Sunday in the Park with ...

Our walk in the park followed on from a visit to the Threadneedle Prize at Mall Galleries (on till 11 Oct), more of which below.

Across the Mall and down a side road is Horse Guards Parade, a nice white building that was once the headquarters of the British Army. Until 1997, 500 civil servants used to park their cars there; this was known as the "Great Perk" -

(Big bollards)

 In St James Park is an exhibition of photos that capture the 21st century peace of WWI battlefields -

Part of "Fields of Battle, Lands of Peace 14-18"

 The photos are by Michael St Maur Shiels, and the exhibition will be touring the UK and internationally.

Unperturbed by history, people were enjoying the sunshine and the birds and each others' company and people watching and ice creams -

Since 1994 Green Park is the site of the Canada Memorial, which commemorates the million Canadians who fought in the two world wars and the 113,663 who were killed. The sculptor is Pierre Granche; the halves represent Britain and Canada's joint participation in the wars -

The compass aligned to Halifax NS, where most soldiers embarked on troop ships. Under the water are bronze maple leaves -

Further along, at Hyde Park Corner, the Wellington Arch. When it was built (1826-30) the intention was to have it topped by a quadriga (chariot pulled by four horses), but the intention wasn't realised till 1912. Till then it was topped by a statue of the Duke of Wellington - and indeed his residence, No.1 London, is nearby (and very worth visiting to see the splendid booty from his conquest of Napoleon).

Rather than climbing to the top, we went to find our bus ... but now I wish we had. As Tony said, you have to do things (rather than defer them to "another day").

To backtrack to the Threadneedle Prize - this is an annual prize for figurative painting, and the winner gets £20K. This year over 3600 works were entered, and 64 chosen. You can see them all here.

A corner of the exhibition. The work on the right is "Acrylic Paint on Canvas and Stretcher" by James Tailor

A group of smaller works

Paul Dash's pen and ink "The Float" got my vote for Visitors' Choice. The collaged strips blend in, subtly...

I was surprised to see two "drawings on sewn cotton fabric", by Tom Jean Webb. As quilts, they'd get some scathing comments from judges, not least about the use of blanket stitch (large!) around the edges -

"Its Always Hardest to See Right Before the Moonlight"

Untitled - the satin stitch of the outline is carried into the white area by drawing

Again I'm asking "why fabric?" ... you certainly see its draping qualities ...

Sorting paper in Studio136

Sorting through the piles/boxes of paper is really difficult. That old whisper-in-the-ear is constantly there: "it could be useful" ... but honestly, how much paper does one person need, how much time is available to use it all? Sorting through it does keep alive in your mind what you have, and keeping it all in one place makes it easier to find, but as with so many things, Less Is More.

At time of writing, the worktop is increasingly gridded with categories of paper from the main box -

Black paper; dense card; "interesting" papers; bits of bookcloth etc

Among the "treasures" -

Waxed collage from a project about sewing tools (2003?)

Offcuts from a printmaking workshop, West Dean, summer 2010

Bad photocopies of family photos ... can't remember what the project was

Photocopies from that sewing-tools project

The tutorial report includes this comment:
"What is the meaning of stitching? (text)"

Even as the volume of paper diminishes, further categories arise: bookmaking materials,
remnants of half-alive projects,  things on the verge of being discarded

Not everything that came out of the box was paper:

Offcuts from the Bookwraps (2013)

A simple box, a pleasing idea ... pulled back out of the bin, it can hold something...

It took the best part of two days, off and on, to go through that box, which is ridiculous. It can go on and on if you let it - so I'm setting a stopping time of noon Friday - a time limitation does rather focus the mind and efforts ... and it gives you permission to stop.

Worlds within worlds, you could say

These bottles in a window caught my eye in Amsterdam -

(So did this hairless cat, quite near the red light district -

but that's another story.)

The bottles say Bols and KLM, and it's easy to find out more about them.

"The KLM houses are presents to travelers a board KLM flights in Business and Royal Class. They have been presented over a long period and thus have become collector items. There are 93 different types which are numbered 1 - 93.

"There is Dutch Genever, 35% alcohol, in the houses, which are in fact bottles with a cork and seal on top. Sometimes the genever has been drunk but mostly the empty bottles were empty all along. On flights to some countries with alcohol restrictions empty houses are presented. On some of the houses a sticker explains this by referring to customs regulations. (Empty due to custom regulations on this flight) Sometimes there is a cork and seal and sometimes there isn't (and never was) on the empty bottles."

Read more of their history here.

Here's one collection (see them separately here) -

Is this all 93? (via)

Blog hopping, and thinking about creating

You may have come across, in your blog reading, bloggers who are taking part in the current big blog hop. Both Sheila and Kathy invited me, and I declined to take part, for the same reason I don't take part in chain letters, pyramid selling, or tupperware parties. (Briefly: the mathematics involved means that when people several levels down from the originator have to find their quota of participants, it's darn hard going, because their overlapping circles of acquaintance have already been mined by people a level or two up from them. I'm probably not the only one who thinks "by the time they ask me, it's not worth doing.")

However the questions intrigue me, and I've been thinking about them.

What am I working on?

Sorting out the studio (and bits of the rest of my life). This is turning out to be quite a creative pursuit, rather than a dull, frustrating task.

Light and air - room on the shelves, at last

Sorting and purging and reorganising, though far from finished (and not a full-time occupation) is helping bring "light and air" into my creative life. I'm deciding what projects are not worth carrying on with, and am firming up ruthlessness muscles to the point of them being strong enough to throw out all traces of those projects, save photos and materials that are needed for current projects.

(At first I wrote "materials that could be used..." - which is the trap I've been falling into for years, holding on to things "just in case". Now there's been a category shift: they have to have a foreseeable purpose.)

Light and air - the table under the studio window is so important, as is the notebook

While all this reorganisation is going on, I'm drawing. Tuesday morning is currently my Dedicated Drawing Time, chiselled out of the week as a result of signing up for a course that doesn't start till 21 October. Until it starts, its time slot is spoken for. There will be no diddling about with the computer on Tuesday mornings for the foreseeable future.

During that time, so far, the drawing is sometimes, or even largely, diddling about.

Large drawing in progress ... channelling Senufo art

Large sheets of paper appear and I want to make large drawings, so I get started, even though I don't know what the drawing will be OF. Not all drawing is observational drawing!

Also I have a few pieces of "drawing with stitch" on the go - hand stitching, on fabric and on paper.

How does it differ from others in this genre?

My drawing... hmm ... anyone's drawing is so unique, so personal to them. Try copying a drawing by an old master, a contemporary artist, your child ... re-making their marks is educational, empathic.

Why do I create what I do?

One of the Big Questions arising out of the studio purge is ... what do I actually want to be getting on with? At this point, I don't want a lot of STUFF hanging around - meaning, stuff that I've created in a fit of enthusiasm and am not sure what to do with because it's not something I'm all that pleased with, after all. (There's much to be said for the oriental practice of putting work away for some months, and then if you have any doubts about it, burning it.)

BIG calls out ... big bits of fabric can be folded up; storing paper or canvas is less easy. Big books fit on shelves. Little books are nice too.

Little dust catchers, mostly, made in fits of enthusiasm

Storing what you've made is an important consideration. So is displaying it. In deciding on which projects to carry forward, I'm keeping both in mind.

Another reason for creating what I do is the need to have something in my hands, something growing. I usually carry a little pouch with a little project, to pull out when sitting on the tube or in a park, or at coffee with a friend.

Portable project

How does my creative process work?

In the past few years, my starting point is different. No longer does it depend entirely on a chance conjunction of two fabric scraps on the floor, though that may feed in to the process - it's accidental conjunctions of ideas that stir a project into life. Once I'm thinking about a theme and its undercurrents, the next step is to figure out how to show what I want to say.

Thinking about possibilities is an important part of the process. Maybe I've been doing too much thinking, and that's why nothing has been made for a while.

Aesthetically, I'm trying to strip back to the essentials ... those become apparent in the milling about among the undercurrents.

Going to exhibitions and/or reading about artists online - and writing this blog - is an important part of my creative process. During the studio purge I'm finding things from decades ago that still interest me, and now they have a different context to fit into.

Literature collected at art exhibitions, over the past four years

That's helped me sort out a few things in my head ("I know what I think when I hear myself talk") - thanks for reading!

Recent blog hop posts: Sheila, Kathy, Uta, Yasmin ... other links are in their posts ...

Imaginary geography

A gremlin, or a senior moment, or simple carelessness, put a wrong city in a subject line of a message to a group (that shall remain nameless, but you know who you are) ... and I have offended people who live in any or all of the places mentioned in the body of the message. Yes, that's complicated to figure out ... and I have no excuse for slipping up in this way ... and people have every right to complain ...

It probably won't stop me from doing the same thing again sometime in the future. Moments get more senior all the time, and the gremlins are always with us.

Silver lining is that my geographical non-savvy, in conjunction with the "folded maps" project that remains hidden from my increasingly frantic search, brought the phrase "imaginary geography" to mind - as a title for a quilt (or painting?).

Searching for images on the internet, as you do, found several inspirations:

And with it "the hyper-architecture of desire" (via)

An Atlas of Radical Cartography - maps and essays about social issues - "the map is inherently political"

The Land of Oz (via, a blog of imaginary maps)

The serious side (from wikipedia): "The concept of imagined geographies has evolved out of the work of Edward Said, particularly his critique on Orientalism. In this term, "imagined" is used not to mean "false" or "made-up", but rather "perceived". It refers to the perception of space created through certain images, texts or discourses."

Some well-documented imaginary places are here (and elsewhere).

The Dictionary of Imaginary Places (1980, reprinted) covers only places on Earth.

By Erik Demazieres (via)

A "capriccio" by Piranesi (via)

Contemporary Art Sketchbook Walk course, week 1

The title of the course is a bit mind-boggling, and I wasn't at all sure what to expect. We met at Old St station and spent the afternoon in various galleries, stretching our visual sensibilities and filling pages in our sketchbooks.

The focus this week was line.

First stop was Standpoint, which was showing Nicola Tassie's work - and as she happened to be in the gallery at that moment, she told us about it - the homage to Philip Guston, Cezanne [ceramic apples in the window], and of course Morandi; the vessel as a carrier of meaning, so that the sealed bottles contain secret meanings; the inebriated bottles falling over, having imbibed their contents; the irrelevance of studio ceramics, given the difficulty of making a living that way. 

On to Charlie Smith, which you enter via a pub. The amazingly shiny charcoal drawings by Reece Jones (polymer varnish is involved...) were outshone, in my eyes, by a row of wooden sculptures by Matthew Cowan, beautifully carved and flawlessly painted -

In Order to See the Past, We Have to Walk Backwards Into the Future

Next, to Carl Freedman, where, behind an applique curtain, Nel Aerts was showing "Lord Nelson's Portrait Gallery" - layers of paint on wood, with the image partly built up, partly gouged out through the layers. A fabric version of "Sailor of the Sea, Lover of the Bottle" is on the other side of the curtain -

Drawing really does make you look at the work more deeply (and more kindly). I found the "gaudy gathering of colourful, comic figures" and their "humour, light-hearted mockery and anguish" very "so what", but was intrigued by the way they were made. From the info sheet: "They are tragicomic in all the contrasts they cry out. Digging, sometimes protesting, the portraits came crawling out of the wood. Some of them are more extroverted than introverted, they scream rather than remain inert. Yet they are introspective and self-deprecating."

Time for tea/coffee ... and a look at what everyone had done so far - 

Then on to Hales Gallery to see the "deceptively dark" work of Omar Ba, who studied in his native Senegal and in Geneva. His works, according to the info sheet, "combine memories of his motherland with experiences of his current home in Geneva" - some of the paintings were made on his recent visit to Dakar. They are painted on corrugated cardboard, and the sculpture in the small room consists of cardboard boxes, cinched together. "Images of warfare and symbols of political power are diffused among elaborate patterns and vibrant colours, often inspired by traditional Senegalese ornaments." The figures in the paintings "seem to exist in limbo between African and Western cultures and painterly traditions".

 Details, showing combinations of materials (oil, gouache, ink, pencil, acrylic) -

As for the actual drawing ... I was happy with my all-purpose fine felt-tip and wasn't tempted to use pencil - or a pen that made a thicker line. Some of my drawings home in on details, but I'm most intrigued by this overview of the "scratched and hatched" jugs and cups, which takes out their most striking feature, the hatch-marks that coalesce them into a group, and restores their individuality and shows their interaction ... I can't help thinking of them as a flock of birds, with the jug spouts resembling beaks, and the handles, are they plumage?

Being limited as to time meant not worrying if the drawings were "perfect" [hah!] - you just looked as carefully as you could and put down some lines to remind yourself of the looking. 

When it came to drawing the paintings, one lot seemed too "simple" to be interesting, and the other too complicated to be dealt with as a totality - my way round that was to do an "unseeing" drawing of a boat in one of the paintings, then to draw it again, looking at the page, along with the adjoining boat.

(This post is linked to Off the Wall Fridays, where you can see what lots of creative people have been up to.)

Drawing in the Petrie Museum

Knowing that there were collections of necklaces in this Egyptology museum, I took along some coloured pencils, but having settled down at a table beside a display case, used them to draw the pots.

It was a way to get started. The room was chilly, so a bit of walking about and looking around was called for, during which I started this page (at the bottom) and then found the copper jug with its arrangement of holes-both-sides.

After that it was a search for more broken, mended, and holey items.

The museum is amazingly crowded, and helpful labels have started appearing. Also in recent times, better lighting has been installed.

Currently there's a display of shabtis, the tomb figures that traditionally provided the  all you need in the afterlife -

The artist, Zahed Taj-Eddin, imagines there is no afterlife and no labours for them to perform, so the shabtis are free to do whatever they like. Some are happy with shopping and gadgets; others search for freedom and liberty ... reflecting the complications and contradictions of the world in which we currently operate. The also embody the secrets of Egyptian faience, which is based largely on crushed quartz, combined with small amounts of the ashes of desert plants or the salts of dried-up lakes. Small amounts of copper produce the blue colour, and other oxides can be used for other colours. Zahed, who is also an archaeologist, spent four years understanding ancient faience and developing an ideal faience recipe. After making the shabti, he made a giant column, 2.2m tall, larger than any faience object surviving from antiquity, which can also be seen at the Petrie Museum.

The shabti exhibition is on till 18 October, and the museum, somewhat hidden in the labyrinth of UCL, is open 1-5 Tues-Sat.

Poetry Thursday - in Amsterdam public library

In the entrance to the central library, above the information desk (if I remember right), are relevant poems by the Stadsdichter from recent years -
Robert Anker 2008, The Book
Mustafa Stitou, 2009, Temple (to celebrate the 90th anniversary of the public library)
F. Starik, 2011 (his Dienstbericht isn't among the list of his poems on the Amsterdam city poets site)
Menno Wigman, 2012, The Last Page

Not shown in my photo is the poem by the first holder of the post, Adriaan Jaeggi, who died in 2008. Click on the photo to enlarge, if you read Dutch; if not, click on the poem titles listed above and get an English translation of some sort, courtesy of Google ... it will then be up to you to fill in the gaps. (To see what's possible with translations from Dutch to English, have a look at the David Read Poetry Translation Prize winners - many translations of each poem are given; a different poem is set each year.)

The tradition of having a "village poet" started in the Netherlands in Venlo in 1993 - a local poet laureate. Amsterdam's current Stadsdicter is Anna Enquist.

Stitched Up - exhibition

"An exhibition surveying artistic approaches ato textile mediums, application and appropriations in Post-War and Contemporary Art during the last three decades, starting with pioneers Rosemarie Trockel and Alighiero Boetti, then leading through some of today's best and most promising artists, Sergej Jensen and Sterling Ruby [not shown], up to emerging talents Ethan Cook, Sam Moyer, Ayan Farah, Nina Beier and Alek O. This exhibition creates a lineage and overview as to how different artists have and are employing textiles in their artistic practice and to what end."

That's what it says in the catalogue. The exhibition was at Sotheby's S/2 gallery, 3-30 September, and you can see all 15 works online. These are my photographs of my favourites.

Ayan Farah, Lahleh (2014), 180x120cm.
Indian ink, black clay, sea salt and dead sea mud on hemp.

Hard to see the subtlety of this piece, Untitled (2013) by Ethan Cook, 230 x 305cm.
Hand woven cotton on canvas, in artist's frame.
(You couldn't make a quilt this simple and "pure" - or could you?)

Another Ethan Cook, again Untitled (2013), 128 x 103cm.
Hand woven cotton on canvas, in artist's frame.
(It consists of nine pieces of fabric, machine sewn and stretched.)

Piece number 16, ex-catalogue, is by Nina Beier, title and dimensions not available.
She puts swathes of cloth - found ("appropriated") garments - into a frame, or as
the catalogue says, "a portrait oriented vitrine".
The garments are animal prints - the work "engages in the problems of representation and the economics of creation.

While quickly adding links to the artists, I saw enough to make we want to go an look at more of their work.

Looking for reviews of the exhibition, of which there were few if any, I thought this was a bit of an overblown claim:
"The ancient techniques of weaving, stitching and the spinning of fibres are among some of the
earliest forms of human creative expression, “Stitched Up” looks at how and why these processes
are being adopted by artists today."

The exhibition did make me think that in fine art, fabric can be a medium like paint - the artist uses it less for its properties and history than simply as a medium, paring back to essentials (or presenting it in some jarring way). In textile art, on the other hand, the fabric/fibre is central and what is done to or with it can usually be classified as accumulation, repetition, and variation - and often all of these at once."Art textiles" might be category between these two, if it could be defined more clearly. Hmm, I'm still thinking about this...