Klee,hamilton,The Vikings, Picasso. Baselitz and co.

Klee, Hamilton, The Vikings, Baselitz & Co. and Picasso

Up to London, by car and train, Russian, Italian, Hubble bubbles on Edgware Rd., crowds, lights, veiled women and rickshaws. My Echo shoe soles disintegrate, Pedyr's spectacles have to be mended with Sellotape, my coat belt buckle gets stuck down by the front seat upstairs on the no 7 bus just when it's time to get off so I am trapped, a lovely Greek meal at Kolossi in Paddington, sunshine and laid back Caribbean buskers by Tate Modern and the lift still isn't repaired , will it ever be? in the Royal Norfolk Hotel.

At Tate Modern the Paul Klee, on it's next to last day is very crowded and must have 300 small pictures to view, in 17 rooms. I am a bit disappointed although there are a lot of works I like, very subtle when I examine them, very finely drawn and beautiful colour combinations. I could have preferred it edited down to a more manageable number, with a few contextual photos of how two world wars were happening in his lifetime, some information about abstraction developing in other countries, about the Bauhaus, music contemporary to Klee etc.

Hamilton, feels easier to process as I remember a lot of the events, but the works that aren't the famous pop collage and the photo of Jagger in handcuffs seem so preoccupied with being stylish. I love the roto reliefs and I enjoy the portrait of Tony Blair as a cowboy with guns, although I think it was more of a saviour complex coupled with being taken over by Bush VIP glamour that led him into Iraq.

A new day dawns and we're off to the British Museum, where enthusiastic officials corall us, detain us and eventually tick off our names as if they used to work for DHSS, before searching our bags but failing to mention that photos are not allowed. There are a lot of very small pieces of jewelry and other small objects, in semi darkness and a slow moving queue to see them, held up by those with audio guides. There are interesting quotes up high in big writing and lovely voices speaking presumably Norse and related languages.
Very little about women until the bits near the end about Odin's wife Sif having her hair cut off by a joking Loki and restored in gold by helpful dwarves, and the lovely white queens with their worried looks from the Lewis chess set, and I realise thence to Lewis Carol.

It's mostly gold ornaments for men of remarkably lovely detail, swords, warships and helmets. Women's jewelry seems to be random stringing of a variety of beads, and their marks of importance are the housekeeping keys.Words we retain from Viking times include 'egg' and 'sister'. One and a half hours later we stumble out into the gift shop, better informed, blinking in the light, wanting to buy something and eat a large lunch upstairs, where I realise I am looking at all the glasses, the decor, the coffee cups as if stuck in a perpetual museum of objects.

I would have liked more and larger video projections of the modern authentic remake of a Viking boat at sea, maybe clips from our previous notions of the Vikings, from Noggin the Nog to wilder adventures, more poetry including sagas in translation.

After eating we went to see the German Baselitz and Co, passing so many other wonderful exhibits we could have enjoyed for free, and delayed to enjoy two recently acquired lino cuts by Picasso, shown in various states as he progressed to the end result, so lively and rhythmic, colourful and dynamic.

The German artists from West and East we viewed from the unfortunate position of visual and mental and physical exhaustion, despite the delicious treat of an expensive lunch and a long sit down. However, even if I had been feeling sprightly I don't think this collection of messily drawn vague stuff could have ever competed with the rest of the museum. These were not the best work by Penck, Richter, Blinky Paloma etc. surely, just an assortment, set against a museum full of marvellous things.

Back to Paddington, guarded by alarmingly armed policemen, with it's ever passing crowds, balm for a flaneur with her sketchbook, with the incomprehensible announcements, the temptations of cheap jewelry, magazines and even sandwiches without horrid mayonnaise, and we'll be back in Cornwall feeling as if these two days have been a week of looking.

Cornelia Parker talking at Falmouth art college.

Cornelia Parker - lecture at Falmouth University , February 2014

The talk had a  title 'truth to materials' to which the artist referred from time to time, whilst showing us images of her work, things chosen because she likes them, whereas she said she has produced plenty of  work she would not show now.

Cornelia said, 'squashing things is my only expertise'. She works in many media, taking an interest in many things, from her famous exploded shed to interviewing Chomsky, to be seen on youtube.

drawing by Mary Fletcher

Some interesting responses came to the questions, which as usual at lectures were kept to rather a short time at the end but were the best part. Cornelia described being an artist as political and philosophical. She was keen on work for an anti - fracking campaign but often her political work was not clearly on one side of a fence as she hopes to have a wide appeal. 

Her work at the V&A using squashed brass band instruments she saw as an intrusion of something working class into that environment but she did not say if the fact that the instruments were clapped out and ruined was part of what she meant to say.

 Equally she mentioned that whereas Gordon Brown cherished the old cracked leather of the old chancellor's red leather case, George Osborne has had a brand new one made with 'fake distressed look' but she did not say if she found this apt for a Tory chancellor. 

However, she admires the work of more overtly political artists like Bob and Roberta Smith and Jeremy Deller.

I always deplore the paucity of political work at the art college shows so hope this encourages more students to interest themselves in the here and now and taking a stand on important issues.

 C.P.seemed to delight in paradox, such as finding a Bedouin family in Palestine who make crowns of thorns to be sold to Christians in Jerusalem.

I  gathered her parents did not understand or encourage her work and that she is a lapsed Catholic.

Whilst showing a rorsach blot pattern Cornelia said they all look phallic, just as I was thinking of womb and vulva shapes.

Cornelia has not made drawings of things for years but takes  photos which are a sort of sketchbook of references.

She is embarrassed to be a Royal Academician and uses her feelings if negative to put into her work, making a work using the many red dots next to the most popular summer show print of a bird and showing this, minus bird image, in the room where all the small works are hung close together.

As I have made two works about red dots and the questions people ask about the success of a show, I fell to thinking that many artists must have also done work on this theme and wondering how Cornelia Parker got her breaks into stardom, but was too slow to ask, fearing that no one really tells us that and that my burning envy of her success is futile.

The artist remarked that some students were bogged down by the amount of theory they learnt before they had even made much art and become accustomed to using their hands and producing ideas in quantity.

I liked her and her quirky work and was surprised to see she is only a few years younger than I am.

Cornelia Parker is apparently creatively open to using whatever she sees around her, such as casting spilt milk patterns between cobblestones, using cold cure rubber, or throwing a meteorite into a lake and putting up a notice about it, making photograms using the light of a match to illuminate the previous spent match, using snake venom and its antidote to make a drawing. The number of ideas was impressive and we should perhaps have asked if she does anything specific to engender them, although she did mention that residencies were useful spaces for new influences and time to ponder.

There is a new book out about her work by Ilona  Blazwick and Yoko Ono, about £20..

Can an artist be successful who does not live in London, or does not wish to jet round the world to take up residencies and exhibiting opportunities?

Did Cornelia have to stick to the one idea about squashing things for a good while before she couldbe accepted as doing other stuff?

Does she survive financially by various means and would she have told us how?

A packed theatre made an attentive audience and I was glad to have been there.

INNterval at Halsetown Inn Feb 2014

INNterval 2-8 Feb 2014 compared with 'The Bridge' on tv.

This exhibition was held at the Halsetown pub, near St.Ives,  in a week before they were to refurbish the upstairs rooms. Hence the witty title.,

Ilker Cinarel  had this bright idea and organised it. He also greeted visitors at the preview which was very nice, and had provided a useful plan of the show and list of the exhibits with remarks about it from the artists. The preview was a very enjoyable occasion and most unusually for an art show had a large area for parking. We, myself and Pedyr, had eaten  downstairs first and so went up to the show feeling quite cheerful and bright.

As often happens the meeting of people we knew and the chat was the most enjoyable part and the art came second. The reference at the entrance to some connection to the actor Henry Irving who lived near here years ago was not in any way connected to by the show, which was  a mixture of all sorts. Maybe the connection helped them get a huge square inchidge in the local paper as a sort of nod to heritage.

My favourite work was two charcoal drawings of a pool table by Michael Broughton , not framed, just put up on the wall. Simply two good drawings with no attendant hype or pretension.

Unfortunately the room was dominated by an insanely bright light and I could not bear to look round the rest of it.

The rest of the show was dimly lit as for a party.

Ilker Cinarel had two walls of drawings of his father which looked good in that they were bold and varied. What he said  in the text  didn't mean anything to me but I could see he was working on something systematically and repeatedly.

Janet McEwan also had repeated images of people in red suits in photos,  apparently a project of substance that could be referred to online.

   

  Christiane Berkhoff  had been embroidering, making a feature of painstaking handwork that takes a long time. You could have a go at this technique, but having a horror of painstaking craft I declined.

Liam Jolly had film of himself endlessly brushing his teeth in the bathroom, and other video and reflections, literally, using ,mirrors, but it needed some help to get the ideas and I didn't ask him about it.

 There were some sweet smelling rotting apples and a dilapidated shopping trolley which had been part of a performance.

There were lots of other things of course, but after an hour or so of sidling round the crowded corridors and rooms, greeting friendly people and noticing who was there we wanted to get back and I was looking forward to the last part of 'The Bridge'

This brings up the contrast between film, the cathedral of our times in its huge work of collaboration, pursued with such excellent control of media, such wonderfully engaging acting, characters and plot, evocative music and moody night scenes, in which the fragility of our contemporary world, so complex, so easily terrorized by extremists, so in need of reform to save the planet from decadent horrors is combined with intriguing alterations from the usual male/female stereotypes, so comfortably watched from my bed with a cup of tea in complete concentration to read the subtitles, so immersive and amazing;  and visual artists, so apt to present something that is only half worked out, struggling after something without anything being clear to the visitor who drops in,  gains a few wild impressions, chats and leaves.

Artists are working without much money, no team of excellence to help like the film crew, and not having had to pass their ideas by powerful people who insist on pace and intrigue, on the work making sense and appealing to a wide audience. 

So, the early evening's haphazard glimpses of fragments of peoples' earnest efforts to continue their addiction to expressing their visual ideas, is followed by the magnificently glamorous and adept film-makers seamless and beautiful production.

Two ends of the spectrum of contemporary art. 

Christmas Coasters in the Arts Cafe St.Ives, Cornwall

The owners of the Arts Cafe had the inspired idea to invite artists to contribute coasters with art work on them for a Christmas display.

These formed a lively exhibition and in a way a snapshot of what art is going on now, contributed with none of the self consciousness of many shows and with all being included.

I didn’t see any of the names of the most famous artists who get shown here.

The ones I include were the photos I took that turned out best.

My own was a joke about how a Hepworth snowman might look. with a stripey scarf.

Angela Elsom also thought of knitting.

Jenny Shaw-Browne 

 and Gazelle did impressionistic paintings of scenes.

James Wood did a formal kaleidescopic detailed design.

Juliette had two images maybe by children?

and an unknown [to me] contributor mounted springs on the coaster.

Marie Keeling used brass fitments abstractly

and Humphrey Hallwood drew a stylish composition  in black and white.

Paul Healey had an elegant collage reminding me of Schwitters

and Mary Hayes had an expressionist dark design, 'Its a cold world without you'.

That’s just a few of them, there were a great many more, many at very keen prices.

Hopefully the Arts Cafe will repeat something similar next year, making dropping in for refreshments very interesting.

A Year in My Studio, exhibition at St.Ives Arts Club

  'A year in my studio'

   

  A solo art exhibition at St.Ives Arts Club , Dec 28 to Jan 3rd, 11 - 4 daily, free admission.

Embrace

This is the first year that I have had a studio outside my house. 

It is at White's Old Workshops, Porthmeor Rd.,St.Ives, twenty minutes walk down the hill , past the sea and Tate St.Ives.

There is a group of studios there and the public can drop in to see our work.

When I was at college at Nottingham in the sixties personal space had been abolished, although you could work where you found a temporary space, and when I did my MA in contemporary art, in 2006 at Falmouth, part-timers were given no space there to work in, so perhaps I felt a bit deprived of a personal space, a room of my own as Virginia Woolf said.

At first I began to be influenced by the seascape but I don't think I have become seduced into commercial tourist imagery. I go on as a flaneur drawing people I see , working quickly to capture their movement as they pass. I also draw at performances of music and dance, most  recently of the Moscow City Ballet.

Moscow City Ballet

15 people I saw in the harbour

New this year has been enlarging the original drawings and collaging these onto canvas to keep the spontaneity of them rather than trying to recreate it

I have liked being out in the town, feeling more part of the community of artists, going out to work. I have painted more but done less film - making.  (See Vimeo for examples)

There have been various political themes that I have used. 

Umanets imprisoned in Rothko

I started an online petition to ask for Umanet's two year sentence for scribbling on a Rothko to be altered, and 129 people signed, one of them Katya from Pussy Riot. 

Paintings about this followed, using Rothko-esque rectangles, which then cropped up as windows, relating to a visit to Sitges near Barcelona, and abstract canvasses, which were an experimental surprise.  Then I used this shape again as  grave shapes in the 104 women piece, 'in sorrow and in rage', which I have shown now as a model shrine in memory of the killing of 104 women in 2012 by their partners or ex-partners, inviting people to place a candle, in this case a symbolic one as St.Ives Arts Club is a wooden 

building in which no naked flames are allowed.

Spare room:spare house

The bedroom tax also demanded some response from me and eventually I used the contrast between Van Gogh with his spare room for Gauguin to visit, and our Tory PM, David Cameron with a spare house. It's a sensitive subject here in a seaside town where there are a lot of second homes, empty much of the year and a lot of poor people unable to buy a first home.

Above us only sky 

As a humanist I wanted to also do something about not believing in God and I used some lines from Ono/Lennon as inspiration and figures I had observed either in town or from drawing from tv when they have discussion programmes.

Exhibiting with Taking Space at Helston Museum, I found four people mentioned there from two hundred years ago and made some pictures, copies of which the museum may use in educational work. The most interesting to me is Joseph  Emidy, a freed black slave, who became leader of Truro Philharmonic and wrote music, now sadly lost.

Joseph Emidy

Also a first was getting a ceramic figure cast in resin and iron. I liked this finish better than the bronze.

Dancer

I have exhibited several times in Redwing Gallery shows in Penzance, which specialise in work outside the mainstream. St. Ives is still dominated by what I call 'Penwithy ' abstraction, a lot of atmospheric texture and marks which allude very loosely to the landscape and seascape of Penwith. There aren't many artists here drawing contemporary people or referencing politics or ideas. There is quite a bit of what I find rather flaky symbolism and myth. So I stand out as different.

Eavesdropper

Next?

I want to see Cornwall as a hub for art, not a satellite of London, but I also want to exhibit outside Cornwall.

I have an idea for a sort of humanist tabernacle made in a wigwam, to celebrate creation without believing in a creator and to be a space for reflection.

I have some film clips waiting to be used.

I keep drawing and observing, influenced by feminism, socialism and psychotherapy, and encouraged when some people really respond to my work.

I painted round the corner of this small canvas partly as a joke about the way some artists continue their landscapes round the sides.

5 on the beach

Art needs to be seen or it's like a TV set waiting to be switched on.

   

Camilla contemplates the scope of youth work

Timothy Spall and Whoopi Goldberg at Sennen cove







  



        

Transitions 4, 2013

Transitions 4

I turned up just as staff put up the 'Open' sign but the artists were a little later.

Upstairs the room looked a bit sparse and the two artists did not say anything to me, but were happy to talk when I began. It seems they aim to link their work by Saturday but so far there is a big space between them so it's hard to imagine. They are both on the BA at Falmouth and it's as if what they might do in their spaces there has been done in this huge gallery space instead so that the public can see, rather like the tv program,' What do artists do all day'.

 Emily Ross describes it as getting out of the confines if the studio, but of course the footfall here is not very large, makes me think how nice if they could be found space at a supermarket, which I suppose is very unlikely.

Emily has been drawing round and round starting from the inside and previously from the outside, as a performance and trying to be fully present in the moment.

Rhys Morgan has been typing on an old typewriter  and videoing it to a tv monitor and has blue velvet playing as soundtrack to 'Death in Venice' and an attractive writers brass lamp. It's something about the image if a writer.

To me it's fairly obscure and also in several days I think they could have done a great deal more, but I am a lot older and tend to work fast in case my time runs out.

There is no concession to the viewer, such as not putting unclear type on the floor too far away to be read easily, or putting some 

handwritten notes too high up on the wall for me, at 5 foot  two.

The blurb in the leaflet mentions appropriation, juxtaposition,the subconscious and volatility in a paragraph which seems to touch a few bases whilst not making anything clear.

Downstairs I encounter Rob Gawthrop and son? who is helping, and a room strewn with sound equipment and musical instruments, a violin, cow bells, cymbals etc. Rob has explained in the leaflet that he will be performing using noises from the beach and it's unfortunate that I am here several hours before the performance, which I imagine will be fun and wish I could hear. It takes me back to the sixties, art college experiments etc. which is apt as Rob teaches at Falmouth.

It's using the immediate environment outside and makes me want to try it too, but the sight of acres if electric cable and leads with different ends and microphones reminds me of happy days playing in a room at Falmouth myself with my film of Porthmeor, having spent several days out in bad weather struggling with a giant camera they lent me.

So, that's it, four weeks of various beginnings and now I want something finished, maybe Andrew Lanyon's show at Falmouth municipal gallery.

Even better would be if all these artists from this years' transitions came back with finished pieces a year or so later.

Maybe the audience for these transitions events could feedback online and the artists reply with feedback on the feedback. I believe film makers such as Woody Allen show a film in progress to audiences and react by making changes if things are reported as unclear, unbelievable, not funny etc. , but do these artists really seek any feedback, do they care if the audience can understand the work ? Do some of them  to my mind hide behind saying they don't seek to be explicit and it's up to the audience to interpret as they wish?

I always want to be clear and understood and like feedback.

What about some feedback on my blog here? Is anyone reading it beyond the three or four I am aware of?

Transitions 3, 2013

Transitions 3

There were three artists upstairs who work with the outside world.

David Paton had granite,some fired in a kiln so it goes from green to pink.He works in a stone quarry and talks very engagingly about questions of sculpture in and out of the quarry. He was full of lively enthusiasm and very pleased to have brought stone into Newlyn Gallery and carved into it there, although to do this more than briefly would be I advisable for health and safety reasons.

Veronica Vickery had ingeniously joined pictures arising from her study of a particular stream so that the canvasses went round corners and made a meandering path on the wall.

Jane Bailey was most unusual in combining an interest in local issues and political action.

 She had taken up the case of the re-opening of the Mexico rail foot crossing at Long Rock and had encouraged folk to post their views, now assembled on the art gallery wall on attractively weathered labels in a grid pattern. She also showed protest placards. I would have liked more information about the fatal accident there, about whether crossings are being closed in general to save money in maintaining them, but anyway it was great to see an artist putting local politics into the gallery and engaging with people involved in protest.

(Since then I read that the appeal to re-open the crossing was lost)

Downstairs Val Diggle was equally open to talking about her work, which to me was a baffling 

collection of items referring to ancient civilisations, including our local men-an-tol holed stone. There was a willow construction which made shadows. Her interest is something to do with memory and it's variability. We, Pedyr and I, added to the event by trying to remember the basics of the Argentine tango, me singing the tango tune 'jealousy' spontaneously, inspired by a print of dance steps on the wall.

It was the third week of transitions and I was still interested in the wide-ranging investigations of these artists. Could they be asked back with finished work? Or is this inexplicit woolly searching the point? - the process not the product as Marshall McLuhan might have said in the 60's, but in fact he said 'the medium is the message.'