The colours of London weather

An early autumn afternoon on Waterloo bridge, looking upstream -

and downstream -

Now the arty, weathery blast from the past. A famous view by Monet, one of a series he painted from his hotel room, just to the left of those trees beside the boats -

"Where, if not from the Impressionists, do we get those wonderful brown fogs that come creeping down our streets, blurring the gas-lamps and changing the houses into monstrous shadows? To whom, if not to them and their master, do we owe the lovely silver mists that brood over our river, and turn to faint forms of fading grace curved bridge and swaying barge? The extraordinary change that has taken place in the climate of London during the last ten years is entirely due to this particular school of Art…at present people see fogs, not becuase there are fogs, but because poets and painters havae taught them the mysterious loveliness of such effects. There may have been fog for centuries in London, I dare say there were. But no one saaw them, and so we do not know anything about them. They did not exist until Art invented them." - Oscar Wilde, “The Decay of Living” 1889

This is the classic image of London fog -

all rather "pretty" these days, but a serious problem until the Clean Air Act of 1956 banned coal fires and ended those pea-souper smogs.

Murk came in several types, says Peter Ackroyd in his book "London: A Biography" - a black species described as "simply darkness complete at midday"; bottle green; as yellow as pea soup; and "a rich lurid brown". He didn't mention "fuchsine", as in this view by Monet:

Fuchsine was a synthetic dye used between 1875 and 1925 - it wasn't very lightfast.

Oops!

Here's what happens when you don't proofread carefully. Somehow (and I know exactly how!) the date of next year's Spring Regional Day came out as 21 March 2008. We've ordered 5000 of these fliers, so very now and then I get out the tippex and the pen and put on some music and fix a few hundred dozen more.

If you're in London on 21 March 2009, do come along to hear speakers on Indonesian batik and Mongolian quilts, and join in with all those other quilterly things that go on at such get-togethers -- show and tell, chat, tombola, traders, chatting, raffle, challenge, refreshments, more chat - a jolly time.

Details are on the Region 1 website.

My trees and their trees

The chestnut out back, in the morning light, was having a Paul Nash moment -It reminds me of Nash's "Wood on the Downs" somehow -Another Nash painting is "Storm Trees" -Unrelated to Nash, more Henri Rousseau perhaps, I've watched the leaves fall off this tree - intrigued by the negative spiky spaces -
Here's Rousseau's "Storm with Tiger" (which is in the National Gallery, just down the road) -We had it as a jigsaw puzzle, a few years back. Jigsaw puzzles are a "different" way of looking closely at art!

Julia Caprara

Sad news that Julia Caprara has died. I attended her classes at City Lit for years in the heady days of the mid-90s, when she was head of textiles there and brought in many well-known tutors for short courses and one-day workshops. She was very, very important (indeed, seminal) in my textile and artistic development - a teacher who encouraged students to develop in their own paths, rather than imposing her own. She introduced us to many embroidery techniques that are now being used by quilters for surface design and embellishment, but most of all she sought to develop creativity and critical skills in her pupils at City Lit and latterly at Opus School of Textile Arts.

Thanks to Julia I have copious sketchbooks, to which I refer often (isn't it interesting how one's early themes keep coming back?). One of my favourites started with her postcard of two huge jars at Knossos and developed into a series of embroidered felt pieces about "old pots"- this one was shown in one of the "Cloth and Stitch" exhibitions that Julia masterminded while at City Lit.

We met on a train once, going north - she was going to Leeds to give a talk and I was going to Halifax to see a Quilters Guild exhibition at Dean Clough, 7-8 years ago - and we had a congenial journey, sitting and chatting and stitching, and exchanging threads. Here's a detail of the piece I was working on -
Julia's thread is the pale green used for seeding on the left. Seeding - that's so appropriate for her role in my creative life.

Finsbury Park - the park

In the 25 years I've lived in north London, I haven't been to my local park, Finsbury Park, as much as 25 times in total. This "people's park" isn't on visitors' must-see lists, but it provides "a rich tapestry of landscapes" - a nice green space as you go by on the bus -Inside is a cafe, boating lake, several childrens' play areas, tennis courts and sports fields, a running track, and flower beds laid out like they were in the 1870s. The views past the large victorian houses (now shabby hotels) is of the City skyline, including the Gherkin -This tree -was planted in 1939, to commemorate 50 years of the London County Council.

Nearby is this signpost for the Capital Ring walkway - 15 miles east to Woolwich foot tunnel and 28 km west to Richmond Bridge -Underfoot are various leafscapes -I couldn't resist taking some of the large leaves home and doing some quick prints on scraps of fabric -

Finsbury Park station

Good public transport is one reason for living near Finsbury Park station, which goes back to 1861. It has two underground lines and a 5-minute overground journey to King's Cross. On match days (Arsenal's home stadium is nearby) the tube station is overcrowded and the train station is busy as fans head northwards home -Turn around and you see the "now controversial" Finsbury Park mosque(raided in 2003 by "only shoeless Moslem police officers") and now renamed North London Central Mosque.

Transition series

A story is developing. Recently we had "Going Around in Circles" - here it is finished -
Now it's "Starting to Fall into Place" -I'm "Getting Ready to Play" -
Looking forward to release! "Out of the Box 1" -Hoping for an explosion of creative opportunities! "Out of the Box 2" -

Spines

From a reprint of an 1842 anatomy book that's been lying around the office.

A matter of timing?

During October I've been making this month's BQL bag-challenge bag, and am pleased to have finished it. It involves 60 squares of 4 pieces each - not huge as quiting projects go. It uses up some of the hand-dyes of pre-used fabric I have lying around, and it wassomething to nibble away at, whenever I had 15 minutes to spare.

Yesterday morning it was all pieced and ready to be quilted and put together; I had the entire day free.... Somehow the quilting, handles, and lining took 4-1/2 hours - I was determined to get it done and dusted, but was amazed at how long it took, and that has made me wonder just how long the cutting and piecing had taken, and what the wage-equivalent value (and possible commercial value) would be.

Of course that's not the point - it's the enjoyment of the making, isn't it?

But sometimes you do have to ask yourself: is the really the best use of my time.

Boating in autumn

The Oxford canal, near Lower Heyford.A brightness of boat-painting -





And domestic details -

Here are two bridges along the canal. All the bridges are numbered, and it's one-way traffic under them:Sometimes there are more modern lift-bridges. One person has to hop off the boat, cross the bridge, pull on the chain that dangles from the weighted diagonal (hidden behind the tree), which raises the bridge. When the boat has gone through, you can let go (carefully), cross the lowered bridge, and hop back on the boat at the other side.The strategically placed sign points to The Bell in Lower Heyford - pleasant pub in a mellow village (or so it seems on a chilly day).

Revisiting the spooky forest

Exactly three years ago I was being driven through the tall trees northeast of Melbourne, huge trees and ferns like these (photo by Palmina Moore) -The memory of the drive surfaced in some "spooky forest" pieces made at the CQ summer school in 2007, which I've written about here and here.

Since then I've been collecting spooky forest pictures and thoughts.

And this little "forest" quilt is based on an etching by Australian landscape painter Fred Williams, seen in a book - a couple of years before my trip to Australia.

Darned art

Hilary Hollingworth lives in Lancashire and works in Yorkshire and has a family history of involvement with cloth - those "personal and collective memories" (as she says on her website) are reflected in her textile work. Here's a scene from "up north" - the brick houses, chimneys, and lines of washing -
At the Knitting & Stitching Show, Hilary gave workshops on her darning technique - these samples encapsulate it -

Art heros - Xu Bing

Seeing some pages from "Tianshu" in an exhibition of modern chinese calligraphy at the British Museum many years ago was a turning point for me. (Below is the complete "Book from the Sky" installation, which took Xu Bing four years to make.)I'd wanted to use some chinese characters for linocuts for an assignment for the illustration course I was taking at (then) London College of Printing. But you know how it is, you don't want them to say something unexpected. And suddenly, here were "nonsense" characters -- perfect for my project. While I was standing there drawing them, an elderly chinese-looking gentleman said to me in an American accent, "You know, I can read Chinese, but I can't make any sense out of this."

That led me to wonder exactly why or how they could be nonsense, and to a week's intensive Mandarin course at City Lit - after which I had some idea of how the writing system works, and which left me wanting to be able to read Chinese. Well, first you have to be able to speak it and understand it... four years of classes and several years without have left me with fading traces of the language, and the ability to recognise only eight or so characters. Maybe in "retirement" I can get back to this; it certainly keeps the mind nimble.
Back to Xu Bing. He started with the woodcut, and had some wonderful work in the British Libary's "Chinese printmaking today" exhibition a few years ago. His "Book from the Sky" offended a lot of traditionalists when it was first shown, and he now lives in the USA, where he's done more exciting work using language and script, including "New English Calligraphy" - making English words look like Chinese ideographs.

Distractions enrich life

"Chance is always powerful. Let your hook always be cast. In the pool where you least expect it, there will be fish." -- OvidEscher's Fish, 1942, woodcut on textile.