Winter Lights in Docklands

Canary Wharf has a year-round light show in the illumination of its enormous office buildings, and from 16th to 27th January it had some clever and arty pieces on show at ground level. Here are a few; various videos (including this one with a cute kid) show others.

Much photography everywhere!
"Huge Reeds"

The elements of Bloom are location-aware and able to communicate;
also they made a changing soundscape

Horizontal Interference links the tops of trees with strips of light

The cascade of words in Bit.Fall is derived from a live newsfeed

Drawing with light onto mist: Water Wall

Some "natural" illumination in the Crossrail garden

Interactive: the Cosmic Radiophone plays the sound of the Big Bang
Reflected, Our Spectral Vision by Liz West

The White-Hat Sisters play Chopsticks

Back to the everyday ... rare is the Docklands tree without blue-lighting,
and what a difference it makes against the griddedness of everything else

World gone mad

This dress, seen in an an up-market fashion magazine while waiting at the lawyer's, is feathers sewn onto tulle; a price of £13,600 was given. (Keep that chicken well clear of it!)

It's beautifully handmade and unique - and Valentino is a big name in fashion - but ...£13k for a dress??

Reading about John Berger

At the top of the piles of books are those I want to read soon - they get shifted up as more books are added to the heap - 

About Looking (1980) is not, of course, his memorable tv series Ways of Seeing (1972), but it will be worth another look.

The memories published in the Guardian included a couple of paragraphs that struck a chord with me. Geoff Dyer wrote:

he was reliant, to the end, on his art school discipline of drawing. If he looked long and hard enough at anything it would either yield its secrets or, failing that, enable him to articulate why the withheld mystery constituted its essence. This holds true not just for the writings on art but also the documentary studies (of a country doctor in A Fortunate Man and of migrant labour in A Seventh Man), the novels, the peasant trilogy Into Their Labours, and the numerous books that refuse categorisation. Whatever their form or subject the books are jam-packed with observations so precise and delicate that they double as ideas – and vice versa. “The moment at which a piece of music begins provides a clue to the nature of all art,” he writes in “The Moment of Cubism”. In Here Is Where We Meet he imagines “travelling alone between Kalisz and Kielce a hundred and fifty years ago. Between the two names there would always have been a third – the name of your horse.”

Olivia Laing wrote:

His essays on painting are packed with unforgettable images, the diligent, inspired seeing of an artist who’d given himself over to written language. Vermeer’s rooms, “which the light fills like water in a tank”. Goya, whose cross-hatched tones gave “a human body the filthy implication of fur”. Bonnard’s “dissolving colours, making his subjects unattainable, nostalgic”. Pollock’s “great walls of silver, pink, new gold, pale blue nebulae seen through dense skeins of swift dark or light lines”. Art criticism is rarely this plain, this fruitful, or this adamant that what happens on a canvas has a bearing on our human lives.

I also liked the idea of "reapprehending possibilities". Whatever that actually means, it sounds fruitful...

His readers are the inheritors, across all the decades of his work, of a legacy that will always reapprehend the possibilities. 

Berger at home in Paris in 1999 (via)

Ali Smith said that without him, we must continue to pay "creative attention", and  his friend Simon McBurney wrote:

He was never not listening.

Poetry Thursday - The White Horse by DH Lawrence

The White Horse

The youth walks up to the white horse, to put its halter on
and the horse looks at him in silence.
They are so silent, they are in another world.

- D H Lawrence


One of the "horse poems" found by a subject search. I was looking for a poem about carousel horses, to go with a photo - no luck there.

No luck, either, in finding a photo to go with this one. It's so much better seen in the imagination.

Jewelled Tales of Libya

An exhibition featuring antique Libyan silver jewellery as well as vintage and reent photography by Sassi Harib - till 27 January at the Arab British Centre, 1 Gough Square (near Dr Johnson's house).

Drawing Tuesday - Museum of Childhood

Despite our fears about the noise level at the Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood (it has a terrible acoustic, and there are often excited school groups), it was somehow ok - and the sun was shining.

Janet B had a foray into architecture with a Georgian doll's house

Sue was struck by the mold for a doll's head, and some other molded items

Joyce found two Inuit dolls in sealskin and fur clothing, collected about 1910

Carol's pull-toys - the wooden duck and furry Wilfred -

If you're wondering where Pip and Squeak are ... here they are at home, in a 1922 newsreel -

Janet K's puppet has a touch of the Josephine Baker about her -

A bear with a balalaika, found by Jo - the bear is plush, the instrument is cardboard -

 I love the cat chair by Gerard Rigot, and still can't figure out how to get the head right -

Here it is from another angle -

 Beyond is a partial view of the rest of the case ...

... which included a glamorous lady riding a blue lion with red legs, and two comic puppets in striped jumpers (I had intended to paint them during the week, but...) -

Sculpture by Sam Smith (1973), and burglar puppets by Mary Bligh-Bond (aka Maria Saunders) (1946)

Technique of the week - using a jigsaw for drawing, as Carol has done for the godly play materials she uses in her work -

Pink stapler

A coincidence - coming across the pink stapler when clearing up, and then, looking back on my blog, coming across the stapler in 2009 -

Perhaps I fixed it? Has anyone used it since 2009?

Sure do wish I could find those little bits of sewing - there were many, and they were fun to do, varying the stitch marks. Often I would base them on the rhythm of overheard conversations or phone calls. Perhaps they were mounted on paper and submitted as project work during the foundation course? Somewhere there is a portfolio with quite a few pieces from the foundation course. (It will no doubt emerge as the studio clearing continues.)

Then again, it would be easy enough to find snippets of silk and stitch them to snippets of black wool. Could they become "chimneypot" ceramics ....

Discovery of a late Christmas present

Having a good tidy-up yields some surprises. I came across a little bag ...

which came home with me from the Persephone bookshop, back in early December, and was put "somewhere safe" with a view to reading the book over the holidays - a Christmas present to myself.

When you go to the Persephone bookshop you can pick up a catalogue (there are now 120 books in the "series") and a copy of the magazine that Persephone produces every six months.

I read about the book on dovegreyteader's blog - she calls it her best non-fiction read of the year -

The memoir was written in 1942 and is illustrated with photographs and wood engravings. "It describes her happy childhood, her life at art school in Eastoburne and London, her marriage to Eric Ravilious, and their life in London and Great Bardfield and elsewhere in rural Essex."

London Art Fair

Can we every have too much art? ... possibly yes, when it's all in one place... eg the London Art Fair. In my four-hour visit I saw too much to absorb - yet much of it was rather ignorable, either gimmicky or samey or seen last year. If you browse in the gallery list on the website, clicking through to the images, you can get the same effect without going to the bother of being there.

It was a surprise to see, among the modernity, a 15th-century German carving - an "Anna Selbsdritt" to add to my collection -

Also surprising, among the many Ivon Hitchins landscapes on show and for sale was an interior with figures -

Work by Julie Airey appeared light and calm from a distance, and up close revealed the importance of a few lines of stitching, being "acrylic and embroidery on muslin" -

Detail; painted muslin layer is stitched onto painted background

A pair of tall thin pieces by Gordon Baldwin got me thinking ahead to making "chimneypots" -

Discovery of the day was the altered book pages by Carolyn Thompson, with revisions sewn on with hair -

Detail of Shakespeare's Sonnet 130, altered

Do have a read of this one on her website, which was also on show.

Many other artworks that caught the camera's eye, these among them -

Harriet Mena Hill

Sandra Blow - "acrylic and tea on ticking"

Katherine Jones

Leo Davy - the texture of the white echoes the shapes of the colour below

Marcelle Hanselaar

Tricia Gillman's "Memory Strings"

Lucy Jones, Reflections

Takefumi Hori's gold and silver leaf brought Dorothy Caldwell's work to mind

Claudia Carr, Col de Fornia, 2016

One of the first and last things I saw was this large painting with its sculptural elements -

Marcus Harvey, Sailing By, 2016
"Acrylic, jesmonite on inkjet on canvas"

The "crashing boar" incident was not exactly my favourite part of the day - enthused by seeing the work of Sarah Gillespie, I stepped back and was "attacked" by a knee-height bronze boar innocently standing in the middle of the gallery space. I managed not to fall onto his spiny back, but the tip of his tail caught me on the way down. I got off lightly and could walk away without hobbling. Fortunately the skirt I was wearing is made of invincible fabric and only a little mark was visible. Under it, though, as I found out at home, the slip and tights suffered huge holes, and my thigh has a 3" surface gash and a lovely bruise is developing. So embarrassing, but it could have been so much worse! 

To end, a mystery - 

These works by Susan Hefuna are described as "pencil and thread on tracing paper" - but they look more like white ink and red paint on tracing paper ... maybe the pencil and thread are underneath?