Quite Too Utterly Utter

The title is from this song sheet cover, satirising a follower of the Aesthetic Movement, the subject of The Cult of Beauty exhibition at the V and A (video here.-take a look just for the fantastic curator) The phrase made me smile. I can just imagine saying it and adding 'daaaahling' on the end. In fact I may start to do that! The exhibition was really interesting and full of beautiful objects- paintings, furniture, ceramics, clothes and jewellery. I seem to have been coming across the art of this era a lot recently-the Red House visit, the novel I am currently reading (The Children's Book by A.S.Byatt) (Interesting articles on this book here and here), newspaper and magazine articles. The idea of 'art for art's sake', that is purely to provide beauty in our lives, is so appealing. We had to wait an hour to go in, so sat and had a coffee in one of the amazing tiled rooms of the museum-it had tiled scenes of the seasons and each of the months. (It is called the Poynter Room) (picture here-if you scroll down a bit) Everything is so richly decorated that it is easy to while away the time just gazing around. On the way to the exhibition-lovely ironwork lettering on South Kensington Tube.

Pictures were not allowed in the exhibition but are in the rest of the museum. This is Thuner-Saxon god of Thunder.

He brought the weather. On the way home-some of the tube stations are so deep underground. Best not to think about it too much!

Grey Day

I love grey so grey days are OK. The sun tried to come out this morning but just managed to shine through the clouds a little. We both had a day off from working today and went out to see a couple of exhibitions at Tate Britain. We decided to get the Thames Clipper as the Jubilee line was off, but got the wrong one. Westminster was in sight when the boat started to turn around! We got there eventually. The exhibitions were both good. One was Rachel Whiteread's drawings and the other was the photography of Eadweard Muybridge. Both fascinating and inspiring.
I found this review which, although quite negative about her previous work, sums up how Whiteread draws in a much better way than I could-

''Her gift is for applying a sculptor's feeling for materials to two-dimensional images. In particular, she uses the obliterating opacity of correction fluid to stark effect, blanking out a building in a street, or a step in a staircase to trip up the mind, making it fumble through the white-out in search of what is no longer there.''

I had never thought of using correction fluid as an art medium-but think it is such a great idea-so bought some today!

Eadweard Muybridge had an interesting life and long career as a photographer. He is most famous for pioneering techniques which allowed photographs to be taken of animals (famously the horse-showing how all four legs leave the ground at a certain point in a gallop.) and people in motion, thus showing in detail what the human eye could not perceive. This lead to his developing the zooipraxiscope-a device which took the still frames and reanimated them. Here is a little example. (The drawings are from photos) This was early cinema. His tale is fascinating and the photos he took of the American landscape are beautiful. I was a sucker for the moving ruler illustrating a naked running man! It must have been so exciting to see these pictures come back to life for the first time. It is funny to think how excited I get when I do one of those little animations-how things have come full circle for amateurs like me to try really basic techniques digitally. It makes me wonder what someone like Muybridge would come up with now, with all the technology available.

I took lots of photos along the river-most of which were not great. I played around with the few I liked.
I used one of Kim Klassen's textures-this Friday's freebie actually-called appropriately 'Grey Day'. Go and visit Kim and sign up for her texture lovin' list and you will receive freebies and great offers on other textures and courses.
This picture was taken because of the cormorant sitting on the post in the foreground. I used Kim's texture, played around with the blending modes and added my picture back on top before doing some more blending. The effects you can get are so varied.
I love the way this one has come out. Like a drawing or etching or some such art technique!

A giant bicycle has somehow replaced the London Eye!

As promised the recipe for the fig and cinnamon cake. It is from December's issue of Country Homes and Interiors. It is really lovely cake-the figs are toffee like and just the right amount of chewy. I am not sure about the icing though. It uses Quark cheese-a kind of curd cheese. The amount of icing sugar it recommended made no difference to the runniness of the cheese and eventually I gave up adding more. It tasted OK with the orange zest and vanilla essence. Any cream cheese type icing with these flavourings would be good. I kept the icing in a container rather than pouring it on so we have used it as a sauce.

If you click on it it should enlarge big enough to read. Let me know if not and I could email you!

Bald Doll and a Visit

This is one of two dolls I am working on at the moment and I love how their faces are turning out. They are based on Queen Anne dolls. I am going to experiment with ageing them, but I quite like the clean look of the paint now. I am going to use very shiny varnish on their eyes to try to make them look like glass. I like the bald stage of a doll. I never really plan how to do the hair and then I get to this point and think 'Oh, hair, hmm, or shall I just leave them bald?'

Today we visited Dad and Joan. We had a lovely walk down to the village (on this website the google street view is the road we walked down!) to see an exhibition of Kent artists' work, have a quick browse in the bric-a-brac and a half of bitter in the pub. Then back for a delicious lunch. This is one of Dad's bonsai trees. He is a man of many interests, and bonsai has been one for a long time, so he has a great collection. He is a really good gardener so I don't know what happened to me!

This is the enticing entrance to the barn where the exhibition was held. The barn is about 600 years old. It makes a great exhibition space. This is the view from the barn across the pond. There was a variety of work as you would expect. I didn't get a catalogue so cannot link to any artists apart from this one. She made lovely circus themed ceramics and paintings which I really liked. I also took a fancy to a painting of a lobster, and a raku cat. No purchases were made today though!

I hope your weekend is going well!

Richard Long

It is hard to describe Richard Long's work-it is much easier to experience it. He is an artist who uses the land and simple forms-lines, circles, spirals. His work is beautiful, calming and poetic.
It was strange to be in an indoor space seeing the exhibition but to feel so much like I was outdoors, in the wild places he explores and uses in his work. He records work in ways that are suited to it and the ideas it is about. His work is about being in the landscape and moving through it. He may take a photo, write a descriptive list or make a map. One of my favourite pieces of work was called 'Transference'. He took a three day walk on Dartmoor, listing some of the things he encountered. He then took a seven day walk on Chokai mountain in Japan where he experienced the same things in the same order-obviously-choosing to look for them in that order, but the fact that it is possible to do this showed the universality of places and experiences.

His work also relates to space, time and measurement and is almost a way of classifying experiences-through listing or focussing on a particular thing. For example he made a work called 'Dartmoor Time'-a continuous walk of 24 hours on Dartmoor. Two examples of Dartmoor time are
'HOLDING A BUTTERFLY WITH A LIFESPAN OF ONE MONTH'
and
'CLIMBING OVER GRANITE 350 MILLION YEARS OLD ON GREAT MIS TOR'

He makes books as a particular way to show his work and one of my favourite examples was a book containing only photos of pebbles on the beach he walked-one photo taken at regular intervals-they are all pebbles-single examples of the thousands on the beach and each in the book has its moment of exposure and importance. I just loved that idea.
Here are a couple of my favourite quotes from artist statements in the exhibition book
"My art is about working in the wide world, wherever. It has the themes of materials, ideas, movement, time. The beauty of objects, thoughts, places and actions. I hope to make images and ideas that resonate in the imagination, that mark the earth and the mind. My work is about my senses, my scale, my instinct. I use the world as I find it, passing through by design and chance."

"Of course, an important aspect of my work is just the pleasure of doing it, for me a walk is a great thing to do. It can feel like being outside the normal difficulties of life. Sometimes on a walk I can feel intensely alive or free or unencumbered or simply happy. Basically a road walk is walking all day and sleeping all night, and in hindsight the time of the walk seems to have passed very quickly as an almost out of life experience. I love the simple pleasures of eating, getting fit or finding a new campsite or B&B each night. I realise all this might be outside the experience or interest of a lot of people, which is fair enough" (I love that last little bit especially!)

I am almost tempted to go and see the exhibition again I enjoyed it so much!