On the road

Blast from the past - looks delicious!

Queen's Park farmers market, July 2013

Neighbours

Gower Street, London WC1

Poetry Thursday - Vase by Yang Lian

(via)

Vase

a word eradicates the world
a feather
drifts down

and yet, a bird’s nest
in each of its fragments
preserves the whole

Yang Lian, translated by John Cayley (via)


Yang Liang (b.1955) had an education interrupted by the Cultural Revolution (1966-1977). Working in the countryside, he began writing traditional Chinese poetry. Back in Beijing, he became involved with the group of poets writing for 'Today' (Jintian) magazine, becoming one of the founders of the "Misty" school of poetry and skating on controversial thin ice to the point of a warrant being issued for his arrest. He escaped and now has New Zealand citizenship, and has lived in London since 1993. 

How's that again?

Tuesday drawing - stained glass gallery, V&A

A gallery not just of colour but also of considerable bling - all that church plate ... and this enormous casket...

This glass from Fairford church in Gloucestershire, made in London 1500-15, "spoke to me" -

So many missing pieces, like a very old jigsaw puzzle! (It's the avenging angel, or what's left of him.) And it was as difficult to fit together right as any jigsaw puzzle. At this point I nearly gave up -

and at this point, after much erasure, too -

My comment is "recognising when spaces aren't the right shape & not in relation to others - but not knowing how to fix it". Starting again might have been the best course? I added some colour (karisima pencils, no yellow) and got this -

And moved on. Intending to collect a few "typical medieval" motifs, I started with the blue rosette and got carried away by the interlocking colours around it -

 so the placement on the page is awkward, and you see only the hand of St Stephen - the focus is on the faces of his listeners -

The glass was made in Germany in 1260-80. Stunning; that wonderful blue...

One of Sue's drawings was this Head of the Patriarch Semei from Canterbury - also very old, and the glass such wonderful colours -

whereas Janet found some "new" glass, designed by John Piper in the 1950s -

In the original panel, and the photograph on the V&A's site, it's not easy to make out the figures of St Peter and St Paul or even of Christ in the middle; the glass was hard to photograph, but you can see a good image here.

Follow-up/research ... looking at more medieval stained glass on line, finding faces

Stanford-on-Avon (via)

and the companion piece to my Avenging Angel -

The apostle Matthias (via)

the latter in an article about the restoration of the two panels, which along with the rest of the glass in the church "escaped iconoclasm but not the weather" - " in 1703 a storm badly damaged the upper part of the great west window and several windows on the south side of the church. These were subsequently repaired, using the fragments that had been blown out and replacement glass, but in the middle of the nineteenth century further interventions were made which were responsible for the removal of the V&A's figures."

For museum display, the clear glass needed to be painted to mute the light from the lightbox behind, and various mediums were tried; glass paint mixed with water and 20% gum arabic was chosen, to be painted on the back. Also, a colour needed to be chosen: "Tests showed that a mix of brown, green and black provided the right level of colour to make the clear glass recede and the medieval glass stand out. It also intensified the colours of the medieval glass, adding to the dominant effect ."

The green line again

Some more photography along this line, somewhere between Old Street station and Moorfields Eye Hospital, at a point where water from a construction site had made a large puddle in the gutter, which some vehicles drove through, and some pedestrians got soaked as a result of the spray.

A bit of searching for the history of the green line reveals that it was painted by an artist named Warren Neidich. In an interview he said:

"since I began as a photography I tend to think of all mediums in terms of photography. For instance, in London I did this project called Blindsight in which I used the machine they paint streets with to paint a green line from the subway station to Moorfields Eye Hospital, so that partially sighted people could find their way there. It was a kind of Situationist project about nested perceptual realities within the larger framework of the urbanscape. In the end, however, the line became something that I photographed and that generated images. Beyond the photographs of the document of my performance I actually made images that recounted the very nature of what it is to be blind and described the limits of the camera as image machine. Could the camera act like touch and construct a total image from a multiplicity of possible focal points in time, in memory?"

In this video you can see him painting it -

Blindsight is the ability of people who are cortically blind due to lesions in their striate cortex, also known as primary visual cortex or V1, to respond to visual stimuli that they do not consciously see.

Lost souls

Lost between N4 and N19, June 2013

Getting started on JQs

CQ's journal quilt size this year is 6" x 12". I've chosen a theme of "grids and structures", based on the cage-like towers by Susan Hefuna that were shown in a gallery on Eastcastle St in December.

And I saw on her blog that Linda had done a monoprint of a circle each day for a month, and is now combining those fabrics in quilts, which made me think that if a person were to get rid of all her printed fabrics ... if ... then she could do something like this to build up a stock of fabrics-with-potential ... 

and then came thoughts in quick succession: How long would it take to do a monoprint, Could I do it every day, These would be good for my JQs ... and, What ink to use...

quick bit of internet research on fabric printing ink ...

followed by ACTION - into the studio, have a rummage, and what do I find but some Textile Screen Printing Ink - black - unopened! (At least 5 years old; you forget what you've bought...)

My intention was to do a monoprint using one of the cut-out road plans arising from the "monoprint and handstitch" course last summer, but I was too impatient to go looking for them so decided to use the edge of a credit card to make lines directly on fabric. And the first bit of plain fabric that came my way was the right size (and shape) for a JQ ... so my intention swerved into printing it as a base and a few fabric scraps for adding to it.  

Strange printing setup!

Lines from the edge 

The ink will dry while I'm in Edinburgh next week, and I'm looking forward to putting the bits together asap on return.

Another wonderful thing about JQs is that you can use those small scraps - some of the bits that came out of the scrap box during the rummage are thumb-sized but too precious to throw away, and those are what I like best to use to enliven the piece. 

Quilt I like, by Keiko Goke

How would you categorise this quilt - modern? contemporary? traditional? folk-art? art? What's its technique - improvisational? faux-naive?

Keiko Goke, My Double Wedding Ring, 2008; 88"x87" (via)

It's by Japanese artist Keiko Goke, and I find it utterly delightful ... but why? The colours are overwhelmingly bright and at first glance the effect is of green-yellow-red brightness ... not something that usually attracts me. Then you start to notice the subtle secondary hues in their random piecing ... or is it? Look at those tiny-piece sections, how artfully they are placed; not too many and not too few. That change of scale is brilliant - and also the use of larger-scale pieces, among which one, just one, of the greens is made of two shades; doesn't your eye keep coming back to that one?

The yellow centres tie it all together (their shape helps too); they look to be slightly different shades of yellow... and then you notice the red squares, another shape contributing to the lively mix and harmonious variety, and the colour contributing to that variety too. The dark yellow finds its way among the reds and oranges, and one of those squares is definitely a rectangle - though another rectangle is made by two reds of similar tonality.

As you notice (and verbalise) what's going on, you find yourself looking and looking...

Keiko Goke also designs fabric, a wide range including this one -

Revisiting medical specimens

As the Royal College of Surgeons is close to City Lit, students in drawing classes are often taken to the Hunterian Museum for a session - I was last there as part of the "museum" course in 2013, wondering what to draw and why...

This time I went more willingly, to an afternoon session led by Lucy Lyons (who will be teaching a short course called "Exploring Art and Medicine" at Mary Ward Centre, starting 25 Feb). First stop was the "War, Art, and Surgery" exhibition, where we drew from Tonks' drawings of WW1 soldiers with facial wounds. Lucy pointed out how important it was to these men to be looked at in the steady way needed for drawing, without being judged, rather than being ignored.

Wax model used for training surgeons (via)

War injuries, drawn by surgeon Henry Tonks (via)

Being in the habit of photographing what I'm drawing, I would have liked "an original" but photography isn't allowed in the museum ... and I'm starting to wonder why, after spending all that time looking at an object or artwork during the drawing, I feel I need the photograph.

After Tonks - two young men with facial injuries, Corporal PJ Smith and Private Joseph Hickey

 Next, looking at a few tools and instruments -

Then, what I found most difficult, diseased bones - what are we looking at, what are we seeing, what is there to understand and what needs to be understood for the drawing to "be real"?

The left femur shows "osteoplastic changes to the distal shaft as a result of inflamation below the periosteum" and the right shows "changes to the bone consistent with Paget's disease of bone (osteitis deformans)" - that doesn't help me much...

Around the corner, an interesting object in a square glass jar -

"the last eight thoracic vertebrae of a lion showing evidence of severe osteoarthritis of the spine".

A challenging session - but interesting, definitely.

A collection of collections

The "Magnificent Obsessions: artist as collector" exhibition is at the Barbican is  till 25 May 2015.

My collection of orange wrappers - or rather this photo of about 7% of the 500+ different designs - was a runner-up in Time Out's competition, and bagged me a pair of tickets to the show -

See 14 other "bizarre" collections at timeout.com.

The exhibition is certainly full of a lot of objects, beautifully arranged - some of which, Howard Hodgkin's collection of Indian paintings, for example, more spaciously than others, such as the "selection of objects from two rooms" of the large house where Hanne Darboven spent half her life (you can only imagine what the other rooms were like).

No photography was allowed (though various photos can be seen here and here and elsewhere on the net) so I took notes -

Among the hasty sketches are a little red suitcase (from Hanne Darboven's collection) like the one I had as a child in Germany; an old photo showing five views of the same person (collection of Martin Parr) and also his Russian space dog figurine, one dog in red the other in green; elephants collected by Peter Blake, who was on the lookout for "something modest" at markets to save him buying the more extravagant stuff; African masks and samurai mouthguards collected by Arman; kimono-clad from a Japanese print collected by Sol LeWitt when he was stationed in Korea (his music scores by Steve Reich and Philip Glass are displayed in pull-out drawers); ceramic hamburgers (of all sizes) collected by Martin Wong - some of his 4000 objects were sent to his mother in embelllished boxes, and Danh Vo, who rescued this collection, has made a gold-leafed tribute box. Let's not forget Pae White's 3000 Vera Neumann textiles, hung in this show like prayer flags, held by tiny magnets on metal wires.

Scarves, calendars, etc etc by Vera Neuman (via)

Martin Wong's shipping boxes (via)

Works by some of the artist-collectors are shown - notably the complete pages from Sol LeWitt's book Autobiography and a chilling assemblage by Arman -

"Autobiography" (left) records LeWitt's objects in  3x3 grids (via)

Arman's "Home Sweet Home" 1960 (via)

Poetry Thursday - "The waves, blue walls / of Africa" by Rafael Alberti

Africa seen from Spain (via)

‘The waves, blue walls/of Africa’ 

The waves, blue walls
of Africa, go and come back.

When they go . . .
Ah, to go with them!

Ah, to come back with them!
When they come back . . .

Rafael Alberti,  translated by Mark Strand (via)


Hitchhiking round Spain in the early 70s - after reading "As I walked out one midsummer morning" and other books by Laurie Lee, in which he writes about Algeciras and seeing Africa across the water - I longed to see it too, just a tiny edge of a great continent which I had enjoyed learning about in Grade 4. But it was not to be - though we were treated to a memorable lunch by the businessman who gave us a lift from Cadiz to Malaga and, my tongue loosened by a few glasses of win, were able to converse quite fluently in French (learning Spanish came later).

But the poem speaks of something else, especially in the context of the poet's life of exile.

Rafael Alberti Merello (1902 – 1999) is considered one of the greatest literary figures of the so-called Silver Age of Spanish Literature, and he won numerous prizes and awards. After the Spanish Civil War, he went into exile because of his Marxist beliefs, returning to Spain after the death of Franco. The best source of information on his early life, though vague in many details, is his memoir La Arboleda perdida (‘The Lost Grove’), published in 1959.

Born in Cadiz, he had Italian grandfathers in the sherry business, but bad management resulted in the bodegas being sold. The sense of belonging to a “bourgeois family now in decline” became an enduring theme in his mature poetry.

At the age of 10, he entered the Jesuit-run Colegio San Luis Gonzaga as a charity day-boy. A growing awareness of how differently the boarders were treated from the day-boys, together with the other ranking systems operated by the Jesuits, inspired in him a desire to rebel. In his memoirs, he attributes it to growing class conflict. He began to play truant and defy the school authorities and was expelled in 1917, just as the family was moving to Madrid.

Alberti was interested in painting, and in Madrid he again neglected his formal studies, preferring to spend his time copying paintings and sculptures, entering the artistic world of the capital as a painter. It was the deaths in 1920 in quick succession of his father, the matador Joselito, and Benito Pérez Galdós that inspired him to write poetry. Recuperation from tuberculosis gave him the chance to read widely; turning to writing poetry in earnest, in 1924 he won his first poetry prize.Sobre los ángeles (‘Concerning the Angels’, 1929), a book that showed a complete change of direction in the poetry of not only Alberti, but also the whole Generation of '27 group, is generally considered his masterpiece.

He and his wife, the writer and political activist María Teresa León, spent the years of exile in Paris, Argentina, and Rome, returning to Cadiz in 1977.

Read more of Rafael Alberti's poems here, and more about his life and poetry here.

A touch of red along the green line