Drawing Tuesday - Museum of the Mind

Last week's visit to Bethlem Museum of the Mind (in Beckenham, via Croydon) was most interesting. First of all, Bethlem Royal Hospital has a long history - it was founded in 1247 and has moved from location to location over the years. From the name of this mad-house (or lunatic asylum)  comes the word "bedlam". In the 18th century, it was a recreational outing to go and stare at the peculiar behaviour of the patients - this was stopped in 1770.

Another now-reviled practice that was stopped (by act of Parliament in 1890) was restraint, with chains and later with straight-jackets. ECT (electroconvulsive therapy), which started in the 1930s,  has found a new, if still controversial, niche. 

Of course the entire history of treatment of mental illness was not what we were there for, and we sat down and did some drawing, focusing on the current exhibition, The Art of Recovery (till 24 Feb) - sculptures created by wounded, sick and injured service personnel and their families.

Life sized figures made of metal mesh

The project was coordinated by Al Johnson, who also made this piece, Broken

Joyce's drawing

 Joyce also spent time with the ink-blots -

The Rorsach Test was used until the 1960s

 Janet drew two of the "Art of Recovery" figures -

 ... and I started with this humble, but historical, object -

 ... got the perspective a bit wrong, and then tried to add its context -

 Moving quickly to extra-curricular activities -

Joyce had been to the RachelWhiteread exhibition and seen her use of flattened packaging -

We suggested she paint the background white - the difference was even more striking as the silver sheen caught the light -

Janet had spent time drawing her Christmas table decoration -

Something that struck me particularly at the museum was a large, intricate, complicated painting that made me think of the work of Richard Dadd, a 19th century painter who created most of his work while he was in psychiatric hospitals. This work, called The Maze, is by a Canadian painter called William Kurelek - he was admitted in 1952 and given room to paint - the painting can be interpreted as a means of justify this privilege. He describes it as a painting of the inside of his skull, and provided a description in his biography, Someone With Me.

(via)

Peter Doig (at Michael Werner)

First, my favourite in the show (till 17 February ) -

Figures at Night, 2017 - oil on stretched craft paper

 Some of the paintings were on vellum and had folds and wrinkles of the substrate painted in. (Why?) Others were a sort of series, or exploration, or preparation ... "the Rastafarian Lion of Judah" -

 The room - the Winter Garden - in this Mayfair gallery was somewhat splendid (the house was built in the 1740s) -

Peter Doig currently lives and works in Trinidad.  "Doig was a friend and collaborator with Derek Walcott, the Nobel prize-winning Caribbean poet who died this year and whose epic work Omeros transposes the myths of Homer to the West Indies. Doig’s new paintings are similarly Homeric, or Walcottian. He sees his Trinidad home as a place of giants, monsters, blind singers. ...  all the memories and references that end up in Doig’s paintings are transfigured into a bright palette of dreams. This is imaginative art of the highest order." (via)

Floor-standing sculptural mandalas

An informative talk at Waddington Custot gallery, Cork St, by Jon Wood on the work of David Annesley (b.1936), who began making sculptures of welded steel in the 1960s. He studied under Anthony Caro at St Martins School of Art, 1958-62. Before that he had trained as a pilot in the RAF, and it was contended that one way of looking at the works was as aerial views. And the size of the circles was the diameter of a fuselage....

 "The artist Kenneth Noland, who was a close friend, saw Annesley’s sculptures as the extension of colour field painting: as painting got flatter, Annesley saw the potential of sculpture to take colour to another dimension." (via)

 The reflection of colours in Untitled (1969) was particularly alluring -

 As were the shadows elsewhere -

and the sinuousness of the ogee shapes -

Some of the works had been remade, the originals having perished in a warehouse fire in the 1990s.

More words about the exhibition are here.

Four reading

Library books in various stages of being read - in bath, bed, bus, or on the sofa - now that my latest pair of glasses make reading easier - no more "double lines" or having to close one eye, what joy.

Jane Urquhart is a Canadian author whose books always seem to involve art or artists in some way, at least all those I have read do ... the first such was The Underpainter (described in this scholarly article), the chief character of which is coming to terms with his personal history in a series of paintings called The Erasures. Her latest book is described as "a novel of melancholy" in the NYTimes' review's title (I have not read the review). The artist appears in the first chapter, in a photograph; the character who appears in the second chapter sees his work, a mural in Gander airport (the novel is set in 1960, the days when propellor planes refuelled at Gander after crossing the Atlantic). I look forward the chapter 3 and the rest of the book, melancholy or not.

Donna Leon's detective novels, set in Venice where she lives, can have grisly scenes but I enjoy the main character, Guido Brunetti, and his colleagues with all their irritations. This 1995 novel has computers doing some of the work, but mobile phones haven't made the scene yet. However there is prescient, if somewhat jokey, mention of avoiding using plastic bottles - and from this interview, it seems that ecology will be rearing its head more fiercely in subsequent novels (there are now 26).

Sea Room is about the Shiants, three tiny islands in the Hebrides, home to half a million puffins, which Adam Nicolson inherited (and has now passed to his own son). Read the first chapter here.

The little grey book, one of the 125 Persephone reprints of neglected or forgotten books by 20th centure writers (mostly women), is Saplings by Noel Streatfeild, whose ballet-themed books I devoured in early adolescence - Ballet Shoes sold 10million copies by the time of her death. Saplings was her tenth book for adults.

"Please do not touch"

Outside the Rachel Whiteread exhibition at Tate Britain (till 21 January) are some sculptures she chose, including this 1967 piece by Barry Flanagan. The instruction caught my eye -

... and was repeated here and there within the exhibition ...

Poetry Thursday - August Rain, After Haying by Jane Kenyon

Before the rain, perhaps (painting by Toni Grote (via))

August Rain, After Haying

Through sere trees and beheaded

grasses the slow rain falls.

Hay fills the barn; only the rake

and one empty wagon are left

in the field. In the ditches

goldenrod bends to the ground.

Even at noon the house is dark.

In my room under the eaves

I hear the steady benevolence

of water washing dust

raised by the haying

from porch and car and garden

chair. We are shorn

and purified, as if tonsured.

The grass resolves to grow again,

receiving the rain to that end,

but my disordered soul thirsts

after something it cannot name.

                  - Jane Kenyon (1947-1995)


One poem leads to another. I found this one while looking for information about Jane Duran - it appears in a "poetry workshop" from 2006.

Jane Kenyon was New Hampshire's poet laureate at the time of her untimely death at the age of 47. She was noted for verse that probed the inner psyche, particularly with regard to her own battle against the depression that lasted throughout much of her adult life.  She also explored the cycles of nature: the fall of light from day to dusk to night, and the cycles of relationships with family and friends throughout a long span of years brought to a close by death.

She has been compared with Keats: "like Keats, she attempts to redeem morbidity with a peculiar kind of gusto, one which seeks a quiet annihilation of self-identity through identification with benign things." Find more of her poems here.

Local monster

This tree stands at the corner of the block, and I'd simply never noticed it before - not in the 23 years of living here.

 The trunk twists back on itself - how did it get like that?

 It seems to do a complete loop -

 Contorition! -

 This is the view that caught the corner of my eye -

and my reaction was, "Wait a minute, what's going on? This needs to be photographed! Or drawn!"

Around here, trees keep disappearing - some street trees are diseased and possibly dangerous, and trees in gardens become a nuisance to the owner or to neighbours and are cut down - one suspects this may be done without checking whether there's a tree preservation order. Trees take a long time to grow and it's sad to see them go.

Drawing Tuesday - Maritime Museum

This week we're having Drawing Tuesday on Thursday, how confusing is that? And the previous session, shown here, was last year ... though it seems like it wasn't all that long ago....

This was my subject - I was drawn to the stripeyness of the standing oars, against the gold of the lions -

 and then forgot to add that element to the drawing -

 Of course this would be the day my truly-gold pencil wasn't in the bag, so out came the yellow to get things started, then I got bolder with graphite.

 Both were water-soluble and I didn't want mud or sludge, so water was added carefully, followed by soluble brown and touches of non-soluble red. And some indigo Inktense -

As for the background: to stripe ... or not to stripe?

Without seeing what they're supposed to be, I doubt anyone would recognise them as gilded lions! Never mind, it was fun doing it, though how would you do it differently for a more cogent result? Tonally, with pencil, perhaps, and never mind the bling.

Jo's "scare devil" - in the Nicobar Islands these were meant to protect homes from sickness, and when they "failed" they were discarded, and collected by sailors -

 Janet K's Tipu Sultan, figurehead of HMS Seringapatam -

 Judith's admirals - Admiral James de Saumarez and Sir Edward Pellew -

 Janet B's figurehead of HMS Bulldog -

To add to the confusion, this week's Drawing Tuesday is happening on Thursday, because the museum we're visiting isn't open on Tuesdays, but as usual will be posted on the blog on Tuesday ... and then everything will be back to normal, I hope!

Winter wonderland

It was wonderful to wake up to snow, in Painswick, on 27 December. Not only was it wonderful to be somewhere so congenial, but how likely are we to see "Christmas" snow in England?

Churchyard fairyland

Slushy reality

People say, "But you come from Canada, you must be used to snow!" Indeed, most of Canada does have an extended, hard winter as the cold north wind sweeps down over the prairie and all points east - and I have experienced the long, cold winter in Calgary and in Halifax - but mostly I lived near Vancouver, on the west coast, where the mild wet winds sweep in from the Pacific and rise up when they get to the mountains, and dump their moisture ... and what we get all year round is rain, rain, rain. There is snow up the mountains in winter, but infrequently near sea level, though I'm told there have been various episodes already this year.

End of geographical disquisition, here are the "drive-by shootings" from Cranham Common as we drove towards the motorway and home -

The strong winds plastered the snow onto the trees in a narrow stripe

Highway traffic - slow and careful, everyone, please