Boxer

A quick portrait from Saturday's chessboxing training at Islington Boxing Club. This is Chris Levy who is fighting at the Royal Albert Hall on Wednesday.

6am gym session

This morning I left before the larks to draw chessboxer Sean Mooney's daily weights session. A most interesting start to the day!

Over the next week I am documenting several fighters as they prepare for a big fight night at the Royal Albert Hall.

Chessboxing

New work is on my website now! 

http://hannahsimpson.com/filter/Reportage/Chessboxing

Chessboxing is a hybrid sport in which opponents play a round of chess, then a round of boxing, until knockout, checkmate, or timeout.

Drawings made at PrizeFightKnight - The Heavyweights at The Scala, London. September 29th. Featuring Ruthie 'Pink Machine' Wright and Ben 'The Veggie' Reid.

a poem by John Glenday

Etching of a Line of Trees

in memoriam John Goodfellow Glenday

I carved out the careful absence of a hill and a hill grew.
I cut away the fabric of the trees
and the trees stood shivering in the darkness.

When I had burned off the last syllables of the wind,
a fresh wind rose and lingered.
But because I could not bring myself

to remove you from that hill,
you are no longer there. How wonderful it is
that neither of us managed to survive

when it was love that surely pulled the burr
and love that gnawed its own shape from the burnished air
and love that shaped that absent wind against a tree.

Some shadow's hands moved with my hands
and everything I touched was turned to darkness
and everything I could not touch was light.

------------

from Grain by John Glenday, Picador £8.99 with a nice cover.

The best thing I've ever read about the process of print.

Out of Africa

Yesterday I went to the National Gallery to study the paintings. I was taken by these three men from a Velazquez painting. And there they were outside, by the South African Embassy, another time and place but maybe the same men. These ones weren't silent. Their protest centred on the killings of 61 miners from a London listed mining company by South African police.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/aug/21/south-africa-warns-lonmin-strike

Barbican

Scorching yesterday.

New altarpieces

We have at last moved out of Kingston and into London. The last picture is a painting of a glass dump. It's a big green hunk of glass, bulbous and full of flowers. My grandparents have them on the floor.