Leach Pottery Doug Fitch and Hannah McAndrew: An Ongoing Devotion. 25 Feb to 30 April 2023

 Leach Pottery- Doug Fitch and Hannah McAndrew: An Ongoing Devotion.

25 February to 30 April 2023 St Ives, Cornwall, UK
Online 15 May to 11June

The Private View gave a great sense of occasion for those present. The pots looked sparkling and delicious as they are so well lit, drinks were flowing, with nuts and crisps to nibble and  there was an inclusive atmosphere where one could strike up conversation with a stranger in the small gallery. 

To top this the two potters appeared online to convey their special enthusiasm for the tradition of slip decoration, all the way from Scotland and after that you could take a turn with the headphones to speak to them privately.

These two are a couple and say that  potting  ‘isn’t  our job, it is our very being’.
Prices began at £35 so many were tempted to buy.

I liked everything but particularly the black plates which set off the colours alluringly and the assured slip trailed drawing of birds or tulips. 

There were tall sinuous vessels and crisper forms for the planting of bulbs.

There were rounded vases very satisfying to hold and large chargers that look too good to use for anything.

One plate had a particularly bold design that looked very modern and as if based on something biological.

It made me want to seize a slip trailer and try it out for myself.

Leaving in a euphoric ceramic dazzled mood I realised I had not worked out which of the two  made which pots.
And I was carrying a perfect small rich honey yellow vase with beautifully placed vegetation decoration which turned out to be by Hannah.
I gather there is a stock to replenish from when sales are made but you might want to make up your mind quickly if you want to secure a purchase.

Locals can obtain free entry with a card to the show and the museum, which not many people may know.

'Penlee Inspired' 18Jan to 22April 2023

 This is a show which invited people to make art as a reaction to one of the paintings in Penlee House’s collection of Newlyn pictures.

An obvious problem with this is that the collection is of very good paintings so that those who make copies of them tend to painfully illustrate the difference between very talented artists that many visitors know and love and less talented artists that we have never heard of.
In a way this invites more admiration for the original artists  and more noticing how they have made their work.

For example the flat copy by I Hazel of a Fred Yates shows how the thick ribbons of paint in relief in his work make it so lively.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Those who don’t just copy fare better in the comparison. Some have written poems, others take the same subject but look at the same view nowadays.
‘The Rain It Raineth ‘ by Norman Garstin 

 

is reseen at night by Amanda Mackenzie Morton, 

 

 

a view of Newlyn by Charles W Simpson 

 

 

 

is brightly updated by Michael Hart.

Then there are the works by young chidren. So many were sent in - teachers no doubt grabbing the idea with both hands -  that there has so be a slide show to include them all - and this is indeed a rare event to see children’s paintings alongside famous artists. It brings out the absolute verve and unselfconsciousnness before they get a bit older - the abandon and Joie de Vivre that   Picasso tried to re acquire.

 

When I was there a class of primary school children were assembled in front of ‘The rain it raineth’
They were from Perranporth and many took it to be not a picture of Penzance but of Newquay. One strangely suggested London. They were remarkably well behaved, quietened easily by their genial teacher. It was a treat to see them looking eagerly and to imagine that they would enjoy making their own paintings later from their quick sketches.

Yes,  a good idea which refreshes our view of the collection.

Prostitutes in Pictures?

 Do men often see women in paintings as prostitutes?

Tonight there was an interesting tv program on Edward Hopper.
In it it was said that the woman in a green dress in ‘Soir Bleu’ is a prostitute.

I could not see why this assumption was made by the man speaking.

Yesterday Waldamar Januscek made the same assertion about the woman in the large foreground couple in Seurat’s ‘La Grande Jatte’ in his film about the Impressionists.

 

 

 

Again I can’t see the why he is so sure about that.

Are male critics likely to label women in paintings as prostitutes?
If so why?

Is any image of a woman out and about and near a man going to be labelled thus?

Why isn’t the man possibly a gigolo then?
No, that would be ridiculous!
 

I hope people reading this will comment.

'We are Floating in Space' Exchange Gallery and Newlyn. 2023

‘We are Floating in Space’. Newlyn and Exchange, Penzance. 11 February - 3 June 2023

Walking into the Exchange I saw a lot of video screens and a lot of explanatory texts. 

I instantly felt a bit depressed - that I could not be bothered, that artists seem to think a video that bores you to death with its glacial pace can compete with the snappy speed we are used to in tv. However, something kept me trying and I slowed down enough to look around. 

I found a project about involuntary infertility which I wanted to read about although I thought it was approached far too obliquely and symbolically to pack the punch visually that Melanie Stidolph's written accounts had. 

Naomi Frears shows two videos- not too long- one using written memories about her father dying and the other images of men falling off their surf boards in a variety of balletic and amusing ways. She makes a strange connection between the two and it’s eloquent. 

Then I drove over to Newlyn. Here there’s a lot of playful stuff - from a bronze fish finger

with its own sound of the sea by Eleanor Turnbull, to sea shanties with a gay slant by Rhys Morgan and choir, found seashore objects and similarly constructed complex creations by Anna Harris

and a beautiful dark stool made from ancient washed up wood by Alistair and Fleur Mackie. Oh and video of synchronised swimmers for environmental improvement. 

There’s a lot more at both places and Blair Todd has chosen and given a chance to exhibit to a variety of artists who aren’t all the usual suspects.

The Militant Muse

The Militant Muse by Whitney Chadwick, 2017 - subtitled ‘Love, War and the Women of Surrealism.’ 

Now I have finished reading this book I notice that the subtitle is very apt. Whitney Chadwick has done a lot of research and certainly adds to my biographical knowledge of the people in the book, who are listed as characters in a drama at the start of it. 

What she doesn’t do is say much about their art beyond some description. Occasionally Chadwick goes over the top in giving interpretations of relationships from looking at photographs of people. Writing of Frida and Diego Rivera she does not account for their devotion to Stalin or mention how Frida childishly writes Stalin’s name in big letters repeatedly in her journal-which I found on purchasing a facsimile. 

What Chadwick is good at is evoking the atmosphere say of occupied Jersey or the blitz in London. My interest in Claude Cahun was roused as I found out the extent of her brave continued propaganda distribution of anti nazi messages in Jersey, which lead to her solitary confinement in prison. I purchased a further book about her that will be published in April. 

There are complicated relationships involving changes of partners, lesbianism and friendships. Women managed to refuse a role simply as the muses desired by male surrealists and made their own work in art, writing and photography. World War Two affected everyone deeply. 

It’s not a great illuminating work about these women’s contribution to the history of art but it’s a book full of biographical detail that is interesting if you are already interested.

The History of Art without Men

‘The Story of Art without Men.’ Katy Hessel. 2022 

 

Ambitiously, Katy Hessel attempts a new worldwide overview of women artists. It’s over 450 pages and bound with very heavy covers as if to lend it weight symbolically as well as literally. There are good quality coloured illustrations close by the text that discusses them. 

Is it clever or a bit too cautious to make the words on the cover, ‘without men’ so nearly invisible in their slight white outline on yellow? 

What can be added to the other books that have covered this territory to fill the scandalous gap left by Gombrich’s exclusion of women in his 1950 ‘The History of Art’? 

Katy Hessel begins in 1500 in Bologna, frustratingly abandoning all speculation on previous centuries. She then proceeds to reiterate a lot of now accepted knowledge but adding new names from various countries and references new to me, for example that Vanessa Bell collaborated with Duncan Grant to make ‘The famous women dinner service’ 1932-34 nearly fifty years before Judy Chicago’s ‘Dinner Party’. 

Hessel points out the Duchamp’s Urinal was in fact made by Baroness Elsa Avon Freytag-Loringhoven. 

In a survey there can only be a tiny amount about each artist, leaving the reader to do back up online searches. I was pleased the importance of writing is acknowledged, such as ‘The Subversive Stitch’ by Rozsika Parker and Linda Nochlin’s essay, ‘Why have there been no great women artists?'

I regretted no mention of Brixton Womens’Work and the group for Black Women in Brixton, ‘Mirror Reflecting Darkly’. 

It’s a good survey - putting movements in context and bringing in many examples new to me. Rather indigestible as a whole but useful if taken as a gradual progress and with a useful timeline to remind us of all the names. 

Katy Hessel ends by coming up to the present, a time of bewilderingly multiple approaches and less media coverage than hitherto, by choosing to focus on young figurative artists, the last three all British.

JoJo Rabbit

JoJo Rabbit is a film directed by Taika Waititi, 2020, on tv in UK February 2023. 

It’s utterly brilliant. 

It’s very rare that I use this description. 

Roman Griffin Davis plays JoJo, aged ten, who idolises Hitler in the last period of World War Two until his fantasy meets reality. 

He expresses a range of emotions eloquently. It’s this combination of his interior imaginings at odds with nazi brutality that is so unusual and telling. A few stereotypes are effectively blown- a nazi soldier saves a Jewish child, a Jewish teenage girl in hiding threatens a German child with his own knife. 

Early on JoJo sees a row of hanged victims and asks his mother what they did. She replies “what they could’. 

The tying of shoe laces recurs as a symbol. 

When the Americans and Russians arrive the myths previously told about Jews are repeated about them. A nazi woman says,’ we must kill everyone who doesn’t look like us’. 

It’s a story with terrible tragedy and pain told in a quirky satirical way that makes it all the more powerful. 

The soundtrack incongruously but beautifully uses songs from the Beatles and ‘ Everybody’s gotta live, Everybody’s gonna die’ by the band Love,1974 

As we helplessly see the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, the oppression of Palestine, the endless repetition of stupid destruction, it’s a film to treasure.