Ms. Caroline Coon: Radical person recalls Pauline Boty’s My Colouring Book and the first time she heard Otis Redding and Wilson Pickett – at Derek Boshier’s Ladbroke Grove studio
//From Radical People, Vol 1, No 2//
Great to see heroine Caroline Coon among the subjects/contributors to the second issue of Radical People, Reba Maybury’s celebration of quinquagenarian-plus non-conformists.
Ms Coon’s website is a must-visit; I particularly liked the 2013 post about her contribution to Anna Braun’s thesis for Berlin’s Humboldt University on the interaction between art and music from the 1950s to the 70s (for which I was also interviewed).
Discussing the ways in which the emergence of the Dansette helped enhance many studio environments, Coon recalls: “The first time I heard Otis Redding (‘Otis Blue’) and Wilson Pickett (‘In The Midnight Hour’) was at my tutor Derek Boshier’s Ladbroke Grove studio in 1965.
“I was pleased to be able to show Ms Braun the innovative Pauline Boty painting ‘My Colouring Book’ (1963). Boty dry-transferred Letraset verses from the eponymous Ebb and Kander hit song, recorded by Barbra Streisand and Sandy Stewart in 1962, onto her painting making it a Pop Art icon to heartbreak:
‘These are the eyes that watched him as he walked away,
Colour them grey.
These are the arms that held him and touched him and lost him somehow,
Colour them empty now’.”
//My Colouring Book, Pauline Boty, 1963. Muzeum Sztuki//
Read the rest of the post about art and music at Caroline Coon’s blog here.
Find out more about Radical People and Reba Maybury here.