Along the lines - Metropolitan line

For the Sketchbook Project I'm "writing the lines" - each of the lines that make up what used to be known as London Underground - in alphabetical order. I won't bore you with each one; this is an example. I started in July and have just one left to do - Waterloo & City line - which is just one stop. 

One of the longer lines is the Metropolitan line (67 km - 42 miles, of which only 6 miles is underground). The first underground line in the world, its first section was opened in 1863. The line is now is used by about 190,000 passengers on a weekday (map from here) -

When I get to the end of each line (and some lines have more than two ends!) I take a few photos and sometimes leave the station to have a coffee or look for interesting shops. At Uxbridge, Frank's Coffee Shop, inside the station, was more interesting than the "chains" outside -

The station has a few "original features" -

One of the photos that is part of my "rules for this project" is the poster of train times. At each station along the line these posters give times for travelling to other stations. Producing them must be a small industry in itself -

Part of my journey was on the old-style cars (A stock) -

The new-style trains (S stock) have more standing room, and you can walk the length of the train - but they no longer are "metropolitan line purple" (real name: Corporate Magenta) -

The journey so far -

Hmmmm .... I started at King's Cross and dutifully travelled to the four western ends of the line - Uxbridge, Amersham, Chesham, Watford - but omitted going to the eastern end, Aldgate. With any luck, there will be room at the end of the sketchbook for a "Metropolitan line appendix" - it's only 5 stops.

New materials

Exciting to see the work made by design team Glithero. The video of "Bench Mold" on the first page of their website gives me ideas about how to make my "lines" in relief, as I focus on trying out various materials -

Another process is shown in Burn Burn Burn - a flame travels along a line of flammable paint -

 They developed the paint in their kitchen, but - "Don't try this at home."

What a difference a title makes (2)

"The Desert Ablaze", 1953, by Jean Dubuffet. The title works on its own - all sorts of images and questions come to mind when I think about a desert in flames - what is burning? how does the fire spread? Is there enough combustible matter in a desert to support a "blaze"? How did it start?

Applied to this painting, was the title an afterthought or was it part of a concept that existed before Dubuffet started the painting? On the whole, his painting doesn't appeal to me aesthetically (too crowded, too "fiddly",  too much impasto; ungraspable; the deliberate eschewing of traditional standards of beauty) -- but certain works on their own have that ineffable quality that causes me to stop and suspend judgment. But I like the reasons he abandoned traditional beauty - an authentic and humanistic approach to image-making (as exemplified in Art Brut). Even so, it's this human-free painting that I'd choose, for it's abstract qualities - and because of the intriguing - and perhaps arbitrary? - title.

What a difference a title makes (1)

A painting by Barnett Newman; the date is 1954. It can be categorised as Colour Field painting (a "direction" in Abstract Expressionism) -

Simple fields of colour, nice proportions, interesting juxtaposition of colours. But unless you knew it was by a famous painter, you wouldn't look twice, probably. It's deceptively simple - subtle. Needing patience.

Wikipedia says of Colour Field painting: Color Field is characterized primarily by large fields of flat, solid color spread across or stained into the canvas creating areas of unbroken surface and a flat picture plane. The movement places less emphasis on gesture, brushstrokes and action in favour of an overall consistency of form and process. In color field painting "color is freed from objective context and becomes the subject in itself." Colour Field painters "sought to rid their work of supefluous rhetoric" and to use colour in a pyschological way.

Although not lauded as a painter till late in his life, Newman (1905-1970) wrote various influential articles in the 1940s, and perhaps his writing skills (or verbal fluency) helped him with the title (or concept?) for this painting - he called it "The Gate".

En passant

You know how it is - you're looking for something on the web, and come across other interesting stuff... I've been looking at this site, which presents a variety of art works with the minimum of information.

This painting by Avery Preesman speaks to me in its use of dark colours, restrained texture, simple shapes; the different directions of the lines, and qualities of those lines; a certain mysteriousness... It feeds into my experimentation with graphite -

His paintings have been called "experientially generous". He is self-taught, and also makes sculpture.

Ropes and beads

Brazilian artist Maria Nepomuceno uses ropes to make nets, hammocks, and other space-occupying structures. She allows her materials to obey their own organisational logic. The spiraling is central to her process. She describes rope as a line, an umbilical cord, and every bead as a fertile point and a possible beginning that can be multiplied infinitely.

She says: "I like to do a lot by myself because I have many ideas during the process. I sometimes say that think with my hands, because I do very simple drawings before starting the sculptures and then during the process it changes and has its own development." The work is colourfully appealing, but it's that description of process rather than any resonance of the materials or shapes that makes me look twice at it.

Photos from here and here.

False start (shades of red)

After gathering all my red, yellow, and blue scraps, I started with the red ones - ironing, tearing into strips. It made sense to lay out a few at a time, and after an hour or two this layout had evolved -

Even as more and more pieces joined each layout, I was getting the feeling that more wasn't what was needed. So it's back to square one - back to the blank canvas....

My original idea was to hold down the strips with handstitch, and then add machine quilting across the piece. The quilting is supposed to make a major contribution -- not get lost among busyness.

Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman

Went late in the day (less crowded); lingered, and saw only half; will be going back. Loved the exhibition -

Bought the book -

This is "map of truths and beliefs" -

and there's so much more. Rather than making work based on the British Museum's (vast) holdings, Grayson Perry made work and then found objects that related to it. It makes for a very cohesive show. What he says about the works really draws you in - perhaps museums are like that, whereas work shown in art galleries seeks to shut you out (just call me cynical!) ...

Object du jour

This beautiful object, the shower mixer

This beautiful object, the shower mixer, will be hidden in the hole in the wall -

If the lights are in, can the bathtub be far behind?

Desirable door

Woburn Square, Bloomsbury.

The pleasure of notebooks/journals

Domestic upheaval (of the bathroom-renovation kind) means that the stack of "morning pages" notebooks that have been languishing underneath the spare towels for about a decade have again seen light of day.

I won't be opening them to read all that boring stuff! At the time, the daily dumping of negativity was a real help, and later this daily writing session turned into a way to practise generating ideas, which is a good skill to develop. Over the years, as the ideas became more plentiful, the writings became much more positive - and so did I. (It does take a while.............)

Some people are lost without their smartphone or ipad - and some of us are lost without our companion notebook, recording the chronology of the tiny events that make up our lives. Or our grand thoughts (which are arguably the same thing). We'll have these bits of our histories to look back on, when memory has failed - "the palest ink is lasts longer than the best memory".

Choice of notebook is crucial, and it can take half a lifetime to find the right one. Having avoided the Moleskine craze (overpriced, undersized, yet so very trendy) I found a generic notebook at the local branch of a big stationers and bought what may be a lifetime supply. It has quality paper, sturdy binding, flexible cover, a resilient elastic round the middle; I number the pages and index them as I go along (but haven't yet used the indexes to find stuff!).

As Robert Genn wrote recently, about notebook-keeping:

"Understanding that we become what we think, advanced Moleskiners avoid three main negatives--nostalgic regret, adherence to outcome, and fearful anticipation. These sorts of thoughts, common to all humanity, are banned from the tiny pages. Proper Moleskiners stick to a positive, optimistic outlook.

"I find mentioning things that no one else must know about, even if I have to erase it right after, to be particularly valuable. For example, last night I wrote, "Three square inches in the lower left centre of that 11" x 14" are rather excellent." But I wouldn't want this sort of flagrant boasting to get around. Keep it under your bonnet, eh? And even though I erased it right after, I wouldn't want my journal and all that positive erased info getting into the wrong hands."

One possible project that would make use of the daily-writing books is to continue the "erasure" - overwriting, un-writing - of  the words, sentences, thoughts in my old journals. It was the thinking, the mulling over (and the chain of thoughts, one leading from another) that was the valuable part of the process. The words, the sentences, can be released. Hopefully some of the tired old topics that constantly got rehashed will be released too.

Coffee/tea shop

My travels to the ends of the tube lines landed me in Cockfosters, northern end of the Piccadilly line. No charity shops, but I found the Jamaica Plantations tea and coffee shop (and health food store). It's been around for about 60 years, and some of the coffee containers look to be original -

 In the window, a selection of mad teapots - the garden chair (with little table); the steam train; the golf bag; the kitchen mixer; and the speeding motorcyclist -

 ...or, for someone who has everything - "Teapots through the ages" -

Journal Quilts 2012

This year Contemporary Quilt's JQ challenge is "Shades of..." and involves using 75% or more of a colour in the monthly A4-sized quilt - red for Jan-April, yellow for May-Aug, blue for Sept-Dec. This morning I had an idea for a series and before leaving the weekend studio had time to rummage for strips and scraps of the appropriate colours, ready to start next weekend. There looks to be enough for half a dozen small pieces in each colour....

Even while I was collecting fabric, the idea was evolving ... goodness knows what will actually happen when I get started. As with all my current work, it will be rather abstract (though perhaps tending to landscape rather than "figurative") - and needless to say, "journey lines" are part of it.

On the Piccadilly line

How did they do that?

"Northampton squirclamshell" from here (originally from here somewhere, which has lots of interesting folded things to look at...)

Art I like - Marian Bijlenga

Large work from small elements, carefully disposed -

The evolution of the work over time (and space) -

Marian Bijlenga's work has been described as "a calligraphy of shadows" -

Some of her materials are cotton, paper, horsehair - as in this "pojagi grid" -

and fish scales (from here) -

Her book Written Weed was published in 2010. Images made of dried leaves, grasses, and seeds look like exquisite writing (photo from here) -

Gesamtkunstwerk

New art from Germany at the Saatchi Gallery (till 30 April) - see it online too. Without knowing anything about the artists, I found the works largely opaque and aesthetically unappealing. Should have splashed out £1 on the gallery guide - but it you look online, all is revealed. It all explores a wide range of contemporary references, etc etc etc...

The poppy-head balloons are by Thomas Zipp and are part of a larger installation that includes framed drawings that you look at with your back to the black objects -

 Favourite was by Romanian twins  Gert and Uwe Tobias, who moved to Germany when they were 12 -

They print woodblocks (shapes inked in colour) onto paper and then glue the paper onto canvas. Their work shows evidence of folkloric traditions (and 1920s Russian suprematism and constructivism), and they parody and recyle all sorts of styles and quotations ... turning the primitive into the contemporary. "A collision between outmoded skills and a knowing postmodernity" says this article. One of their typewriter drawings is included in this article -

A coincidence of "woodcuts"

Mere days after seeing a work by Gerhard Richter that uses lino printing ink as a "drawing" medium, I've come across the woodcut "paintings" of twin artists Gert & Uwe Tobias.

Richter made the work in 1957 and left them in the safekeeping of a friend in the GDR. When he saw the 31 monoprints again, almost 30 years later, he gave them the title "Elbe", the name of the river that runs through Dresden. They are the result of Richter's experiments with an ink roller during a printing course ... they look like abstracted landscapes, and some are almost entirely black, more like a night sky. See the entire set here, and a video here.

The works by the Tobias brothers are in the current show at the Saatchi Gallery. The large "paintings" are made with shaped wood blocks printed in coloured ink onto paper that is then glued to canvas. In following up the images that appealed to me, I found this poster they made for a recent show in Berlin - the black prints in the middle of the circle are coincidentally like those Elbe pieces.

Mended ceramics

See the work that lies behind Janet Haigh's mended ceramics here. She's done a lot of research on mending...

Wordless Wednesday