Art I like - Mandy Patullo

For many people, Mandy Patullo's exhibit, "Thread and Thrift" was one of the highlights of Festival of Quilts. Mandy lives in Northumberland and is a printmaker as well as a textile artist, working in a collage style with the old quilts and textiles that people give her. To the fabric afficionado with a historical bent, her work speaks for itself -

More (and better!) pix of Mandy's work are on her blog. On going to her website, I found that she makes artists books as well "when I have a story to tell" (what better reason??) - see some here.

Missing in action

Collect the set

Lurking among the condiments on the table at the cafe is a mystery - why do the open-here areas of these packets each have different numbers?

"Marking the line" - new ceramics in an old house

On view at Pitshanger Manor, Ealing, till 8 September - four ceramic artists have put work related to Sir John Soane inside his "other" house. The exhibition has already been shown at the Soane Museum and Port Elliot. 

In a talk accompanying the exhibition, Christie Brown pointed out that Soane was "a contemporary art curator" - contemporary to his own time, not ours - rearranging his collections in a curatorial way. The collections are now at the museum in Lincoln's Inn Fields, very worth a visit for a glimpse of another way of life - and collecting.

Nicholas Rena's pots are painted and waxed, not glazed, and fit well into the soft light of the historic interior -

In the room beyond, a display stand commissioned by Carina Ciscato from her architect mother holds porcelain vessels and figments of architectural detail.

Christie Brown drew on the Soane family history for "Thwarted History", busts of his sons and Fanny, the family's beloved dog -

In the bedroom, a collection of glazed porcelain vessels by Carina Cistano -

(The bed hangings are dimity, lined in watered (moire) silk; the spread looks like a whitework wholecloth quilt but is a woven tapestry.)

For "Everyman's Dream", Clare Twomey contacted 1000 men and asked "what is your legacy" - their replies are written in gold inside the rims of 1000 bone china bowls -

A video of the makers talking about their work is here.

Pilbarra series

Very exciting to get this slim volume in the post - ordered from the National Gallery of Victoria -

A new edition of the 2002 publication. I saw the paintings round the walls of a big room in the gallery in 2005 - perhaps they have grown bigger in my memory, but 1.5m x 1.8m is quite big enough to be impressive. The oils were painted in 1981, but he first went to the area in 1979 to paint a series of gouaches. The book includes excerpts from his diaries at the time, and photos of him painting.

As for the colours - it's about the way the colours work together, those vivid bright dots...

Some sample pages -

I've written before about Fred Williams and my connection with his art, so I'm looking forward to reading about this series of work.

Colour mixing 2

This week I've been obsessed with painting dictionary pages. Pages 935-1251 are now covered (one side only) -

White and Payne's Grey are always on hand, and for each session (15-20 painted pages, about 2 hours) I use a limited range of colours, mixing in one after another to the paint that's left from the previous page. I don't have enough experience to know what will happen, so there are lots of surprises along the way - and though I'm trying to avoid brown, I'm starting to appreciate its nuances...

Russniak-ryve to scapus-scatological 1135-1155
medium magenta, naples yellow, cobalt blue, titanium white

rest-resuscitate to run-runcible 1103-1133
naples yellow, cobalt blue, magenta, paynes grey

quadrilateral-qualify to residue-resonance 1055-1101
yellow light hansa, naples yellow, mixing white, paynes grey, french ultramarine

presentient-pressure to Pythia-pzazz 1017-1053
prism violet, french ultramarine, titanium white, naples yellow, paynes grey, mixing white

pipe-pirlicue to prenzie prerogative 975-1015
cadmium red, paynes grey, titanium white, prism violet, french ultramarine, bright green

paw-pea to pine-Pinna 935-973
cobalt blue, viridian, mixing white, paynes grey, cadmium red, french ultramarine

A new "rule" has emerged, as a result of working forward in the book - the final page of the session should be related to the painted page that follows it. This gives something to work towards, and is a matter of using one of the colours that started the previous session. The colours added for each page are written in the margin, so the colour mix can be traced back -

This yummy blue contains a big dash of French Ultramarine into a mix of Cobalt Blue, Viridian, white, and (way back, so just a tiny bit) Cadmium Red.

My tube of Titanium White was old and looked a bit grainy - and this is what happened when a mixture containing it was applied with the palette knife -

Useful for certain effects, no doubt - it goes back in the drawere, and I've bought a new tube.

This project has to be put away as we're heading to Edinburgh for a few days, on account of family involvement in this production, and to see what else we can see.

Art everywhere

Thanks to contributions from the public, 22,000 billboards across the nation are plastered with art - for two weeks. Who is looking??

I spotted one on at Russell Square station. Must get out more, get looking, before they disappear...

A taste of Finnish

The classroom was full of "remove and destroy" signs -

This coat rack was so wobbly that a it could barely stand - how did it hold coats for so long?

But the reason we were there had nothing to do with these signs - we were there for a short "taster" language course, one of a spectrum that City Lit has been offering. I chose Finnish, as I'd heard that in Finnish a whole sentence could be expressed in one word (agglutination). While in Finland in 1997 for an editing conference, I came across information on the linguistic history of the country - and here was a chance to find out a little about the language itself.

In three hours, we practised greetings and phrases, pronunciation and spelling (reading out a list of names of famous Finns, among whom I recognised only the architect and the conductor), dipped into the structure of the language, practised numbers 0-9 by giving phone numbers, learned words for a few foods and how to ask for prices (with further numbers to 100), and tried to keep straight the phrases regarding name/nationality/town/language. Just about enough to make the head spin...

Alvar Aalto - architect and designer
Martti Ahtisaari - 10th President of Finland, international peace worker
Tarja Halonen - 11th President of Finland, 2000-12
Sami Hyypiä - football manager
Mika Häkkinen - twice Formula One World Champion
Anna-Leena Härkönen - writer and actress
Mika Kallio - Grand Prix motorcycle racer
Aki Kaurismäki - screen writer and film director
Marja-Liisa Kirvesniemi - cross country skier, 1984 Olympics
Heikki Kovalainen - Formula One racing driver
Jari Litmanen - footballer
Karita Mattila - operatic soprano
Paavo Nurmi - middle and long distance runner, "the Flying Finn"
Matti Nykänen - ski jumper, 1988 Olympics
Kati Outinen - actress
Kirsti Paakkanen - designer who rescued Marrimeko
Kimi Räikkönen - racing driver
Esa-Pekka Salonen - orchestral conductor and composer
Tarja Turunen - singer/songwriter and composer
Martti Vanhanen - twice prime minister of Finland

In the big contest of which language is most difficult to learn, Finnish is a top contender; the session gave us only a hint of why this might be.

An unexpected spinoff came via colour names, a topic that wasn't covered ... which was quickly remedied by looking on the web, where I found this:
"There are some discrepancies as to what Finns think is blue/green and what Americans think is. This also occurs in red/orange/yellow. As far as I can tell, anything that is blue to an American and approaching turquoise is green to Finns. Also, orange usually becomes red or yellow, e.g. Finnish mailboxes, which are without a doubt orange to Americans, are yellow to Finns, although younger Finns tend to make a distinction between orange and red/yellow."

That led to further research about names of colours, more of which later no doubt - if you want to know more right this minute, start here for colour names, or with this list of colourful idioms.

Poetry Thursday - Goulash by Myra Schneider

…While you’re stirring the stew

it dawns on you how much you need darkness.

It lives in the underskirts of thickets where sealed buds

coddle green, where butterflies folded in hibernation,

could be crumpled leaves. It lives in the sky that carries

a deep sense of blue and a thin boat of moon angled

as if it’s rocking. It lives in the silent larder and upstairs

in the airing cupboard where a padded heart pumps

heat, in the well of bed where humans lace together.

Time to savour all this as the simmering continues…

from Goulash by Myra Schneider, found in Poems of the Decade (hear the author read the whole poem here; it's also in her book Circling the Core)

I came across the poem, with its "darkness" passage, immediately after reading "Darkness and Light" by Kathleen Jamie in Findings -

and a week later, learned that some languages have words for only two colours, "light" and "dark". Meanwhile, and perhaps forever from now on, quotes about darkness (and sometimes, lightness) have been jumping out of the metaphorical bushes.

Colour mixing

The two things I most enjoyed in the recent painting course were colour mixing and using the palette knife instead of paintbrush. This latest project combines these.

It started with badly-scuffed shoes, my most comfortable pair, and the thought that a bit of paint might cover the areas where the surface of the leather was gone - so I mixed up a taupe colour and restored the shoes. To use up the leftover paint (very little was needed on the shoes), I added in different colours and painted a little picture on the page with "shoe" in a battered old dictionary, which I'd bought in order to have a supply of thin, strong paper -

Then came the idea to mix up a different colour for each page - or perhaps not each page of the book, it's some 1400 pages - but for as long as the project held interest.

The colours on hand were a warm red and white left over from a previous project (leftovers like this are, despite my best efforts to do otherwise, still what gets me going on serendipitous paths), Naples Yellow, Red Oxide, Light Emerald, Payne's Grey, Light Blue Violet, Hooker's Green -

 By adding one or two colours to what was left on the palette after each page was covered, the colours segued from orange to purple to various murky blues and greens -

showghe-shtetl to spoliate-spore

"Rules" quickly evolved - mix enough paint to cover the page and have some left over; cover all the text, but leave the headwords (could they be used as colour names?); paint to the bottom of the page. Write in the margin what the additional colour(s) are.

Repeating the process with different colours the next day, here is the range -

scenophylax-schiz- to short shoulder

One thing to work on is evenness of coverage. Some of the words are so glorious, I hate to cover them up -
Ripuarian, saliferous, procinct, novaculite, noursle ...

For today, the colours are white, Payne's Grey, Naples Yellow, Cobalt Blue, Magenta. I have no idea what will happen; tomorrow will bring different colours again.

Looking for a different sort of work-around

A while back Google brought out their "new reply" screen - with a little box that you type into at the bottom right of the screen, causing a change in typing position and unnecessary aggravation! I chose to continue with the old reply, which gave a bigger box and didn't have the "screen clutter" of the inbox visible behind where you're working. (Am I alone in liking - needing - to see just one thing on the screen at a time? Why is the cluttered desktop seen as such a desirable thing??)

(via)

Today's computer session did not start well, with a message from Google that the new reply was back. Inescapable. I let off steam by composing a blog post ... and then deleted it ... because when I actually went to use the dreaded New Reply, it was not as before - the box isn't a separate thing in a corner, it's central (none of that deleterious leaning to the right and squinting in) and doesn't look cluttered.

BUT - you're still between a rock and a hard place - either you can see, without scrolling, a few sentences of what you've already typed, or you can see the text you're responded to - so will this make for more scrolling? Once you get knocked off track, you're ready to jump to the worst conclusion ... time will tell on this one.

Putting up with inevitable changes - it's such a challenge in everyday life.

In north west London on a summer Sunday afternoon

 The Welsh Harp reservoir in Brent is like another world - sailboats on a pond -

It was built in the 1830s to supply water to the canals, which were a very important mode of transport for coal and goods before trains took over. In the 1880s the local pub, The Old Welch Harp, was a popular place for day-tripper excursions - it had its own train station and even had a little zoo, from which a bear once escaped - but by the end of the century the area became urbanised and the pub closed in 1903. Whether the reservoir or the pub came first is a subject of controversy.

 The reservoir is on the Capital Ring - "the M25 for pedestrians" - 60 miles of footpaths right round the city -

Going west, 18.5 miles to Richmond Lodge; going east, 24.5 miles to Woolwich Foot Tunnel

Near the reservoir is our favourite garden centre, the one with the big section for fish -

 Photographing fast-moving fish in dim light, with reflections on the glass of the aquarium or the top of the water in the indoor ponds, is no easy matter.

So many different types are available for purchase, common and rare, small and quite large, in gorgeous shapes and colours -

The corals and sponges come at a price too.

Then, for something different - home and into the garden. This mass of undifferentiated greenness, beloved of the local colony of sparrows, is a pyracantha (which sounds more like a snake than a shrub) - vigorous and thorny. It's been growing there for about 30 years, and hasn't been seriously trimmed in the past decade, at least.

So far this year, nibbling away with the secateurs on sunny Sunday afternoons, I've taken out three "green bins" packed full of clippings, even large branches, and have cleared the suckers from the space under it, revealing a long-lost forsythia that used to cascade its yellow blooms gently every spring -

 Much old wood, now barren, is left - and the new shoots are whippy and struggling in the gloom -

not to mention the rogue honeysuckle that is entwined in it, and gives a lovely scent in the late-July evenings.

Apparently pyracanthas' stems aren't all that strong, so the shrub should be kept in check, as it could topple over and bring down the fence, not a happy thought.

The sparrows dart in one after another, perhaps to rest, perhaps to feed, certainly to chirp. If you're watching from inside the house, glancing up from the computer every now and then, just when you've forgotten they're in there, the bush explodes with birds as they leave all together. The number of sparrows in London is steadily declining, and I hope they'll consider this pruning work an improvement and continue to visit us.

This 'n' that at FOQ

"From old to modern" by Merete Veian, in the Norwegian Quilt Association "The joy of quilting" display 

Prints on plastic by Rita Merten, in the EQA (European Quilt Association) exhibit

A quilted diary, by Elizabeth Brimelow - in the Fine Art Quilt Masters exhibition

A detail of"Every text he ever sent me" by  Lara Hailey
(see the entire quilt here)

Linda Onions' quilt in "In the Spotlight" (see others here), on the theme of "underground"
- painting/printing, and judiciously used hand stitch

"Evidence of Bodies" by Susan Chapman and Terrie Hitchcock
had a table where you could sign your name on the paper "cloth"
- audience participation -

In the Quilters' Guild challenge, on the them of "transport"
- top, Terri Donaldson, below, Margaret Ramsay

"Straplines" by Hilary Gooding

"Flowerpecker" by Stephanie Redfern

Painterly work by Annabel Rainbow, from Through Our Hands
(read about her working process on her blog)

A diptych caught in passing - by Sandra Meech, I think

Vivid patterning by Bethan Ash

My favourite in the SAQA "Metaphors on Ageing" exhibition
- "Evening Walk" by Cynthia St Charles

From the CQ (Contemporary Quilt) "Horizons" exhibition
- gorgeous colours and subtle quilting by Christine Restall