my REAL creepy eFit, originally uploaded by andytgeezer.

Back in January I met a whole bunch of folk at a photography exhibition and
before long I was talking about, suprise surprise, postcards and my REAL
wall.

It was no coincidence that, as usual, I had a whole set of postcards in my
bag, and Vlad the Russian amused himself greatly with a series of eFit
postcard photos.

It's been a while since these photos were taken and I wondered what had
happened to them, then by some stroke of luck I bumped into Russian Vlad on
the 94 bus last night!

So here are my eFits made from your postcards a little belatedly. Enjoy!

my REAL exhibition opening night, originally uploaded by andytgeezer.

It's been a hectic few months for me and Elena. As well as taking up study courses on top of our full time jobs, over the past few months I've been busy with a small team of photographers putting together my first photography show, which opened last night!

The show featured the works of 4 photographers including me, who followed my carnival group on tour last year. I've been doing Notting Hill carnival with the Yaa Asantewaa carnival arts group for nearly 10 years now, making the costumes with the team after work every summer as a volunteer then touring on the road. You may have seen some of my carnival photos on my flickr site over the years.

A few years ago I started getting into photography and decided to spend one year behind the lens instead of in front of it on the road for carnival. Although the pictures for that year were great I felt like something was missing from them, namely me, so over the years I have slowly convinced photographers to join the group, so that I could spend more time in front of the lens where I belong, and this year my photography group toured with us on the road to France and Germany as well as at Notting Hill in London.

Last night's opening showcased the works of these great photographers, Olga, Manuela and Jana as well as some of mine. The photos will remain on the wall until the 23rd of May at Tabernacle, so if you didn't make it to the opening you can still catch the photos until then.

More shots from the opening night can be found on Olga's flickr profile.

my REAL wall - The white tree mystery, originally uploaded by andytgeezer.

There's something that has puzzled me ever since I first visited Romania in 2005.

As you drive through the towns and countryside, meandering through sometimes painfully poor villages, all the tree trunks are painted white, uniformly to a metre up the trunk, where the paint just stops. All the trees are like this.

After observing this the first time by the roadside, I asked my host and she told me that the reason for painting the trees was to make up for the lack of roadside lighting in the night. Apparently the paint made the trees more visible, so reduced the number of crashes.

Fair enough, I thought and thought no more of it until I walked through an orchard. All the trees were painted for the first metre of the tree again, all the way through the orchard. Weird.

My host explained this away by saying that it was for the drunk people who tended to shortcut through fields on the way home when they stumbled back from the pub.

Now I started to smell a rat and decided to ask someone else. The can of worms was open and it seemed that the more people I asked the more weird answers I got.

"The trees are painted white to stop the ants climbing the tree trunks as it makes them visible to birds"

"The trees are painted every year to make them more pretty"

"The trees are painted to stop them being cut down and sold for wood on the black market"

"White paint contains an antiseptic that seeps into the trunk and protects the tree from infection"

and so on.

Elena goes with the explanation that the trees are more pretty and that it's an old Romanian tradition she has grown up with all her life. As we drove through the Romanian countryside, she made sure to point out all the white trees and comment loudly about how much more beautiful white painted trees were than our plain English ones. I roundly disagreed and pointed out to her that this can't possibly be a Romanian tradition as I have since seen white painted trees in Vietnam and Egypt.

The closest we ever got to finding out why trees were painted was in Egypt, where me and Stew actually saw a guy painting a tree trunk.

When we asked him what he was doing, it turned out that he didn't speak a word of English, so the mystery remains.

Any ideas?

my REAL wall - March 11, 2010 - Art meets mathematics, originally uploaded by andytgeezer.

This last month has been absolutely hectic in my REAL wall HQ. Both me and Elena have taken up new courses which have meant that I'm studying web design and she's studying statistics every night, hence why postcard and wall production has fallen through the floor. In addition to this, I decided that, with all my evenings taken up, I had to find more time in the day to fill, so I've taken up Aikido from 6:30-8:00 AM(!), 2 days a week!

In this week's post I have post from some of my REAL life friends Carl, who paid a visit to Berlin and L-Plate and Sana who went to Oxford this week, returning some maths homework for me on a postcard. Mailart on the wall this week comes from Fluxus Dakota (Art Detox 2010) and Super-Aska.

Super-Aska is an Australian artist, whose work is inspired by numbers. Maths and Fractal imagery permeate her pieces. The orange piece on my wall today seems to show the internal structure of an orange, but could also be translated as the plasma fluctuations in a plasma ball. I guess the parallels between nature and maths are illustrated in this case, and often fractal imagery occurs in natural phenomena.

Super-Aska is sending out loads of postcards showing close-ups of her paintings, some of which can be seen on her site. If you want one, why not visit her site and send her an email, and apparently she has something
called a facebook group too. Whatever one of those is...

my REAL wall - 03 March 2010 - Wall of arts, originally uploaded by andytgeezer.

It's been a few weeks since I posted on the kitchen REAL wall and since then I paid a visit to Goldhawk Road, the old address to pick up 3 pieces of mail, shown here.

I have never taken it for granted how much effort the readers of this blog go to to send stuff and always appreciate everything that arrives but this morning, looking at this lot I felt a REAL sense of pride and elation.

A year down the line from setting up my REAL wall, and almost every day I get something amazing in the post and all of it is so different and inspiring. As silly as this may sound, puttinga REAL wal up in morning reminds me how cool it is that humans have such great creative ability and capacity for sharing that with others.

It's a tremendous feeling.

Today sees the return of Art Tower and Shivablack, 2 regular mailart contributors, and a set of colour swatches from Sherri Ayers, around which I should base a poem to send back to her.

The beautiful collage with the face and paddles in the bottom left is a new mailartist to the wall, who I have seen around other sites, called L Podob. I love the textures on this piece, it has what I think is a glue layer over it which feels great and the colours merge really well. One to watch for the future I think.

In the top centre is a postcard of @Jason Cullison's from an exhibition he was recently exhibiting at in LA.

At the top right is a postcard from France from Nicolas de La Casiniere. This may be in response to my call for post related to causes, as it is against the wall in Palestine.

The Israeli West Bank barrier is a huge concrete wall built in Israel to seperate Israel from the Palestinian West Bank. I was there 2 years ago, and it is a huge imposing feature, sometimes up to 8m high, with checkpoints all along it. I was interested in taking pics of graffiti there, but the Israeli guards shouted at me for taking pictures, which is a shame as it's full of great protest art.

As Nicolas says, "Some walls are peaceful and full of graphic poetry. Some are not."

Which side of the wall are you on?

It was a year ago today that I decided to close down my facebook account and start accepting REAL post only for my REAL wall, so today to celebrate the first year of my REAL wall, me and Elena spent a few hours sticking as many of the received post on the walls of the house as possible.

It's been quite a year and no-one could ever have guessed that one silly idea that I had one morning would blow up into such a success.

Since starting my REAL wall, I discovered postcrossing, IUOMA, sendsomething and swap-bot. I've sent nearly 100 postcards on postcrossing and appeared on the postcrossing blog.

Also, to defy all the facebook-loving friends who were sure that leaving facebook would spell certain love-disaster, I met the girl of my dreams, who turned out to be possibly the only person I know who is NOT on f acebook. She's perfect! And now we're engaged!

Not only does she not find it inconvenient that I'm not on facebook, she loves it! It means I spend more time doing stuff with her in REAL life, and Elena makes most of the walls with me.

my REAL wall has also seen lots of other media action, most notably my REAL wall vs Hammersmith Council, after my local council sent me a demand letter for £5000 for business waste disposal after they assumed that the amount of post I was receiving must have implied I was running a business! This led to appearances in all sorts of newspapers.

Then last month, the stairs in the centre of the picture were in the money section of the Sunday Times, but try as we might we couldn't get any postcards in there.

In just a year, I gained the confidence to become a fully-fledged mailartist, and my REAL wall has been involved in a number of art projects, including the month-long inaugural Twitter #mailart project in July, The 100 and Thing-a-day 2010 (official and unofficial) and I'm pretty sure there will be plenty more.

Postcards sent from around the globe have travelled with us far and wide to Austria, Romania, Portugal, Switzerland and of course all over the UK. People have sent pics of their own walls too, from Holland, Australia, Iceland, Malaysia, France and beyond.

So, one year down, countless postcards later and my REAL wall has far exceeded my expectations. Thanks for all the support everyone and here's to another one!

my REAL wall features Okadascat, originally uploaded by andytgeezer.

Today's featured REAL artist is the totally brilliant UK based knitter Okadascat

For me and Elena, knitting begins and ends with Okadascat and every parcel through from this mysterious northern knitter makes us both squeal with delight.

The REAL wall correspondence affair began not long after I began my REAL wall, when one day I received a small random square of wool in the post with some mailart calls. Being new to the whole mailart thing back then I wondered what the heck the mailart calls were, but was fascinated by the wool. Up until this point I had figured that the only things that could be sent through the post were made of paper. Fabric in the post? Weird, but strangely compelling.

So I tracked down the artist and had a poke about on www.okadascat.blogspot.com/, where I found loads of examples of yarn-bombing and street furniture cosy knitting. Somewhere up north Okadascat was getting up to yarn-based mischief, keeping bollards warm with custom made wooly cosys. This was my kind of fun, so I cheekily sent her an email asking if she could make my REAL wall a new banner.

Much to my surprise, a full size knitted banner appeared in the post at the end of that week and it's been all over the place with me since.

Thinking that things couldn't get any better than that showed yet another bit of underestimation on my part and when the whole council fiasco got under way, one of the outstanding pieces that came through was the wooly protest mail from Okadascat, which was knitted onto a card.

The wooly star which arrived in late 2009 spurred Elena to pick up some knitting needles and we spent New Years Eve indoors knitting and making mailart, which is really testament to how much of an influence this wooly stuff has had on us.

The latest piece, a complete surprise too, was mini-Andys new hat and scarf, which will come in extremely useful when he takes to the road in March. We couldn't believe our eyes when this one came through.

So, even though other knitters do exist out there, Okadascat has opened our eyes to a whole new angle on knitting. Before her, knitting was really just functional and not all that glamorous, but now we all know that knitting is actually the new cool.

All hail the one and only Okadascat!

my REAL wall - 07 February 2010, originally uploaded by andytgeezer.

Can you see the good news? Can you?

my REAL wall - February 2, 2010 - A Thing a day, originally uploaded by andytgeezer.

It's been a while since a bunch of complete strangers on the internet took over my life completely for a month-long project, and experience tells me that when this happens it's usually a good thing!

This month I thought I'd make it a doubly good thing, and have signed up for Thing-a-day, a project where you do something creative every day for the entire month of February. I decided that this month, I'll post up a new REAL wall every day, here and on the Thing-a-day site. Usually my REAL wall isn't quite a daily event, but for the month of February, REAL wall fans will get a guaranteed REAL wall a day right here!

Not content to simply make one thing a day, I'm also signed up with the Unofficial Thing-a-day, (UTAD) a smaller version of the Thing a day, which feels much more personal.

After 5 years, the original Thing-a-day is perhaps a little too big for some participants so another site has been set up, which pays homage to the original but is invite only for a small number of people. Thanks to Sam for the invite to this.

Actually, I'm not really in the UTAD personally but for that project mini-Andy is taking the reins with his comeback. Check out his posts on the UTAD site or at The adventures of mini-Andy, then get ready to take part in the NEW adventures of mini-Andy from March!

my REAL wall - February 1, 2010 - Elena models the new REAL wall hoodie!, originally uploaded by andytgeezer.

Being that it was my birthday last Monday, me and Elena went out on Friday night to meet Stalex, AAA and Carl for Vietnamese food and Karaoke.

I always insist that people don't get me presents for my birthday. Most of my friends think that I do this because I am modest, but I'll let you REAL wall fans know the REAL reason. It's cos my friends always buy me such crap presents. Shhhh don't tell them.

However, this night was VERY different. When we arrived in Deptford, Stalex handed me a bag which was soft to the touch and told me that my present was inside. With no clue as to what it might be, I was intrigued. After a few beers, some banh cuon and a rendition of "He aint heavy" I opened the wrapping and to my surprise, out popped the best present EVER!

Seen here on Elena is the brand new my REAL wall embroidered hoodie, complete with full postal address on the front and URL on the back! After lamenting all those missed opportunities to get my REAL wall in the papers, I finally have the ultimate wearable billboard!

my REAL wall - 24 Jan 2010 - The Road to Tavira Island, originally uploaded by andytgeezer.

This was the very last REAL wall I took aged 29, and was taken in Tavira in the Algarve, southern Portugal on the way to Tavira Island.

Having been born in January, booking holidays for my birthday is always cheap. One other bonus of the off season is that no-one else goes on holiday, so when we got to the island of Tavira, me and Elena pretty much had the whole expanse beach to ourselves! With no-one around, we pulled out a pair of deckchairs and collected pretty shells for a whole afternoon unmolested.

Neither of us are particularly into swimming, but nothing beats lounging around on an empty beach!

Thing is, being January and in the Mediteranean, it was warm enough to fall asleep on the beach with our jumpers on, but cold enough to wake up with a cold, and that's exactly what we done. Since coming back Elena has had a cold and is only just now getting over it. Awwww.

(As you can see it's the same postcards as we thought there was going to be a lot more to do so didn't bring that many!)

my REAL wall - 24 Jan 2010 - Water fountain fun in Faro, originally uploaded by andytgeezer.

As you all know, I love taking your post for a walk, but up til now I've never taken it for a paddle. With so little to do in Portugal last weekend and so much time, I thought I'd get my feet wet in a local water fountain and what better thing to take into the pool than your postcards..

Thanks to Richard Canard, the Museum Spree Gang and Evmorfia Ghika Rachouti for your post. Luckily for your post, it was pretty sunny so they didn't take too long to dry off...

my REAL wall - 23 Jan 2010 - The tracks by the beach, originally uploaded by andytgeezer.

We thought we were due a holiday and, having never been to the Algarve, me and Elena decided that a birthday weekend in Portugal for £10 per person each way was too good a bargain to pass up. Return flights of THREE AND A HALF HOURS for both of us for £40! Who would say no!

WE arrived in Faro at about noon on Saturday, a time that we Brits are used to seeing high streets buzzing with shoppers and diners and the place was like a Ghost town. After getting off the bus in the centre of town we were pretty convinced we'd alighted a few stops too early as there was no life to be seen at all.

They obviously do things differently in Portugal.

After a while of looking for people we decided to make our second wall of the trip and here it is.

By the end of the trip we came home totally relaxed. If you're thinking of a trip to the south of Portugal in the off season, it's cheap but there really is very little to do, so make sure you bring some postcards to make REAL walls like what we done!

Thanks to Cross Ryu, Dumpsterdiver and the others who accompanied us there in spirit!

my REAL wall - 27 January 2010 - First arrivals in the PO Box, originally uploaded by andytgeezer.

I moved in to my new place on December 13th of last year and I figured that, as I own this new place and that my REAL wall is a huge and very public website, that I didn't really need any unpleasant surprises, one of my priorities was to get a PO Box.

It took me a while to apply for and the Royal Mail offer the option of either collecting your post from the delivery office or going the whole hog and getting it delivered, which I went for.

2 weeks ago, Royal Mail called to confirm that my PO Box had gone live so I changed the postal address on postcrossing, swap-bot, my REAL wall, sendsomething and everywhere else that the legendary Goldhawk Road address had taken root.

Then I sat back and waited for the flood of post.

2 weeks later, I was still waiting and, despite sending out loads of paper updates I was starting to get very very worried that Royal Mail had delivered all my lovely post to some undeserving business somewhere on the other side of the country.

So I called them and it turned out that the delivery office had marked my PO Box for collection and not delivery and I had all the cards you see sitting in a box lonely and waiting!

So, to those of you looking to be the first post on my REAL wall sent to my PO Box, congratulations! Sorry I can't pick out a definitive winner but give yourself a pat on the back as these all conveniently arrived a few days after my birthday. Yay!

my REAL 30th birthday card from the team at work, originally uploaded by andytgeezer.

Having taken the day off for my birthday to go to Portugal, I came back to my desk to find that it had been taken over by the People's Republic of China!

Everyone who has to spend any time around me at all knows that I am a HUGE Google fan. I was an early adopter of the G1, I actually like Android and I have Chrome as my default operating system.

So appropriately, my birthday surprise had lots of references to the big G in it. The computer had Chinese flags all over it and a notice saying that it had been taken over by the Chinese, so I was to cease and desist using Google products.

The only birthday card I received this year (yes imagine that! Manager of my REAL wall receives only ONE card for birthday - scandalous!), which was from the team was a Google card with the Google Sesame Street logo on it "Brought to you by the letter G and the number 30..." and there were balloons organised in the Google colours.

Ace.

my REAL wall - 23 Jan 2010 - Faro Portugal, originally uploaded by andytgeezer.

It was my 30th birthday on the 25th and me and Elena decided to take your postcards to Faro in Portugal for the weekend.

Not knowing much about the Algarve, we weren't sure what to expect so didn't take too many postcards as we wanted to travel light. As it turned out, when we got there, it was a quiet little place with not a lot going on, so we had a lot of time to put your postcards around the place.

This first REAL wall shows post from Olga's Museum Gang, Girlzootzilla, Cross-Ryu, Dumpsterdiversanonymous and Richard Canard against a backdrop of Graffiti, beach huts and palm trees.

Happy birthday to me! :-D

In a recent photoshoot for the Sunday Times, me and Elena tried desperately to slip in a few postcards, which were heartlessly cropped out.

I have just done a quick bit of photoshopping before this was worthy of appearing on the site, so here is that front page header thumbnail, complete with some postcards sent to Elena.

I've edited the main article a little just putting in the locations of the cards, in case you were wondering

my REAL wall - Subversive postcard plant fails to materialise in national press, originally uploaded by andytgeezer.

So we failed to get any postcards in to the national press this time. Oh well, the year is still young...

my REAL wall - January 18, 2010 - Anthony and Elena appear in the Sunday Times, originally uploaded by andytgeezer.

Only 2 weeks into 2010 and already my REAL wall has hit the national big time press...but not for what you think!

On Friday, I got a call from my mortgage advisor telling me that the Sunday Times had been in touch with him. They wanted to interview a young couple who had recently taken out a mortgage, and so he thought of me and Elena, and gave me a call.

The paper arranged for a photographer to be around in an hour and interviewed me on the phone as to why I chose the mortgage I did and next thing you know, me and Elena were on the front page of the Sunday Times money section!

I could hardly believe my eyes on Sunday, when I picked up the paper and saw our thumbnail on the front page in the top left hand corner, the very first thing you see when you turn to the money pages, and all my friends have remarked how little sense it makes that I, who care not a jot about the stuff, should be there looking like some money guru! As Jason says "...it just doesn't compute"

Amusingly, the paper reported my name as Anthony Hoang, the second time that my name has been spelt wrong in the papers. And yes everyone I know has ripped the piss out me for that already, so feel free to add yours below...

For REAL wall fans, me and Elena tried our very hardest to get your mail in.

The picture on the front page, which is also featured on the online version of the story was taken with the official REAL wall as the white background. The photographer was looking for a white background and said "Could you take those postcards down and we'll take the picture over there"

D'oh!

Inside the paper, on page 4 me and Elena are pictured on the stairs. After clearing the place up a little, Elena slyly draped Okadascat's knitted banner across the top of a table in front of us, and I set up a postcard from Richard Canard at our feet on the staircase.

Desperately we tried to maneuvre ourselves so that the photographer would take a pic of a postcard, but to no avail. Shucks. Maybe next time.

If any of you are going to appear in the press, please write to me and tell me and I'll send you some postcards to try to sneak in under the photographers radar. REAL subversion of the press is one of this years challenges!

my REAL wall today features what I hope to be the last of the post sent to Goldhawk Road. Still nothing has come through to the PO Box address yet at the new house, so the competition for first through the door is still very much on.

As usual, you can find out more about the postcards by clicking through to the flickr page and hovering over the picture, where you will find full annotations!

my REAL wall - 14 Jan 2010, originally uploaded by andytgeezer.

The new REAL wall PO Box is now live and waiting for your post!

In the meantime, I've dug up some of my favourite old ones, from Missive Maven, Stalex and Amymc, and put them alongside some newer bits from L-plate, Pola and Nico Van Hoorn.

Getting very excited about mail in the PO Box, and in case you don't already have it, the new REAL wall address is...

my REAL wall
PO Box 63138
LONDON
W14 4BR
UK

My REAL wall - January 10, 2010, originally uploaded by andytgeezer.

I'm finally getting my act together in the new house and yesterday me and Elena put up our kitchen noticeboard.

Obviously, the REAL wall kitchen noticeboard has to be a little special as it will play host to all your wonderful post as well as notices, and I picked up a really awesome memo board for the job. It's this 3m memo board stuff, that is slightly sticky, and all you need to do is push your postcard onto it and it sticks up there. No blu tac or glue or staples needed. It's almost as if it were made for the REAL wall!

Post today comes from the amazing Cross-Ryu, regular contribtor Wackystuff, Lorraine Kwan. L-plate, and Lou among others.

Also up on the wall are my latest theatre tickets. Me and Elena have decided to be a little more cultured this year and have pairs of tickets to all sorts of shows, including Aladdin at the pantomime in Hackney Empire (excellent - highly recommended but probably sold out), Eigengrau and the Whiskey taster at Bush theatre in Shepherds Bush, and Three Sisters at Hammersmith Lyric.

I want to let you in on a little local secret now. That last ticket for the Lyric was an absolute bargain. The Lyric theatre in Hammersmith has a special offer for local residents in the borough of Hammersmith and Fulham on the opening night of every show.

If you live in the borough and can prove you do, just go there the Saturday before the show opens at 9:30 and you can get a free pair of tickets! So there you have it. Local bargains exposed on my REAL wall. You heard it here first...