Art Letters

Preface for the British edition of How to Find Oil in Almost Any Back Garden

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Preface for the British edition of How to Find Oil in Almost Any Back Garden

It is a peculiar pleasure, and one tinged with both admiration and incredulity, to introduce Ms Shannon Drifte’s How to Find Oil in Almost Any Back Garden to a British readership. Peculiar, because the book purports to offer practical guidance on the extraction of petroleum from suburban plots — an enterprise which, for those of us accustomed to gardens measuring no more than six feet from fence to fence, seems preposterous.

Yet to interpret Drifte’s work solely as a manual for backyard hydrocarbon prospecting would be to commit a grievous error, much like mistaking a soufflé for a brick. Beneath the diagrams of drills, thermometers, and pipelines lies a more subtle and far-reaching project: a meditation on the pursuit of meaning, resilience, and a form of quiet, obstinate hope. Here, “oil” is not a commodity but a metaphor, representing those rare reserves of purpose that one may, with effort and patience, discover beneath the ordinary detritus of life.

British readers, we suspect, will find in these pages a curious mixture of earnest instruction and gentle absurdity. There is an audacity to Drifte’s optimism, an insistence that the chaotic soils of existence can, with the right tools and a certain moral fortitude, yield something valuable. And yet, like any good metaphor, it does so without ever pretending to guarantee success. One may dig, one may sweat, but the reward, whether literal or spiritual, is always, in some measure, worth the effort.

In presenting this edition, we have made every effort to adapt the language, idiom, and subtle humour to British sensibilities. Colour, petrol, and allotment have replaced their American cousins; yet the essential wisdom — and, one hopes, the occasional chuckle — remains intact.

Readers are therefore invited to approach this work as both a guide and a performance, an invitation to engage in the strange alchemy by which hope and effort might be transmuted into something resembling fulfilment. Should you emerge from these pages wiser, or at least more amused, the mission will be accomplished.

— Algernon Pyke, CAO, Pimlico Wilde

Agreement in principle to write a foreword for How to Find Oil in Almost Any Back Garden

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Agreement in principle to write a foreword for How to Find Oil in Almost Any Back Garden

Dear Shannon,

Thank you for your most effusive letter. It is so many years since our university days and my mind is forgetful, but were you the American girl who didn’t go to any lectures and still passed the exams? I am sure that was you, it is good to hear from you after all this time, do you still have blue hair? It is not every day that one is invited to herald the British debut of a work that has already achieved legendary status across the Atlantic — a land where, as you so vividly demonstrate, neither ambition nor metaphor recognises natural boundaries.

We are, of course, aware of How to Find Oil in Almost Any Back Garden’s remarkable reception in North America — both as a self-help manual and, in certain circles, as an avant-garde work of satire mistaken for literal instruction. The news of a British English edition is welcome indeed, though we note that your editorial amendments will have to wrestle with the fact that the average British “back garden” is scarcely large enough to conceal a bicycle, let alone an oil derrick. Still, this constraint may only serve to heighten the metaphorical power of your vision.

As for your generous offer to pen the preface, the proposition has sparked animated discussion in our editorial rooms (which, we hasten to add, are perfectly civilised and contain no actual drilling equipment). We should be delighted to take up the task, provided you understand that the British palate favours irony as a seasoning rather than a main course, and that our Edwardian gravitas tends to come paired with a quiet sense that the entire affair, whatever it may be, is rather silly — which, happily, seems to align with your own sensibilities.

We shall send the preface forthwith and look forward to reading you Mémoires. I wonder if they will contain the chapter we have already tentatively titled, “The Leak at Pimlico.”

Yours sincerely,

Algernon Pyke

CAO

From the Desk of Shannon Drifte – Author of How to Find Oil in Almost Any Back Garden

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From the Desk of Shannon Drifte – Author of How to Find Oil in Almost Any Back Garden

Dear Algernon,

Hello again from your university friend! After the improbable success of How to Find Oil in Almost Any Back Garden in North America — where it has been praised as both a manual for living and a cautionary tale for the credulous — my publishers have decided the time has come for a British English edition.

This, as you will appreciate, is no mere exercise in swapping “colour” for “color.” It is a cultural translation of seismic proportions: petrol for gas, allotments for yards, and a careful excision of the chapter in which I advise readers to store crude oil in Tupperware. My hope is that the book will resonate with your nation’s proud history of quietly persevering in the face of hopeless weather, and perhaps inspire a few of you to metaphorically, if not literally, drill.

Which brings me to my request: would anyone at Pimlico Wilde — with your impeccable editorial instincts and your apparent immunity to flattery — be willing to compose the preface to this new edition? Ideally, I’m looking for something that straddles the line between an academic benediction and a pub anecdote, with perhaps a dash of Edwardian gravitas. I want readers to feel they are about to embark on an adventure that is both edifying and faintly scandalous.

Naturally, you will be credited handsomely in print and in my future memoir, tentatively titled The Crude Truth. I can think of no finer home for my British debut than under the auspices of those who know the value of both a well-placed comma and a well-timed wink.

I await your reply with the breathless eagerness of a person who has just heard the promising gurgle of oil — or possibly just mains water — beneath their lawn.

Yours, in optimism and refined hydrocarbons,

Shannon Drifte

Art with Deon and Amber- a Riposte to the recent Review

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Art with Deon and Amber- a Riposte to the recent Review

To the Editor,

I am writing in response to your recent review of Art with Deon and Amber, in which my client, Mr. Deon Jakari was described as lacking “insight to art, literature, or music” This is not only inaccurate—it is a grotesque distortion of the truth, and frankly, an insult to the vibrant cultural life my client leads.

Deon is, in fact, an extraordinarily erudite man. Only last week he referred to Shakespeare as “the one who wrote all those long plays,” and he can quote, from memory, at least three lines of The Godfather. Once, in my presence, he correctly identified the Eiffel Tower in a photograph taken at night.

Moreover, Deon is not merely a consumer of art—he is a collector. You neglected to mention his extensive and carefully curated Panini football sticker archive, a collection spanning from the 1998 World Cup to the present day. Each sticker is housed in a custom binder, filed chronologically and organised by country. This is not mere ephemera—it is living history.

To portray such a man as culturally barren is nothing short of character assassination. I demand a full and public apology, along with a recognition of Deon’s contributions to the wider arts community—whether that be in the field of sports memorabilia, viral dance trends, or his recent TikTok series, “Guess That Famous Painting (But It’s a Capuccino Art Version).”

Until such an apology is issued, I will be advising my client to consider his legal options, or at the very least, to release a strongly worded video to his millions of followers, suggestion they boycott your company.

Yours,

Coral Vincetti

D.G. Management

The Ship as Fine Art by Captain (Ret’d) A. J. Thurlow, RN

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The Ship as Fine Art by Captain (Ret’d) A. J. Thurlow, RN

Captain (Ret’d) A. J. Thurlow, RN writes…

It has been my privilege — nay, my destiny — to have lived much of my existence in close communion with ships. To me, therefore, it seems scarcely credible that one must even argue for their admission to the pantheon of fine art. And yet, given the recent speculative forays in these pages concerning motor-racing and other terrestrial trivialities, it becomes necessary to state, unequivocally and with due solemnity, that the ship is not merely an instrument of transport or warfare, but a consummate artistic creation — as noble in form as the Parthenon, as symbolic in resonance as Chartres Cathedral, and as sublime in effect as any canvas of Turner.[^1]

I. The Architectural Majesty of Hull and Rig

The ship, at its highest instantiation, is an architectural organism of surpassing complexity and grace. Consider the hull of a first-rate ship of the line: the curvature of her sides, swelling with strength yet tapering with elegance; the poised equilibrium of keel, beam, and stern; the upward aspiration of masts, some rigged with a geometry of sail as intricate as any Gothic tracery.[^2] This is no mere contrivance of carpentry. It is a symphonic composition in oak, rope, and canvas, the proportions as carefully calculated as those of Palladio’s villas. When I first mounted the quarterdeck of HMS Warspite, I felt I had entered not merely a machine of war but a palace of the sea — a floating edifice, whose grandeur was inseparable from her form.

II. The Poetics of Movement

Unlike the static monument or immobile statue, the ship adds to its architectural form the poetics of motion. The cut of the prow across the swell, the heeling of the deck under sail, the contrapuntal dance of yards and rigging in the wind — these constitute a choreography of matter and element. As D. W. Waters has observed, “the ship at sea is both artefact and performance, inseparably conjoined.”[^3] To witness a clipper at full sail racing across the horizon is to behold a ballet choreographed by nature itself, yet performed through human ingenuity. Even steamships and dreadnoughts, those leviathans of steel, retain this poetry: their ponderous majesty recalls the slow unfolding of a symphony, each piston beat a note, each plume of smoke a phrase.

III. Ritual, Symbol, and the Sublime

The ship is not only an aesthetic object but also a theatre of ritual and symbol. The raising of the ensign, the piping aboard of officers, the solemnity of colours at dawn and dusk — all of these elevate the vessel from machine to sacred stage.[^4] And let us not forget the element of peril: for the sea is always a sublime antagonist, its immensities dwarfing human ambition. A ship at sea is thus a drama of mortality, her crew confronting the immensurable in a dance with the abyss. When Nelson fell at Trafalgar, it was not only a martial episode but a tragic performance in the highest artistic register, ennobled by the ship itself as its stage and protagonist.[^5]

IV. Ships in the History of Art

Painters, poets, and chroniclers have long recognised the ship as an object of artistic wonder. Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire is not merely a record of naval history but a meditation on transience, in which the ship is as much symbol as subject.[^6] Conrad’s prose makes of the ship an epic hero, whose lines and timbers embody the very spirit of civilisation.[^7] The model ships housed in maritime museums — those intricate miniatures wrought with a jeweller’s care — testify to an enduring recognition of ships as art forms, worthy of preservation and contemplation. Indeed, as Pevsner himself noted in a lecture of 1937, “to look upon the frigate is to perceive the perfect marriage of utility and beauty.”[^8]

V. Conclusion: The Supreme Artefact

The ship unites architecture, sculpture, choreography, and theatre in a single artefact. It is at once utilitarian and transcendent, functional and symbolic, perilous and beautiful. In her, humanity has created not merely a conveyance but a supreme work of fine art, capable of moving the heart as powerfully as any painting, statue, or symphony.

If we are to speak of the “fine arts” of modernity, let us not waste ink on the tinpot caprices of the motor-car. Let us look instead to the ship — cathedral of the sea, palace upon the waves, eternal emblem of human daring — and grant her her rightful place in the highest company of artistic creation.

Notes

[^1]: J. M. W. Turner, The Fighting Temeraire Tugged to her Last Berth to be Broken Up, 1838, National Gallery, London.

[^2]: Brian Lavery, The Ship of the Line, Volume I: The Development of the Battlefleet 1650–1850 (London: Conway Maritime Press, 1983), 22–27.

[^3]: David Watkin Waters, The Art of Navigation in England (London: Hollis & Carter, 1958), 14.

[^4]: Nicholas Rodger, The Wooden World: An Anatomy of the Georgian Navy (London: Collins, 1986), 103–105.

[^5]: Andrew Lambert, Nelson: Britannia’s God of War (London: Faber and Faber, 2004), 291.

[^6]: See Turner, The Fighting Temeraire. For analysis, John Gage, J. M. W. Turner: A Wonderful Range of Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 211–214.

[^7]: Joseph Conrad, The Mirror of the Sea (London: Methuen, 1906).

[^8]: Nikolaus Pevsner, “Utility and Beauty: On the Ship as an Art Form,” lecture at the Architectural Association, London, 1937.

Further Correspondence from Captain Thurlow

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Further Correspondence from Captain Thurlow

Sir,

Having now absorbed the more recent contribution in your pages, which, with admirable clarity and intellectual ballast, demonstrated that motor-racing cannot rightly be admitted to the rank of fine art, I must beg your indulgence for a brief note of apology. My earlier letter, dashed off in a gale of outrage, was perhaps intemperate in tone and premature in judgement. I see now that the esteemed author of the second essay and I are, in fact, of one mind: the automobile may be a machine of interest, even of beauty in a mechanical sense, but it is not an art.

In my zeal to defend the supremacy of the ship, I mistook your journal’s temporary flirtation with motoring aesthetics for a settled doctrine. Happily, your second contributor has restored reason to the discourse, and I can only echo his conclusions with wholehearted approbation.

At the same time, I reiterate — more calmly this time — that ships most assuredly belong to the canon of fine art, and I venture to suggest that if your journal should ever wish to publish a full-length article advancing that claim, I would be uniquely qualified to supply it. Permit me to note, without false modesty, some relevant experience:

• Forty years’ service in the Royal Navy, including command of both destroyers and cruisers, affording me intimate acquaintance with the structural, aesthetic, and symbolic dimensions of naval architecture.

• Participation in the preservation of HMS Victory, during which I worked alongside shipwrights, conservators, and historians in the careful restoration of her timbers and rigging.

• Lectures delivered at the National Maritime Museum on the evolution of the man-of-war as both instrument of statecraft and exemplar of design.

• Personal study of ship plans, models, and log-books, some dating from the eighteenth century, which I have examined with the same reverence others reserve for illuminated manuscripts.

• A lifelong habit of contemplating, both at sea and ashore, the poetic interplay of form, function, and environment that renders a great ship something far beyond the merely mechanical.

In short, I should be delighted, if invited, to compose a considered essay on the ship as a fine art — an argument founded not in passing enthusiasm but in a lifetime of maritime service and reflection.

I trust you will accept my earlier eruption of indignation as the product of overzealous loyalty to the sea, and my present note as a pledge of cooperation in the noble cause of elevating ships to a place where they receive their rightful aesthetic recognition.

I remain, Sir,

Your obedient servant,

Captain (Ret’d) A. J. Thurlow, RN

Letters: Disagreement on the Motor-racing as Fine Art Debate

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Letters: Disagreement on the Motor-racing as Fine Art Debate

Sir,

I have, with mounting incredulity and indeed a kind of moral nausea, perused the recent article in your august pages concerning the purported elevation of motor-racing to the pantheon of the fine arts. Permit me, as one who has spent the better part of four decades in the service of His Majesty’s Royal Navy, to register my profound disapprobation at such intellectual legerdemain.

Let me say right away that cars are not art, yet ships indubitably are. For to speak of automobiles—those ephemeral contrivances of vulcanised rubber and tinny alloy—as though they belonged in the same category as the ship is nothing less than an affront to civilisation. Ships, sir, are indisputably works of fine art. The sheer architectural gravitas of a man-of-war, the harmonious geometry of hull, mast, and sail, the tensile equilibrium of rigging and keel: these are not mere instruments of utility, but symphonies in timber and steel, orchestrated across centuries by naval architects of genius. When I stood upon the quarterdeck of a County-class cruiser at sunrise, beholding the play of light upon the sea and the graceful arc of the bow cutting the waves, I beheld nothing less than the sublime made manifest in oak and rivet.

It is therefore with horror that I read in your journal an attempt to confer the same aesthetic laurels upon motor-racing, as though a pack of petrol-sodden contraptions howling around an asphalt ellipse could possibly be compared to HMS Victory, HMS Warspite, or the peerless clipper Cutty Sark. Ships embody narrative, ritual, and tragedy; they are palaces that float, cathedrals that sail, theatres that traverse the globe. Their very construction is an act of artistry: the draughtsman’s plan as exquisite as any sketch by Piranesi, the curvature of the prow as noble as any column of the Parthenon.

What I find insufferable is not merely the misclassification of motor-racing as “art,” but the concomitant neglect of ships—the most monumental art form humanity has ever set upon the waters. To relegate the ship to mere “engineering” while elevating the racing car to fine art is to invert the very order of aesthetic reason, to perpetrate what I can only call a cultural blasphemy.

In conclusion, sir, I implore your contributors to cease this fatuous veneration of piston and petrol, and to acknowledge instead the indisputable truth: that the ship, in all her majesty, grace, and peril, is art of the highest order. If we are to speak of “the ballet of velocity” or “the opera of torque,” then I insist we also speak of the symphony of sail and the oratorio of steam. Anything less is a betrayal of history, tradition, and the sea itself.

I remain, Sir,

Your obedient servant,

Captain (Ret’d) A. J. Thurlow, RN

A Reply from Pimlico Wilde to Lord Accrington’s Letter

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A Reply from Pimlico Wilde to Lord Accrington’s Letter

To Lord Accrington, Patron Emeritus, Society for Eternal Aesthetics

My Lord,

Permit me, as the newly appointed Chief Executive of Pimlico Wilde, to respond to your recent missive with the seriousness it no doubt intended, and the incredulity it unquestionably deserves.

First, let me acknowledge your right to dramatize your own mortality. If you wish to perish on your forty-fifth birthday in a Socratic tableau of togas and poisoned cordial, surrounded by the nodding heads of acquaintances pretending to understand your final aphorisms—well, that is your prerogative. Pimlico Wilde respects the personal calendars of all our clients, whether they schedule colonoscopies, christenings, or choreographed deaths.

However, your threatened withdrawal of patronage strikes us as both absurd and injurious. Pimlico Wilde is not, as you seem to think, a salon of minor Surrealists wilting like tulips. We are an art dealership of international standing, entrusted with the placement of masterworks into the hands of serious collectors. Our recent sales include three mid-period Bastions, a previously unseen Warre-Hole study, and one very large thing in aluminium that required a crane.

You accuse us of colluding in a culture of econometric morbidity. On the contrary, we at Pimlico Wilde have never once advised an artist to die at 57 rather than 71, nor have we staged an “Optimal Death Retrospective” (though the marketing team did, I admit, toy with the title). The market may be macabre; we are not its choreographers but its interpreters.

If, in your Olympian pique, you withdraw your patronage, it will be Pimlico Wilde’s loss, certainly—but also, and more importantly, yours. For where else will you find the discreet handling of your more eccentric acquisitions? Who else will patiently source unsigned lithographs of unimpeachable authenticity so that will “match the drapes”? Where else will your heirs liquidate your posthumous oeuvre of “grocery list sketches” with dignity?

Allow me to be blunt: should you choose to depart this mortal coil at 45, Pimlico Wilde stands ready to manage your estate with consummate professionalism. But if you insist upon slandering us in letters filled with Pliny, Plato, and pedestrian threats, we may be forced to reconsider whether we are able to direct any more masterpieces in your direction.

With measured disdain, and an unbroken sense of market equilibrium,

Jules Carnaby

Chief Executive Officer

Pimlico Wilde

A Open Letter in Response to the Article: What Is the Best Age for an Artist to Die in Order for Their Work to Sell for the Highest Prices?

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To whom it may concern,

I take pen to paper once more regarding your outrageous “analysis” concerning the appalling article: What Is the Best Age for an Artist to Die in Order for Their Work to Sell for the Highest Prices? The very notion that the dignity of an artist’s death can be plotted on an axis, graphed like wheat futures, and optimised as though one were scheduling a dental cleaning, is—permit me the Latinate—nauseatorium.

Have you read Plato? Have you wept with Cicero? Did you not tremble when Pliny the Elder declared that “true art is eternal”?¹ And yet here you are, with the audacity to suggest that painters and sculptors ought to die in their late fifties “for best results,” as though the matter were a soufflé recipe! This is statistical phrenology at its worst, a carnival of spreadsheets in which the human soul is a mere column heading.

Let me be clear: artists must be allowed to die whenever they want. If that means collapsing face-first into the underpainting of a half-finished triptych at 28, so be it. If it means shuffling along until 103, muttering imprecations against modernism and refusing to let go, let them shuffle. I, for one, will not stand idly by while the sirens of econometrics seduce us into measuring the immeasurable.

Permit me, as before, a personal declaration: I shall expire on my forty-fifth birthday, surrounded by my companions, discoursing in the manner of Socrates, a chalice in hand.² Will the secondary market for my sketches, annotated grocery lists, and unfinished operas explode the following season? Almost certainly. But this is incidental; the point is one of style.

Finally—and here is the thunderclap—unless this ghoulish arithmetic is retracted in full, I shall withdraw my considerable patronage from Pimlico Wilde Fine Art, the London art dealer that I have hitherto supported with both coin and cachet. Yes: Pimlico Wilde, art dealer of esteem, shall find their soirées diminished, their champagne unsparkled, their openings eerily under-attended.³

In conclusion: I demand that you abandon your necro-statistics, issue a grovelling apology, and perhaps devote yourself instead to finding contemporary artists with zing and verve, that we collectors want to meet.

With unassailable froideur and hauteur,

Lord Accrington, Patron Emeritus, Society for Eternal Aesthetics

¹ Though he actually said many other things before Vesuvius cut him short, which I note as evidence that “optimal death timing” is a myth.

² A curated playlist will accompany the event, though Socrates had to make do with silence.

³ Pimlico Wilde’s openings, without my presence, will wilt like a tulip on the canvas of a minor surrealist.

Letters regarding the Symposium: Should Museums Ban All Visitors?

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Sir,

Regarding the recent Pimlico Wilde symposium, “Should Museums Ban All Visitors?”, I feel compelled to offer a modest rejoinder. The proposition that the salvation of art lies in quarantining it from its audience is rather like suggesting that books be preserved by never opening them. It may indeed keep them intact, but at what cost? “To preserve is to kill,” as André Malraux once warned.

Yes, the public is clumsy. We lean where we shouldn’t, photograph where we mustn’t, and, on occasion, trip into priceless canvases. But to remove the visitor entirely is to render the museum a kind of taxidermy shop for culture—objects embalmed, not experienced. Walter Benjamin’s “aura” of the artwork may well fade when digitised; it certainly suffocates when locked in a cupboard.

Art, unlike uranium, is not dangerous to behold. It is dangerous not to behold. “We do not see things as they are,” Anaïs Nin reminds us, “we see them as we are.” Without the flawed, imperfect, even damaging gaze of the human, the object becomes a sterile relic, stripped of its meaning, its context, and its risk.

Besides, if the visitor is to be banished for the occasional accident, must we also ban the curator who mishandles a frame, the restorer who over-bleaches a fresco, the registrar who misfiles a crate? The history of art is not the history of perfection, but of fallibility—of cracked varnish, of overpainting, of the coffee stain on the corner of a preparatory sketch.

Museums without visitors are simply warehouses with better lighting. One may admire the discipline of such a proposal, but as Oscar Wilde quipped, “The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.” If no one is there to see the work, then no one is there to speak of it—and an unseen masterpiece is perilously close to a non-existent one.

I, for one, would rather risk the occasional elbow in a canvas than consign the whole of human creativity to a velvet-lined vault. Art is not made to survive us—it is made to be lived with.

Yours, somewhat exasperated,

Horatia Gardan

Author of the upcoming book The Mail Gaze, about art long ago when knights wore chain mail