ARTICLE PREVIEW: “BEERNADO DA VINCI”

Peter Wilson describes how Philip Muspratt spent his last decades transforming his north England home into a sun-catching masterpiece

Creativity knows no bounds, and people will use a seemingly endless variety of materials or possibilities to express, create or decorate. We use whatever is at hand, whether paint, paper, wood, metal, stone, glass; obviously, we’ll use whatever we can. We’ve even used berry-juices and charred sticks – the former spat over splayed hands placed as stencils on cave walls, the latter to further mark those caves with living figures.
    The buff brown and coloured dirt of the very earth itself is used in the intricate sand “paintings” of the Navajo Indians. These sand paintings’ primary function, however, was for healing not decoration.
    Philip Muspratt, far removed in time, geography and culture from either the Navajo or pre-historic cave dwellers, has also used the most basic of materials he had to hand to create, decorate and, in a way, to bring healing. His dirt-of-the-earth, common-as-muck material being empty beer cans: Carlsberg, Heineken, Fosters, whatever – empty, drank dry and discarded. Trash to most, except for Muspratt, ex-soldier and retired bus driver who, from 1995 until his death in 2015, decorated his modest, semi-detached house and garden in Hartlepool (County Cleveland, England) with beer bottles then, from about 2005, with beer cans.

 The house, not surprisingly, is fondly known as “the can house”, and Muspratt himself as “the can man” or “Beernardo da Vinci”, as the local newspaper dubbed him. Muspratt’s work is a gem of creativity in an otherwise unspectacular north-eastern coastal town which has seen better days. But, on second thought, Hartlepool has intermittently boasted flashes of peculiarity in its history. Maybe something to do with the heady, salt-laden sea air. During the Napoleonic wars, for instance, a French warship sank in a storm off the coast from the town. The ship’s monkey was the only survivor that, upon being washed ashore, was arrested, tried and hanged on the beach as a French spy by the local fisher folk (who had never seen a monkey or a Frenchman before): strange but true. Years later, in 2002, a certain Stuart Drummond, the town’s football team’s mascot who wore, naturally, a monkey suit at matches campaigned under the name “H’Angus the Monkey” to be elected town mayor and, without any previous political experience, was actually voted in: strange but true. Similarly Muspratt, whose only recollection of ever doing any art was when he was a school child, has created a unique work that consists of about 75,000 empty cans held mainly in place with waterproof, industrial-grade adhesive.

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