Cactuses at Kew Gardens

Choosing a book ... by its cover

These for dipping into, not for the delight of looking at the cover -

Claxton: field notes from a small planet, by Mark Cocker; The Book of Barely Imagined Beings: a 21st century bestiary, by Caspar Henderson; Mind of the Raven, by Bernd Heinrich

And this one for reading too, though it was the linocut cover (and endpapers) that drew my eye, to the point where I need to get a copy -

Here again it's the cover ... cut out of an endgrain woodblock, so the trees show a strange sort of woodiness -

How delightful to have a shelf full of "secret art" in the form of book covers. A democratic medium?

A different but equally fascinating (to me) topic - "lifting the lid on women's lives" (reviewed here) -

Apologies for the blurry photo - my hand was trembling with excitement...

Poetry Thursday - nine winners

The nine winners in the Poetry Society's 38th National Poetry Competition are published online at http://poetrysociety.org.uk/competitions/national-poetry-competition/. Here is one of them, the one that took first prize -

(via)

Night Errand

Eric Berlin

O, Great Northern Mall, you dwindling oracle
of upstate New York, your colossal lot

of frost-heaved spaces so vacant I could cut
straight through while blinking and keep my eyes

shut, I’ve come like the flies that give up the ghost
at the papered fronts of your defunct stores,

through the food court where napkins, unused
to touch, are packed too tight to be dispensed,

past the pimpled kid manning the register
who stares at the buttons and wipes his palms.

If I press my eyes until checkers rise
from the dark – that’s how the overheads glower

in home essentials as I roam through Sears,
seeking assistance. I know you’re here.

For this window crank I brought, you show me
a muted wall of TVs where Jeff Goldblum

picks his way through the splintered remains
of a dinosaur crate. There must be fifty

of him, hunching over mud to inspect
the three-toed prints. I almost didn’t

come in here at all, driving the opposite
of victory laps, and waiting as I hoped

for the red to leave my eyes, but my urgency
smacked of your nothingness. I did it again –

I screamed at the woman I love, and in front
of our one-year-old, who covered his ears.

(From the website) Eric Berlin’s winning poem explores a fleeting private moment: with a sleep-deprived dad making a dash to the shops on a mundane errand, a flash of anger, and the shame that follows. The setting is a mall in upstate New York, but the emotions and the experience are universally human.

Judge Sarah Howe described ‘Night Errand’ as “one of those poems that wouldn’t let you move on, but demanded a pause to dwell and recoup, followed by the compulsion to read it again. Its initial grip gave way to a sort of haunting”. 

(Further news) Filmpoems of the winning poems have been commissioned in partnership with Alastair Cook and Filmpoem, and will be available to view on our website soon. The films will tour at festivals around the [UK] and beyond.

Puddling about

Some shots of houses across the street reflected in the giant puddle that forms at the corner during heavy rain.

Flipped, and with some cropping -

And more, taken while Storm Katie's winds were still blowing -

 Sometimes they lose something by being turned 180 degrees ...

Drawing Tuesday - Maritime Museum

A sunny day in Greenwich -

and a great display of figureheads at the Maritime Museum -

Information on the ships they came from

It felt like I'd bitten off more than I could chew ...

... but perseverance filled the page

More figureheads

Part of the figurehead of HMS Bristol, built 1861 and broken up in 1883.
The figurehead was one of many that decorated the roof of the office of
Castle & Co (the breakers)at Millbank, London; its head is all that
 survived WWII bombing

Other work -

Carol continues to use colour

Sue's speedboat - Miss Britain III - rivets and reflections

Mags looked again and again at the "roping palm" - she writes about it here

Sitting at mezzanine level, Janet K focussed on two of the figureheads

Janet B took both the front and back views of a statue of a ssiilor

Both Mags and Janet B had been on a drawing course at the
British Museum and told us about what they'd done and learned 

Tool of the week - a tin of Lumograph pencils, HB to 8B

Conservation of contemporary art

Ice Bag Scale C by Claes Oldenburg at the Whitney (via)

Museum conservation is a rich medium, says a recent article in the New Yorker. (The Custodians, by Ben Lerner; The New Yorker, 11 January 2016, pp50-59.)

"At a time when so many artists outsource fabrication, [the conservators at the Whitney and other contemporary art museums] are conservators of skill: they know a material's chemical composition, its reflectance levels, its history of usage (and if they don't know they'll find out). In an era when many critics speak of the rise of curation as art - when artists arrange objects as often as they make them - conservation is deeply curatorial, as conservators choose which aspects of a work are presented and how. To treat conservation as it has traditionally been treated - as the behind-the-scenes work of minimally invasive technocrats, bursting onstage every few decades during a cleaning controversy and then receding into the shadows - is to exclude essential questions about culture and value from the domain of contemporary art."

When is it sufficient to restore a work of art (and to which of its former states; the question of the "elusive original") - and when does it need to be replicated? Contemporary works, made in new media, can be most in need this decision; the article talks about the subtleties of conserving Rothko's late, dark works (containing house paint and rabbit glue), and Claes Oldenburg's Ice Bag Scale C, with its (internal) broken gears, motors and fans, a sculpture described as "moody" and even "suicidal" - it never functioned for more than a few days at a time. It was restored by hired experts of various sorts: a guitar maker, an electrician, a robotics engineer;  an auto body expert worked on the lacquer of the cap, and the exterior fabric was carefully matched and replaced - though a slight change in colour needed the approval of the artist. The museum regards the sculpture as conserved, not replicated - a wording that means it can continue to exhibit it as "the original" other than as a version of it.

In any case, says the article, a new strategy is needed for acknowledging the hand of the institution in the life of the work, a way of showing when and how and why the museum has altered what it displays. The conservatorial vocabulary joins other museum vocabularies - curatorial, legal, archival - in considering questions that cannot be answered impartially or finally.

Homage to Winifred

Winifred Nicholson, that is - she of the pot-wrapped flowering plants. I wrote a bit about them here, and think of them often.

These were sitting in the sunny corner of Minkies deli, Chamberlayne Road, where we seem to be lunching rather often lately. The sandwiches are substantial, the music doesn't jaggle the nerves (though sometimes an overheard conversation will), and among the books lying around for dipping into are some hardbacks by Barbara Kingsolver.

Art and Empire at Tate Britain

The "art and empire" exhibition at Tate Britain  (till 10 April) turned out to be surprisingly interesting - I rather expected a chronological  debunking of jingoism, but that shows a certain narrow-mindedness on my part. The exhibition was more rewarding - and I especially enjoyed the first room, with lots of old maps, and Fante flags hanging from the ceiling (video about them is here).

No photography, so the notebook got well used -

Lots of notes of things to look up, especially the commentaries on selected objects, available online - audio insights, they call them. Hope they'll remain online after the exhibition finishes.

The room called Power Dressing included the bare-legged portrait of Captain Thomas Lee, 1594, which Tate Britain usually has in its historical displays. He fought, and negotiated, in Ireland; in 1594 he presented position papers to  Queen Elizabeth  and took the opportunity to have the portrait painted in London.

From the transcription of the audio:
" Captain Lee is standing in the open air. He’s standing by an oak tree which stands for loyalty, stalwartness. We presume that the landscape behind him is meant to signify Ireland in general terms. Of course it’s not a faithful representation. So behind to the left we have hills. Behind to the right we have a stretch of water and little helmeted figures and this seems to obviously refer in general terms to Lee’s, activities in Ireland but also specifically there had been a skirmish at Erne Ford the previous year of which he was obviously proud of his involvement. Everybody looks at the picture and at his bare legs and asks what’s going on, and this is something that we have to try and unpick. One thing that I should mention is that Lee had been widowed the previous year and he was, it’s clear, on the marriage market. So it has been said that he’s actually showing off his assets for potential brides."

Dr Karen Hearn also says:
"The bare legs seem to reflect a number of different strands of Elizabethan thought  ... this is a period in which engravings are coming in, showing classical heroes as individual figures ... we might particularly say that Captain Lee’s pose in general terms reflects that of the Apollo Belvedere. ...

 However there’s another element to the bare legs which is very specific to the Anglo Irish connection. In the mid-sixteenth century we start to get an interest in the costumes of different nations.  ... There seems to be an idea that it was typical Irish dress to have bare legs ... this notion that the Irish had bare legs in order to run through bogs.  ... it’s the sort of misapprehension which I think can be quite common in ideas about national dress. And for instance in the British Museum there is a manuscript collection of such images [by] Lucas de Heere of local costumes ...  between about fifteen-seventy-three to seventy-five and one page does, show Irish people including a young male warrior, with bare legs and in fact the text talks about the ‘wild Irish’. So I think we can presume that people looking at this would see Captain Lee as wearing somehow a form of Irish dress. However this is really nothing like even the fantasy Irish dress in the books."

In the final ("modern") room, I was intrigued by Rita Donagh's "Shadow of Six Counties" -

From Dr David Blayney Brown's commentary:

"Donagh’s map really is a reflection on that history,[of the separation of Ulster], it shows that the territories were disputed that a shadow of history falls across Northern Ireland, particularly focussed around the Belfast the focus of the Troubles in the later Twentieth Century. And many people would feel that history is still problematic and has never really been resolved. And so in the shadow that falls over the map in her rendering, that shadow reads like a dark cloud, a spectre of history that just refuses to go away."

Elsewhere was mention of Mary Impey's aviary in Calcutta, of which 200 birds were painted by  Indian artist Shaikh Zain-ud-Din -

Lady Mary's bird paintings have been exhibited at the Ashmolean, Oxford (via)

And representations of John Burke's Kabul War Album, with the  (very Victorian) tracery augmenting the pages above and below the photographs -

(via)

Rachel Pringle of Barbados, who was the owner of a famous hotel in Bridgetown, Barbados. By the time of her death in 1791, she was one of the wealthiest citizens in the town -

(via)

Judy Watson's prints from the 1990s, including "Our skin in your collections" -

(via)

Thomas Ona Odulate's woodcarvings -

(via)

Much experimentation with "Edge"

Sanding the words off of the page works well with a single sheet, except that the paper sometimes tears. But if the pages are glued to cloth, they don't seem to stick well at the edges. 

And the sanding is (a) dusty and (b) tedious.

So I looked for sheer fabrics that could be glued over the unsanded pages to get the "same" effect. Best was the (matte) grey silk organza, but I haven't got the energy to track down a big-enough chunk of it.

So while the next Big Idea sprouted in that dark area known as the subconscious, I did a little "space clearing" - rummaging through the cacophony of fabrics to sort out another bag to send out into the world. And found a bit of crumpled paper with some wild stitching ... here it is in the tiny window in the 8" sample; this effect would of course look a bit different in the huge centre of the 60x100cm piece -

It's dressmakers' pattern paper from a huge roll in the textiles room at City Lit, vintage by now! That set me thinking about how to get large sheets of strong paper - I found some A1 cartridge, would that crumple easily and well? tissue paper, could that be layered with matte medium and have enough strength?

Baking parchment??? - it comes in white (I found a too-small piece, left over from a previous project) - and in a brown that I find silently stomach-clenching. It crumples well and might be strong enough as is, or as "two layers joined by stitch" - for stitch there would be in any case -

And the chaotic stitching fits in with my idea for representing a silence that is really a muffled roar (of rage at the loss of words).

Another possibility - gesso on the pages to obscure the words - tinted rather than stark white - here are some colour experiments -

Weaving them together, just for fun, and adding almost-invisible stitch to secure them -

No, too repetitious of the woven border. The centre needs to have its own character; perhaps that can be obtained by adding sheer fabric on top? -

And what about that border, the edge - trying out acrylic wax (right) and candle wax (left) - having to heat the paper so the candle would melt on being rubbed over it meant that the old paper went a crisper shade of brown ... and the show-through of words on the other side isn't adding anything either.

Another possibility is matte medium - the one I have mentions UV protection, which would be all to the good with the old paper - the less frying the better!

The final decisions are near. And to be honest, I just want to get this done and dusted! Looking forward to some crumpling, layering, and chaotic stitching ... and seeing how it turns out.