Sketchbook walk - some Eastcastle Street galleries

Inside the boxes, crystals have formed - they are napthalene, the chemical used in mothballs, which Aiko Miyanaga uses to shape objects that are then trapped within glass: "the naphthalene sublimates and re-solidifies to release itself from the shape of the [objects]. Instead of disappearing into air, it is continuously crystallised through the conditions of temperature and humidity". Other objects are ceramic, in her show at White Rainbow.

Drawn from the other side, the trapped shoe seemed to "need" the view of the street -

At Art First, "Moon" - always an appealing topic for an exhibition.

Douglas White, White Moon I, 2014, wax, pigments, lightbox

Caroline Gibson, from Galileo Series, indian ink on paper
(plus a shadowy reflection of the photographer)

Detail from Simon Lewty, Reverie of Lunar Seas, ink and acrylic on paper

Chang Eung-Bok, Hanging moon fabric (cotton organdy)

My favourite in the show was Bridget Macdonald's "Tree with Daylight Moon" (via) - the actual tree stands near her birthplace at the southern tip of the Isle of Wight, and is buffeted by the salty wind -

My drawing was of Douglas White's other moon, suspended between glass in a wood frame; he "drew" it by dropping wax - all the wax from a single candle - onto water (carefully, after practice, with skill ... my drawing is lamentably less careful and skilled) -

No drawing went on at Carroll Fletcher, though the light works of James Clar were pretty to look at -

Freefall v9

Rain under Lampost

Liquid Viscosity

At Pi Artworks, the work of Susan Hefuna - works on paper alongside palm wood structures and bronze works, influenced by the streets of Cairo, which has been a reoccurring element within her practice.

I sat on the floor and drew the tower in charcoal and (right centre, below) in pastel, knowing the charcoal would transfer to the opposite page, whereas the waxy pastel hardly transferred at all. This left a space for the pencil drawing (left centre) of the structure's construction - square panels made of sticks inserted into holes in the crossbars, a time-consuming technique for such a improvised, temporary look. The panels are tied together with string.

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"Fragile and porous cross-hatch layers"

An imaginary map quilt

Blue Collar City by Sally Dutko (via)

"Yes!" was my response on seeing this photo in Kathy Loomis's review of the map quilts in Quilts=Art=Quilts. In fact she's reviewed all of the categories of quilts in the show - abstract, representational, etc, and with considerable insight ... she was a juror for the show ...

So, why does this piece hit all the buttons for me?
- The title: it does what it says on the box - with tongue in cheek.
- The aesthetics: composition, materials, colours.
- Thrift: clever reuse of materials.
- Inventiveness: I find myself mentally sidling up to the artist's moment of seeing-the-connection, vicariously enjoying the moment when the pieces fall into place, the way is clear...
- Verve: everything is confidently placed, without fuss or fiddling.

The size is 52"x36" - it would have been easy to make this quilt, this map, too big or too small, but it's in balance with the size of its components.

And ... it almost looks like a real city, without the viewer having to fuss about details. You don't get lost in looking for familiar streets; you can stand back and think about what "blue collar" means in the life of a city, in the death of a city, in the lives of its inhabitants. Imaginary map, imaginary city it may be, art work it is ... and it's what the viewer brings to the work that completes it as art. For someone outside the industrial life a a city, "seeing" this "map" is totally a feat of the imagination, but none the less real for that.

Large sketchbook development

The little John Piper picture in my new large sketchbook has been joined by another image I simply couldn't throw away (for reasons not yet known to me), a vignette of a carving of an Indian(?) musician -

After cutting out its shape through several pages and glueing it on the last one, I started adding colour (the paint was used as glue too). On the last page of this set has been rolled with block printing ink ... which, being water soluble, easily mixes into any paint subsequently added to it.

The ovals are the cutouts, also inked up, for use elsewhere ... cut into filigree perhaps? Thinking about this as I write, the next step with the musician will be to draw him, or others like him*, behind the cut-outs and on other parts of the pages. Also, I'm seeing faces on the left-hand page - amazing how we tend to see faces whether we look for them consciously or not. John Updike said something about abstract art aspiring to remove anything that could be seen as a face...

And coincidentally to faces - from a review of James Hall's recent book on the self-portrait, this photo from the review in World of Interiors -

It's a self-portrait of Sofonisba Anguissola "holding a medallion". Hall says that the medallion is actually the back of a mirror bearing her father's initials and a marginal inscription: "Painted from a mirror with her own hand by the Cremonese virgin Sofonisba Anguissola". Perhaps this was fresh in my mind when the Indian musician, with his "medallion", came to hand?

Elsewhere in the large sketchbook, more scrapes and blobs of colour get added whenever the paints or pastels are handy -

*Similar musicians are surprisingly hard to find on the internet, but this one is certainly appealing -

Apsaras as a musician, 6th century Chinese, V&A (via)

Photo download organising tip

A very simple thing is saving me lots of frustration. It's one of those "why didn't I think of this sooner" things....

When I (and perhaps you) download pix from camera or phone, the "natural" way they are organised is by date taken, oldest to most recent ... so you have to scroll down to the bottom to find the photos you took only yesterday.

It's so much easier when the most recent photos are at the top of the screen.

At the top left of the screen is an icon called "Change your view" - click on the arrow to get options -

Near the bottom of the list is "Details" and it's here that you can re-order the way you see your files -

Clicking on the column heading changes the "Date Picture Taken" column to show the most recent photos first -

Change the view back to "Large icons" so as to actually see what the photo is. (Take a moment to delete the duplicates!)

Now the latest photos are shown at the top, saving you the effort of having to scroll down. OK, that scrolling only takes a little time, perhaps less than changing the view - but this new way of looking at the files has a knock-on effect -- to the other folders in which you have photos.

My downloaded photos are saved into monthly files, named "2014 05may", for example, so they are listed in sequence and are easy to identify. The photos within these files are listed in reverse order, so that the newest are at the top - and that means that the photos downloaded today are most easily accessible. (The rest are out of sight, off the screen, not cluttering my field of vision - that helps!)

"Image Size" is found under Image in the Photoshop menu

My downloaded photos arrive on the computer at 180 pixels/inch resolution - rather useless, as it's neither 72 pixels/inch to use on screen, nor 300 pixels/inch to use for printing. It's a camera default, and I have a workaround, a little routine for preparing the photos for use on screen -- open, crop, deal with colour balance, save for web.

The "organisational" part of that routine has taken care of itself, now that I have a monthly file for the on-screen photos ... and that's the "why didn't I think of this earlier" part of this story. Previously, the selected, edited, resized photos went into the main folder, and once I'd used them they went into "archive" folders - sometimes....

Not the best way to keep on top of things

Sometimes that step was forgotten, making for a clumsy, inert backlog, some of which hadn't been used on the blog but had been sent in emails. (What a mess; I've not yet steeled myself to deal with it.)

So much better - monthly folder with most recent photos at the top! 

In their monthly folders, current photos at the top, the older ones can simply be disregarded. How simple, how obvious, is that? ... once you think of it.

Poetry Thursday - Fine Knacks for Ladies, by Anon

Sing along (via)

Fine Knacks for Ladies

Fine knacks for ladies, cheap choice, brave and new
Good penniworthes, but money cannot woo;
I keep a fair, but for the fair to view;
A beggar may be liberal of love.
Tho' all my wares be trash, the heart is true,
     the heart is true,  the heart is true.

Great gifts are guiles and look for gifts again,
My trifles come, as treasures from my mind,
It is a precious jewel to be plain,
Sometimes in shell, the orient pearls we find.
All others take a sheaf, of me a grain,
     of me a grain, of me a grain.

Within the pack, pins, points, laces, and gloves
And diverse toys, fitting a country fair
But in my heart, where duty serves and loves,
Turtles and twins, courts brood, a heavenly pair.
Happy the heart that thinks, of no removes,
     of no removes, of no removes.

Borrowed from "An Elizabethan Song Book."
John Dowland, Second Book of Songs or Ayres, 1600. (via)

Carol Rumens' analysis of the poem will deepen your understanding of it - there is a little mystery about the author - it's given as "an old peddler's song", but could it have been Dowland himself, or perhaps Thomas Campion? And what of those "removes" in the last line - a removal of clothing, perhaps?

Plenty of renditions of the song can be found on youtube - by Sting, a 1984 BBC clip from the King's Singers "Madrigal History Tour" (with a young Antony Rooley on lute), by tenor Tyler Ray, from German television sung by the Singphoniker (with a good strong countertenor), by Alfred Deller, an inspiration to the early music revival ... pages and pages of versions ...

Traditionally rendered (via)

"We would like to sincerely apologise"

Spotters of split infinitives may well think this is going to be another rant about editing (lack of) - but no ... split infinitives are small beer in the word-misusage pantheon. More on that another time, perhaps?

This is a story with a nicely surprising outcome. It started when my son found a bit of wood in his packet of crisps - and let the manufacturer know. 

Back came this box of goodies -

with an apologetic letter -

which details how they are improving their manufacturing process. Hopefully no other bits of wood  found their way into crisps packets ... if you find one, let them know!

Poking around in and around the Barbican

The Barbican was planned in the heady days when "everyone" travelled by car, so getting there on foot is a labyrinthine trek. Either you go up narrow stairs, along a windswept plain, down shallow steps - and up yet more steps, internal this time, to the art gallery ... or you dodge between temporary fences along the  upper levels - as we did, and on passing the Conservatory found that it was open.

It was built to camouflage the fly tower of the theatre, once and possibly still the highest in Europe, or at least the UK or perhaps London. It's a nice addition for events held in the adjacent halls, and is open to the public on Sundays, 12-5.

Our destination was the Constructing Worlds exhibition - photography dealing with architecture. You can see some photos on the website, and read the exhibition wall texts. This image (found here)

appears with the Audioguide on the website - it's by Lucien Herve, taken at Chandringar, Le Corbusier's designed city in India - I did try to draw it in order to make sense of it. (Look how important that one little person in it is...)

While I was writing down the name of the photographers and extracting "one little fact" from the wall text, not once but twice a member of staff came over and mentioned that the texts could be found on the website. Which was nice.

I'd been interested to see this show because of having to wait for a train and having a chance to draw the interesting structure on the poster for the show, which also appears on the cover of the book -

It's the Monument to Progress and Prosperity on the banks of the Yangtze River, photographed by Nadav Kandar.

Coming out of an exhibition like this, you see your familiar surroundings in a new way -

Outside the Barbican Art Gallery

While in the building we had a quick look at a little exhibition about the architects of the Barbican itself - these are the "old fashioned" tools of Geoffry Powell -

Another visual delight was the lighting in the cafe -

And then we went to The Curve - wow - 12,000 cyantopes! -

The artist, Walead Beshty, photographed the front and back of each piece as it was made (over more than a year) and the photos are being assembled at half size in chronological order in huge books. Two are on display ("don't touch!") and there will be 41 eventually. The words stamina and endurance come to mind.... Not only in the making, but in the week or more it took four people to install it all. It's on till February ... read more about it here.

Walking back to the tube, we saw this sign, amid others pointing what used to be where now modern buildings stand ("Thanet House was on this site, demolished 1878" etc). (Ironmongers Hall in the background is a survival from the 1920s, though Pepys mentioned the previous Hall, on a different site, scorched but not burnt in the Great Fire) -

"The probably site, where, on May 24, 1738 John Wesley "felt his heart strangely warmed." This experience of grace was the beginning of Methodism. This Tablet is gratefully placed here by the Drew Theological Seminary of the Methodist Episcopal Church, Madison, New Jersey, U.S.A. August 1926"

What a mixup and layering of history London is, not just in grand places but on ordinary streets.

Tuesday is drawing day - Horniman Museum

The Horniman currently (till Sept 2015) has a display of Romanian textiles - and this poster from its 1985 exhibition is one of my earliest London "souvenirs" -

so in front of the textiles is where I settled down, choosing first of all the vivid patterning on a coat that also showed signs of moth ravages (a subject close to my heart) -

As you can see, the black background to the border gave me some problems, using water-soluble pastels. How I longed to have had some black tissue in my bag ... but you can't carry everything, it's a matter of making do with what you have - and there's always the possibility of doing more once you get home.

On the other side of the display case were "my three guys" and other icons, flanked by colourful cloths, as they would have been displayed in traditional homes -

 This is St Elijah, driving his chariot across the sky to bring rain for the farmers -

Copying "primitive art" allows for a variety of sins ... accuracy isn't part of the spirit of the thing. First I put down some areas of colour -

The line-work made it come to life -

The blue and "beige" backgrounds await a decision on how to add them - watercolour? acrylic paint? pencil crayon?

The icons on display were painted on glass, so the lines would have been put on first, then the colours, with the background last.

One of the glories of the museum is an enormous walrus, first exhibited in 1886, though the museum has had it only a century. The "souvenir" biscuits are a nice touch -

After lunch we decided to continue drawing. Jo went to work on several versions of the walrus, and I settled down in front of one of the bird displays -

My drawings are linked to an ongoing photo project -

Candidates for "Close encounters of the bird kind"

After drawing the birds (from a distance) I went up close to add their names, and to get a closer look. For several, it wasn't all that easy to find the right bird ... which rather mirrors a story told by the scientist Richard Feynman. His father had pointed out to him that it wasn't useful to know what the name of a bird was - that told you nothing about the bird, it just told you about humans: "Let's look at the bird, and what it's doing."