Sunday walk

The Climate Change march through town

 past Trafalgar Square

 turning down Whitehall

 past Horse Guards

towards the Parliament buildings

 with a little monumental sightseeing along the way

 and, retreating from the blare of the rally, some architectural details in the back streets

 not to mention these crazy trees

 and other plant life

 on the way to Tate Britain.

The big central space looked bare - but it's a listening place, not a looking place, with an installation of speakers playing Susan Philipsz's reconstruction of The Last Post, or rather, drawn-out notes from it, using war-damaged instruments.

 A film shows the instruments, which now rest in museums, being played and recorded. Some are so badly damaged that only the breath of the player is heard -

A thoughtful and affecting piece, I thought. That tuba, recovered from the German trenches in 1915, brings to mind my father's (German) cousin, who played the tuba though he had a finger missing, and also my grandfather, who fought in Belgium in that war.

The instruments are listed here; hear them till 3 April.

Tala icing set

Having worked out this bit of the instructions in the recipe for "Russische Waffeln" -

und spritze auf einen Teigstreifen kleine Quadrate von 1 cm. Alsdann zeichnet man an diesem Streifen durch leichtes Eindruecken mit einem nassen Bindfaden 2-3 cm breite Waffeln ab

I needed to find my piping bag. It's part of a Tala Icing Set, bought for $1.00 at a garage or yard sale in Halifax, NS, round about 1979. It's rarely used but reminds me strongly of my mother, who always used a cloth bag and perhaps never owned a "syringe". She used the star nozzle a lot to add pipings of whipped cream onto Obsttorten and Butterkremtorten, and oh how we loved it! She surely enjoyed doing that decoration, and certainly the cream added to the deliciousness of her legendary cakes.

And there, in a top cupboard, was the set, "Made in England", with its two sets of instructions, English and French - sold in Canada.

Goodness, it's a No.1705 and it'll set you back £12 or more these days! Or nearer £30 if you buy it new.

Tala has been going since 1899, when it was established as Taylor Law & Co. It became known as Tala in the 1920s. In the 1970s it was acquired by a French company and the brand became much less visible, but in the 2000s ownership passed to two British entrepreneurs and products returned to being made in the UK and bought as part of the resurgence of home cooking.

NW10

Kensal Rise Library under redevelopment

Waiting for it to reopen, could be a while...

A hole in the sky

Drawing Life and Death - UCL Art Museum

A three-hour session at UCL Art Museum on a Saturday afternoon, 20 people there, starting out sitting in a circle, getting up to draw an object, sitting down to discuss it a bit; coffee break, and then a life model. It packed a lot into that short time, and I really enjoyed it. Excellent facilitator, Chiara Ambrosio, lecturer in the history and philosophy of science.

Photos of the group's work are here.

First task: get some drawing materials and choose something in the room to draw. I chose a (wax?) model of a brain and tried to distinguish one lobe from another, or perhaps to make them identifiable by someone who knew something about the structure of the brain. How would a knowledgeable person approach drawing this object? How would they "see" it?

When I raised this point in the discussion, fortunately there was an anatomist present, and she talked about what sort of section it was, and what functions the lobes controlled, balance for one thing (I was struggling with labyrinthitis at the time!), and that the brainstem was also shown.

Next task, draw something 2D - I looked intently at the fine lines on an Albinus etching (1749) and tried to render them with my clunky pencil. Then, draw something 3D - the hand of a skeleton. Different approaches to the same subject, bones; during discussion some people felt the 2D artist had already made all the choices for them, whereas with the 3D drawing they had more input and interpretation.

 The model did several 2-minute poses and several 6-minute poses. Life drawing is ... challenging ...

 He ended with a shoulder stand -

Leftovers

Sometimes you realise that Today Is The Day - for tackling that heap of papers that's been building up.

Set the timer for 15 minutes - start - and if in doubt, bin it. Or at least that's the theory.

When the timer pinged, or rather buzzed, to signal the end of the task, I had a few things left over, things I couldn't quite manage to put in the bin. Taking a photo is helpful with this, so here they are -

- an article about Idris Khan, in the Guardian's Saturday review, 02.09.06 (here, with fewer photos; a more recent article on him is here)

- Persephone Biannually, with cover pic of Southern England 1944: Spitfires attacking flying-bombs by Walter Thomas Mornington (1902-1976) - available as a print from the Imperial War Museum (it knowingly references the cart from The Haywain, and surely that low-flying plane is either about to crash or has an extremely skillful pilot?)

- article on the art of Lucy Ward, needing another read on a tube journey sometime soon (available here)

- a little cutting from a horoscope that makes me smile wryly -

Gemini May 22-June 21
As the multi-tasker of the zodiac, you are great at juggling many different projects. However, your home life could do with organisation. Eventually everything will fall into place but something will have to give.

- a quote to send to a friend

- a few doodles, combined with yet more articles to re-read - or bin straight away

- two recipe supplements from the newspaper - these go into a heap for sorting later, and yes I do make a recipe from them now and then, the latest being Smoked Haddock Dauphinoise (too rich!)

Now we're at "the irreducible minimum" -

- a postcard that needs keeping, but where to put it? Unlike the recipes, I have no collection of "postcards that must be sorted some day but should be looked through more often"; they are in various places and I just don't feel like gathering them, at the moment, or perhaps ever

- a lovely little used envelope, with an interior of tiny squares and a fragile but valient feel to the paper

- two tiny pix of art from a magazine, to be glued into my notebook

-recipe for a cauliflower salad with pomegranate seeds (or pistachios) that, seduced by the photo, I'll make in the next day or two

- a memorable fact: "the arctic tern, travelling from the Arctic to Antarctica and back each year, sees more daylight than any other creature on the planet". What's more, arctic terns can live for 30 years, and thus travel 2.4 million kilometres. Amazing.

Sorting was quick, documenting The Irreducible took rather longer; now the originals can mostly be binned. 

Something, as the horoscope hinted, is giving.

Layering

Removing some same-size squares of "texture" from a magazine left interesting layers showing through, each one unplanned -

Sort of a reverse-collage.

Poetry Thursday - "My dearest dust" by Lady Katherine Dyer

(via)

My dearest dust, could not thy hasty day
Afford thy drowsy patience leave to stay
One hour longer: so that we might either
Sat up, or gone to bed together?
But since thy finished labour hath possessed
Thy weary limbs with early rest,
Enjoy it sweetly: and thy widow bride
Shall soon repose her by thy slumbering side.
Whose business, now, is only to prepare
My nightly dress, and call to prayer:
Mine eyes wax heavy and the day grows old.
The dew falls thick, my belov'd grows cold.
Draw, draw the closed curtains: and make room:
My dear, my dearest dust; I come, I come.

Opening "101 Sonnets" at random, I found this 1641 epitaph, and a mystery - did Lady Katherine write the poem, or did she commission it? The memorial on which it appears was erected 20 years after Sir William's death ... and she had to wait 33 years altogether before she joined him.

But this is not a sonnet in itself, the poem has an earlier section, which you can read here, as well as a bit of family history. Their seven children appear as adults on the tomb, which is at Colmworth in Bedfordshire.

Two of the suns are dressed as royalists, and two as roundheads (via)

The three daughters hold handkerchiefs - weeping about a family schism? (via)

Browsing Chillida

Found photos, from a magazine-browsing session months ago. An article on Eduardo Chillida, no idea what magazine it was in. Events overtook me and I never did look closely at the images, until now.

His ironwork, made early in his career, is new to me. The text on that page, cropped from the photo, read:

"In Silent Music (1955) and In Praise of Air (1956) Chillida has fully mastered the material and is able to articulate it according to his wishes:

A piece of iron is an idea in itself, a powerful and unyielding object. I must gain complete mastery over it, and force it to take on the tension which I feel within myself, evolving a theme from dynamism. Sometimes the iron refuses o give in. But when I eventually reach my goal I always know; the individual fragments crystallize with a sudden shock and form a whole. Nothing can no separate the space from the force which encircles it."

Stone sculpture:

Alabaster

Clay?

 From his "Homage to Goethe" series:

When you google Homage to Goethe, most of the images are from pinterest -

Here's an interview from the late 90s, mostly about his public art, in which he says that on his return from "Europe" to the Basque country:

" In the studio every day, I was looking back to the things I had been doing for the last year, and then I stopped to ask myself, "Why?" This was a crucial moment for me. At that moment, I decided never to look back. "

A question and an answer:

Wagner: Issues surrounding your work involve interior and exterior, solid and void, time and space, weight and weightlessness. Do you think you are continually solving these problems?

Chillida: The sculptures are very large and my work is a rebellion against gravity. A dialectic exists between the empty and full space and it is almost impossible for this dialogue to exist if the positive and material space is not filled, because I have the feeling that the relation between the full and empty space is produced by the communication between these two spaces. You can't simulate volume.

And this, about Chillida's homage pieces:

Wagner: You have often dedicated works to these people: Bachelard, Pablo Neruda, as well as artists Alexander Calder and Joan Miró. How were your homage sculptures conceived?

Chillida: I discover connections, even without thinking of people. I am concerned with them because I admire them in the history of thought. Miró was a fantastic person, his work inspires an unusual feeling. Everyone has always noticed him because of color, but I look at the drawings of Miró. The drawings are very important, all the curved lines were always convex, never concave. This was an important problem: I drew concave lines and his were convex. A concave line encloses a space, but it must be accessible or it is dead. He changed my way of looking at line and space, so I wanted to do an homage to him, "Homage to Miró" (1985).

A recent art market view of Chillida's work is here; the first of the Homage to Goethe series sold for $2,8m.

Finishing off the year's JQs

My journal quilts this year (size 6"x12") contain fabrics stitched on various train journeys, and others stitched at home, at the studio table under the window (with the radiator, under the window, making it cosy, and Radio 4 as company). Which fabrics were stitched on which journey doesn't really matter - the JQs, for me, are a way of continuing to use fabric on a more or less regular basis. Also I like the gathering and steaming and combining of the smaller pieces - these have been steamed and "relaxed" and their combinations are auditioning -

The small bits might get used in JQs, or they might become the basis of a ceramic piece. And there are some larger "all-in-one"s being stitched for the final JQs.

What the pieces look like when gathered is always a surprise - sometimes needing amendment with stitches added into some areas.

Drawing Tuesday - Barkcloth at British Museum, again

A chance to draw the piece I'd wanted to do - as "something completely different" after my finicky literalness last time -

It's from Vanuatu and includes sea urchins, lobsters, and a bird, as well as mythological figures. I hope this closeup gives and idea of the barkcloth quality, marks, and painting -

 My plan of attack was light lines to position the elements, then splodges of colour added with a waterbrush and soluble Stabilo crayon, and finally the outlines in marker pen -

Going over it three times meant I got to know it well!

And for good measure, here's a version I traced on the ipad -

Truer to the original perhaps, but not to the spirit of the thing.

With half an hour left, I turned to a piece representing a journey, from the Solomon Islands, early 1900s, a long tapering piece with a long thin line -

It's pale and rushed, but was interesting to see the buildup of the bands of patterning, some of which represented frigate birds, and bush tracks through the hills to an island refuge. The large figures are bonito fish.

And the rest - everyone was prolific! Apologies for the faintness of some of the images, my little camera just isn't up to it.

Janet K's headdress and strikingly bold patterining -

 Mags' spirit masks (she's posted in detail on her blog) -

 Janet B's bark cloth clothing -

 Sue had a field day with patterns -

 Jo drew in the Japanese Gallery nearby -

 Cathy went for the spirit maks too -

 Pictures of the pieces in this exhibition abound - google "bark cloth british museum" or just click here.

The exhibition is open till 6 December - access is via the Japan Gallery, 5th floor, north staircase.