Silent Saloon.

[Howard Wright]

Jon raises an interesting point.  What is a pastiche? 

My feeling is that any copy that is made without a proper understanding of how and why the original was designed and built is a pastiche.  It the case of Gordon England's patent construction, it seems to me that without the necessary insights, one would be making a bad copy of a bad design.  Jon and I had this conversation about aspects of his lovely little shooting brake.

Has anyone ever bought a cheap Chinese rip-off gadget only to find that it CANNOT work, because someone has copied a photograph without understanding HOW it should work?

We're going to build this body with a version of the very robust, 3/4" ash board, Swallow floor.  There can be absolutely no doubt about how that works!

I've often wondered about Gordon England's love of very lightweight ply construction.  The lack of surviving bodies of the many hundreds built demonstrates its inadequacies.  I have a suspicion that in the early 'twenties, GE bought a huge stock of war surplus aviation ply and was then stuck with it!

Hi Martin

I’ve just looked up the definition of pastiche.  Unfortunately it is nearly always used in connection with art.  But one example is Gauguin who went to Polynesia and painted  pastiches of the native art.  I think you might have to argue with art historians as to whether Gauguin understand how the natives painted. I, like you, assumed pastiche was a slightly negative term as in “it was a pale pastiche of the original”.

There is also a problem with “replica” which I’ve also thought as being slightly negative but the dictionary defines as an exact copy (by the artist or under the artists direction).

So it still doesn’t help in defining the excellent vehicles you produce which are (in dictionary terms) probably more akin to pastiches than replicas.

Cheers

Howard