By the Skin of My Teeth

April’s blog post is finally here with some new artwork of Fred Astaire, just in time! It’s been an eventful month that has flown by packed with stress, achievement and family commitments. The stress was mostly due to the new Castle Sefton Press online store, which proved to be more difficult to set up than I had realised due to some limitations of WooCommerce that I hadn’t been aware of. Overcoming these certainly felt like a great achievement for almost twenty-four hours, until I realised that the store had a technical issue that I couldn’t fix and had to draft in expert assistance. After much head-shaking, groaning and time, the problem was solved just in time for the publication of our second book. Definitely another achievement.

In our online shop, as well as books, you can now buy art prints, greetings cards and other products featuring our art work, as well as some original sculptures. We also have some bundles and offers on both art and books, so you can save when you buy a combination of products.

Via Paradise

The other achievement, happily with little stress involved, was the publication of our second book, Via Paradise by John Blake, on 21st April. In this satirical romp, Britain’s workers have decided to have a lie-in, leaving the running of the country in the hands of those in charge. Funnily enough they don’t seem up to the job, with bleakly hilarious consequences.

Humour is quite a personal thing, and of course it won’t be for everyone, but I laughed out loud all through my first reading of this, and then was left with sides aching when I had to go through it again for editing. It’s very clever with an action-packed plot that dovetails perfectly, and immaculate timing.

It’s available to buy direct from the CSP website in paperback, and for the first time also in ebook. You can also purchase it from all the major stores and platforms, but buying from us helps us to keep the publishing business going and produce new art and books.

John Singer Sargent

When I was finally able to get back to some creative work, almost the first thing that I did was take up a project that I had been trying to do for quite some time: charcoal and chalk drawings of Fred Astaire dancing. The idea came from a preliminary sketch of John Singer Sargent’s for his picture El Jaleo that I copied as part of my drawing studies. I felt that this style of monochrome drawing would be perfect to capture the movement of the great dancer Fred.

Singer Sargent is one of my favourite artists. There are many things to admire in his work, technical and aesthetic, but the quality that resonates with me most strongly is the way that he synthesises the old and the new into a style of his own. You can easily see the influence of El Greco, Goya, Van Dyke, Reynolds, Gainsborough and the Impressionists in his work if you have them alongside to compare.

Inspiration

That is what fascinates me: how we can combine elements of the old with new ideas to create something better than either. My first novel Ghost Train is ultimately about that. It’s very much not saying that everything was better in the past; rampant nostalgia is an easy trap to fall into when we live in difficult times, but it’s never a way forward. That is actually a lesson that can be learnt from history!

On the other hand, we have also lived through – and sadly still are – an era of constant change for the sake of change (and ultimately profit, of course). As a result, so many beneficial features of life have been jettisoned and forgotten and younger generations are left completely dissociated from the past.

So let Singer Sargent be an example to us all. He used his talent to produce eloquent art that synthesised the best of previous generations’ techniques and modern ideas into a style of his own. He shows the way to a creative future for us all.

The wonderful Fred Astaire

I mentioned living in difficult times, and frankly only an idiot would think that we do otherwise at present. The films starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rodgers made at RKO were an escapist entertainment designed for other difficult times – the 1930s – and so I thought it would be cheering to let Fred dance through this part of the blog.The films are: Flying Down to Rio, The Gay Divorce, Roberta, Top Hat, Follow the Fleet, Swing Time, Shall We Dance and Carefree. They all have much to offer as entertainment.

Top Hat is probably the most famous of the films, and these drawings are taken from the No Strings routine in that film. I don’t like to draw film stars from photographs, which are finished art works in themselves. I like to draw from movies, and it’s easy these days to take your own still photos from them. This is a progression of poses that I think is very characteristic of Fred Astaire.

Support in challenging times

I mentioned that the films were made to lighten the dark depression of the 1930s, but they also carried me through some extremely challenging periods of my life. Looking back, I’ve found life quite challenging most of the time, and while I think that it’s meant to be, to some extent, and that the understanding and experience I’ve gained can feed productively into my work, it’s also true that I still have days when I would love it all to be a bit easier.

A Fred and Ginger film is great support on days like that. They all have wonderful scores, mostly written by either George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin or Jerome Kern, that contributed substantially to the ‘Great American Songbook.’ They have fantastic sets and wonderful clothes, including the most fabulous evening dresses, and they are very funny.

Entertainment

Fred and Ginger themselves are skilled comedians and great foils for each other (although I think the famous remark attributed to Katherine Hepburn about him giving her style and her giving him sex is glib nonsense.) They also have talented support throughout the series from Edward Everett Horton, Eric Blore, Helen Broderick, Alice Brady, Erik Rhodes and others.

There is also, of course, the wonderful dancing: Fred’s experimental solo routines, the joyful tap pairings, dreamy slow ballroom numbers and the ultimate merging of all the styles into a complete art form.

Under the richness of all this entertainment, the plots are generally viewed as insignificant skeletons on which to hang all that sumptuous flesh of comedy, music, dancing, costumes and sets.

Inspiration from the films of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rodgers

But I think there is something to learn from them.. The stories are slight and make use of comedy plot devices that go back at least as far as Shakespeare, but they are pitched perfectly for escapist fantasy. For something to become absorbing, to connect with its audience, to be relatable enough to draw them in so that they can lose themselves, it must have some element of unquestionable reality; to be an escape, it must be complete in such a way that that same audience never wonders what happened to the characters beyond what they see and be perfectly satisfied by what is on offer. That’s quite a balancing act, and one that is a key component of the overall success of the finished work.

It’s another inspiration to me, because I think it’s very important now to write in a readable, entertaining style. I want to use language to its full expressive potential, and I have important things to say, I hope, but I want to do it without making hard work for the reader and to leave them with something of the refreshment that 1930s audiences got from an Astaire and Rodgers film.

You may well think that I haven’t managed that yet, but I’m working on it!

Notes

If you want to find out more about the making of these superb movies, I highly recommend the documentary The RKO Story presented by Ed Asner.

This month’s featured image is the Fred in Flight collection by Emily Tellwright, 2025.