Printed matter

Fun to make ... but how to use them? Appropriate text would be a good start...

Art I like - Fred Williams

Bush fire in Northern Territory (source)

Burnt landscape  (source)   

The burnt landscape exudes desolation just as Paul Nash's Totes Meer does.  

Fred Williams evolved a visual shorthand to represent the vulnerability of the vegetation. Is it that he's so economical with his brush strokes? Not really - it's more that he lets the negative space become an important element; something invisible is happening in that negative space. 

See many, many more of his wonderful Australian landscapes here, both paintings and prints. He's an artist I keep going back to.

Overview

In the studio at college is a little shelf that someone put up for whatever reason - a narrow little shelf. I happened to have some bits of work with me, and some time to wait around, so I put various things on that shelf...

A regiment of inky books

Sonnets displayed (precariously)

The remnants of dictionary pages

 A table was also conveniently empty -- seeing things in relation to each, and in a new/different context, other is so useful -

Which items to take away, which to leave; which projects to abandon, which to develop?

From the top of the bus

Ladbroke Grove

Camberwell

Walworth Road

Angel, Islington

Flypast

As we happened to be in town, we went down to Trafalgar Square - the nearest patch of big sky - to watch the jubilee flypast. It was crowded with people and umbrellas, watching the big screen. Then came the planes - so exciting! First the historic ones ... I managed to restrain myself from getting out the camera when the Dakota, flanked by two King Airs, went over, but whipped it out and pointed it up, hoping to catch the Lancaster, four Spitfires, and the Hurricane -

 Then nine planes from the Red Arrows streaked over, trailing patriotic smoke into the damp sky -

A video of the pilot's eye view is on the BBC website -

Tree of codes

The novel was a translation from Polish of childhood memories; it was made into a 21-minute animated film. And then Jonathan Safran Foer did this to it -

How to read it, though? Here's how: "The difficulty, with Tree of Codes, is part and parcel of its beauty: the holes in the pages let the pages behind show through, giving a three-dimensional layering of text, with words we won’t encounter until later sneaking into sentences now. The reader has to learn to lift the words s/he needs from this thicket (or cloud – it almost works like a tag cloud.) ... The wondrousness of the die-cut technique is in a side-effect, though Foer alludes to it in his title: it shows how to read is to decode. The found text, diced into layers, creates its own chaos, its own white noise, from which you must pull the sense."

To make the book, first it was printed and then some really complicated die-cut plates were made - great pix of the shards falling out! - and then it had to be collated by hand. See a short video here.

I bought a copy online and it came wrapped in coordinated paper. Delightful.

This article compares it with the latest edition of Tom Phillips' Humument, which uses erasure in a different way.

Burnt crochet

The work of Canadian artist Lizz Aston. She uses machine embroidery and thread burnout, and also makes soft sculptures.

Moan on Monday - "please prove you're not a robot"

"Two words"? What IS that thing on the right? And this isn't even the worst example I've seen...

Frustrating, isn't it? Puts you off bothering to make a comment. It's unnecessary, definitely, on blogs that use comment moderation.

I turned it off recently. As I don't moderate comments, I also turned off the "Anonymous" facility. Most people have some sort of OpenID - if not, you can get it at openid.net.

More street parties

On our way out this morning, the next street was setting up their street party. Note the blue sky - after yesterday's torrential rain, today was meant to be fine - before the rain returns tomorrow. About 950 road closures had been applied for - that's a lot of red, white, and blue; miles of bunting; thousands if not millions of cupcakes ...

When we returned four hours later, the party in the street near the tube station was all but over. The puddle shows that it had been raining in the meantime -

Nearer home, some fleeting sunshine for that other party, still in full swing -

The street party is a grand British tradition. In 1945 the war was over - that really was reason to celebrate! This was Norah Street, off Bethnal Green Rd (Norah St no longer exists) - the lad leaning forward near the centre is Tony, and his mum is tall in the centre at the back -

Note the absence of men; some away at war still, not yet demobbed, but others keeping away from what was seen as something for women and children.

Tony also recollected hearing that the war was over (VE Day, Tuesday 8 May 1945) - he was up early and his grandfather had just heard on the radio, so young T went up and down the street, banging on doors and shouting "The war is over!" Sometimes the news is worth waking up early for!

From the archive - London Art Fair, January2012

Kazuhito Takadoi;  washi, grass, gold leaf

Possibly by Ellen Bell? (can't read the label in my photograph)

Alison Lambert; charcoal and pastel - large and hard to photograph behind glass

Eduardo Chillida

Barry Flanagan - etching and aquatint

Melanie Comber 

Simon Morley

Reginald S Aloysius

Upcoming exhibition at college

0.34 mile (0.54km) is an exhibition by Book Art & Printmaking MA students at Camberwell College of Art at the Wilson's Road building, Camberwell. More than 50 students are taking part; my piece will look something like this -

The exhibition runs from 13th to 21st June, 1pm to 5pm (closed Sunday). The private view is on Wednesday 13th June, 5.30 - 8.30pm.

http://www.facebook.com/034Miles054km

and
http://www.facebook.com/events/477184738964248/

As it's in college, guests need to be "signed in". If you'd like to go to the PV or at another time, do let me know.

From the archive - Cambridge Market

The time was January 2012; the place was Cambridge market - and the stall of interest, on the left, was all about sewing and mending. I was intrigued to see a sewing machine set up in a market stall, but didn't get the name of their business and can't remember how often they were there - perhaps weekly?

Mending and making do en plein air

Cambridge market has been going since forever, or at least since Saxon times, and had a big fire in 1849. Here's what it looked like in later Victorian times (see other nostalgic photos here) -

1890 - note the fancy fountain, different now

and nowadays -

The view from Great St Mary's tower

Until his death in 2007, Snowy Farr was a common sight at the market, with his cart full of animals, collecting money for guide dogs and other charities. This 1971 photo shows him with cart at a hospital gala -

Possibly his trademark was the mice on his hat -

Snowy Farr in 1979; photo from here

Art resources on the web

Some UK-based resources mentioned in the professional practice seminar at college last week -

http://www.artquest.org.uk/ (arts council - membership of the site is free; lots of "how to" articles and legal info)

http://www.a-n.co.uk/publications/shortcut/408712 (there's a "toolkit" for artists, but you may have to pay a membership to access it)

http://www.jotta.com/jotta/ (has free newsletter)

http://www.artsthread.com/ ("the world's only creative graduate website")

http://www.axisweb.org/ ("the online resource for contemporary art")

at the moment www.artindustri.com ("the largest art portal on the net") isn't coming up on my computer, but it too was mentioned in the seminar and is listed, with other potentially useful sites, here: http://www.xmarks.com/site/www.artindustri.com/

http://www.isendyouthis.com/opportunities.aspx

Chinese dancers, 7th-8th century, at Guimet museum, Paris

And also...

Thinking to find an image to go with this list, instead I found a random selection of further resources - again mainly applicable to the UK, but in any country a search for "art opportunities" and/or "art resources" should turn up relevant sites.

If you're an art historian - http://www.aah.org.uk/jobs and http://www.aah.org.uk/resources

http://www.thecreativesociety.co.uk/about-us/  ("New Deal of the Mind is a coalition of artists,entrepreneurs and opinion formers who recognise the economic, social and cultural value of Britain's creative talent")

http://ixia-info.com/ ("the public art think tank")

http://www.artslant.com/ew/main (local and worldwide -"the #1 contemporary art network, has comprehensive calendars for openings, exhibits and events, a worldwide community of professional artists, and local city editions for the art lover")

Some progress

Wonderful! But...

Something to chew on

Complain productively (2006)

A picture is worth a thousand words? Jessica Hagy's graphs and venn diagrams at thisisindexed.com are comprehensible at a level below (beyond?) verbal thought - and the titles of the posts give them a nice little kick. Here's a selection to tempt you over to the site.

Lock the library (2007)

Humbling (2008)

The gatekeeper requires bribes (2009)

Why spies are sexy (2010)

Keep calm and carry on (2011)

Art I like - Joy Gregory

Encountered at London Art Fair, January 2012

Joy Gregory often uses traditional processes for her photographs - these handbags are salt prints; she also uses cyanotypes and kallitypes.

Of the handbag series, this site says:
"Developed during a residency in Johannesburg in 1998, 'Handbag Project' focuses on a collection of bags and purses purchased from charity shops around the city. Shown as part of the exhibition Accessory, held at Angel Row Gallery, Nottingham in 2005, the works utilise the power that objects carry when they are contextualised by certain associations. ... these exquisite and seemingly innocent objects take on a deeper and more disturbing significance when we learn that they were found by the artist in Johannesburg charity shops and had belonged to wealthy white South African women during the apartheid years.... These accessories represent a moment in time but are also a powerful symbol of femininity, they explore the representation of women and the lost stories and histories of the colonial world."

Her practice is concerned with social and political issues, with particular reference to history and cultural differences in contemporary society. Explorations of her Jamaican, Afro-Caribbean heritage underly her projects in different ways.

Cinderella has gone to London...

Her "Cinderella Tours Europe" project features a pair of golden shoes photographed in tourist destinations. It's a response to comments made by Jamaican women in interviews about their impossible dream holidays.

Among her many projects are work on marginalised and endangered languages.

an "object of beauty"

The "Objects of Beauty" series uses the old kallitype technique to print contemporary subjects onto thick paper, and apparently simple work with complex messages, raising questions about women's pursuit of changing ideals of beauty and the changing ideals we attach to the objects themselves.

Of "Sites of Africa", an ongoing project, she says: "Although the original intention was to make a reportage I found that the most pervasive element of London is the importance of the ‘document’. Sites of Africa is a photographic document of absent histories, the sites represented were once burgeoning with an African presence which as now disappeared and the sites are now associated with more recent histories."