Snow crazy

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

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

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

My cottage this afternoon

More snow

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

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

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.