Tuesday is drawing day - last week at Natural History Museum

Perhaps the Natural History Museum isn't the best place to go during school holidays. As there's a security check (so-called) on entering, there's a long queue snaking its way forward outside, and it took half an hour to get in -

Near the minerals gallery some volunteers had a trolley of minerals, most of which I couldn't identify, even though I worked for two years in a geology library! (550 is the Dewey category for earth sciences.) (In case you ever need to know.)

Magnetite, haematite; fluorite, quartz;
granite, feldspar, gypsum, rose quartz;
pyrites in a matrix, calcite; apatite

The "handling sessions" are A Very Good Thing, being able to feel the texture, the weight, of the object. Once in the gallery I kept an eye out for these "new mineral friends" - this case, for example, contains different types of calcite -

including these two clear masses, both from Iceland -

Before drawing could start, there was a lot of looking. The information on the labels is written in specialist language, which is refreshing - no dumbing down in this venerable arrangement, in these splendid cases, numbered and categorised -

At the end of the gallery, this look-up table, listing all the minerals and where they can be found -

The azurite contained wonderful colours (it was ground up to use as a pigment) -

 and next to it was hydrozincite, a mineral of lumps and bumps, including the speciment with botryoidal masses -

 More wandering around, in the volcanic displays, found some bits of pumice from the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883 that floated from Sumatra to Kenya, and a rock (er, that's a dacite 'blast facies') from the first moments of the eruption of Mount St Helens in 1980, and also this 'lava foam' pumice, which reminded me of the inside of bone -

Another amazing specimen was a slab of komatite - lava formed at 1650 degrees C - it's only found in the oldest rocks, those more than 2,700 million years old.

The spinifex texture of komatite (via)

Having got up close to the apatite prism, and the calcite, I was delighted to find more apatite, of various colours, on calcite, and beside them an odontolite - fossil turquoise - antelope tooth (but did I think to photograph it? no).

A gathering of minerals

The gallery got very busy, but no one else showed up to draw -

On the way out there was a convenient seat right beside the moa skeleton - an extinct flightless (indeed, wingless) bird whose bones were found in New Zealand -

... it called out to my pen -

and on closer inspection revealed that it had some tail bones, and a third toe on each foot (of course).  

What a difference a little sunshine makes!

The old magnolia tree at Kenwood, Easter Sunday, just as the clouds were breaking up

Same place, different view, next day

Materials have a memory

We're always being told to roll, not fold, our quilts ...  or if they must be folded, to refold them regularly, and never in the exact middle or the same place twice. Better to fold them diagonally; the crease is more likely to come out.

But what of fabric itself, even before it gets to be used in a quilt? Fat quarters are filed away for years, still folded. The centre-fold in stockpiled yardage stubbornly refuses to let itself be ironed out.  Most likely to suffer are the fabrics we're keeping "for best" - when we come to use them, will they be permanently pressed, simply from benign neglect?

Camera games - "maximum zoom"

We usually have our cameras with us on our Sunday cultural outings, and there's nothing to add zest to an outing like a little contest. So we make up a theme for the day - lettering, dogs, feet maybe - and see what the camera can capture.

Recently the challenge was to set the camera to maximum zoom. Mine does a 12x zoom at the touch of a button, "e.zoom". One of the ad hoc rules is that the photo must be composed without moving from the spot for a better shot - and sometimes it would be dangerous to step backwards into the street in pursuit of the photo! These are the pix du jour of a walk across Kensington Gardens down to the V&A -

Photo flurry

An antidote to the annoyance of the captionless photos sent out with the Guardian's daily summary - for example, what are these big white things, 21st century zeppelins? ... that's just a guess. (To be fair, the "eyewitness" web page at least gives the location, leaving you to figure out the story. A riff on "art makes its own statement".)

The photos below were stumbled upon here. Click to enlarge and read the caption -

Extraordinary.

Volcanos R Us

Foxy for Prime Minister! Yay!

Barking, all right....

Sketchbook, 1993

At the same time as I discovered the joy of textiles via classes at City Lit and attended courses by Julia Caprara, Caroline Bartlett, Heather Belcher, and so many other talented tutors, I discovered the joys of drawing in museums - thereby "possessing" the objects, and making "rich pages" in sketchbooks.

An odd-sized sketchbook (B4?) turned up in a neglected corner of a bookshelf, full of drawings from the Museum of Mankind (now incorporated in the main British Museum) - what a glorious place that was,  so many wonderful things on display and so few people, so little disturbance...

In 1993 I was using felt pen, putting as much as possible on a page, and carrying a little brush for filling in the background with coffee in the museum cafe (it really does make the objects stand out, and the page easier to "read").

Weekends on the river with Tony on the narrowboat were a chance to draw flowers ... and the "moving geography" seen in the fields -

Sometimes the sketchbook went to class - this is an exercise in tissue-paper collage -

Years later I used the still-empty pages for random things - like this ink drawing "channeling Munakata" -

Pre-Easter feast

A trip to the builders merchant required hiring a car, so I went along for the ride, which took us through Green Lanes, hotbed of Turkish restaurants. It was coming up to supper time, so we hatched the idea of getting a takeaway -

This is adana kebab, with all the trimmings - rice with a bit of lentils in it; bread; salad; cacik. With the adana, a grilled tomato and wickedly hot green pepper.

I could do this more often!

The right framing

Background:
I'm researching an artist and poet called Jen Bervin - she works with erasure in her books, in various ways, and has appeared on this blog before, thanks to her artists books. Shakespeare's Nets is erasure of the sonnets, leaving (or revealing) new poems. 

What I'm most interested in are the huge quilts that carry the dashes and crosses that were until recently edited out of Emily Dickinson's poems.

A recent interview updates her work - she's working with a 4th century BC poem written by Lady Su Hui in China. It's stitched on silk in five colours and can be read in any direction ... and there are all sorts of translation problems... but it's the visual aspect that's amazing. 

(via)

The importance of framing:

In this interview, in talking about The Silk Poems project, Jen Bervin also says:

 "I feel like in our practice one of the most difficult things is coming to the right framing of something that’s really exciting to everyone, and once that’s in place, the work becomes very easy and fluid. "

Which is exactly what the land artist Dani Karavan found when he got the idea for Passages, the memorial to Walter Benjamin at Port Bou (Benjamin committed suicide there) - opposite the cemetery Karavan looked down to see the sea swirling over the rocks, and that embodied "the whole thing" - now, how to make other people see it? Karavan "framed" the sea at the end of a long tunnel of steps going down the hill. Brilliant. 

Link to the video is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJKFGpkN934.

How NOT to write an article

Having spent the whole of yesterday trying to "hurry up" with an article that was past its deadline, and tying myself up in knots in the process [that could easily have been left as "typing myself up in nots" ... are there freudian slips in typing?], here are some helpful hints for next time 

... if there IS a next time ...

1. Stick with Plan A - don't shift topics just before the deadline.

2. When finding photos on the web, make a note of all the details - title, year, materials, size - and make sure you have the URL.

2a. Write to the website owner immediately to ask for permission to use the photo. Do this at least a week before the deadline.

3. Start the research in plenty of time. (Maybe that should be part of point 1. Or go without saying.)

4. If the photos need resizing, indicate in the title that this has been done.

5. When making notes on an interview from a video, watch the video twice, preferably several days apart.

5a. Write down possible quotes exactly as said.

5b. Note the title and production details, eg year filmed.

6. If time is short and two interviews are available, it's likely the entire article can be written by stringing together quotes in some logical order, adding headings where helpful.

7. Go for the jugular - what's the main point of the article? Keep it in mind!

8. Be sparing with quotes, especially when artspeak is involved. 

9. Keep sentences short; and, for online articles, keep paragraphs short. 

10. Leave it for a day before giving it a final read-through, paying special attention to numbers.

(Have you been reading between the lines? Do you know how not to do it, now?)

Poetry Thursday - Chunnel/Le Tunnel sous la Manche by Patience Agbabi

1994 (via)

Chunnel/Le Tunnel sous la Manche
by Patience Agbabi

Me, I was hard, rock hard: chalk marl, rock, la craie bleue,
la craie de la craie bleue: sea bed, her bed, la Manche.
Men fell in love with blue, fell fathoms deep in her
and saw my grey-blue face, my opening, my launch.
Moi, j'etais difficile, unyielding, hard to get.
The men, they craved me more, too dangerous, too dear;
from Shakespeare Cliff they craved deep down and, from Sangatte,
Europa's sisters carved down deep. They first kissed here:

here, in this place where first I felt that stab of air,
l'air frais, bore through me whole and I became its form;
a structure sous la Manche, a sculpture sous la mer.
From cliff to breath, from la to le, I was reborn.
And now I am complete, put history on ice,
salute me in two tongues; come, kiss me, kiss me twice.


The poem marks 1994 in Jubilee Lines - 60 poets for 60 years. Hear it read here (and elsewhere).


Patience Agbabi grew up in north Wales and studied English language and literature at Oxford. She began performing on the London club circuit in 1995, and became a member of Atomic Lip, which has been described as "poetry's first pop group".  "Give me a stage and I'll cut form on it / give me a page and I'll perform on it," she writes, in her poem The Word.

She was 2010's poet laureate of Canterbury, and her  recent big project is a retelling of the Canterbury Tales -  Telling Tales, published in 2014 - a 21st-century take on the characters, as well as the book's poetry and performance elements. Here she performs the Prologue -  but don't expect April's "shoures soote" and all that -

The book is shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry - the winner is announced today, fingers crossed for her!


Diversion: 
As for the Tunnel - what a difference that's made for travel to the continent. London to Paris in just over two hours! As we discovered on one of our Eurostar (mis)adventures, when the tunnel is closed it can take more than six hours to go by ferry.

A previous attempt to build a channel tunnel was made in the 1880s, but was abandoned because the government concerns that it would render Britain more vulnerable in the face of an invading army from Europe, eg from recently unified Germany.

Remains of the 1880 attempt

But what did they do with the earth removed from the 20th century tunnel? They put the English part here -

Samphire Hoe (via)

The Russians are coming

An alarming increase in page views on this blog - into the thousands - sent me looking for the possible source -

Traffic sources

What triggered this bot-attack? Was it the word "model", used about wax models (and in many posts about life drawing etc in the past) - surely not. However yesterday's post does contain the word amazin' [cleverly disguised here to fend off a repeat-attack] next to the m-word.

Well, that's speculation - but one feels unclean, unsafe. A digital native wouldn't turn a hair - "just ignore it".

When will it be available for Blogger?

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Exploring art and medicine - Gordon Pathology Museum

The museum is near London Bridge station, in Guy's campus, King's College London -

On the way, busts of some medical greats -

No photography in the museum, which consists of four connected rooms, each with two tiers of galleries round which are stored specimens in jars. Below are study spaces with tables and computers and meeting spaces - and the Towne collection of wax models of normal anatomy, which we focused on.

Joseph Towne (1806-1879) was taken on to the staff of Guy's Hospital as wax modeller in 1825, having presented a scale-model of a wax skeleton, made without having seen a real one. The models are amazing - this one was made for the Great Exhibition in 1851 and is still in use - as we arrived, several students were clustered around its case, deep in discussion -

I was interested in three feet, showing various layers of tendons and muscles - those closest to the surface are in the middle, next layer on the right, closest to bone on the left - hardly an accurate drawing, but so interesting to think of "all that" going on underfoot -

 My other drawing  was two views of a "section of a thorax at the level of the heart", an interesting view of how the organs fit into the body -

Leaving the building, the inevitable view of the Shard -

and other reflective buildings -

Today is the last class of the series, at the Old Operating Theatre, also near London Bridge.