Lost Property of London

In a pop-up shop on Piccadilly, it was the bright pink - neon pink - bag that caught my eye. It's made of reclaimed sail fabric, beautifully made, and much as I covet it, I don't "need" it. 

However I convinced myself I needed this small one, made from an upcycled rice(?) bag -

with its Liberty print and wonderful label -

Here's Katy Bell with more of her great products, and the emblematic magpie -

 If you can't go to Fortnum & Mason to choose a bag, try the Lost Property of London website.

Colourful warm up

Some people call it playing. I start with the scrap box -

Rummaging in scrap boxes is one of my favourite activities - you come across an interesting scrap, and that gets the creative juices going. 

Starting with a few different scraps, some interesting groupings emerged. When the rummaging caused fabric to fall out of the box, those pieces were auditioned with the groups already there, and that led to some discoveries. But when do you stop?

To help you ignore that grotty green cutting mat background, here are some closeups -

Muted colours mostly - tonal balance will depend on the proportions used

Love that flash of metallic copper - but ... not enough light tones?

This selection needs paring down - too much going on

How or when or if these combinations will ever be used is doubtful, but the exercise has refreshed my eye, cleansed my palate (palette?). And writing about them, in another room, makes a chance for a second look and critical appraisal. Now I can go back to the messy surface and sweep them back into the scrap box - and get on with something serious.

While preparing the closeup pix I learned a new Photoshop skill - how to select an area with the polygonal lasso tool, select the inverse area (background), and then fill it with a colour to frame the strange shape. All in the interests of blotting out that grotty green cutting mat background.

Binders Keepers again

In progress

Done - all that's needed is filling them with craft tools...

...like this

And then the next step is to add them, on a new page, to the Travel Lines website.

(This post is linked to Off the Wall Friday.)

A pre-Christmas Poetry Thursday

Here in the UK we have a wonderful [not!] Christmas tradition of ... no public transport - which the nation embraces with resigned irony: "festive services" indeed -

As a wry juxtaposition, I offer this poem by the "prolific English-born American poet" Edgar A. Guest, who was popular in the first half of the 20th century and became known as "the people's poet".

ON GOING HOME FOR CHRISTMAS

He little knew the sorrow that was in his vacant chair;

He never guessed they'd miss him, or he'd surely have been there;

He couldn't see his mother or the lump that filled her throat,

Or the tears that started falling as she read his hasty note;

And he couldn't see his father, sitting sorrowful and dumb,

Or he never would have written that he thought he couldn't come.

He little knew the gladness that his presence would have made,

And the joy it would have given, or he never would have stayed.

He didn't know how hungry had the little mother grown

Once again to see her baby and to claim him for her own.

He didn't guess the meaning of his visit Christmas Day

Or he never would have written that he couldn't get away.

He couldn't see the fading of the cheeks that once were pink,

And the silver in the tresses; and he didn't stop to think

How the years are passing swiftly, and next Christmas it might be

There would be no home to visit and no mother dear to see.

He didn't think about it -- I'll not say he didn't care.

He was heedless and forgetful or he'd surely have been there.

Are you going home for Christmas? Have you written you'll be there?

Going home to kiss the mother and to show her that you care?

Going home to greet the father in a way to make him glad?

If you're not I hope there'll never come a time you'll wish you had.

Just sit down and write a letter -- it will make their heart strings hum

With a tune of perfect gladness -- if you'll tell them that you'll come.

Born in 1881, Guest came with his family to the USA in 1891. His first poem was published in 1898, and from then till his death in 1959 he wrote over 11,000 poems, published in some 300 newspapers and collected in 20 volumes of verse.

In one of the most quoted appraisals of his work, Dorothy Parker reputedly said: "I'd rather flunk my Wasserman test/ Than read the poetry of Edgar Guest."

A few more of his poems, should you be in the mood, are here (and elsewhere).

Felt houses

mmm, very xmassy! And yet ... slightly sinister, the front of the house like a watching face...

Instructions are here. The lights are LED tealights - no naked flames, please!

Art I like - Herbert Zangs

Recently the Mayor Gallery had an exhibition of the cloth pieces of Herbert Zangs - I missed it (heard about it here) and fortunately the gallery had an overview on its website -

as well as more examples of Zangs' work (mayorgallery.com/Herbert-Zangs/). A quick image search finds an overview of his work (click image to enlarge) -

What of the artist himself? His dates are 1924-2003; born in Krefeld, he studied at the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf along with Gunter Grass (starting in 1945). The colour white is essential to his work. A trip to Paris in 1951 was decisive for his art - but he worked in isolation as he spoke no French. It wasn't till the 1970s that he found a place in the French art scene. He has been called "atypical and original in his epoch". "Throughout his five-decade-long career, Zangs embraced intuitive spontaneity and placed value on the creative act rather than the final product. Working at a small-scale, using cardboard, paper, fabric, and white paint, Zangs’s monochromatic work has an off-hand aesthetic that still seems challenging today" says this brief biography.

Lost gloves

In her series "Edward Higgins White", Italian artist Alek O. takes "found" gloves, unravels them, and stitches the yarn onto canvas.

Does she use just some of the yarn, or all? How does she decide what goes where - is it random, is it planned? - that's the kind of detail you don't completely and clearly get in the description of the work:  she "collected several lost gloves on the streets of the city. Following the order of finding, unravelled and embroidered their threads on to canvas. The result is a composition of rows in chronological order of the discoveries."

Edward Higgins White, III (2011; 42.5 x 72cm)

The project was started during a residency in Helsinki and continued in London.

VIII in the series will be at the London Art Fair (2012; 40.5 x 70 cm)

"In her work, Alek O. often takes a particularly significant object of her personal or family history and makes the effort to destroy it by craft procedures, in order to reduce it to some regularity that ennobles it. She tries to give an image to memories." These significant objects embody the "magic contact" principle "which postulates the transfer of ownership from an object or a body to another through physical contact". A second essence in her work is "the circularity or conceptual reiteration that turns a work of art into a perfect closed system"; read more about that here.
Why the series title "Edward Higgins White"? He was the first astronaut to walk in space (1965) - while he was outside, a spare thermal glove floated out through the hatch, only to be lost in space.

Doing something undemanding

You know how it is, there comes a time when you just can't stand it any more. Heaps of paper have been accumulating on my desk, leaving no room for a coffee cup beside the computer - so I moved them, bit by bit, away from the messy space to sort. (Remembering Rita advising, when I said "I just don't know where to start!" - "First clear a surface"; such good advice ... you really need that clear space, physically and metaphorically.) They started out on the table -

The bowl, my catch-all place, isn't exactly empty now, but the recycling bin is fuller! There always seems to be - have you noticed? - a residue to things that don't really have a home, but you can't throw out "just yet".  Of course we're overwhelmed because we hang on to too much stuff - but it takes a lifetime to overcome the habit of a lifetime....

Encouraged by this (and needing to make a last-minute xmas present), I turned to the studio, where the fabrics for the sewing kits etc are overflowing from one big box (which lives in the cupboard between sewing sessions). A three-tier, wheeled, wire trolley has been sitting under the table by the window, full of nothing much. My plan was to sort the fabrics into one type for each tray, but it turned into piles of 1.prints, 2.shiny fabrics, 3.geometrics, 4.woolly fabrics, 5.plains, 6.travel-lines prints, 7.narrow strips, 8.pieces already cut -

With the help of smaller containers holding the smaller categoriesof fabric, it's now in the trolley and box, tucked under the table and back in the cupboard -

The top of the trolley holds some colourways that just fell together while I was sorting, so now it's just a matter of choosing which to use first. I'm so ready to start....

A piece of paper that turned up along the way has notes from a talk heard on the radio, something about divergent thinking, cognitive slowdown, functional fixedness, schema violation - grand phrases!  What makes it relevant to the mundane task of sifting and tossing and piling things up differently is this -

"If you want to come up with a creative solution, do something undemanding!"

Baskets from Rwanda

Stunning, aren't they? They're made by a non-profit Rwandan handicraft company called Gahaya Links, using traditional, authentic patterns. See more pix at adeledejak.com/blog

Monday miscellany

An art suite in Sweden's Ice Hotel - see more here

“I have been to hell and back. And let me tell you, it was wonderful.” - Louise Bourgeois


Factoid:  In the United States, an additional 5 million tons of waste are generated over the Christmas gift-giving period; four million tons of this is wrapping paper and shopping bags. [And the rest is ...??]

It's a wrap!

Another quote: It's what you learn after you know it all that counts. -John Wooden, basketball coach

(via)

"Clothes are imprinted with stories and memories of the things that happened to us when we wore them and when you shake out that Ossie Clark, or feel the knock of the pennies you stitched into the hem of your circular skirt, doesn't it all come back? The stories in "new" vintage clothes may not be your stories but you can make them your own. And don't fall into thinking that vintage is just dressing "secondhand", it isn't. ... it's important to remind yourself that if something smells of mothballs it's because it's been loved and cared for." Vintage clothes are full of stories, says this article about a recent book on the subject.

Vintage transport - looking gorgeous

At the British Library Bookshop

A bestselling series - and very attractive too

We went to the BL to see the exhibition of children's book illustration (till 26 Jan) and of course had to visit the bookshop, where we found many temptations. "Schottenfreude: German Words for the Human Condition" was lying around on the vitrine housing the ancient typewriter, and I immediately fell in love with the book -

The afterword quote from Mark Twain (on "the awful German language") reads: "These things are not words, they are alphabetical processions" - he's so right -

Each (wide) page of the book sports three of these processions, with explanatory notes and related thoughts given on the opposite page -

I have used the camera (albeit in a blurry way, sorry) to provide these snippets, for the purposes of review and, hopefully, enticement to purchase. Dropping one of these words into a dinner conversation will provide a nice bombshell for the assembled company. 

"We turn to German in moments of perplexity," says Schott. "We turn to it for things like angst, and we turn to it for things like zeitgeist."

Art in courtyards

Chelsea College of Art - the lights pick out the pattern in the paving

V&A Museum
Xu Bing's "Travelling to the Wonderland" is on till 2 March 2014

Ragged Cloth Cafe - discussions about textiles and art

After a quiescent period, Ragged Cloth Cafe is back, with regular contributors starting a new topic for discussion every week. Click on the links below to read recent posts (newest at the top of the list) -

In touch with our senses? (by Olga Norris)

• Taking Pictures – Photographs, by Kristin McNamara Freeman
• What is Art? Part 1: Background vs Composition, by Dena Dale Crain
• Itchiku Kubota (by Sandy Wagner)
• The biggest art prize in the world (by Kathleen Loomis)
• Eva Hesse: A Woman Ahead of Her Time (by Karen S. Musgrave)
• When art is temporary, does it last? (by Margaret Cooter)
• Hand it to the Machine? Celebrating technology (by Olga Norris)
• Ragged Cloth lives! Introducing Ragged Cloth 2
• 
  

The group was begun by textile artists "to verbally circle ideas about their own work, the visual arts, and the theories, histories, definitions and philosophies of arts while relating these to the textile arts." So it's a wide agenda; below are some more topics from years past, chosen more or less at random, for your dipping-into and delectation -

• Musing on Museums (by Clairan Ferrono)
• Cy Twombly (by Clairan Ferrono)

• Private Pleasures at the Textile Museum (Eileen Doughty)
• Immortal Words (Eileen Doughty)
• 
  

• On Art and Political Protest (jane dávila)
• Eileen Agar & Surrealist Games (by jane dávila)
• 
  

• Technology and Human Touch within Fabric Art – Kate Themel
• Art Withdrawal (Kate Themel)

• Art and the Disordered Male by Linda Frost
• Order and the Female Artist by Linda Frost
• 
  

• Principles of Design: Balance – Terry Grant
• The power of an image, by Terry Grant

Posts are also categorised - there may be a topic here that interests you -

architecture (2)

Art criticism (22)

art history (43)

Art Ideas (90)

art intepretation (26)

Art Technique (26)

Artist (64)

artist development (9)

contemporary art (45)

gaze (3)

paintings (1)

quilt art (17)

textile art (33)

Uncategorized (48)

Women in art (26)

Do drop by - and add to the discussion!

Two exhibitions

To deepest Mayfair, to Hamiltons, to see "Silkscreens" by Daido Moriyama. The gallery has a strange facade, this vaulted niche enclosing the door, and no windows to the street -

Inside are many skylights and a wonderfully polished cement floor.

The work on view was 16 photos chosen by the gallery director to be made up into silkscreens and printed on canvas - very suitable for Moriyama's grainy style, with the solid sections of ink gleaming wildly -

Next door, Timothy Taylor also had a polished cement floor and was showing four "European" artists - Hartung, Hantai, Soulages, and Tapies -

Thick black paint (Pierre Soulages)

Earthy colours (Antoni Tapies)

It's about the process? (Simon Hantai)

It was Hantai's "pliage" technique that interested me. I have a little book about his work (somewhere) that shows him working on huge folded swathes of fabric, laid on the floor; presumably they were stretched afterwards. You might just about see the folds in the close-up -

Hartung's titles look enigmatic but there is a system - this, painted in 1970, is T1970-H40 -

Juxtaposition, choice, and a wonderful resource

The Tate Debate entry on "How do you organise your collections" contends that organising in a strictly chronological manner - as they have for the rehang of the permanent collection at Tate Britain - "offers a more neutral way of looking at the collection." (In my editing days, we would have had to be specific about the comparison: "more - than what, exactly?" ... but let's leave semantics aside for now.)

In the sidebar, highlighted in purple, is a link to the "art and artists" section of the website, where you can "Explore the Tate collection online. See and learn about over 70,000 artworks."

Online, what a variety of approaches to the 73,442 (at time of writing) artworks are given! First, random selection - the header picture can be changed by clicking on "show me another". (Great for playing "name the artist", a highbrow alternative to playing solitaire.) (And very addictive - does it show all works, or merely a subset? How long would it take to find out?) The information given is Artist, Title, Date.

You can search - for artist, title, subject, medium, etc.

You can browse: by artist, category, style or -ism, subject, gallery, context.

Then, there are a variety of ways to "explore art" - at time of writing these are highlights of Tate collection; ghosts; abstract expressionism; sunbathing; surrealism; philip guston; theatre; bicycles.

Further information on the collections at various branches of the Tate, and on areas/subjects in the collections, appear near the bottom of the page.

Here, of course, is a kind of curation - or rather, presentation - that parallels the presentation of the artworks in the gallery. You walk through the rooms, turning your attention to this work or that; you click through the website, choosing the "space" from which you'll do so - search or browse, for example.

Either way, you choose what to look at - but behind that is someone else's choice, an informed choice - informed no doubt by criteria which I (in my half-educated confusion) know not of, but the ones that come to mind for a "real" display are value of the artwork (in historical or educational terms, as this is a museum/gallery), importance of the artist or the particular painting, the need to have a balanced or representative display, or to give lesser known works some "air time". Or to give the public their favourite works?

Online, choices no doubt include which works to digitise first, which ones cannot have images displayed (only descriptive information), categories or labels under which works can be found, and all the technical aspects of organising a website - including allocation of funds for running it.

All of which leads me back to the "neutral way of looking at a collection" - is there such a thing? Is a chronological display more neutral than selecting artists or styles to group together? Would alphabetical order be more neutral still? Online, is the seemingly-random selection truly random, or is the viewer subconsciously looking for a pattern? Are the "explore art" topics those most likely to be of interest, or chosen at whim? Does it matter?

I hope you'll have a look at the "Art and artists" page - it's an amazing resource.

Beads with large holes

A small excuse took me to the bead shop - one big bead was needed for the ribbon fastening of a Binders Keeper. For future reference, here's the selection of beads with holes big enough to thread a ribbon through -

 Needless to say, I came out of the shop with more than just one bead!