
“When one pictures a stalker, one imagines a trench coat. One imagines a poor disguise. One imagines someone hiding in the bushes. Turns out, these wide sweeping generalisations aren’t so far from the truth. What I'm trying to tell you here, is that I was hiding in a bush.” More
frame 18 November 2021
NFTs and the Art World
Chris McCormack in conversation with Sam Spike
Chris McCormack: If we might begin by defining what an NFT or Non-Fungible Token is, and how they have arisen through the advancement of blockchain technology. I’m also interested what initially drew you as a writer and curator to NFTs.
Sam Spike: I was first introduced to NFTs in 2019 by a friend who works in cryptocurrency. More
frame 17 October 2021
The Hunter and the Hare
by Rowan Somerville
There was a time in my adult life when, each autumn, the idea would come into my head that I should eat a hare. I had this notion, I don't know where from, that eating the dark powerful meat of this wild animal would protect me in some way from winter’s morose moods and the accompanying afflictions of viral irritants that drag on through endless nights running into weeks More
frame 16 October 2021
Memoir writing with Curtis Brown Creative:
Edit Spaudo interviewed by Maude Martel
Maude Martel: When did you start writing and what inspired you to tell your life story?
Edit Spaudo: I used to do a bit of spoken word and I always kept a diary growing up, but that's really it. The course is the first thing I've done properly. The idea for my memoir came about over lockdown. I'm a carer and I was living in with my client. More
frame 15 September 2021
Michael Bracewell: Souvenir
An Exclusive Extract
Souvenir is an account of London during the last years prior to the rise of digital technology. As such it surveys the capital through its geography, post-punk, New Wave and Style culture between 1979 and 1986. More
frame 14 September 2021
Twenty Entities and the Romance of Bricks:
Olivia O’Connor in conversation with Liz Finch and Nichola Bruce
So, to begin – how did the idea for the book Twenty Entities and Nichola’s film The Romance of Bricks come about? Were the two of you friends beforehand?
(L) I’ve known Nichola since we met in London, 1977. We’ve worked together on projects, collages and drawings, a couple of performances. More
frame 13 September 2021
Katie Kitamura: Intimacies
by Maria Alvarez
Why Intimacies in the plural as a title?
The original title was Terra Firma but when I read through the book at the end, I noticed so many instances of intimacies, many of which were undesirable More