INTHEMAKING

In between 2D and 3D

2012-01-14T12:39:00.000-08:00

still from Light Years Projects

Autumn 2010 - 3D 2D: Object and Illusion in Print - an interesting exhibition at Edinburgh Printmakers from the Centre for Fine Print Research in Bristol. Some of the work focussed on the 3D printer. This technology can simulate 3D shapes (from 2D material?) and then build actual 3D pieces. Others, such as Jeremy Gardiner, translate paintings into digital video format, in collaboration with digital artist, Anthony Head. On show here was a piece entitled "Light Years Projects", "a combination of landscape painting and 3D graphics .. to create evocative and immersive environments". Paintings reimagined from all angles, brought to life and recreated in many different textures and colours.

At the Royal Academy, London this week was another exhibition from a very different period. "Building the Revolution" is an exploration of Russian constructivist art from the early 1920s. At this time artists were inventing a new aesthetic language based on basic neutral geometric elements free from traditional associations. These elements, being mathematically precise, could, it was assumed, be used in engineering and architectural applications.

El Lissitsky Sketch for Proun 6B (1919-21)

It is difficult to grasp, but they were using traditional media such as drawing and painting to express the transition between the idea and application. Lissitsky called these in-between works "prouns". Popova's paintings are similarly explorations of basic spatial relations. I can see parallels between the methods of the constructivists and that of the Bristol artists. What would the early Soviet artists have done with our technology? What will future artists be able to do?

Popova Spatial Force Construction (1920-1921)

How difficult can it be to write?

2012-01-13T14:01:00.000-08:00

Well, Thomas Mann observed that "a writer is a man for whom writing is more difficult that it is for others".

Ryszard Kapuscinki quotes this remark in his book Travels with Herodotus (p. 218)

Dragon dictation and other wonders

2012-01-13T13:50:00.000-08:00

Downloading wondrous apps, in particular the Dragon app which enables you to speak into your appliance, whether phone or tablet, and have the text printed on screen. Presumably ready for print, transfer to document or e mail.

Another glory is the Dark London app to accompany Dickens exhibition currently at Museum of London. Dickens was apparently an insomniac and often wandered around London for much of the night. What he saw, heard and experienced formed the inspiration of much of his writing. The app includes an excerpt from his famous "Night Walks", as well as a copy of the 1862 map of London overlaid (or underlaid) on map of contemporary London, so that it is possible to switch between the two.

The artist and photographer William Raban has made a video of contemporary London at night, shown at the exhibition. The film is accompanied by readings from the Dickens text. Quite a lot remains unchanged, in particular the number of people sleeping rough.

Life long learning

2012-01-12T13:48:00.000-08:00

"As the notion of a stable body of knowledge is receding, a new definition of education could be: everything you need to know and understand which is not on a laptop - mostly connections, context, coincidence, coherence. The electronic speed of evolution implies that moments for educational intensity are no longer limited to youth but will be essential at regular intervals. At Strelka, in Moscow, we are experimenting with a new typology of education: a one-year dedicated focus on premonitory subjects that are on the horizon, but have not yet taken centre-stage, a one-year hiatus of reflection, accessible to anyone..." OMA progress, Barbican, London

I have nothing to say, and I am saying it

2012-01-12T13:27:00.000-08:00

"I have nothing to say, and I am saying it" John Cage

Quoted in recent Gerhard Richter exhibition at Tate Modern, London.

Much to say about this exhibitiion by the multi faceted and highly intelligent painter, Richter, who questions the nature of paint and its processes, as well as confronting his own daemons, both personal and political.

But that is all I have to say!

How to build a universe... or a love of chaos

2012-01-12T13:20:00.000-08:00

"It is my job to create universes, as the basis of one novel after another. And I have to build them in such a way that they do not fall apart two days later. .. However.. I like to build universes which do fall apart. I like to see them come unglued, and I like to see how the characters in the novels cope with this problem. I have a secret love of chaos. There should be more of it. Do not believe - and I am dead serious when I say this - do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or a universe. The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and the birth of new things. Before the new things can be born, the old must perish. This is a dangerous realization, because it tells us that we must eventually part with much of what is familiar to us. And that hurts. But that is part of the script of life. Unless we can psychologically accommodate change, we ourselves begin to die, inwardly. What I am saying is that objects, customs, habits and ways of life must perish so that the authentic human being can live. And it is the authentic human being who matters most, the viable, elastic organism which can bounce back, absorb and deal with the new."

Philip K. Dick (1978)

Riverside Museum of Transport, Glasgow

2011-12-29T13:06:00.000-08:00

This is a new museum designed by Zaha Hadid. I was keen to see the building, which has had rave reviews. It is a success but the building takes an elegantly low profile. The space is used to display over 3000 transport-related objects, many of them full-size, though I did not see any aeroplanes! Perhaps there were some upstairs.

The museum is a wunderkammer, crammed with wheeled and floating transport old and new - carriages, cars, trams, huge locomotives, ship's engines, and much I did not see. The organisation was definitely "post modern", in that there was no historical theme or particular way to view the exhibits. Just plunge in and enjoy! However everything was carefully, briefly, and interestingly described. Not just for petrol-heads by any means.

Very many of the most spectacular objects had been made on the Clyde, and they were a powerful reminder of what has been lost within a couple of generations. For example, this enormous steam-engine which was used in South Africa for many years. All the wasteland area now surrounding the museum was once dockland and ship yards, and not so long ago.

Best of all, a Clyde-built tall ship was moored outside and it was possible to visit, view the living quarters and imagine the conditions of the crew and see the huge hold. A fascinating video (1920s?) with a voiceover by an ex-sea captain shows the extreme hardships of life at sea. Brilliant.

2011-12-27T12:21:00.000-08:00

Can collage by Gillian Lowndes
(1936-2010)
fibreglass tissue, sardine tin, forks and other materials

Gillian Lowndes was a "radical and original ceramic artist" way ahead of her time. In the late 1970s she was using a bricolage technique, fusing together, often in multiple firings, a huge range of materials: "including house bricks, fibreglass tissuem, Egyptian paste, nichrome wire, domestic utensils, dried loofahs and latex, among others". This approach was inspired by time spent with her partner in Nigeria. On their return "The rich textural surfaces of the materials themselves ... quietly filled her imagination".

She described herself as "a materials-driven artist" and her work as "material-based objects, not pre-planned objects".

This information is, sadly, taken from her obituary (19.11.10) in the Guardian, written by Amanda Fielding.

Liking simple things

2011-12-26T12:38:00.000-08:00

Kauto Star flying at Kempton on Boxing Day

On Christmas evening I was driving home when "plop" "crunch" - the exhaust came off the car. I had to abandon it in a lane. Nothing to be done. But next morning, Boxing Day, I enjoy walking the two miles through the country to meet the car recovery vehicle.

I notice a vast flock of crows gathering on the fields where I used to keep my pony. What is the purpose of their gathering there? Perhaps some complicated social ritual for these intelligent creatures, or perhaps they are seeking shelter from the gale. In summer that is the place where the lapwings nest.

The wind is so strong that it is a struggle to stay on course, but as I walk, ideas and solutions to problems arrive in my mind.

I meet the friendly guy with the pick-up truck, he kindly gives me a lift home, half an hour later he phones to say that I forgot to give him the car key! Meanwhile off he goes on his rescue duties. I am forcibly stranded at home until he is able to pass this way again. No problem, I can spend time at home enjoying the unaccustomed peace of this time of year.

I can watch Kauto Star the beautiful racehorse striding out to win his fifth King George prize. What a sight. Nothing simple in that, of course, it is huge tribute to the skill of his breeders and trainer and rider that he is able to achieve this at the age of 12.

Eventually 7 hours later the rescue man reappears looming out the dark in his vehicle and I hand over the key. I retire to my study to review the past year and sort out papers, Bach on cd player. I fear this will all sound either sad or smug according to your interpretation, but I guess there are some who will understand.

Poem for the old year

2011-12-26T12:30:00.000-08:00

"I try saying what I feel
Without thinking about what I feel.
I try fitting words to the idea
Without going down a corridor
Of thought to find words.

I don't always succeed in feeling what I know I should feel.
My thought swims the river only quite slowly,
Heavily burdened by clothes men have made it wear.

I try divesting myself of what I've learned,
I try forgetting the mode of remembering they taught me,
And scrape off the ink they used to paint my senses,
Unpacking my true emotions,
Unwrapping myself, and being myself ...."

Fernando Pessoa
Translated from the Portuguese
With thanks to Jane-Anne Shaw who sent me this poem 11 years ago!

Wuthering Heights

2011-12-19T13:47:00.000-08:00

Went to see this movie today, but was a little disappointed. I thought very highly of Andrea Newman's "Fish Tank" which dealt with growing up in a poor part of contemporary Britain. That film was an acute observation of frustrated aspiration and the cruelty of society, and one of its most powerful aspects was the soundtrack, much of it rap music. This soundtrack set a rhythm to the whole film.

Wuthering Heights, on the other hand, is mostly "silent" except for the natural sounds of animals and the countryside and weather. With a few human voices. This, together with the strong photography and brilliant recreation of a harsh Yorkshire farm on the moors, makes for a very realistic atmosphere moving in its bleakness, particularly when Heathcliff is cast out of the family to live in the cattle byres.

The first part of the film is very slow moving, focussing on the relationship between Heathcliff and Cathy, with very many long lingering moments of Heathcliff's profile and Cathy's beautiful round sensuous face. I was not entirely convinced by the strength of this relationship. Newman is really good at portraying young people very powerfully and sympathetically, but I do not think she captured the "soul connection" that Bronte claimed between this couple. We do not get to know Heathcliff as a young man. He is silent much of the time and we have to interpret his expressions. I did not find either character particularly sympathetic.

The environment is overwhelming, both the moors and the farm. It seems much larger than either Heathcliff or Cathy, and in fact Cathy's brother and father seem much more a part of it. Although the photography is very good, the natural world is over-romanticised. Too much lingering again on details such as trapped moths, sprigs of heather, and on splendid landscapes.

The issue of class is also confusing. Cathy is considered the equal of the family in the big house even though she "runs wild". How does this fit into the strict religion of her father? Even as a farmer's daughter she has some fine horses to ride. Reference to social context is similarly confusing - what for example had Heathcliff been doing between his sad departure from the farm and his confident reappearance as an adult?

The fact that Heathcliff is a black man in this film adds to the complication. Newman may be making an effective comment on contemporary Britain, but it is also a cliche to match the Heathcliff character with such a powerful and nonconformist part. Bronte's Heathcliff is the classic "other".

Newman wanted to portray Heathcliff and Cathy as victims of prejudice and of their own passionate feelings. For me these feelings came over as nothing more than would quite naturally occur between two children playing on the farm. More cruel and real was the treatment of Heathcliff by Cathy's jealous brother.

I suspect that Newman is more suited to working in a contemporary urban context, where we recognise meanings and can read the characters immediately - and learn something from her fresh, informed and radical outlook. I did not learn much from this film.

Finally, hey, it is Christmas time! Why do I choose to go to a movie with not one moment of humour or lightness? Because it has had great reviews and this was a rare chance to see it, that's why.. But I have to confess that ultimately I was not able to sit through the whole thing. Just too dark and depressing and a little bit dull.

My Week with Marilyn

2011-12-06T13:30:00.001-08:00

I made an effort through the sleet and snow to see this movie and I am glad I did. For one thing, the acting is brilliant. Kenneth Branagh does a great turn as Sir Laurence Olivier, Judi Dench also great, and Michelle Williams does a wonderful Marilyn Monroe.

The movie is about the making of the Fifties film "The Prince and the Showgirl", starring Olivier and Monroe, but more deeply it is about Marilyn as a wholly instinctive actress, and the insecurities she experienced both because of her lack of formal training, and because of her traumatized childhood.

At one point, Olivier acknowledges her great presence on screen, and remarks how much pain she must endure as such a completely intuitive performer. But at the beginning he tries to bully her into following the usual rules, with absolutely no success.

Lovely portrait of an artist.

The dark side

2011-12-05T10:54:00.000-08:00

The Baths of Caracalla, Rome

Rose Macaulay, in her magnificent book, "The Pleasure of Ruins", describes the satisfaction of ruins and the catastrophic element they symbolise:

"The literature of all ages has found beauty in the dark and violent forces, physical and spiritual, of which ruin is one symbol. The symbols change; the need does not. Oedipus, Clytemnestra, Atreus, Medea .. all the atrocious horrors of Greek drama, of Seneca, of Dante's Hell, of Tasso, of the Elizabethans and Jacobeans - these have a profoundly ruinous and welcome gloom" (p. 20)

Of course, humanity has not changed, we only have to watch the tv news or go to a multiplex movie to understand that. But difficult to accept that such a need exists, probably in all of us.

The Way of Unthinking

2011-12-05T10:38:00.000-08:00

Johannes Itten wrote in his book "The Art of Colour"(1961), when discussing analysis of colour theory, that if "unthinking"is your way, then that is the way to work.

Reading the recent obituary of the Czech poet and translater, Ewald Osers, I was reminded of this remark. Osers write that for him, translating poetry was a natural aptitude he could not define:"I don't believe that translation theory has ever helped me to translate.....Without conscious effort a translated line ... would stand ready in my mind."

This, too, reminded me a little of J.K. Rowling's story about how the idea of Harry Potter "dropped into her mind" on a train journey to Scotland. I am definitely no Rowling/Potter fan, but I have to acknowledge the meaning of the work for many.

"Rag Rose" and "Reworked" at the Edinburgh Craft Fair

2011-12-03T14:40:00.001-08:00

This weekend at St. John's Church, Princes Street, in Edinburgh for a small cosy fair - fortunately covered in a marquee and with plenty of warmth in the air!
I am so impressed by many of my fellow exhibitors. Here are two I particularly like.

Rag Rose (www.ragrose.co.u k) makes exquisite brooches and other accessories from beautifully made fabric flowers. This maker has a brilliant sense of colour and the photo only gives some idea of the quality of her work. The website is more helpful!

The Reworkd Workshop (www.reworkd.etsy.com) uses components from old manual typewriters to make into jewellery such as necklaces, pendants and cufflinks. These are SO clever and witty. I have been wearing one of their pendants since August! It is just a simple typewriter key with the letter "D". I love it.

Flatpack fiction

2011-11-22T11:20:00.000-08:00

Robert McCrum bewails the state of the contemporary fiction. According to a literary editor in the U.S., there is a new criterion for the successful novel. "A new novel should be summarised in a single sentence, and should stop dinner party conversation for at least 10 minutes".

He calls it the IKEA novel, "competently written in a simulacrum of fine writing", but unfortunately it is "not original, and not distinctive, and with an inner vision of humanity ..it was invented to please a market and to make money."

What would have become, asks McCrum, of Heart of Darkness or Ulyssess in such a world?

Observer Review, 13.11.11

Feeling the future?

2011-11-22T11:15:00.002-08:00

"So often one's writing is prophetic. When you write, you are in touch with another force, not the everyday force you employ, you retreat so deep into yourself, you don't suspect those feelings had been there". Anita Desai in conversation with her daughter, Kiran Desai (Guardian Review, A Life in Writing, 12.11.11)

Glasgow School of Art - intentional ruin

2011-11-22T11:09:00.000-08:00

I passed GSA today and saw how demolition teams are tearing down the ugly modernist blocks opposite Charles Rennie Macintosh's sublime Art School.

Quite a sight, and one that must pluck a heartstring or two, considering alll the labour, angst and creativity that has gone on in these studio buildings. Do buildings contain memories, as some believe?

Wax maquette

2011-09-26T12:36:00.000-07:00

This week I tried out modelling wax over an armature made from wire, wood and bubble wrap padding.

Lovely medium to work with, yay! This little horse is about 200 mm high. He is watching his human friend (not modelled!) hence the rather hesitant and focussed stance.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

2011-09-17T15:18:00.000-07:00

To the new film of John Le Carre's famous spy thriller. Beautifully made film with great atmosphere and psychology. I particularly enjoyed the totally accurate recreation of the drab feel of London in the 1970s. Though it did not feel drab to those of us who lived through it, of course.

The photography is marvellous. I confess that I will have to read the book or watch film again to totally appreciate the plot.

Saturday morning in Stirling

2011-09-17T15:07:00.000-07:00

A rather different scene this morning in my town - the annual Orange March. But much lighter in spirit than it used to be. I did not see any grim-faced men wearing orange sashes and bowler hats. All respect to them, but this was a chance for the young musicians to march to and fro through the streets cheering everyone up.

Sauchiehill Street, Glasgow

2011-09-17T15:05:00.000-07:00

Cheerful moment in Sauchiehall Street last week with the sun and the feathers and the music.

Not shown: visit to Glasgow School of Art Library to search for books about Frink and Marini, both celebrated animal sculptors

Small is much more beautiful

2011-09-15T14:28:00.001-07:00

Returning to the scene of the sculptured horse today, I realise that very small pieces of netting coated in the resin mix work very much better than big chunks. Now I shall have to rasp or sand down all the sticking-out bits resulting from early attempts.

I am beginning to enjoy this way of working. Now I see the horse in a different way. He is becoming a bit more bulky and I am going to increase his "top line", in horsey parlance. At the moment I have just placed a strip of bubble wrap on his neck to see if it looks better. I definitely think it does, so I will work from that. He is an Andalusian breed of horse, and they have muscular necks. When they are well trained and ridden, that is.

The strange logic of materials

2011-09-13T10:32:00.000-07:00

I am using a new material to coat my horse sculpture and make it permanent. As it is made of wire and plaster it is fragile and needs this strong coating to preserve it.

But using this stuff is a completely new experience, with its own "logic" and texture. After the first application on part of the horse I came back 2 days later to find lumps and hard edges set rock solid. Well, that is what I want, ultimately, but in more controlled form!

Also, the fibre content creates a special hair-like surface very like a horse's coat. And if I remove sections of fibre for any reason I find it pulls out like a horse's tail or mane.

It is a whole new relationship. I will have to be patient and listen. As Bernard Tschumi, the architect, remarks (and this is true for sculpture as well, I am finding):

"Architecture as the materialisation of forms not ideas. For me, the nature of materials is far more important than formal concerns. The materials introduce a new logic... construction is a form of constraint that is extraordinarily fertile for invention."

The 20% debate

2011-09-12T11:55:00.000-07:00

This is not the place to air political views, nor do I have the expertise, but I cannot resist quoting Will Hutton in yesterday Observer in response to the current debate on tax for high earners (proposed reduction of): ..." the rich are part of society too... what really drives dynamic capitalism .. is .. the revolutionary urge to innovate and the deep plumbing of its institutions which aid or abet that effort... The framework which supports this costs money, and it is proper that the rich should contribute proportionally." Hutton, Forget the top rate of tax. We need a proper strategy for growth", Observer, 11.9.11

This makes sense to me.

Hunting the Snark

2011-09-10T11:30:00.000-07:00

.. whatever that means. But I take it as the endless hunt for definition or feeling of completion or arrival. Such feelings can only be fleeting but satisfying anyway.

I am currently reviewing my time at art school, the memories of confusion and anxiety are terrifying, but that is as it should be when one is trying something new and/or different.

Meanwhile I am loving the three-dimensional things I am doing (see pictures - currently coating this piece with a resin that will make it more permanent!). I am certainly a material person. Thanks to all those who have supported me in this.

Very sorry I have not got to visit anyone in Perth Open Studios this week. I remember how valuable it was when people came to see me in my studio during Forth Valley Open Studios during June. There has just been such a lot of essential paperwork and forward organisation to do after Edinburgh Fringe and ahead of October break and Christmas season.

Damien Hirst's Pegasus

2011-09-10T09:39:00.000-07:00

Damien Hirst has turned his attention to horses and created a huge sculpture of Pegasus. One side of the horse is flayed to show its anatomy, the other is white and perfect.

Hirst has done other dissection sculptures, notably of a male toy figure and a pregnant woman. I used to think his work pretentious and wrote an entire dissertation to this effect in my final year at Glasgow School of Art.

Now, 10 years late(r), I am beginning to get it. I also am fascinated by what lies under our skin and that of animals.

Where have the birds gone?

2011-09-08T11:34:00.000-07:00

Suddenly hardly a bird in my garden. I so take for granted the constant flutter and movement and this morning I woke up and sensed.... nothing. Confirmed by session in garden this evening. Possibly a cat on the prowl, could even be my recent attempts at keeping garden a bit tidier. Also no bees, usually lavender and borage swarming with insects at this time of year. I hope birds return soon.

Postscript 10th September: They're back!! But there was a weird emptiness the other day.

PPS 15th September. I saw a cat in the garden. That's why they all went quiet.

The wonder that is uniqlo

2011-09-07T12:38:00.000-07:00

This Japanese clothing company makes wonderful stylish and simple clothing. They can be found on www.uniqlo.com, but at present their website is a bit overloaded because they are launching a new collection designed by Jil Sander. So it might be better to try after a few days.

I have bought heat tech vests from them and worn them practically everyday, winter and summer. For cold weather just layer them and you will be warm and feel comfortable.

They have many stores in London, perhaps other parts of UK too, and also a good on line service.

Twitter makes me want to cry - or being too honest in my blog

2011-09-07T12:22:00.000-07:00

I am learning to try out social media, but am astonished at the immediate sense of intimacy with people I have never met, am never likely to meet, or even want to meet. Thinking to previous blog about Hoffmann, I feel that so much instant friending is totally false, it bypasses the way we relate to people through all important senses of hearing, vision, touch maybe, smell and sound. Such sensual information unconsciously helps us to relate to people. Neuroscientists say that our bodies make decisions before our brains are aware of it. I guess even the fact of taking this social media issue seriously also makes me rather sad.

Another vanity is the sense of equality with famous celebrities. I am now a follower of @Frankie Dettori. Soon I shall try @Cheryl Cole and, probably, @Prince William! But @Robert Peston was my very first choice and that brings me to the most important role of Twitter, that is as a source of information!!!

Zoe Williams of the Guardian writes about the absurdity of tweeting about David Walliams while watching him swimming down the Thames. "To borrow from Audrey Hepburn" she says "it is like drinking coffee through a veil" .. when nothing is "real" unless mediated via facebook and/or twitter! Though actually I myself prefer life as mediated through the "veil" of the printed word!

Malvina Hoffman

2011-09-07T12:16:00.000-07:00

For more on this twentieth-century sculptor, who was a friend of the dancer, Anna Pavlova, go to www.soapstonesculpture.com and click on the link to her name, then scroll down to read "Can Sculpture Be Taught", for an inspiring read about art, skill and learning.

Edinburgh Book Festival

2011-09-04T11:43:00.001-07:00

Andrey Kurkov (above) and A.D. Miller were speaking (26th August) about their recent novels, which are centred on contemporary Russia and Ukraine, and in particular the endemic corruption.

Kurkhov is a Russian now living in Ukraine. He spoke about his experiences as a writer under the Soviet regime and the need for undercover publishing. His new book, The Milkman in the Night, is an absurdist novel about ordinary and poor people in Kiev trying to make their way in the world by extraordinary devices.

A.D. Miller is English and spent several years in Moscow as journalist for the Economist. His novel is called Snowdrops, a misleadingly lyrical title. "Snowdrops" is actually the term used for the frozen bodies of homeless and other unfortunate people which emerge in the cities when the snow melts. The subject of his book is a young Englishman and his encounters with the corruption of Moscow and in particular two Russian women.

The discussion was chaired by a representative of the EBF, gave both writers the opportunity to read short extracts from their books, and to talk about their personal experiences and their impressions of the Moscovian and Ukrainian society. The discussion was delightful, very witty, anecdotal but full of knowledge and experience. Both loved Russian literature, compared their thoughts about Dostoyeysky, Gogol, Babel and others. A real treat. It is impossible to convey how very enjoyable and refreshing this evening was.

Beamish

2011-09-03T14:04:00.000-07:00

Above, one of my best photographs (ever) from this week's visit to Beamish Open Air Museum, Co. Durham. It happened to be a special day, coinciding with a Steam Festival.

Martin Creed's famous marble steps

2011-09-03T13:36:00.000-07:00

Conceptual artist Martin Creed, formerly best known for the Amazing On and Off Lightbulb Experience at Tate Britain, which won him the Turner prize, has gone very material with this reconstruction of an iconic flight of Edinburgh steps. Each step is a different kind of marble (I hope I am correct in that, it is what looks like), and that is saying something, for there must be about 60 steps and 4 or 5 landings. Best viewed wet through whatever cause - well, there are quite a few pubs round about as well as a lot of wet weather.

Ingrid Calame

2011-09-03T13:26:00.000-07:00

This interesting artist from USA is showing at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh. I really liked her ideas and her work because she uses random found markings from the street, any street, anywhere, traces them, overlays them, and creates drawings and paintings from them. The photo here is a large scale piece, not entirely typical of her work, but I liked it. Speaking if her working methods, Calame remarks that she thinks, "but thinking not like thoughts more like experiences"

Hiroshi Sugimoto

2011-09-03T13:07:00.000-07:00

I went to see the work of this wonderful Japanese photographer in Edinburgh this week. The main part of the exhibition was a spectacular series of "light drawings" made by generating electrical discharges onto film. Sugimoto uses a Van den Graff generator with a discharge wand of 400000 volts to create the "artificial lightning". The question he asks is: "Are these artworks or primal lifeforms?"

He also experimented with very old negatives, 160 years old, by the first photographer, Fox Talbot, and enlarged them greatly. The results (no image available here as light too low in gallery and I was photographing surreptitiously anyway) were ghostly portraits of long gone people, much more haunting than the developed photograph would be. Of these works, he says they express "inner phenomena that painting cannot depict".

Sugimoto is known for photographing architecture. Of modernism, he approvingly says that the abandonment of superfluous decoration was a great step. He photographs modernist masterpieces such as La Savoie by Corbusier with a very soft focus, finding that "superlative architecture survies the onslaught of blurred photography". I will add a photo here at some point. I have his book of architectural photographs.

He did a series of portraits from the wax figures in Madame Tussauds. Only one example was shown here as part of his earlier work. The wax maquette of Henry VIII was meticulously based on Holbein's contemporary painting. Here is Sugimoto's translation, apologies for the blurred and snatched photo, already small.

The new religion

2011-09-03T12:57:00.001-07:00

It's official! Spotted in my town.

But I know it is not a joke and that there is a huge housing shortage especially for first timers. But this is a bit blatant.

Speaking of perfect spaces...

2011-08-03T09:47:00.000-07:00

... in July I visited this year's Serpentine Pavilion (Hyde Park, London). Designed by architect Peter Zumthor, it is simply a large wooden rectangular shape with deep overhanging roof on all four sides. This wide roof also provided shelter in the courtyard and created a powerful sense of shelter and comfort, with echoes of the cloister. The wild garden, designed by Piet Oudoff, counteracts the severity and simplicity of the space. Zumthor says "Plants embody everything that I like to have around me: presence, personality, character. They are supple and therefore strong, and yet soft-spoken and gentle; they are fragrant and delicate; they have movement, colour, structure, scale and proportion..."

Tables and chairs lined the walls and provided a completely pleasant place to sit and socialise, with a quiet noise level, looking out onto the sky and the earth, while protected at the same time. Deceptively basic and very effective.

The secret life of buildings

2011-08-02T14:52:00.001-07:00

I am loving this series on Channel 4 by Tom Dyckhoff, architectural correspondent for the Times
(some OK things about this paper after all, it seems). He explains how neuroscience and other forms of research are showing how deeply we are affected by architectural space. In a lab in Los Angeles he gets wired up and placed in front of various different virtual rooms. This experiment shows how much more stressed and depressed he becomes in a small space with low ceilings.

Which is exactly the kind of living accommodation in so many new build housing estates in the UK. We also have the lowest overall size of house in the Europe, apparently. This kind of building frequently economises on the window size as well. Dyckhoff does an experiment in his extremely light flat in London. The window walls are covered with sheets of card which let in the same ratio of light as an average estate home. He spends a week there, measuring his mood, which predictably shifts rapidly downwards.

Yet when we look for houses, the main factors featured are often the number of rooms, not the amount of light or the proportions of the rooms. It need not be like this, according to Dyckhoff. There is no reason why more people-friendly homes cannot be built for exactly the same budget. Watch out for the next programme, Monday nights.

The Bay Walk, Morecambe

2011-07-24T14:26:00.000-07:00

By chance heard about today's walk across Morecambe Bay Sands in Lancashire. I was driving north from Cheshire to Scotland, and liked the idea of this. So I made my way to Arnside on the coast, together with about 600 other enthusiasts (and their dogs in many cases) and we all set out together out into the Bay - at low water of course!

This area is 35 square miles in size, and when the tide flows, it covers the bay in 30 minutes, making it a most dangerous spot. Today's walk was in support of the Bay Search and Rescue Team, who use amphibious vehicles. Our leader Cedric Robinson, is the Queen's Guide to the Sands (so named after he guided Queen and Consort over Morecambe Bay in a horse and carriage). Cedric is a retired fisherman, and has written his autobiography entitled, "Sandman". Have a look on amazon to find out more about him.

Before a walk he carefully explores the lie of the sand. The sands can shift each day and each moment. Even as we set out today, our route was uncertain and we zigzagged our way to and fro to avoid deep channels of water or soft patches of sand. We could not avoid crossing the outlet of the local river, however, and as one our large group surged across this water. The water reached nearly to my waist and I am 5'5" tall. It was quite dramatic.

I did not have my camera with me (less to carry) so only have these snaps of the river estuary taken on my way home. We walked about 10 miles plus, I should think. It was wonderfully refreshing and therapeutic to splash about in bare feet over the sand, especially after hard week's work at Slaidburn YHA as temporary warden. A real day off!

2011-07-14T15:15:00.000-07:00

To British Museum this week, saw this superb Roman sculpture of a young man riding his horse. It is a masterpiece of harmony which exactly shows the rapport between a horse and rider. The young man is calm and relaxed, the horse is following his rider's gaze and is equally poised and relaxed, while ready to respond instantly.

What a privilege it is to have one's eyes suddenly open to an artwork and its quality. Only possible after much effort expended in the studio attempting to express some of my own feelings about the horse.

Chilling out in the sun

2011-07-03T12:01:00.000-07:00

Given myself a weekend off to regain balance and sanity, fantastic. Yesterday to a village near to Edinburgh, where, with a group of like-minded people and the help of a tai chi master, I spent the day practising my tai chi. It took half a day to get into the mind- and body-set, but so healing once it started to happen. My residual aches and pains, caused by tension and anxiety, mostly, melted away. So thanks to all and especially to Dorothy and Dharmamudra. It was wonderful.

Today to Fife and time sitting in the sun watching a charismatic and knowledgeable horse teacher in action with a group of riders and horses. In the blazing sun, equipped with insect repellent and sun cream, fairly blissful just to relax and watch this, without even the stress of having to ride myself and face my inadequacies as a rider. Plus, beautiful horses, especially this one. Insects had bitten her in girth area, so this is why she and rider are practising dismounted! Sun was so strong I could not see camera images on my phone, which is why they are a bit far away. Thanks to all concerned.

Regaining sanity

2011-06-26T14:01:00.000-07:00

Been on a frantic activity trip over past two months, well, almost three months if you count the trip down south to Harrogate trade fair and other events during early April, not yet absorbed. Hardly time since to breathe and under pressure constantly to revise the way I work, prepare for exhibition and big shows with completely new profile. I showed horse drawings at the Highland Show and no one I knew recognised me because they were expecting a textile display!

Now this evening home from show and I feel slightly saner and a bit better off, but urgently needing to review what has been done, what was valid, what was a vanity project and what might actually work in the future.

Little time recently to read and register what is happening in the world, in spite of much momentous happenings. However, managed during lengthy quiet spells during Highland Show to catch up with news and also on a personal level improve my tai chi practice! Just learning to release energy down into the earth and let it rise up through the body. Martial arts idea. Very powerful. Useful in learning to relate to encounters by allowing them to be absorbed by the earth and rebound.

Appreciation of my wonderful smart phone which allowed me to research info and stay mentally alive while I sat at my stand at show.

Three dimensions - or getting plastered

2011-05-28T12:26:00.000-07:00

Further horse sculpture pictures.

I have been applying the plaster gradually. Nerve racking but so enjoyable and the horse is beginning to come alive again. He has a feeling of gentle power, which is what I wanted.

Much to do still, his tail is just a piece of fabric for example! His mane, hooves and ears need much work, too.

I wonder whether there is more to horse symbolism that I am aware. I found this picture in "The Surreal House" a catalogue from Barbican, London, 2010. It is a painting by Leonora Carrington from 1937-8.Autoportrait a l'auberge du Cheval d'Aube" ( Self Portrait (Inn of the Dawn House)

Archipelago the movie

2011-05-16T03:01:00.001-07:00

Film by Joanna Hogg set on the semi tropical Tresco estate in Cornwall. A mother and her two grown up children are on holiday before the son goes away to Africa for a year, as a volunteer adviser on the treatment of Aids. The family is joined during the day by the (real life) artist Christopher Baker, who is teaching them in painting the local landscape.

Baker is a quiet observer of the fractures that open within the family. I enjoyed his relaxed remarks of encouragement in making of work - for example,
"Think what you want to say , but be open for chaos to intervene and take over."
" You have only so much energy, listen to it and don't abuse it."
Was this supposed to have a wider relevance, I wonder?

At one point he talks to the son, who is feeling uncertain about whether he is right to abandon his high paid City job for the journey to Africa. Baker himself says that, as a young man, he had great passion for his art, but he was advised not to go to art school because he was "not tough enough". He had an inner determination and vision but it might not survive in the competitive environment of an art education. Instead he followed his path in a different way, and it has been a success for him. Interesting how the conventional wisdom is not always the right way.

Adam Curtis - documentary film maker

2011-05-09T15:03:00.001-07:00

I read an interesting article in yesterday's Observer. Adam Curtis is a documentary film maker. His new work "All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace" begins on BBC2 on 24th May.

In the Observer interview he made two points which I found particularly interesting. He criticised the "1960's" assumption that nature is a self regulating system and that there is a natural order, both in nature and society. In such a society our role is to stand back and enable, rather than to change and respond to and reinvent.

Curtis regards the system ideology is a myth, since inequalities between humans mean that politics, or the intervention and protection of the weak is always necessary. He considers globalisation and internet communication and the proliferation of managers to be part of the network society. But in this de-politicised society, power actually lies with corporations and financial institutions which use a corrupt and weak political system for their own ends.

Secondly, according to him, the private dimension of this society is an obsession with personal feelings, as expressed in reality TV and on social networks such as Facebook, and Twitter, both owned by large corporations. This apparently sincere and open expression is of the same network ideology, and masks not only real issues within our own societies but ignores other societies where people are completely powerless and often very poor - but who have "different myths about us as human beings, things that the west longs for, but which make us terrified".

I am not sure I agree with much of this mainly because of the obvious benefits of the internet as an incredible and revolutionary means of communication and expression. But I do find Curtis' analysis interesting, particularly his critique of social networking. Maybe that is because I don't really get it!

Going into three dimensions #2

2011-05-03T10:56:00.000-07:00

I am working on a large horse sculpture for the Open Studios event in June. I have a wonderful space for the period of the exhibition and I want to make an almost full-size piece. Here I am working on the armature. All totally experimental, but fingers crossed! I am loving the process anyway.

Coming home through back lanes I noticed this example of good tree planting, now looking its absolute best.

May 1st

2011-05-01T11:27:00.000-07:00

Glorious day, glad to be alive. A few pictures to convey the life in my garden.

Royal Wedding Day

2011-04-29T08:15:00.000-07:00

Thanks, William and Catherine, for the holiday, which I intend to take full advantage of! I enjoy the ceremony and the faces and the clothes and the horses of these occasions. A deep conservative streak, I guess, but I defy anyone not to appreciate the beautiful Abbey, the "costumes" of all concerned, and the incredibly beautiful and appropriate wedding dress from the Alexander McQueen label. With the greatest respect I thought Catherine looked more regal in this dress than almost anyone else there. She certainly looked, in the nicest possible way, as though she had stepped out of the Middle Ages.

George Shaw

2011-03-27T14:53:00.003-07:00

I made a special trip to Newcastle in March to see these paintings. I knew they were about lost spaces of suburbia, the unacknowledged environments which form the background to so many lives. I was not disappointed. I very much enjoyed this large exhibition of richly coloured paintings, full of intensity and atmosphere.

Shaw paints the estate in Coventry where he grew up. He left to study art, then gave it up for some years before returning to study at Royal College in London, and since then he has been photographing the Tile Hill estate and making photo-realist paintings using Humbrol paint intended for model making.

George Shaw Ash Wednesday

The paintings are a reworking of his teenage years, a time when feelings are intense and where the most ordinary places accumulate strong meanings.

Shaw explores the suburban street, the bus stop, the garage doors, the school playground, the path in the woodland, the banal landscape. Estates such as Tile Hill were planned with a benign agenda and assumptions about how people wish to live. Shaw subverts these assumptions by hinting at the ways in which the inhabitants actually use such places in unanticipated ways and at how these places become haunted by intense emotion.

In comparison, the city is highly charged and we are carried along by its energy, which disperses memory and is less stagnant than the suburbs. A rural area is accepting of the land and the rhythms of creation and destruction. There is a kind of deathliness and sterility about the suburbs which makes these paintings and the emotions they evoke so poignant.

George Shaw has recently (5th May, 2011) been nominated as a contestant in this year's Turner Prize.

Day out in Newcastle upon Tyne

2011-03-27T14:52:00.001-07:00

Thrilled to step through the monumental station doors into the vibrant city which is Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

Passed old old building, which once, long ago, gave a clear view of the Tyne up and down stream. This was a ship owner's house, and is known as Bessie Surtees house, after his daughter, who famously eloped through a small window in the front room.

I also came across the kittiwakes busily and very noisily nesting under the Tyne bridge. This is a famous tradition and the birds travel here every year.

Spectacular engineering of the Tyne Bridge, and the slightly more contemporary Millennium bridge at Gateshead! This echoes curve of the Tyne Bridge but is built to open and allow shipping through.

After a visit to Baltic Art Gallery, the main reason for my visit (please see different blog for the painter George Shaw), I went up into the city and happened upon the clothes exhibition, "Primitive Streak" by designer Helen Storey and her scientist sister. Fabulous and fascinating, but sadly no time to visit as I had to get train back to Scotland. Not before spotting the ever-present and fabulous inflatable prawn in city centre.

Creativity and Les Freres Guisse

2011-03-23T14:40:00.000-07:00

This week making work for British Craft Trade Fair in Harrogate (see events page of my website if you are interested). I am dyeing and printing strips of cloth for scarves. I have done this for nearly 30 years and it is still a huge pleasure. Energy and ideas flow so easily, the delight in using liquid dye in brilliant transparent colours (unlike sticky expensive paint!), the smell of the alginate thickening paste and the freshly washed fabric - all a delight.

I know, however, that I can only enjoy this because I have other projects going on, projects which are more challenging and even threatening for me, but let's face it, more interesting. When it comes to making "art" of whatever variety, the whole process is different from dyeing the fabrics. The purpose of the work is different, so is its ultimate use. I totally cannot work in the same free way.

The only way in which I can recapture the play and delight and freedom is through long long processes of intellectual work or some other form of extreme rigour. This seems to shut my guilty and intrusive left brain (which says making art is somehow "wrong") down (or up), and allows the free energy to flow. Hurrah!

Professor Norman Crowe in his book "Visual Notes for for Architects and Designers" describes how the process of looking and of drawing has the same effect. It silences the logical mind somehow and allows the artist or architect to go beyond the observations and create his or her own interpretation.

I thought of all this the other night while watching a live performance of a wonderful group of musicians from Senegal, Les Freres Guisse. The drummer in particular was a true artist, creating intricate sounds and rhythms in a way that felt very free and natural. But each of them was brilliant. The sounds of this group are soft, rhythmic and poetic but really dynamic and complex too. Very special.

Danmark - hvor det sker!

2011-03-22T12:38:00.000-07:00

Denmark - where it's at!

I have been catching up on iPlayer for past two weeks with the brilliant Danish crime thriller "The Killing". Star Sophie Grabol (above) as detective Sarah Lund, with some very impressive support.

I love the setting in Copenhagen, the grand city centre, the grungy settings of warehouses and docks, the insights into how Danish people live their lives, what they wear, how they interact with each other, what their homes are like. I also enjoy the amazing power the CID seem to have, they apparently think nothing of stopping a plane on the runway or suspending fresh water supplies for 24 hours while they search the canal system.

But today I have been grieving for Lund's colleague, Meyer, who was murdered in Episode 18. It had to be coming, he was such a devoted family man, and so human.

Equine touch

2011-03-21T14:34:00.000-07:00

Equine Touch is a technique of vibrating muscle and soft tissue in the horse which relaxes and gives relief to tension and rebalances the body. It was developed by Jock Ruddock in Scotland, and was originally derived from Bowen technique, though it is different from this.

I was lucky enough recently to meet Jock's wife, Ivana, in a special demonstration of horse anatomy. Ivana is a vet and she dissected a horse over a period of 3 days. As an emotionally involved horse lover, I was apprehensive of this experience, but I had been looking at anatomy from an artist's point of view and I very much wanted to take this opportunity.

The dissection was a fascinating experience. I have owned horses and to know more about what is going inside them was extremely interesting. In fact, it had implications for all mammals, including, of course, humans. The body is an intricate miracle of bones, muscles, tendons and nerves, as well as organs and digestive system. In the horse the latter system is literally gigantic.

I have even greater respect for the horse and its body after this, as well as far more understanding about, for example, the "stay" mechanism (whereby horse can lock its stifle joint and save muscle power. Ivana showed us exactly how this works. There were so many other things she told us and showed us, and it will take me time to recollect.

I took many photographs. The group was mainly composed of ET practitioners and students, and Ivana took care to label the main muscles as she proceeded. I do not want to upload any of my photos in case readers of this blog find it distressing. In any case my iPhone does not always agree with google :( so that I cannot get pictures right way however much I try!

Bartabas, the horses and Butoh

2011-03-20T11:52:00.000-07:00

Ko Murobushi

Bartabas

A few weeks ago I read an article about the equestrian artist Bartabas. I was fascinated by his beliefs in the nature of the horse and how our relationship with him is a partnership. Bartabas is based in Versailles, close to Paris. There he trains his horses according to his principles.

Recently he collaborated with Ko Murobushi, a Japanese practitioner of the art/discipline known as Butoh.This movement began in Japan after the second World War as a reaction against traditional forms of dance and theatre in Japan. It was essentially subversive, associated with grotesque images and decay. Its founder, Hijikata, was influenced by European writers such as Genet and Artaud and by the Japanese writer Mishima. It seems also to be about putting the body under such extreme pressure that it can access a different kind of energy, and even relate to the beings of animals. As Hijikata said, "The tendency I speak of involved extricating the pure life which is dormant in our bodies".

Bartabas wanted to find out if he could teach his horses to "empty out himself and his energy before he starts to move". He taught the horses over 2 years to breathe differently and to become very calm and focussed. He said that when successful he was able to give the horse freedom to be more himself without so much reliance by the trainer on traditional techniques.

I saw Bartabas and Murobushi perform at Sadlers Wells theatre in London recently in "The Centaur and the Animal". The stage floor was covered in a bed of sand and the horses moved silently on stage. Horse and rider related to the solo butoh performance by Murobushi. This was an extraordinary display of control and expression. Bartabas finished the work by riding one of his horses in a beautifully fluent display of dressage. But mostly he was riding with no bridle.

Red Nose Day 18th March 2011

2011-03-18T14:28:00.001-07:00

This is how Newcastle upon Tyne celebrated!

River Forth

2011-02-27T10:24:00.000-08:00

I cross this river everyday - it looks like this.

But 30 or so miles east it has become this... a major estuary.

A few moments of Venice

2011-02-25T11:46:00.000-08:00

I was in Venice for two days last October, these are just a few moments I remember. I willl post others onto Flickr and paste the link in here.

3d-cakes - the most fabulous

2011-02-25T11:31:00.000-08:00

I pass this Edinburgh shop every week, never had the chance to stop until this morning. Would you believe these are ALL cakes, yes, edible ones!

View from the bridge

2011-02-24T11:51:00.002-08:00

British Museum

2011-02-23T10:05:00.000-08:00

An installation made from recycled bottle tops by El Anatsui, world-famous Ghanaian artist. Sainsbury Gallery, British Museum

El Anatsui's large installation at Venice Biennale, 2007 (below)

Horse at Marble Arch, London

2011-02-22T11:24:00.000-08:00

More on three dimensions - I have not so far been able to discover who made this brilliant sculpture at Marble Arch in London, or indeed why it is there. Why a horse's head? And why in this place? I would like to know the back story.

Going into three dimensions

2011-02-22T11:03:00.000-08:00

Spending time at British Museum during visit early January, I became aware of how vital the three-dimensional pieces were. Of course most of the things in there are three dimensional because of the cultures from which they originate, or simply because of their antiquity. I took my iPod and listened to podcasts from The History of the World 100 Objects, by BM Director, Neil McGregor. It was so different to be in the presence of these pieces.

Here (above) is a marvellous bull from 2500 BC, Temple of Niwhursag.

Here are some little very basic "three-dimensional
sketches" by me, February 2011!

The mystery of lithography

2011-02-22T10:53:00.001-08:00

Time this month with the vexing issue of lithography.

Working on the stone is a complex process, needing much devotion, experimentation and time to learn and to become acquainted with. It definitely is a technique that has a mind and soul of its own, and demands much respect.

With the help of head technician and master-lithographer, Alistair Clark, I made a careful sample of different marks and processes. This picture gives an idea of what we did at Edinburgh Printmakers Workshop. It is a limestone litho stone with different strengths of wash.

google art project

2011-02-02T09:51:00.000-08:00

This amazing project gives access to most of the greatest world art collections, in great detail.
It is possible to zoom right in to see brushstrokes. For example, Seurat is known for his pointillist form of creating colours by little separate marks which the eye then combines into one(ish) colour, and using the google programme shows exactly how he did this, probably even more than if I were standing in front of the painting.

I have been studying optical colour mixing, as it is called, and so this example just comes to mind, but there is SO MUCH more to discover and I am looking forward finding my way around this unbelievable and brilliant (free) facility. It is really interesting for painters in particular.

Have had a busy January, was away in London for a bit catching up with movies, theatre and dance, visiting relatives, recovering from the snowblitz we had in Scotland over Christmas and New Year. Spent lots of time in British Museum while in London. I am convinced many of objects in there still retain their original power of transporting humans to a higher or at least a different world.

I visited the London 2012 site one chilly morning with a group and a well-informed guide. Lots of politics around it, but given good weather on the day, it looks like being a beautifully designed success. The construction is well ahead of schedule apparently.

At present I am enjoying being able to get to my workshop without Arctic equipment, hopefully will not need same again this winter, dare I mention. Much satisfaction this week in doing a one-to-one class in lithography with the highly expert head technician at Edinburgh Print Workshop, although it is still a complicated technique, and I do not for a moment assume my struggle to "master" it is complete.

Will try to get some pictures into this post in due course. Happy New Year to any readers!

At last back in studio

2011-01-02T08:47:00.000-08:00

My print table!

Back in workshop AT LAST. I am having a review and sort-out of prints from the past three years. S0 pleased to get started on this after long period of ice and snow has made access to studio impossible.

Cannot believe I have reinvented myself

2010-12-29T10:53:00.001-08:00

Is it possible that I am effectively speaking "techno" in digital stores and, what is more, actually taking product, going home and working through all the glitches either on my own or with assistance from experts in Southern India or the Philippines (to name but two). Well, it has taken me long enough to move from a state of total panic to something like confidence. The solution is there, just wait a while and all becomes clear.

Great to meet a creation such as the iPhone which sings out "use me, have fun and pleasure in all you do" (thanks, Apple). Goodbye to the Kindle e reader, acessible in more stylish form on iPhone, hello to portable netbook (sadly not another Apple product, maybe one day).

Not to say that this revolution in communication is the answer to everything, of course not, we are still bundles of irrational needs and emotions. It is just a medium. But (maybe I am sad) what a thrill to talk to people the other side of world and have them sort out your computer even if it takes an hour (their call). It is thrilling to be part of this huge change in human experience. I believe robots are next - but not just yet.

I like this too ...

2010-12-29T09:47:00.000-08:00

Art Spiegelman, cartoonist, explains his working method:

".He is so paralysed by the pressure of creating the perfect sketchbook that he prefers to draw while on the phone, on Post-It notes or envelopes, which he usually throws away. If he is drawing on a newspaper scrap, it is easier to shut down the left side of the brain, so the right side is free to move around: he won't know what the drawing is until it is finished".

From : "The curse of the 5000 lb mouse" Angelique Chrisafis in Guardian, G2, 11.06.09

"Every good work must be ruined"

2010-12-26T07:53:00.000-08:00

I like this:

Finnish architect Marco Casagrande writes in 1.1 Architects Build Small Spaces (Victoria and Albert Museum, London, August 2010)

"First I design and then I ruin my own design. Ruin is when man-made has become part of nature. Every good work must be ruined.

When the ruin happens, control gives up so that nature can step in. This point is where the stories begin. Accident is greater than human control. Accident is nature. Architecture is a living thing."

Is this partly what Robert Smithson means when he refers to buildings and places "rising up into ruins"?

www.vam.ac.uk/exhibitions

Happy Christmas

2010-12-23T12:09:00.000-08:00

My kind of Santa
- with thanks to Hermes, Paris

Happy Christmas to everyone!

Ai Wei Wei

2010-12-21T12:48:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago, Alan Yentob profiled the Chinese dissident artist, Ai Wei Wei in the "Imagine" series (BBC1). Wei Wei has up until now been mainly known in the West for his part in designing the famous "Bird's Nest" stadium at the Beijing Olympics (together with Swiss architects Herzog and de Meuron) but he works in many other media, such as ceramics, jewellery and sculpture.

Wei Wei was deeply affected by the cultural revolution. His family was exiled and made to live in poverty until the death of Mao in 1976. Wei Wei then left for his “home”, New York, and remained there for 14 years. He was strongly influenced by the conceptual art of Warhol and Duchamp.

He returned to China after the protests of Tiananmen Square in 1989, and as a political and avant-garde artist in the repressive state of contemporary China he is a target for the authorities. In 2008, for example, he sustained life threatening injuries from police following an art work he made which exposed the true extent of the losses in the Sichuan earthquake.

Wei Wei depends greatly on the internet and on feeds such as blogs and Twitter to keep in touch with the global culture. He regards this as a cultural space in which it is possible to clearly express who you are and to fight for your rights. These are fundamental for any artist, he says - “Only when art has connection to ordinary feelings or commonsense does it become most powerful”

It is interesting to compare him with Damien Hirst (see recent blog "Playing to the galleries"). They live in totally different societies and have completely different backgrounds, but both are hugely successful conceptual artists, working on an often spectacular scale. But Wei wei is a political artist with an avant-garde background and agenda. .“It can't be right that art has to depend on the market. Liberty is what makes art unique”.

Hirst comments elegantly on decay and the presence of death, a great taboo in the consumerist Western society. He is subversive in this sense but operates within the market, as his comments make clear. Art for him seems to be partly a business.

Wei Wei's famous project currently at Tate Modern comprises 100 m porcelain sunflower seeds made in the traditional way from the finest clay. First the white seed-shapes are fired in moulds, then, once painted, they are fired again. They are indistinguishable from the genuine article. The process took two and a half years and involved a team of 1600 people.

Wei Wei wants everyone to interpret the installation individually, but obviously it can be seen as a comment on China's history, both ancient and modern. During the revolutionary period the sunflower was the symbol for Mao's power and its seeds were, ironically, all that many people had to eat. Even the vast total is only one sixteenth of China's population.

To see this programme try copying and pasting:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00w5lkw/Imagine_Winter_2010_Ai_Weiwei_Without_Fear_or_Favour/

Snow crazy

2010-12-21T12:40:00.000-08:00

Still stuck here in the snow. Even the few hundred yards that separate my house from a navigable road is proving to be a formidable barrier. An underground water waste pipe burst under the ice and turned the road into a kind of glacier experience, covered with large uneven chunks of ice, lethally smooth sheets and narrow grooves formed by brave drivers.

I have not been able to get to workshop for nearly a month now. I am just hoping the thaw arrives soon.

Playing to the galleries

2010-12-17T13:08:00.000-08:00

Hilary Spurling, famed biographer of Matisse, has written a review of Bridget Riley's new exhibition at the National Gallery in London. As a contemporary and friend of Riley, she understands the impact of this “op-art”, as it was then known, on a hidebound and traditional British art scene of the late 1950s.

Riley's work, which is about perception, the optical and dynamic interaction of painting and viewer, became immediately famous, and appropriated commercially. “We'll have you on the back of every matchbox in Japan” said the trustee at New York MOMA in 1965, year of group show “The Responsive Eye”.

Riley was horrified by the way her work had been exploited, but Spurling points out that her paintings had in fact touched a nerve and reflected a shift in ways of seeing, a new collaboration between artist and viewer. “One moment there will be nothing to look at and the next second the canvas suddenly seems to refill, to be crowded with visual events” (Bridget Riley).

Spurling compares Riley with the late Matisse, who aimed “to clarify, liberate and restore to painting its central emotional charge”. “My aim is to make people feel alive” says Riley.

What first caught my attention in this article was a quote about Damien Hirst and his bemusement at the notion of “art for art's sake”, rather than considering how work could be marketed via the commercial galleries. There would appear to be a greater integrity in art made in isolation, but this may be misleading. Artists, unless they have private means, have always depended on patronage of different kinds, and interaction with others is usually central to making successful or pivotal art . I think of groups such as the Impressionists and the Salon des Refuses, or Die Brucke in Germany, or indeed the YBAs.

Commercial galleries are a contemporary form of patronage, and the work remains, as ever, a fabulously expensive luxury. Yet through the media it becomes an accessible part of our culture. But it is impossible to imagine Lucian Freud worrying too much about the commercial gallery. Maybe painting is a more private and reflective activity. Hirst famously has said that he always wanted to be a painter but lacked the ability and confidence, so he started making installations instead.

I was reminded of a comment by Pacheco at "The Sacred Made Real" exhibition of Spanish sculpture and paintings last year at the National Gallery. She thinks that painting draws the spectator in, whereas sculpture comes out and meets the viewer.

Copy and paste link: (www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2010/nov/27/bridget-riley-national-gallery-review)

(www.nationalgallery.org.uk)

A poem about kindness

2010-12-08T12:25:00.000-08:00

Kindness

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and
purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you every where
like a shadow or a friend.

Naomi Shihab Nye
from The Words Under the Words: Selected Poems

No comment needed

2010-12-08T09:22:00.001-08:00

My cottage this afternoon

More snow

2010-12-06T12:42:00.001-08:00

I braved the elements once again today. It was a pleasure once I was safely wrapped up and going. The whole environment was transformed and all sense of time lost. Please copy and paste this link to see more!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/50932933@N03/sets/72157625544081956/

Any Human Heart - best moment

2010-12-06T01:27:00.001-08:00

I am watching this adaptation of William Boyd's novel on Channel 4. It is an informal romp through twentieth-century history, and the acting is superb.

The best moment so far was Gloria's (Kim Cattrall) memory of spending her last shilling on violets rather than a sandwich, "because she would always remember the violets but forget the sandwich immediately".

I love this idea that common sense, although pretty useful, is not always the best way!

Monday morning

2010-12-06T01:18:00.000-08:00

This is the scene this morning - at least 6 inches of snow fell silently and unexpectedly overnight. Now I am really stuck here, do not relish wading through the drifts to go anywhere!

Plus car broke down yesterday, now it is stranded along the road.

So - no chance of getting to studio anyway! And
it looks as though the show this weekend is a write-off.

At least it is, hopefully, not life threatening, but
I worry for the wild birds.

It's so nice to come home..

2010-12-04T07:19:00.000-08:00

but it's even nicer to go out.

At last I braved the elements in my car today. Some time was needed for thorough de-icing so that I could see where I was going! The hero of the hour for this proved to be my steam kettle (see above). It did a brilliant job of clearing the windscreen and the wipers.

Once on the road, I did feel a bit vulnerable, especially right out in the middle of nowhere. I had to park the car at a farm and walk about a mile along a snowy and slippery track to the workshop. I have these fear thresholds, I kept thinking of what would happen if .... but then, what are mobiles for?

It was spectacularly beautiful out there in the valley, I saw hare tracks, a deer and a great cluster of crows gathering, and the trees and hedges and mountains looked so fine. The Clydesdale filly at the farm ran through the snow with excitement. Unfortunately no camera with me. Once I got to the barn, however, EVERYTHING was frozen solid, even the medium I use for my dyes. Fortunately I rustled up some hot water by boiling snow in the kettle and managed to do a bit.

Great sense of achievement to get out and back safely in these conditions. For me, too much domestic time becomes very stifling - and there has been quite a bit this week due to weather conditions. According to the new programme "At Home with the Georgians" (bbc2 iplayer) the home was definitely the pinnacle of aspiration of people in eighteenth century Britain. It was a status symbol and also, in practical terms, the only way to achieve a comfortable existence. Thank goodness we have more options these days.

Serious weather and serious temptation

2010-12-03T09:30:00.000-08:00

Very beautiful but .... I have not dared to venture out with the car since Sunday, and it is now Friday evening. Today we got post first time for a week. Fortunately it has been a chance to (almost literally) get dug in and finish my year's paperwork.

To let off steam, I have been negotiating on amazon for an iPad, the great must-have, but have been encountering scams and too-good-to-be-true priced items, which just turned out to be a way of obtaining personal e mail addresses. So, still no iPad, and none in sight for now.

I want to and need to get to my workshop, but as it is way out in the valley I need to be sure I am not going to get stuck in a snow storm, and marooned for the night or worse! Today I dug out the car, so hope for good conditions tomorrow.

Another year - Mike Leigh's latest film

2010-12-01T14:12:00.000-08:00

This was such an acute film, and beautifully made.

It is the story of a year in the life of a couple in their sixties, kind, happy and devoted to each other. Both are professionals and live in London, far from their Lancashire roots. They are extraordinarily kind to the more inadequate people around them, offering constant support and hospitality. They worry about their only son, a lawyer with Citizens Advice, as he seems to have no permanent relationship.

Everything changes when the son meets someone and brings her home. The friends suddenly become "pathetic" and "tragic" and the subject of rolling eyes and stage whispers. There is a breathless and anxious moment when the confident and feisty new girlfriend tells them about her own parents (her father is a postman) and then tells them that she herself is an occupational therapist.

The gap between generations is brilliantly portrayed, the friend in the middle a lost soul seeking for identity through acceptance as a girlish and helpless woman, at last in the final frame seeming to realise that this role is false, and her friends are adults for whom close family relationships will always come first. And that perhaps she herself has much greater value and strength than she had realised.

I interpret this film as a comment on contemporary Britain and its increasing inequalities, where family and aspiring middle class values become more important than recognising that we are ultimately all individuals with varying needs and levels of vulnerability and sensitiveness. A wider sense of community is lost, and many people fall through the gaps. Furthermore, since the credit squeeze, there is now a gap between aspiration and reality for almost everyone.

The film also touches on the way we sometimes mask our own needs by helping others, and on how destructive this can be.

Tuition fees - John Sutherland's views

2010-12-01T13:47:00.000-08:00

Professor John Sutherland of University College London writes in Education Guardian about the confused or just plain wrong thinking behind the rise in the tuition fees to £9,000 per year.

He points out that cadets at Sandhurst actually get paid to attend because of course the army has a discernible political role. The same could be said for subjects such as medicine or science and degrees in these subjects. The financial investment in such subjects is almost certain to yield high returns.

This is not so obvious in the case of arts degrees, the benefits of which are more subtle and longer term. Rising fees will deter students, whatever the government claims. Also the more expensive a degree and the more commercial the approach to education, claims Sutherland, the more the nature of education is corroded. The student becomes a customer and demands a good degree rather than a good education.

The danger to underfunded and under-valued arts courses is that they will lose their rigour and educational value. Financial considerations will become paramount, and good academics will distance themselves from the teaching process in order to preserve any sense of meaning and integrity.

Human kindness

2010-11-28T12:33:00.000-08:00

To continue the snow saga, it duly snowed early this morning and I did not know how I was going to get into Edinburgh. Snow too deep for my car, and I was wondering whether I could carry a large if empty suitcase a mile through snow to the station. By a miracle, a UPS driver appeared (on Sunday morning 8.30!) to deliver parcel to neighbours and he kindly took me down to the town.

Then a long wait, two hours, as I just missed one train, and the next one was an hour late. Much commiseration and exchanging of experiences among the stranded. People were concerned about missing connections, some gave up altogether and went home. Not an option for an extended Nigerian family who had come to Stirling to celebrate the graduation of a young woman (Master of Science) and accompany her back to Nigeria. I was interested to hear more about Nigeria and Lagos and about the new capital that has been built.

Managed to get to Edinburgh by 12.30, but all pretty quiet at the show due to dreadful state of city pavements in the snow. A friend agreed to take my stand home in her car once her husband had managed to get into town through 12" of snow in his village. I packed everything else in my trusty Poundstretcher maxi-case and headed for station.

There I managed to drop my return ticket under the train, but the train driver kindly gave me a reference both to the conductor and to the people on ticket barrier in Stirling, so I did not have to pay extra. How kind was that? Finally, my taxi driver, who had parked at the bottom of the little driveway here to avoid getting stuck in snow, carried my heavy suitcase right up to my front door, carefully placing in a dry place on the step.

So a mixed day. Mostly positive. I enjoyed being in my home patch after experiences in London and Newcastle, and catching up with friends and acquaintances.

This is not my usual blogging style, but the snow does something to me, creates a sense of helplessness and insecurity.

Back on home turf

2010-11-27T13:10:00.001-08:00

To the cinema last night, to see "Winter's Bone", a film about a bleak backwoods community probably in Appalachians, USA. A young woman is threatened with the loss of her home and the care of her younger brother and sister (as well as her sick mother). She needs to contact her father or prove his death to avoid losing her property, and the story is about her search for him as she approaches members of the local community, most of them with a secret to hide.

I found the movie most inspiring because of the courage of the hero in the face of prejudice and bullying and powerful criminal vested interests and because of the respect she eventually gains.

When I left the cinema around 10 pm I was dismayed to find small ominous sparkly flakes of frosty snow falling. This usually indicates more serious stuff is on the way, and so it proved around midnight. I had to drive into the city this morning for a fair and spent most of the night awake wondering whether to repack my stock and take a taxi/train, or whether to hold on and drive in.

I did the latter, but I was in the minority. The motorway was restricted to one lane and for several miles I did not see another car. Everyone was doing around 50 mph, most unusual. In Edinburgh the pavements were slippery with ice.

But it was good to see the local craftworkers and have a blether. And I got home safely, though the back road up to my cottage was still covered with snow. I am now debating what to do tomorrow morning, as it is a two day show! Not a taxi to be had, so if forecast snow falls overnight I shall have to walk to station with empty suitcase and collect my things in that when show finishes.

Will power or inspiration?

2010-11-26T11:14:00.000-08:00

Alan Bennett writing about Auden and Benjamin Britten in his play "The Habit of Art" discusses what this habit means - "the need to sit down and work every day, even the muse has gone walkabout". Bennett says that will power is more important than talent:
"Talent you can dispense with, but not will. Will is paramount, not joy, not delight, but grim application. Without grim application you get nowhere, but one would like to think one has more than that"

Comforting words. But I don't think there is anything wrong with like some joy and delight as well!

And more..

2010-11-24T14:45:00.000-08:00

This weekend I was in outer London, near Kingston-upon-Thames, at the Landmark Christmas craft fair. A long way to go, but I wanted to explore a different part of the country. I knew the area slightly from teenage and early twenties, so many memories.

I travelled there with my stock on public transport, so it was a tight fit to get everything in and still reasonably portable. I used a basic concertina clothes drier for the display (this is just visible in the photo). It all worked well! I only forgot a mirror, but I found one in Kingston.

The fair was held in a old Victorian Gothic church (now an arts centre) near the Thames river at Teddington Lock.

Catching up

2010-11-24T10:56:00.000-08:00

It has been an extremely busy time, much travelling to north of England and way beyond, and no time for blogging. Something like normal service resuming and today I was at Printmakers Studio in Edinburgh. Cleaned off my lithography stones but also need time to regroup in mind body and soul, so left it at that. Pleased to see that my two lithographs submitted were both in the Christmas exhibition. Pace my classical followers!

Pythia 1 Pythia 2

This is it

2010-11-09T15:55:00.000-08:00

My, how this lifts the spirits. I saw this film on the big screen a few months ago, loved it because of the music and dancing and the creative rapport of a talented team. Now, how strange, it is as though I am watching it for the first time, seeing it differently.
Loving it again for the passionate involvement of the players, especially for the fabulous and sensitive and dynamic rhythm of MJ and his dancers and singers. Perhaps there is less poignancy now and we can just appreciate and enjoy.

On a different note, I also enjoyed the move, The Social Network, very different but exciting too. A young man, Mark Zuckerman, with a big idea (Facebook) plucked from almost nowhere, follows his vision to the stratosphere.

On an even more different note, I have been watching Downton Abbey on ITV. Well acted, beautifully photographed and well written saga of Edwardian Britain. Echoes of this society still exist even in modern Britain, in my opinion, even just in folk memory. Maggie Smith holds the stage/screen with amazing presence.

But how far we have come in 100 years. In 1914 women had little overt freedom or opportunity, and the majority of the population, both male and female, had little choice or education, and their limited prospects depended on the approval of their live-in employers - or on that of draconian factory managers.

Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow

2010-10-18T13:18:00.001-07:00

Lead books, Installation in Berlin, German

I have been to a documentary film about the German artist Anselm Kiefer. He has lived for nearly 20 years in Barjac, southern France, and worked in a huge space, a derelict silk factory.

The film silently journeys through this space, the excavations under the building, the outside area and installations, and the huge painting studio. There is then a sequence of Kiefer working with his team of assistants, in the studio and the grounds.

His paintings are on a massive scale, perhaps 6 x 10 metres or more, and are moved about on specially constructed free-standing trolleys. No holds are barred, the canvasses, already deeply scarred and textured, are laid horizontal, covered by roughly thrown paint or plaster or glue, followed by a layer of soil or dust. The canvas is then replaced to replaced to vertical and shaken hard "once". Some of this new texture remains.

Gallery in Berlin, Germany, showing a sculpture and painting by Kiefer in the background.

Kiefer is also a sculptor, working with different scales and materials. He makes relatively small wooden objects such as boats or submarines, which are moved by crane to sit against the canvasses. He has a fascination with lead, which is apparently quite instable on a molecular level and changes shape over time, for example in old cathedral roofs. Kiefer makes huge lead books, actual books with pages that turn. Sometimes these are incorporated into the paintings, sometimes they are an independent sculpture.

He also uses the earth as a material. In the film large earthmoving machinery scoops masses of soil or subsoil from one location to another, sometimes covered with liquid lead.

He has an apocalyptic vision, hence the title of this film, and is fascinated by ruins and destruction, and fragments of once great and strong buildings. One exterior installation is inside an enormous glasshouse. It consists of twisted steel girders and huge crumbling and broken chunks of concrete.

He also makes precarious almost toppling towers (as in illustration above), which have a bleak rawness and desolate poignancy.

There is an interview in the film. This takes place in Kiefer's library, and the artist talks about his ideas, his fascination with the Bible (from which the title is taken), and the figure of Lilith, a biblical figure who inhabited ruins. He also disparages the mind as a minor and small area of consciousness, claiming that the whole body, at a cellular level, is far more dominant than we know. Blood has almost the same composition of sea water, this reflects our origin and explains our deep longing for water and the sea.

He says that boredom is a place where we can know ourselves. Children experience boredom, he says, and this is a blessing for them, but as adults we try to escape from it. He quotes an essay by Heidegger on this subject.

Kiefer is strongly influenced by Joseph Beuys, with whom he studied, and by the writings of the Jewish poet, Celan. He is deeply affected by twentieth German history, and most of his work reflects this.

I had no idea of the range of his work until I saw this film. I was inspired by the physical energy and scale with which he works, and by the power of his subject matter. He is the same generation as myself, perhaps some of us are haunted by history.

Steam textile mill in Burnley, Lancashire

2010-10-15T13:58:00.000-07:00

Two weeks ago, I was in Lancashire for a few days, and had the opportunity to discover some of the history of the local area, known as "Pendle".

Barnoldswick from hill, showing the last remaining mill chimney

Lancashire was famously one of the "cradles" of the industrial revolution in eighteenth and nineteenth century England. Many small towns, such as Barnoldswick, Colne and Burnley, had numerous large mills where cotton was woven and exported throughout the world. It is difficult to imagine now. These towns, surrounded by beautiful green hills, are quiet and the mill chimneys are gone, except for the occasional museum piece.

I had the privilege of visiting the only remaining steam textile mill in the world, at Queen Street Textile Museum in Burnley. This mill is preserved intact, just as it was when it closed a few decades ago. It is a perfect example of how the huge boilers created steam for the engine room, which then powered a great wheel, whose energy was transmitted throughout the entire factory to power individual looms. The racket in these mills was literally deafening. Another visitor told me that her mother eventually became completely deaf from this work.

Boiler room

Detail of steam engine

Weaving mill

Tapestry Studio at Stirling Castle

2010-10-15T13:36:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I visited the Tapestry Studio at Stirling Castle. This project, which is organised by West Dean Tapestry Studio in Sussex, is taking twelve years. The weavers in Stirling and Sussex are recreating, on a very slightly smaller scale, the famous Unicorn Tapestry series, now in Metropolitan Museum in New York. These works will hang in a recently restored part of Stirling Castle when completed, and some of them are currently on view in the Chapel.

Two weavers work on the loom all the time. They are responsible for making the drawing or "cartoon" which is located behind the upright loom and acts as a guide for the very precise work. They also make numerous small woven samples of particular details before they start on the main piece.

It is fascinating to watch as they recreate small flowers and animals and details of faces. Louise Martin, one of the weavers, tells me that all the yarn is specially dyed so that they get the exact colour.

A detail from one of the new hangings in Stirling Castle Chapel

Coming up for air The Red Tree exhibition

2010-10-14T13:12:00.000-07:00

"The Red Tree"
View from studio window

Busy month, no blog for several weeks. But now quite a bit to write about. Firstly, the exhibition for The Red Tree, which was last weekend, was a great success. Exhibitors were: May Chipulina, Catherine Froy, Libby Yule, Jose de Unamuno and myself.

Lots of people came and some of us sold work.

Diana Hand
Prints

Jose de Unamuno
Paintings

Digital doldrums

2010-09-16T15:03:00.000-07:00

I have taken time out to sort out my computer system and save my files. It is a Pandora's box and takes a long time.

It is a bit like cleaning a house, pretty boring, but it makes me feel better afterwards, in this case to know that my files are safe. Not to mention the fact that I have found quite a lot of interesting stuff that I had completely forgotten about.

Working with the computer is so fast and intuitive. It can easily run away with you. So not a bad thing to go into slower left brain mode for a while. Maybe that is what my very sluggish laptop is telling me!

PS I have got the laptop back to perfect again, thanks to PC World emptying it out and starting afresh. I am all digi-ied out for now.

The poet Rilke

2010-09-07T15:02:00.000-07:00

I am reading again "The Hare with Amber Eyes" (mentioned in previous blog July 2nd). The author, Edmund de Waal, writes about his grandmother, a law student in 1920s Vienna. She is also a poet and that is her deepest and lifelong passion. She corresponded with the German poet Rilke during this time and he tells her:

"I find the great contrast between your two occupations positive; the more diverse the life of the mind, the better the chances are that your inspiration will be protected, the inspiration which cannot be predicted, that which is motivated from within".

Humble though my own efforts are, I very well know the importance of protecting one's inner, miraculous and unexplainable self from the humdrum logic of commonsense and rationality.

Another time, writing about Vienna, he says:

"Cities often feel things in anticipation, a paleness in the light, an unexpected softness in the
shadows, a gleam in the windows .... in my own experience only Paris and (in a naive way) Moscow absorb the whole nature of the spring into them as if they were a landscape..."

I know this feeling in cities, perhaps it is the result of so much human energy focussed in a restricted space.

I have been busy updating my website for the past and am still working on it, but this page from de Waal's book caught my imagination yesterday (p. 217).

Suburban nights

2010-08-31T11:50:00.000-07:00

Quiet evenings catching up in my garden. Accompanied by a soundtrack of pigeons cooing, neighbours mowing, and even a horse galloping in the field behind.

My neighbours' plum tree comes right over the fence, ripe for plucking! On the other side an apple tree is spectacular but out of bounds.

It's only rock 'n roll but I like it, I like it ...

2010-08-28T13:07:00.000-07:00

... up to a point.

All this week I have been travelling into Edinburgh and selling some of my textiles at the Festival Fringe Art Craft and Design Fair.

Good company, good weather and, vitally, good sales. But very tiring. Four days I drove into the city, since I needed to carry things around and get used to the set up. Yesterday and today I took the bus, but it was a rush. Everyone has been most friendly, and it is brilliant to meet a wide range of people and learn lots.

I spotted this installation outside a nearby church. The orange figures are not real people but dummies.

For me they
evoke many associations, from helplessness and oppression to extreme violence.

Inception - the movie

2010-08-24T15:56:00.000-07:00

At last I made time to go see this movie. Was it worth it? I think so, just for the mixed-up and over-lapping narratives which truly denote the wild irrational energy of the unconscious. Violence, upside down cities and architectural interiors, out-of-control driving, delusions and reality of love and passion - all aspects which tend to be marginalised from our conscious minds because of their power to disturb. "Which is the reality?" is a question frequently asked by the characters as they move between different states.

My favourite, gasp-inducing sequence came towards the end of the film, when de Caprio and the female lead return to a deep place in his mind, the place where he and his (now dead) wife had created a kind of eternal world. They built a great architectural landscape of skyscapers and other high buildings, now gradually being submerged under water and eroded by the sea, in the grand tradition of dreams. Among these super-modernist archi-scapes are also old, crumbling traditional houses and other buildings, which are the echoes of our deep childhood mind.

I have never seen this relationship between architecture/buildings (different things?) and our unconscious mind portrayed so wonderfully. I sat up and wanted to shout out loud in the cinema with recognition and delight I only wished that I had had my camera with me, though I probably would have been ejected from the cinema if I had used it.

Some things about the film I cared less for. In particular, the context of extreme power and wealth in which it was set, and also the frequent dramatic and very violent sequences. I suppose these aspects are an indispensable part of its commercial appeal, but the basic surreal message of the film might have been more effective had it been made in a more subtle way. I got bored sometimes with the overpowering special effects and speed, as well

Nonetheless, I enjoyed the film and its appeal to the imagination.

Horse drawings - traditional

2010-08-20T15:09:00.000-07:00

Not much time for this at present. I did go to Gleneagles tonight because there was a dressage clinic there and I wanted to do some drawing. But when I got there at 8 it was very quiet and just finishing, so I came home and went on making the scarves for next week.

This is such a busy period, I am up until 11 each evening working. Hopefully I get a bit of slack at the show next week in terms of being able to sit down for a while- though obviously I do not want too much slack. No! no!

These are some quick charcoal studies based on a photo I took in Lisbon earlier in the year. The rider is teaching the horse a movement called "shoulder-in", I think. I have tried to look at the figures from several different angles and in simple tones.

Edgar Degas "Hacking to the Track"
oil on canvas c. 1892

When I read about and look at the marvellous Degas horse drawings and paintings, I realise how very carefully he prepared his free-looking compositions. He consciously was NOT spontaneous in his approach. I decided to try and work in a few simple tones at first,which I might be able to build into colour and paint, rather than only making drawings.

Henry Coombe and Edinburgh

2010-08-19T10:07:00.000-07:00

Henry Coombe, Portrait of a Swiss Restaurateur(2009)

Today visited Glasgow School of Art to catch an exhibition before it finishes. The artist is Henry Coombes (www.gsa.ac.uk/exhibitions), and I was attracted by the invitation I had received. I liked the figurative and gently tonal look of this drawing/photo (?). I also thought the exhibition might be about our confused identification with animals.

Remote chance.... the show turned out to be a clever and comic scatological video about pre exhibition processes, as portrayed by naked man (who could have been Coombes' father??) producing drawings by means of pencil stuck in his rear end. References here to art as shit etc, also to the nightmarish and distorted anxieties of exhibiting.

Also wall pieces, kind of paintings, collaged mixtures of cut outs and mark making, rich and dark and varnished,needing deep study. Quite interesting, but not what I expected from the original invitation. And ... well I am glad I saw the video, it made me smile.

Then bus to Edinburgh from Glasgow. Bus queue very long due to Edinburgh Festival. I got a seat, but then spilt my cappuchino on the bus. Fortunately my copy of Guardian newspaper came in handy for mopping up the mess. Enough of newspaper left to read "Mrs. Cameron's Diary", a hilarious weekly column about the PM's wife as imagined by Catherine Bennett (look on guardian.co.uk, search for Mrs. Cameron's Diary)

Diana's velvet scarves with the horses!

In Edinburgh I stopped off at the West End Art Craft and Design venue to have a look at my stand for next week. Then to the Royal Mile to deliver some velvet scarves to a shop there. I did some with a primitive horse motif. I like them!

Felt pretty tired but popped into print workshop for an hour or so and did some work on current lithograph. The head technician was doing some special work of his own in the litho section, and the atmosphere was highly charged. This is energising.

Life in fast forward

2010-08-17T10:47:00.000-07:00

What have I been doing I last posted in this blog? I will have to look back at my diary because it is a blur which seems to gain momentum by the day.

One way to look at it is that the ideas and techniques I explored in the first half of the year have "come through" so that they are useful and exciting. There is always for me a sense of relaxation from July onwards - I work out a sort of plan early in year, then just "do it".

Main thoughts are:

the usefulness of screenprinting course in June, which helped me to run my workshop in a much more systematic way. This is calmer and the work is hopefully better, at least more predictable and satisfying

Edgar Degas "Hacking to the Track"
Oil on canvas, c. 1892

My work on the horse studies is proving really exciting. I try to make time for it each day, and now I am thinking of making compositions. I looked at a book by Degas, the French 19th century painter, and saw how he put compositions together really carefully from his sketches and colour studies.

I will soon put some images into this text. I am working hard this week to prepare for the Edinburgh Fringe. I have a stand there next week.

Tonight I am off to a meeting of artists. We have formed an exhibiting group.

In my studio, the yurt makers are moving out. They have found a wonderful farmhouse with a big barn and they are all going to live there. They are a sort of clan and it is a family business. Rather to my surprise, I am really going to miss them! Good luck, yurt company!