A dying tradition

When I hear the sound of hooves, I grab the camera. There's something attention-getting about horses on today's streets ... and this throwback to a Victorian funeral procession.

This country has seen some magnificent state funerals -- pomp and ceremony galore -- and even a re-creation of Nelson's funeral. At the other end of the social spectrum, "having a good send-off" is not an unimportant event. Traditionally people saved throughout their lives for their own funeral - ah the ignominy of a pauper's grave...

Back to the horses - why the plumes? "Dependant upon its splendour an elaborate funeral in the late 1800 would consist of a horse drawn hearse hitched to four black horses wearing plumes of ostrich feathers and velvet drapes to cover the horses. Traditionally black carriages and black horses wearing black plumes were used for an adult funeral and white horses wearing white plumes were used for the funeral of children and youths."

Horse drawn hearses took coffins to Victorian cemeteries, which were at the edge of town. Replaced by motor hearses, they disappeared in the 1950s but were reintroduced in the mid-80s.

Book du jour

Production of the list books continues, and they have expanded into a larger project. With each book comes an explanation:


"Often our lists are endless, and we feel we can never finish all the tasks on them ... is it any wonder we feel so overwhelmed? Sometimes so little on the list gets done that we resort to adding things we did instead - and then cross them off, negating our achievements!
    "This little book aims to reverse that mentality.  Choose just three things to “cross off” each day, and use the rest of the page to list the other things you have done. (The blank pages will help with the overflow.)
    "When you have used this book, please scan or photograph a double-page spread and send it to me, with your thoughts on list-making, if you wish, at mcooter3 at gmail.com, or contact me via my blog, http://margaret-cooter.blogspot.com. I would like to use the photos (anonymously) to make another book, which will be available as a “real book” or online."

If you'd like to take part, please contact me and I'll send you a copy of mydailylists.

Fear of photos

The prospect of organising thousands of accumulated photos is literally sickening. This gut feeling is actually fear - fear of starting and finding you're doing it "wrong"; fear that the job will never be finished; fear that you'll delete the wrong pictures.

This fear also has subtle dimensions: sad feelings, on looking at the photos, about "what used to be" ... leading to fear of the future. 

The other day I hunted through about six months' worth of photos for a particular one, and got increasingly frustrated - and got angry with myself for not doing anything about this chaos, this muddle, this superfluity. I know that about 90% of these photos - well, 75% for sure - can and should be deleted. Why do we keep them? Do we really look at and enjoy them? Does there come a time when we recognise they are a burden? (That was definitely a rhetorical question - as well as 25,000 digital pix I have 8 shoebox files of prints.) 

Less is definitely going to be more - but where to start? There are free organising programs for digital photos. I already have Bridge, and my son has been filling my ears with how to use it, so I've watched a short video (there are many such). But mostly I've been thinking about what I want to use the images for, which will influence not just how many get deleted, but how the survivors will be categorised, or rather, labelled - how detailed does a description have to be for retrievability? 

Looking through all those files the other day did give me an overview - landscape, family, events, art, and lots of quirky things - setting up a file structure isn't the problem. If, that is, a file structure as I know it is the solution. Nowadays we have metadata and tags - this "new stuff" requires a different mindset; it requires change. Change is hard, change is frightening. We're back to where we started, feeding in to the fear loop. 

Time to make a plan. Today: research. Tomorrow: starting. Next week: progress.

The wisdom is that you start with the current stuff, and work backwards. Set the timer for 15 minutes ... little and often!

Alas for the independent bookshop

Another closure -the Amwell Book Company is one of at least six bookshops closing this month. These include The Harbour Bookshop in Dartmouth after 60 years, The Travel Bookshop in Notting Hill and The Derwent Bookshop in Cumbria after 50 years. It also follows the closure of another independent shop in Amwell Street , L’Epicerie at the end of August.

The shop is at 53 Amwell  Street, London EC1R 1UR, tel. 020 7837 4891, opening hours 11 – 6 Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday until 1^st October. There will be a sale from 10 September until the end of the month, and after that books will be available only online at www.amwellbookcompany.co.uk or visiting by appointment.


Owner Charlotte Robinson  says ‘I have had a second hand bookshop off and on since 1979.  I closed my previous shop in Soho during the recession in the early 90’s.  Then it was rising costs and falling incomes.  As a second hand bookshop we have had a slight advantage over the independent new bookseller as we have an online business alongside a bricks and mortar store.  However what we are experiencing now is quite different.  The sheer speed of change in peoples’ reading and knowledge acquisition habits is incredible.’

Drawing with a video camera

Stills from Woldgate 7 November 2010 11:30 AM (left) and Woldgate 26 November 2010 11 AM (right). Credit: ©David Hockney

Always an innovator, David Hockney has been getting up to new technological tricks. In the 80s he used polaroids to make large collages of subjects like a road in the desert or the Brooklyn Bridge. He was a pioneer of using digital cameras in his art. Now he's mounting an array of high-definition video cameras on the side of a car and driving down a quiet country road in Yorkshire. The results are shown on 18 screens - in two groups, with one set of screens showing a time delay - of seconds, or of entire seasons. The cameras are set at different angles and focal lengths, so he is providing a way of seeing something very intensely.


He calls these works drawings rather than photographs. "There's always a lot more to see", he says. 


Hockney has written a book (Secret Knowledge) on how early painters used a camera obscura as a drawing tool, and is interested in all sorts of technology - a paintbrush is a technological device, he contends. He now uses an iPad as a drawing tool, and has printed out some of those drawings on a large scale, using a program to prevent them from pixelating. These will be shown at the Royal Academy next year. 


'Hockney started using photographs as a basis for paintings in the late 1960s,' the article says. 'But he became dissatisfied with the direction his work was taking, which in some cases veered toward a form of photorealism. By the '80s he was conducting a personal research program into the nature of pictorial and photographic space. He began to entertain the idea that what the camera sees and what the eye sees are in some ways fundamentally different. "Most people feel that the world looks like the photograph," he says. "I've always assumed that the photograph is nearly right, but that little bit it misses by makes it miss by a mile. This is what I grope at." '


It's interesting to read, amid an account of Hockney's technological innovations in making his art, that photocopied work can be made uncopiable: 'Hockney has been adept at using new technology to find new ways to draw. In the 1980s he used early color photocopiers and fax machines to make art. Using the fax, he distributed art by telephone; with the photocopier he made prints that, paradoxically, could not be photocopied (if you make an intense black by putting the paper through the machine four times, it cannot be replicated by a single copying process).'


The author of the article, Martin Gayford, has written "A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney", to be published in October.

Turner at the Tate, and some thoughts on drawing

They do say that "tone does the work, but colour gets the credit" - you can see that better in the enlarged watercolour, and the engraving made from it, below -

"Interactive display" meant not only videos the watch but - oh joy! - a chance to sit and draw. You could get close up and personal with a Turner drawing and pick up a pencil and do what he did.

Nor could I resist. Some of the drawings had such delicate lines that my decrepit eyesight couldn't cope, so I settled down in front of this landscape, initally deterred by the subject. But bit by bit I got into it, and started noticing more and more subtleties ... as well as having to revise my initial impression of its structure.

This experience, coupled with a comment in an email about "drawing badly", prompted some reflections on drawing itself. I'm trying to figure out where drawing stops and starts - in relation to both writing and painting. (How it relates to sculpture may be an entirely different topic...)

I am uneasy when people say they draw badly. Maybe because bad-good is a continuum with a slippery slope. To me, drawing is about looking, looking hard and looking again. This includes looking at other artists' drawings - especially how they made their marks. I've spent some time trying to make "their" marks ... standing in dimly lit art museums, sometimes with a lined notebook and ballpoint pen, and focusing on a small section of an old master drawing ... making the marks I see. It has the same effect for me, emotionally, as looking intently at stitching - the maker's hand and mine are powered by the same mind, one that  accepts small accumulations because it knows what the larger effect will be. 

So there I was with my ballpoint pen wishing I had a better tool - a pencil, thick paper - then the drawing would be "better", it would more closely resemble the original. I came to realise it doesn't matter - the important thing was the looking, and the translation of that artist's mark into my own gesture. I could have been drawing in air, and gained from the process.

Is drawing is the bridge to painting? Yes, I think so, in that both need composition. But the drawn line is so different from the spread paint ... can they be on the same continuum? This issue touches upon "the word as shape" - to be seen rather than read. For me, reading-for-recognition-of-information trumps word-as-shape, and often I can't get beyond constantly rereading the word to look at the painting as a whole. 

Mind maps again

The map that will (surely!) help me think clearly about my essay topic continues to be populated with new lands of discovery -

Meanwhile this book turned up at the V&A bookshop -

In it, not just this bit of mapping

In it, but three dozen diagrams of history designed by Maciunas between 1953 and 1973 as a visualisation of chronological causality. Maciunas attempted in various ways to draw a picture of history using dates, facts, lines, and vectors. The many flaps show that it's not completely straightforward -

George Maciunas (1931-1978) was an artist, gallerist, and entrepeneur, and is one of the founders (perhaps the inventor) of Fluxus. In addition to editing and designing the first anthology entitled Fluxus in 1960, he also supplied the paper and money for printing. By 1961 Maciunas had moved from New York to Germany to escape his creditors. His view of humanity is expressed as a struggle between the hedgehog (obstinate, determined) and the fox (curious, quick, skeptical). 

His view of humanity (it says here) is expressed as a struggle between the hedgehog (obstinate, determined) and the fox (curious, quick, skeptical).

Breadbox

The breadbox was a birthday present, designed and built by my son, who wants to be able to fill it with four loaves of home-baked bread at a time. It sat around unpainted for quite a while, until I finally remembered to pick up some "silver" leaf at an art shop. 

First step was undercoat - acrylic paint out of a tube, thinned down slightly. Sanding, then a layer of acrylic gold size, which "dries" in 15 mins but stays tacky for ages.

The exciting part was putting on the aluminium leaf. A blunt (stencil) brush is useful for getting the leaf into any crevices, and in the absence of the proper big soft brush, I used a blusher brush for brushing away the loose bits.

 The box in situ - it still needs a handle -

I love the subtle reflections -- and now want to gild everything in sight!

Book du jour

What happens if you have holes, and different colours of lines? Is there an optimum placement of holes? Is there a "delightful" sequence of colours? (Is it better just in black...) How is looking at photos of a book object different from handling it? Does the handling help in discovering the "best" photo ... or is there even a "best" photo?

Im-materiality

"Mistrust of the Image as Representation" is a web project by Michael Robbs (2007) - he draws a line in Photoshop, using various brush and pencil tools, including "scattered maple leaves". What you see is pixels of various tones, in various configurations, while reading the name of the tool. Fascinating.

Other web projects are at antenna.org.uk

Moan on Monday - advice for the over 65s

 A leaflet for The Elderly, designed by a bright young thing, who doesn't realise that  Elderly People like to read things as a swathe of text - not cut up into jolly little boxes! They (we?) want to be sure we've read the whole thing - and have the attention spans to do so - whereas having it "chopped up" means some of it is likely to go unread and/or be offputting.

(For those who commented on the earlier version - apologies - my carefully composed text simple disappeared...) If you enlarge the pic with boxes, you can enjoy the many useful tips. For example - Replace worn out slippers. Flapping or damaged soles or slack slippers can be dangerous. 

I also wanted to pass on a tip that will help with balance and fitness - walk on your tiptoes - and if you do it while going up stairs, no one will notice!

Being in the right place

There's a name for these fractured or distorted drawings/paintings - ana...something - and this one is the ladies' loo, to the left of the main entrance at V&A museum. To be in the right place to see it, use the first sink to wash your hands, and look in the mirror...

Hookey chickey

Hooked in London is taking part in a chicken-rug challenge. My contribution will be some coasters. Larger and rather more splendid chicken-rugs are on the group's blog - hooked-in-london.blogspot.com

The group meets once a month - like, today - hence the resurrection of this project!

Camberwell Book Arts show

Juk Hee Kwon's eviscerated book leads you up the stairwell of the old building - and more are inside.

The rooms are calm, the content is varied. You can pick up things and read them.

 You can see the work close-up at wearebookarts.co.uk

The MA shows are on till 8 Sept and include printmaking, illustration, digital arts, fine art, and designer-maker.

Book du jour

It started with a coincidence - seeing the "writing book" by Aisha Khalid at the V&A on the way to the cafe, and then over coffee discussing the finer points list-making. When you realise you've done something that isn't on the list, do you add it to the end of the list and then cross it out as done?

In a deeply psychological way that's not a good idea. Why are you negating your accomplishment?

Thus, in addition to the To Do list, we now have the Done list in which things are proudly added, rather than crossed off. They rub shoulders in a little book -

To Do consists of three lines only - to keep the daily burden manageable. These tasks can be crossed off - or ticked. (Perhaps in Version 2.0 I'll provide a little circle to fill in, according to how much of the task actually got done.) For Done, there are rather more lines - for recording all those distractions and creative procrastinations that are part of doing the work of the world.

This little stitched booklet is the Finite Version - a dozen double-sided pages; an arbitrary number. Of course it could be a monthly thing - 32 pages isn't much thicker than 24. But I've forgotten to have a place for the date ... another refinement to implement in Version 2.0.

The cover consists of a strip of paper folded in half vertically, so the back is double but the front has an extra page. Perhaps that should be the other way round?

And the colour of the sewing thread ... ah, so many decisions!

I also plan an Eternal Version, with replacement pages within a hard cover.

Book du jour

The Alisa Golden book fell open this morning at Flexagons, so I immediately started folding. This structure requires cutting out a square in the middle (which will make another flexagon, ad infinitum...) and also needs glue*. I'm happy to report that even with a rubbish old bit of paper, it works!

The diagram on the right of the page shows how to sequence the pages, back and front of the sheet of paper. First I need something (text?) to put on the page, and then .........

*Could you cut slots to give those pages a couple of half-pages that fold open, or rather, lift up? Yes! (Tip: cut the slit in the corner piece first.) How useful this leap forward is, is up for debate.

Recommended reading

 

Alisa Golden's book is attractive, comprehensive, and clear. It's inspirational and interesting, thanks to the photos and "tidbits". You really want to get stuck right into making books when you look through this compendium!

I loved this snippet on Visual Diaries (shown on the page above) by Anne Hicks Siberell:

"As a child I wrote but later liberally censored my five-year diary, confiding 'Dear Diary, YOU know what happened...' Now, decades later, the diary tells me nothing. As an adult, I found myself still reluctant to write anything but the decorous in my journals - heaven forbid someone should read it. While researching the origin of Babylonian clay tablets for a children's book, it occurred to me that tablets might work for my diaries. I began to record events by placing objects into wet cement, then painting, drawing, or carving on the solid surface. These small-sized memory jogs never lose their ability to aid my recall of an event or certain period of time. I also make collaged diaries in accordion-fold books, and the pictures flow into one another, forming a timeline or a long mural. I like that information can be recorded, stored, then brought into focus without what we recognize as our traditional written language."

The top boo-boos

Words to remember, from Robert Genn's newsletter:

"Overwork, overstate and over-busy are three of the top boo-boos [in painting]. We come by them honestly--from our innate human desire to give more. Sometimes it takes another person's eyes to see there's too much going on. Sometimes it's painful to remove stuff. But art very often needs lines that disappear, it needs subjects that are suggested rather than told, it needs incomplete areas so viewers can complete for themselves. Our work does not have to be a seamless stream of cleverness.

"The same is true in writing. Passages are almost always better when cut back. Writing is rewriting."

He says that using paucity helps introduce mystery. In my mind, mystery=richness. I often find it in white paintings. The one at the top is one of many by Robert Ryman (from this article). 

Ancient trees

Lovely photo feature in the online Guardian today - this image is by Richard A Brooks and encapsulates why we need, need, need those trees. See more pix here.

Jameel Prize

This wonderful exhibition at the V&A is on till 25 September, and on 12 September the winner will be presented with £25,000. The show is in two parts of the museum - the main Islamic room (the Jameel gallery, which opened in 2006) and the studio gallery on the way to the cafe. 

On the website it says: "The V&A began to collect art from the Islamic world in the 1850s, and it was the first institution in the world to do so with a purpose. The Museum's mission was to reform design, and it was thought that Islamic ideas about structuring patterns and matching decoration to shape and function could improve British design, as indeed they did. The Jameel Prize shows that this link between the Islamic art of the past and contemporary practice is still very much alive."

It's one of the best exhibitions I've seen recently.The work is astonishing and thought-provoking, and beautifully crafted. The shortlist of 10 artists was chosen from submissions, based on work in the past five years, from over 100 nominated artists who have links with diverse countries in the world.

On entering the Studio Gallery, you are confronted with what looks like a shawl (or magic carpet) with simple gold embroidery. On closer inspection the embroidery turns out to be gold-plated pins - 300,000 of them - symbolising the agony of the people in Indian-occupied Kashmir.

The same artist, Aisha Khalid, has created a lined exercise book similar to those used by school pupils in Pakistan for writing practice as they learn the two national languages - which each start from a different end of the book. The 300 pages of the book were created with materials and techniques used in islamic manuscript production. In the Urdu half, the lines have often been 'misprinted'. In the open page, the languages approach closest to each other - blurring and overlapping to reflect the increasing tension between them.

The accompanying video sets out the story -

The mirror mosaic by Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian was inspired by the feathers left behind by sparrows on her balcony in Tehran. Perhaps because of the reflection and shiny patterning, this work seemed more superficial - or is it that we distrust bling on any level?

The "bricks" of Noor Ali Chagani are his translation of the principles of Mughal miniature painting into three dimensions. Life Line suggests a supple cloth, but the brittle hard bricks relate to the hard struggle of individuals for daily survival. 

I was interested in the edges of the work both from a structural point of view and in a vaguely conceptual way - neglected areas perhaps; or, rarely seen aspects? - or perhaps because of the double meaning of "edgy" in this context.

Also drawing on the miniature painting tradition, Soody Sharifi has created digital collages she calls "maxiatures" - inserting her own photographic images to draw out the contradictions between reality and fiction, past and present, and public and private spaces. Frolicking Women in the Pool, for example, contrasts photographs of women swimming fully clothed at the seaside in Iran with a 14th-century depiction of women swimming naked.

Hadieh Shafie's work combines simple strips of coloured paper and repetitive meditative practice to create large works with hidden Sufi texts, printed or written in Persian on the strips, which are then rolled up tightly and put in frames -- concealed mystic knowledge. This is part of 26000 Pages; the title reflects the number of strips used -

Lighting conditions in the large gallery are kept low, so my photo of Hazem el Mestikawy's Bridge is a bit blurry. He's covered the cardboard structure with Arabic and English newsprint. The seven movable "bridges" create symbolic contact between West and East, or the economic North and South -

Bita Ghezelayagh's felt tunics (seen sideways on in the upper of the photos) are simple shapes, with the felt embodying qualities of simplicity and resilience. The embellishments originate in talismanic shirts, often worn in battle, on which inscriptions and charms were thought to confer supernatural protection. She has used symbols of resistance, protection and martyrdom taken from Iranian post-revolutionary culture. Attached, embroidered and painted on to the felt, these symbols merge contemporary urban imagery with a rural craft tradition -

Six banners by Rachid Koraichi - Les maitres invisibles - also draw on Sufi traditions of numerology and mystic symbolism, but rather lost their impact through being hung high in the gloom of the gallery.

I somehow missed taking photos of Babak Golkar's architectural models rising from the patterns of handmade carpets, and Hayv Kahraman's "playing cards" series, which was inspired in part by the 40,000 decks of 'archaeology-awareness' playing cards sent to American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2007. You can see good images of all the works on the V&A's website.

On the way back to the Studio Gallery to cast our vote we noticed another work by Noor Ali Chagani - a section of wall that could have been part of the doorway. Through a small hole you see other brick walls, which seem to stretch back in time as well as space -

Showtime

All sorts of action in various parts of the building as the MA Visual Arts students set up their degree show. These shots were taken in the Book Arts section, earlier this week.
The show opens tomorrow (2-8 September) and the "party" is on Tuesday 6th. Details are here. If you're in the neighbourhood (south London, UK), do drop in...

It will all be looking great - and the amount of work and worry behind the whole thing will have become invisible!

(This time next year, I'll be one of those setting up my stuff ... the part of the course I'm least looking forward to.)