Underwater

Aquarium area, Princess of Wales Conservatory, Kew Gardens.

Drawing Tuesday, Faraday Museum

This quiet museum, in the lower floor of the Royal Institution, includes a reconstruction of a 19th-century laboratory with many of Michael Faraday's tools -

 and other examples of famous bits of experimental aparatus, such as conductors and his "egg" -

 The museum isn't limited to Faraday (that's his photo at the back of the display) -

Humphrey Davy figures in it too, and other heroes of science. The museum has all sorts of "wonderful shapes" and bits of apparatus from the history of science, such as these objects connected with lighting -

 I took many photos, but you'd rather see the drawings, right?

My small warm-up sketches, and a closer view of the table in Faraday's lab

Carol was trying out watersoluble media, and rendering glass

Janet B went for the objects associated with lighting ...

...and quickly drew Carol drawing

Davy's electro-chemical apparatus, with which he isolated 9 chemical elements ...

... and Faraday's voltimeter, by Joyce

Sue S's rendition of the case full of things to do with lighting...

... and lighting effects in the background of a collection of shapes

Unexpected art

Something to see in a stairwell!  It's in Block F, Hammersmith Hospital, should you be nearby. Right next door to Wormwood Scrubs prison (but that's neither here nor there).

Horizon by Kenneth Draper, 1971
"Although abstract, the work alludes to nature, which is suggested by the title.
The artist's distinctive use of materials creates a gravity defying lightness."

Carnival, 1971, by Viacheslav Atroshenko (1935-1995)
"The artist abstracts the essence of nature in order to create a powerful
abstract form that interprets its subject, rather than imitates it."

Untitled, 1971
"Atroshenko's paintings consist of bold compositions of colours that
are filled with energy and sharpness."

The Horizon piece works brilliantly there, with what's on the horizon changing as you descend (or ascend). Whereas the lifts offer only mirrors and stainless steel.

Other hospitals have art collections too - for instance The Royal London. A list of hospital-based art programmes is on the London Arts in Health Forum website. 

Needs new home

1970s fabrics - brave attempt at hexagon paper-piecing by an amateur.

Artists at work

They are using oil paint to create “Loving Vincent”, the world’s first feature length painted animation, with every shot painted with oil paints on canvas, just as Van Gogh himself painted.

Quite a project. Needing 12 paintings a second, the film employed about 100 painters, based in Poland.

See some of the animation and watch the trailer here.

Or, watch William Kentridge doing an animation the sensible way - with charcoal - and talking about the process here.

Editorial workarounds

I am putting together a newsletter, as happens four times a year. This is the editorial desk, with very little space for anything except the computer. The current issue is showing on the screen, greatly reduced size, to show which pages have space on them. That happens in InDesign file, and I also have an all-important Word file of what article is at what stage - which is conscientiously updated every time an email goes out, or an article and/or photos arrive and is saved in the issue folder. (The emails are given a label and can be tracked down, but it's so much easier to have an up to date record in one place. Record keeping is vital - it's so embarrassing to find that you've left something out!)

The articles are put on double-page spreads - they each start at the top of a page, rather than follow on from the end of the previous one. This means the order of articles can be changed ... which means that at the start, the order of articles isn't particularly important. I just add some pages and add the latest article.

But you can confuse yourself unnecessarily by having things all over the place, and not being able to see all the screens at once. So I went back to paper, and made myself a flat plan. Not wanting to draw all those tedious boxes, and not finding a template online, I folded a sheet of paper, aiming for 48 pages ... er, 6 x 6 doesn't equal 48! Never mind, the bottom row will have to squish up a little, and we can forget the cover. Here it is, minimal drawing of boxes. Page numbers are vital though -

Then I started pencilling in the articles, but soon found a better way

A rummage in the desk drawer turned up some post-it index tabs, bought in Canada 10 or 15 years ago - yellow for articles, red (cut in half) for fillers. Organisational bliss. See it at a glance -

Tabs can be filled out when article arrives - next issue, I'll have a border for parking those still to be put in the InDesign file. And some of the tabs can be reused in the next issue.

The point isn't just that "the old ways are the best ways". We get used to the system we've built up for ourselves, and sometimes limp along with it and grumble at the bits that don't work so well. In a work environment either it's imposed from above or we don't have time to step back and think about how to make improvements. It's good to have a chance to step back and see a better way.

The Peacock Boat

This enormous kantha was purchased by The Hammersmith Arts Committee from the "Woven Air" exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1989. I remember that exhibition, and may still have the book of the show, but don't remember this work, made by the Kumudini Trust, whose primary objective among its welfare activities was and is to provide medical care - so it's entirely appropriate that the kantha is still on show in a hospital.

Women from the wedding party

Warriors hunting with elephants

But I don't seem to have taken a pic of the boat itself!

Poetry Thursday - Rauschenberg's Bed by Adrienne Rich

(via)

Rauschenberg's Bed
by Adrienne Rich (1929-2012)

How a bed once dressed with a kindly quilt becomes
unsleepable site of anarchy What body-holes expressed
their exaltation loathing exhaustion
what horse of night has pawed those sheets
what talk under the blanket ravelled
what clitoris lain very still in her own subversion
what traveller homeward reached for familiar bedding
and felt stiff tatters under his fingers
How a bed is horizontal yet this is vertical
inarticulate liquids spent from a spectral pillow

How on a summer night someone drives out on the roads
while another one lies ice-packed in dreams of freezing

Sometimes this bed has eyes, sometimes breasts
sometimes eking forth from its laden springs
pity compassion pity again for all they have worn and borne
Sometimes it howls for penis sometimes vagina sometimes
for the nether hole the everywhere

How the children sleep and wake
the children sleep awake upstairs

How on a single night the driver of roads comes back
into the sweat-cold bed of the dreamer

leans toward what's there for warmth
human limbs human crust

Read more about the painting and the poem, the painter and the poet, in an essay by Rick Barot (here), and of their different lives:

"The image of Rauschenberg in his New York studio, the image of Rich as a young mother in Cambridge – these have a dissonance that is stark and poignant. Seen from the near end of celebrated careers, Rauschenberg and Rich in 1955 now seem like figures caught in the placidity of amber, caught in a moment of impending flux in their lives. Rauschenberg will turn out to be our painter of earnest pranksterism, while Rich will turn out to be our poet of social agon. But in 1955 they were artists of metamorphosing visions. Their subsequent stories are, in many ways, metaphoric narratives for what has come to pass in America’s cultural life in the past fifty years. Rauschenberg’s odes to the images and items of everyday perceptions and historical events, re-envisioned in ever-inventive technical ploys; Rich’s transformation from a writer of deft lyrics to a writer of expressively open forms dealing with her identities as a feminist, a lesbian, and a social activist – their stories are particular idiosyncrasies in a half-century of wild change. "

Betty Woodman at ICA

The bright colours and "strange shapes" I knew about, but the joyousness and wit were a wonderful surprise. "Theatre of the Domestic" is showing at the ICA till 10 April, and what a treat, especially in the greyness of winter.

Betty Woodman is a Californian potter, and in her 80s she's only just being discovered in the UK. (That sunny footwear gives it away.)

(via)

The show includes work from the last ten years, following her 2006 retrospective at the Met in New York - after which she wondered what she was supposed to do, crawl up in a corner and go away? So she started working again...

What's the appeal of this installation, is it about the pots themselves and their painting? The combination is wonderful - two very different sides of the same pots, for instance, connected with the painting -

But there's more - strange shapes (cut clay leftovers) painted and patterned and arranged in wall patterns; she calls it wallpaper, and each bay is a complete piece -

 And habitats for some individual pots, either on pot-bespoke plinths or on the floor -

Putting the pieces on the floor really changes the way you interact with them.

The combination with fabrics leaves me a bit dubious, but the "kimono girls" did make me smile -

 Another view in the gallery - note the painting on the wall, and the pots on the shelf in front of it -

"All these pieces have something pretty peculiar about the perspective - it's off." She's playing games with the 2D painting and 3D painting and the 3D objects in relation to the painting. "It's a marriage of surface and form." By painting the surface she makes us see the form very differently. "They're very much about the material I use, and that I know how to use," she says in a video here, where there's also a 70-minute artist's talk.

 Drawings, in the same spirit -

 Another painting-and-pots scenario in the upstairs gallery (note the "ghost pots") -

 The ICA's flooring, near the tupstairs galleries, fits right in -

Drawing Tuesday - V&A Medieval gallery

Some choice objects -

Griffin ewer made about 1120

Aquamaniles - the one in front made in Hildesheim 1215-1230

Columns from southern Italy, 1150-1200

Ivory and enamel made up the objects of my choice. Ivory objects are usually quite small; enamel objects can be larger. Both take great skill, of course. And it's amazing that the ivory box "representing a relatively obscure story" is nearly 1000 years old; the Limoges plaque showing the resurrection of the dead dates to about 1250.

 I spent a long time on the little scene (two tonsured figures in close and animated discussion beneath a rounded arch), and was able to get the various layers of decoration on the plaque sketched out in a short time - but didn't get to grips with the "pseudo-Kufic" on the three borders; "This pairing of a border decoration derived from Arabic with a strongly Christian scene may reflect an appreciation of Islamic luxury arts in French church or noble treasuries."

 Sue S captured a flying-bull roof boss, and a tile -

 Sue M caught the griffin ewer -

Michelle went for a pillar from Tuscany and a carved saint -

 Carol fastened on a door from Ipswich, made about 1500, and its bolt -

 Meanwhile Joyce sampled the Faraday museum a week early, but joined us for lunch -

Overkill