Hooking a face

Started in January, my rag-rug revision of Jawlensky's painting is growing slowly. The rug-hooking group meets today; I plan to add lots of yellow - daffodil-yellow and primrose-yellow - welcome, spring!

On yellow - "According to surveys in Europe and the United States, yellow is the color people most often associate with amusement, optimism, gentleness, and spontaneity, but also with duplicity, envy, jealousy and avarice. It plays an important role in Asian culture, particularly in China, where it is seen as the color of happiness, glory, wisdom, harmony and culture."

Art I like - Doris Bank

"folded bowls"

Not only does Doris Bank press, fold, and overlap porcelain, she makes various other ceramic tableware and objects -

glazed interiors

"Black structure" from the "Sepia" series

Ceramics, penultimate week

Trying out different swatches of metallic organza -

The trial piece ready to be gathered, and some other bits for dipping

The "flouncy" pieces have been steamed to set the folds, then the folds picked out by stitching metal threads - the dipping (and firing) process will transform them utterly, but will the metallic lines still relate to the folds? -

Distortion could result from the weight of the clay - they are dipped "upside down", then left to drip and the porcelain to touch-dry. The threads, being fine, disappear from view, so there will be a surprise when they come out of the kiln -

A flat (gathered) piece is drying too

These are going into the kiln -

Rolled from paper clay, with snippets of metallic fabric incorporated

These were left to dry, and will be fired after the next (last) class -

It's rather frustrating to have not just one week, but two, in between making the "pot" and seeing how it came out - it's hard to move forward on the basis of the results of the previous experiment. But the drying is important -- if the base isn't dry, the sand will stick. (Because these have metal in them, which could stick to the kiln shelf, they have to be fired in a sand tray.)

These two came out of the kiln -

Both are very fragile, and on the large side - about 15cm diameter. I wrapped them up and brought them carefully (I hope!) home, but haven't dared unwrap them yet.

Once the classes are finished, I'll use the 4 hours a week of class time "saved" to get on with documenting the pieces, and deciding which to keep and which experiments to pursue at the next opportunity. As for the several hours a week used to prepare the textiles ... that chunk of time is earmarked for a related project - clay and kilns are not involved, but fabric is.

Solar eclipse

It's going to be 97%, they say ... and sure enough, it's gloomier, darker than usual, even on a gloomy overcast day in London.

Here's the real thing -

Remember the 1999 eclipse? I was working flextime and able to go to Hampstead Heath - watching it in a crowd definitely enhanced the experience, and the unnatural darkness was memorable.

Dollhouses within dollhouses

Seen in the Small Stories exhibition at the Museum of Childhood, Bethnal Green -

1870, renovated 1970

1890

1980s, memories of 1940

Collect the set?

Seen on Marylebone High Street, in Anthropologie. Much as I love the idea, I can't imagine having my breakfast toast on these plates ... and egg-on-toast would be a transgression.

Avian delights

This year's Folio Diary is on the theme of birds, starting with the cover -

and extending to a page a week, including this charming whimsy -

La Cage, by the versatile illustrator Jean Emile Laboureur, 1928.

Poetry Thursday - Pavlov's Cranes by Hasegawa Ryusei

On second glance - it's a heron, not a crane...

Having found this photograph of a "japanese" jar (it's in the V&A somewhere), I went looking for a poem about cranes - and discovered Hasegawa Ryusei (b.1928), whose first book of poems was published in 1957. He is often associated with the Retto (Archipelago) Group of Social Realist poets, which was formed in 1952. After spending years working as a day labourer, he went on to write poems full of intellectual tension suggesting barely suppressed violence, says the Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature.

Four more of his poems are here.

Pavlov’s Cranes

Beating sturdy feathers,
exerting the power of flight,
in unison severing, repelling
the fog in space,
their oars, wings, a single motion,
thousands of shorebirds’ vibrations
begin to resound in the depths of my ear.
Japanese cranes perhaps, demoiselle cranes or storks,
hard to distinguish,
Pavlov’s odd wing-beats,
in the sky of the quiet cerebrum, of the night,
like the splashes of water by the pectoral fins
of flashing fish in flight,
across my skin, consecutively,
echo, come closer.

From the marshes of despair
they’ve flown up and away,
and betting on the night
or heading toward daybreak,
Pavlov’s strange cranes,
one hundred or so in each group,
have begun their energetic move.
Each, green beak tilted upward,
weight resting
on the tip of the tail of the crane before it,
balancing power,
gliding on the air current,
strung together in a line,
they fly.

The one heading the group
is a lump of resistance and exhaustion.
But one after another,
they replace the leading one,
the leading ones, one after another,
in good order, fall back to the end of the flock;
constructing a balance,
drawing a small half-circle
in a line of space,
they fly splendidly.

Have you not seen it:
it is always touched, and induced
at the surface of the reflex-bow.
Night’s cerebrum. It’s on the sea of the occipital cerebral cortex.
Betting on nihilism perhaps
or heading toward daybreak,
thousands of Pavlov’s cranes,
one hundred or so in each group,
migrate as if challenging.
All the hundred birds, beaks tilted upward,
weight resting on the tips of the tails before them,
strung in a line, in silence,
never cease.

-Hasegawa Ryusei (via), translated by J Thomas Rimer

Wordless Wednesday

Tuesday is drawing day - 20th century ceramics at V&A

There was a time, a time almost before living memory, when I thought those "fancy cups and plates and vases" were boring, much of a muchness. But "the more you look the more you see" and over the years objects made of fired clay have interested me more and more, especially since trying my hand at it myself ... which gives an appreciation of the skill involved in producing the wonderful work that finds its way into museums, and also how these objects fit into history.

So it's a treat to go up to the 6th floor of the V&A - the lift to the left of the entrance is a stairway to heaven! Jo and I spent rather a lot of time looking (and oohing and ahhing) enthusiastically, rather than drawing. 

Any shelf would have had something of interest - or, something to make a drawing from. It was almost arbitrary to sit down in front of this -

The reflections obscure the big black vase by Jean Lerat (see it here) - and what initially attracted me was the central object, 25 little drawers beneath fanciful buildings, by Ian Godfrey (and the black "anxiety bowl" in front is by him too).

Seeing that the "sculptural form" was by Gillian Lowndes, I decided to draw that (nice and simple?) 

My "choice" of medium - soluble graphite. And don't those blobs on the top look like a row of birds on a wire?! The surface treatment (ie, glaze) is subtle, and the piece was made in 1968 ... but I do prefer Lowndes' later work, which incorporates wires....

("Choice" of medium - yes it's good to experiment, and yes favourites come and go ... and wouldn't it be so much easier - so much better! so much less to carry! - to always use the same thing, perhaps a certain type of pen or brand of pencil, at least when drawing "in the field" ... save the fancy stuff for working at home? Ah, dream on...)

Still with the graphite (and waterbrush) in hand, I quickly blobbed in the shadows of the shelf below, then added a vague rendition of the pots above, as well as careful note of their makers -

and went on, biro in hand, to attack Vase (1975) by Elizabeth Fritsch and the adjacent bowls by Mary Rogers, including "convoluted porcelain" -

Convoluted porcelain bowl by Mary Rogers (via)

The "convoluted" form simply doesn't work, and the biro marks that are meant to give tone are crude if not misplaced - but I shouldn't have abandoned it... even though the lure of coffee was too great!

After coffee, something more monumental - 

Form Series 1 by Goac Ron-Hoon (three trees and their foliage)

Adding the "dark areas", I found that they were often "light" areas - holes in the structure that depended on whether light or dark was behind them - conveying the "flickering foliage" effect that you get with trees. The piece is made of coils of clay, simple but subtle -

77 Grosvenor Street, W1

Entrance: "Grosvenor Gate" by Shelagh Wakely, one of her architectural commissions; made in 2006.  "Wakeley's conceptual starting points would be inspired by the location yet were never prosaic: 'historical, social and environmental considerations influenced their form,' according to the artist. ... The River Thames, loosely interwoven within the watery imagery meandering its way around the porte-cochere of 199 Knightsbridge, 2005, is the genesis of the culverted River Tyburn, present in the surface patterning of the bronze Grosvenor Gate, 2006" (from Shelagh Wakeley (eds Sandie Macrae & Aideen Morgan), ROOM Books, 2013).

Office rent - £120 a square foot! The building "achieved the highest office rent in the biggest letting seen for two years in May 2007" (via) and in 2013 was up for sale at £125m. (At which point it ceases to interest me...)

Yellow...

On the left, Sigmar Polke, Vase II, 1965; on the right, Richard Diebenkorn, Untitled (Collage), 1975.

"... two series of paintings that he instituted in 1963, Grid Pictures and Fabric Pictures, in both of which he played with codes, disguises and processes by which familiar things were made to seem strange. The Grid Pictures, such as Vase II (1965; Düsseldorf, Kstmus.), were painted with the aid of epidiascopes and slide projections, usually from crude half-toned newspaper photographs; this technical procedure may have been prompted by the example of Andy Warhol’s screenprinted paintings based on similar source material. The scattered dots in more complex works such as Crowd (distemper on canvas, 1.80×1.95 m, 1969; Bonn, Städt. Kstmus.) form a virtually abstract pattern that makes the imagery almost invisible when viewed from near the surface. Graphic alterations help to increase this sense of unfamiliarity, blurring the boundary between the objective reproduction of reality and the subjective production of art." says MoMA.

In the Diebenkorn exhibition at the RA, another of his collage pieces was described as "joined paper". [It might be an idea to describe patchwork as "joined fabric"?]

Front garden

Two years on from buying the garden flat in this building - I was desperate to get the bulky bikes out of the narrow hall and into a bike shed in its garden - the garden, my garden!, is taking shape. The bikes have been in the shed for nearly two years, fortunately. 

Before - concreting up the wall

During - clearing out the raised bed area for planting;
the cubic metre of topsoil soon disappeared

Still more "during" - starting to level the paved area

The morning after - Mr Fox has visited the new topsoil

There will be planting among the paving stones (aka "the bike path") as well as in the raised bed. Although this small area won't hold a lot of plants, I hope to have something in bloom throughout the year, and some scented plants. Any suggestions?

Exploring art and medicine, week 3

Entrance to pathology museum, St Bartholomew's Hospital
Over the door it says "Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do / do it with thy might"

In a niche on the stairwell:
"This Roman sarcophagus
 with another of the same kind
was discovered in digging the
foundation of the Library in
December 1877."

No photography allowed in the pathology museum, a large light room with two tiers of galleries around it, and specimens spaciously displayed; these photos are from the internet -

At one end is a bust of Paget, at the other, of John Hunter. Recent displays include the "Death under Glass" histology exhibition, and a series of drawings from the 1880s, and it was from these that we started drawing (you can just about see them in the photo on the right, their stands making little bays).

On the left, the "meet and greet" quick drawing(s); then on the right, a closer look -

Repetitive strain injury, and rheumatoid arthritis, affecting the hands of a woman who worked as a ropemaker. What a story you can build up as you draw.

Another drawing, a watercolour, was of gouty nodules on the hand of a woman. Painted in red and yellow, they looked like large bejewelled rings at first glance, and she's wearing a wedding ring ... probably impossible to remove at this stage of the disease -

On the right, a preserved gouty hand, the nodules stretching the skin - "gouty deposits of unusual extent ... chalky masses varying greatly in size ... uratic deposits spread into tissues near joints".

I was fascinated by the refractions and reflections within the container - the way the hand developed so many fingers within the glass, overpowering the terrible things happening elsewhere -

Away from hands, to an example of scoliosis (sitting between two other spinal deformities, which I would have liked to draw but simply lacked energy to do so). These bones were all black, and the entire effect was of a hybrid, sci-fi creature. The case was about 50cm high, the other cases even smaller.

Next, a series of holes in a long bone - the jawbone of a crocodile, sans teeth, laid on its side on top of a heater under a shelf - not a view you usually get -

And finally, a gentle reminder on the water cooler -

Springy stitching

With Monday, and ceramics class, fast approaching, it's time to get on with some stitching. First I had to Do Something about the state of the studio, and am pleased to report that it took only minutes to clear the surfaces and floor - much, much less time than I've spent thinking about it in the past week or so!

Before (distant and darkened to spare you the sordid details)

It's such a delight to sit down at a big, empty table -

In progress are some more cylinders, and some flat pieces of ruching with applied metallic organza, inspired by "Four Fields" (and related pieces, via) by Dorothy Caldwell -

Outside the window, in the downstairs neighbour's garden, is this harbinger of spring -