Demolition

Driving through the quiet, wet city on the way to a special Christmas day opening at the Dickens Museum (newly refurbished), we passed St Pancras station and hotel, restored not so long ago.

Next door, at King's Cross Station, terrible things looked to be happening -

It's only a bit of demolition planned for the one day a year when there are no trains (or tubes or buses) and the station is shut. The 1973 facade will go, and a new public square will appear.

Felt insoles

As I was getting out the bags of wool tops and wondering if I could remember how to make felt - it's been a while! - I came across the bag with felt and pre-felt made in years past. What a lot of it there was -

 All I needed was enough to make some insoles, and with a little further felting this piece became thick enough, and was still large enough -

The larger scraps were used as an extra layer at the heel.

He'll probably like to use them plain side up -

Why do we have Christmas trees?

The ornaments on Tony's tree have different memories for him and for me - some are from his childhood and marriage, and a few we have acquired together. Putting them onto the tree is quite a thoughtful time, often involving the telling of stories.

This year we wondered why people put up Christmas trees at all. Wikipedia sprang to help out, of course. Apart from pre-Christian references to winter greenery and eternal life, the custom dates back to the 15th century, when guilds in north Germany and Livonia put up trees in guildhalls, decorated with sweets, sometimes taking them outside to be danced around and then burnt. About the 18th century trees found their way into family homes, and the decorations were edibles - apples, nuts, dates. Wax candles to light the tree were expensive, and in its early years having a Christmas tree was a custom confined to the upper classes.

Edible decorations had a religious association: apples (the forbidden fruit of Adam and Eve) and wafers (the Eucharist). Christmas trees came to (Catholic) south Germany rather later, as they were regarded as "Protestant", and the Vatican got its Christmas tree only in 1982,  instigated by Pope John Paul.

Christmas trees were brought to Britain by George III's German wife in the 1760s, but it took nearly a century for the custom to spread beyond the royal family. North America had a few Christmas trees by the beginning of the 19th century, and in 1850 this print appeared -

a reprint, without tiara and moustache, of Victoria and Albert's 1848 family Christmas.

Times of putting up the tree - and customs regarding taking it down - vary from country to country. Our family traditions mean we put it up very late. As a child in Germany, I remember not only the disappearance of my dolls at the start of Advent (to be returned, with new clothing, by the Christkind) but the first sight of the Christmas tree on Christmas Eve, lit with candles, as the door to the room was opened by the actual Christkind - in white robes, looking rather like an angel - at age 2 or 3, it was magical.

After the October Revolution, Russia banned Christmas trees, but they were reintroduced in 1935 as a  New Year custom, entirely secular (getting back to the pagan relation to greenery) - the star of Bethlehem at the top became the Red Star. The other common ornament for the top of the tree is an angel. Our tree has an angel, of considerable emotional value, at the top -

Ornaments are stories unto themselves. I like the idea that the red balls are descendants of the apples put on early trees to represent the forbidden fruit.

Wilhemina Barnes-Graham

Usually classified as St Ives school, Wilhemina Barnes-Graham (1912-2004) had Scottish roots. Her "Glacier" paintings were shown at Tate St Ives shortly after her death. She arrived in St Ives in 1940 and her painting career spanned six decades. In the 1960s she inherited a small estate in Scotland; here work thereafter was "neither St Ives nor Scottish, but looks to a tradition of modernism more disciplined, abstract and formal than either".

Her "revival" started when major monograph was published in 2001.

 A small exhibition of her work, from which these photos come, took place at Art First in April 2012.

Christmas reading

(image from here)

If you need to while away the time till Santa comes, or are relaxing on your own, or escaping briefly from "all the fun of the family", how better than with some seasonal reading.

dovegreyreader.typepad.com has a long list. I recommend Children of Green Knowe, and A Child's Christmas in Wales ... and reading out loud, to a young child or an old friend, or anyone in between.

Feel free to escape the season and indulge in those books Santa brought you, as well.

This is how they grow

Some tomfoolery -

 What's that about not playing with your food?

This isn't food ... it's a silent saxophone.

Winter rain

...or was it an April shower? Rain painted by Van Gogh. He knew about Japanese woodcuts and would likely have seen this one -

While looking at woodcuts I came across the work of Paul Furneaux -

Rain Window by Paul Furneaux

Years ago I spent a two-day workshop making monoprints of rain, some on paper and some on fabric, mostly with the edge of a credit card, getting different densities and angles. It might be time to revisit "weather" as a theme, especially its emotional effects ... the way the greyness of a rainy day can press in on you. And also, the way that listening to the rain can be soothing.

Things found in books - bookmarks

Some of the sets of bookmarks made by participants in the Bookmarks VII Project, Escaping the Library System. "The Bookmarks projects series aim is to encourage appreciation of work in the format of the artist's book. Participating artists each hand-produce an edition of 100 signed and numbered bookmarks to give away through distribution boxes at venues around the world. Each bookmark has the website address which brings visitors to the gallery of artworks online." Read more about it on bibliobuffet.

A sample from Bookmarks IX, Infiltrating the Library System. "Over the last eight years, the Bookmarks series of free artwork distribution has visited 82 venues in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Croatia, Cyprus, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Singapore, South Korea, Turkey the UK and USA. 316 artists have contributed 31,600 bookmarks to the nine projects to date. " Further info here.

Also from bibliobuffet, a collection of metal bookmarks. And an extensive archive of articles on bookmarks - enjoy!

Making your own maps

image from here

Japanese engineer Masayoshi Nakano, after his retirement, would walk around his town and pay attention to what he saw. He would then go home and draw out intricate maps noting where things were, often accompanied by small photos. His maps are made with an engineer's precision and were intended to help him better understand his roots in his old age.

Making a map of a place can also be a record of an event - a way of forming memory, rather than reactivating it.

Up my street

 These characters, on the way from the pub to ... a nativity play, perhaps?

Angels, wisemen, and other seasonal characters, sprinting out of site before the camera could refocus.

Wet weather in Hastings

Sometime in the summer of last year, I went to Hastings for a talk on artist's books by Lorna Crabbe.  She passed around some of her work -

Next day, we drove past the burnt-out pier

to the De La Warr Pavilion, where Catherine Yass's show included a video that hadn't started yet - we weren't the only ones who checked whether there was some new technology that would give a "screen start"-

It may have been summer, but it was cold, wet, and blowing a gale -

Ah, the charms of the English summer - it's often hard to tell whether you're in summer or winter...

Insights on printmaking

[another "post from the past" - my draft folder has reduced from 96 to 63; the rediscovery of former interests is interesting in itself...]

In a lecture in March that focused on various artists' series of prints, Paul Coldwell talked about what was an original work "something in the form the artist intended" - so a print (eg etching, screenprint) would be an original, even if it was a multiple, whereas a painting scanned in or photographed and reproduced isn't original.

Gelande III, 2010; woodcut, 21x26cm; image from here

In answer to "why did Christiane Baumgartner take digital pix and then laboriously translate them into hand-carved woodcuts" he said "there's something incredibly perverse about a lot of artists' practice, but it shows commitment to an idea, and the contrast [of "quick" digital and laborious handwork] makes focus" - for instance it might take months to travel to a place, to experience it for just a short time.

Allee II, 2008, woodcut 142 x 181 cm; image from here

There's a long lead-up (making) to an intense experience (viewing).

Hanne Darboven at Camden Arts Centre

Camden Arts Centre had an exhibition at the start of this year of Hanne Darboven's work.

The three rooms showed several of Darboven’s large scale serial works, which focus on the passage and structuring of time. The installations consist of hand drawn notations and numbers, musical scores, and texts, sometimes accompanied by images and objects.

The music was played on an organ, and the recording played continuously - rather disconcerting till you found out what it was and why it was part of the exhibition, after which it became possible to stop letting it interfere with your looking. 

Darboven's systems of recording have me shaking my head at her perseverence and their arcaneness. It's either art or madness... "All that order, all that organising, for nothing" said one review.

Art I like - David Nash

One frosty morning we finally made it to Kew Gardens to see David Nash's exhibition. It's been on since June and runs till April, and it's great that so many people are seeing his work - probably for the first time - both at various places on the grounds and in the Shirley Sherwood gallery and the temperate house.

made of bluebell seeds

See a short video at bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-18352050. "What I'm enjoying," he says, "is that the sculptures are not overwhelming the plants - there's a real conversation going on."

The works on paper include "Family Tree" (image from here; a view from the other end is here), showing the evolution of his work -

Bark

Thinking of Nathalie Bandulet's work using tree bark, I started noticing the various ways bark splits on different species of street trees. Guess I stood looking at them too long, camera in hand - a man returning to his home asked me, in that polite English way, if I was looking for something. (People get suspicious if you take photos of things they either don't notice or don't find interesting.) The reply - "I'm an artist doing visual research" - probably didn't reassure him...

Bioluminesence

Photos taken in the Maldives by Doug Perrine. Photos found here - beautiful, aren't they!

Book du jour - teeny tiny map books

 Having made one teeny-tiny map book, I immediately wanted to start mass production.

They are made from one-square-of-the-grid from pages of a road atlas (about 4cm square), and move across southern England - this lot ends up in north London (top of photo) -

It's easy to get confused about what goes with what, and in what orientation and order, so if you want a particular order, and you're doing mass production, it's good to lay it out carefully and clearly, before starting folding -

At some point I got confused about whether the diagonal fold should be a valley fold or mountain fold, so that the desired image ends up being the one that's unfolded. Never mind - in this instance, it wasn't important - something slightly different was still going to look like a book of maps!

Starting to glue it together -

Some configurations you can get with pages glued together in this way -

(The snake book is another way of gluing the pages together; experiment!)

And now the cover - the finished size of the folded pages determines the size of the board, and how much you leave around the edge for turning and gluing is up to you -

I glued a narrow ribbon onto the inside of the front cover before gluing the cover to the book -

Another possibility is to put ribbon under both covers. In the photo above, the pin shows how this little book can be converted into a bauble to hang on the xmas tree when there's just one ribbon - obviously, having two ribbons to tie together at each end would make a more elegant hanging system.

They went to new homes in little silky bags -

(The large "thing" is a jar of home-made parsley and almond pesto.)