Martin Rowson

Martin Rowson's work is improving. There is less of an Eighteenth Century murk and heaviness of symbolism. It seems that he is beginning to understand how modern satire works and is used by the newspaper reader. Low, Trog, and Vicky all understood-in most of their best moments, that something akin to a poster effect is needed. Most people don't spend more than a few seconds looking at a cartoon. The message must be immediately understandable.

The cartoon above Guardian (20/01/12)  is actually one of Rowson's more complex works. You need to read the reversed text to get the message about the workshy. And IDS-prepares the targets which the  daft duumvirs in the background are about to target. Their economic pig looks most unlikely to fly. The composition is excellent.But I have to say that on the whole, Rowson's work seems best to me when it is most like that of the Great Bell. Rowson's drawing is not as strong as Bell's but he is getting there. The Guardian obviously has a tradition of allowing their cartoonists time to develop their graphics. Bell was pretty ropey in the early days.Ropey but full of life.

I predict great misery throughout the land. The fuss about the "reforms" will not be over by election time.
They said that Mr Cameron was worried that folk still thought of the Tories as the nasty party. Is he schizoid or what?

The Book of Sand

I was playing around with some images the other day. For some time I had been  thinking of  producing what would look like a book or sketchbook with illustrations derived from my digital images. As I worked a thought came into my mind from somewhere deep in the memory; perhaps I could call this project The Book of Sand. And then I remembered who had written this story. I had not read any Borges for some time and it was the title which came before the memory of the artist's name; when I reread the work I found that my memory had not been very clear. There are few illustrations, everything changes, there is text in double columns, the numbers seem to be haphazard, one cannot find the beginning or the end.
So I did not really set out to illustrate Borges but the images which come may or may not relate to the story in a closer degree than before.

Samuel Palmer-a new biography

Over Christmas I read Rachel Campbell-Johnston's biography of Samuel Palmer-Mysterious Wisdom. It is a pleasant, enjoyable, sensitively written portrait of this wonderful but somewhat cranky artist. The eccentricity of his dress and the dreadful grief and possible guilt after the death of Thomas More Palmer are shown clearly enough. This is a work which would serve as an enjoyable introduction to the circle of the Ancients. The author also reminds us that Palmer was almost hysterically in love with the old ways, paranoid about civil unrest and was somewhat rabid in his political views. That he had such a father-in-law as John Linnell cannot have helped him to stand on his own two feet psychologically or artistically. Palmer had deep friendships with other artists such as Richmond who in turn was a great help and comfort to Palmer in old age.

I suppose I was hoping for a massive new work of scholarship-and this is not what we find here.Indeed by now the archives must be entirely picked bare. Ms Campbell-Johnston is heavily indebted to previous authors-in particular Raymond Lister who gets a mention as "an earlier biographer" when he more justly might be described as the doyen of modern Palmer studies. And the author only mentions Lister in the text to quote one of his dafter remarks.He is certainly mentioned in the notes/bibliography for she depends as any writer would on his edition of the letters and on Alfred Herbert Palmer's notes . Lister's two biographical works are not listed in the very brief bibliography. There are two works named on comets-both having the same author: comets do not figure largely in Palmer's life.

Old fashioned spellings such as Buccleugh for Buccleuch are not modernised. Papignia should probably be Papigno. Sir William Blake Richmond is referred to at one point as Sir William Richmond Blake. There are supposed to be editors who deal with these things. I recently reread an Oxford edition of Anna Karenina. All its 900 odd pages had been set in real type and I don't think I noticed any misprints.Here Bloomsbury give a page to witterings about the typeface used in the text. It is a fairly feeble effort which with the shoddy paper used in the book adds up to nothing special as a work of book design.

Mysterious Wisdom: the Life and Work of Samuel Palmer: by Rachel Campbell-Johnston, London 2011.

See also my earlier entry on forgeries of Palmer's work

The Goscut

This is a very useful cutter which I am delighted to own. I was given it in the late 60's when I was a  student.It was marketed originally as a Goscut. Labels on later versions refer to the Eclipse firm but this one  has no reference to Eclipse on it. It merely says, patent pending. I  would say that it was a  small design classic and it would be extremely useful for any artist/modelmaker. It  was excellent for thick card. Hardboard was considerably more difficult and laborious.
 It is in effect a pair of vertical scissors. You hold it as if it were a small pistol.Mine came with two other blades and I seem to remember using it to cut thin soft metal.Models do sometimes come up on Ebay. There was  an Eclipse Goscut 2000 on EbayUK recently. It sold for £16.50. Mine seems to be an older model and I'm wondering if it was made by a small firm taken over by Eclipse.
Discussion of how to use a Goscut can be found in the Model Engineer forum here.

DEAR GOSCUT FANS PLEASE ACCEPT MY APOLOGIES THAT I HAVE LEFT MY BLOG UNTENDED FOR SO LONG.I WAS ASTONISHED WHEN I FOUND YOUR FASCINATING AND VERY HELPFUL COMMENTS. I WILL SEE IF I CAN GET THEM PUBLISHED BUT FOR THE MOMENT I NEED TO RELEARN MY BLOGGING SKILLS.

James

Close Harmony in Edinburgh-Sylvia Wishart

I visited Edinburgh on Tuesday for the last day of the annual show of the Turner watercolours in the Vaughan Bequest.Also on my schedule was the Sylvia Wishart exhibition at the RSA.
Both exhibitions were very impressive.In many of the Turners the range of values was quite narrow-and yet they were rich an colourful.I am thinking of the the Swiss scenes such the lovely glowing Verrès. So too with Wishart; her colour is very pleasing and she does not insist on a high dynamic range.Nor is she interested in heavy impasto.In the work illustrated, Reflections 11 you might see something of an affinity with Bonnard in both colour and composition but really its  in the background rather than a direct influence.


Sylvia Wishart's work is the product of a subtle artistic personality.It breathes a clean,airy clarity and transparency whether in drawing or mixed media.Her delicacy and relatively close harmonies do not reproduce well. Many will know her from George Mackay Brown's Orkney Tapestry which came out  with Wishart's superb illustrations.They reveal a fine draughtsman with a strong sense of design.

This is a small show-far less than she deserved but still we must be grateful for the chance to see it.The drawings exhibited here include a group of illustrations she made of Orkney farms and coasts for a locally produced calendar.Here the artist works with a very fine pen line (Gillot 404 or whatever) framing the simplest of subjects-a farm and its outbuildings with a patience which is never laboured,is utterly clear formally and of considerable delicacy.This sort of work is too fastidious to reproduce well.Some might call it timidity but I prefer to call it simplicity.There must be a Japanese word for this quality,surely.

You need to look at a Wishart especially when she takes up her favourite theme of the interpenetration of reflections and views from a window.This theme appears in works big and small.Here are the birds, the ship in a bottle and the studio easel.

She does not fit the Scottish cliche image of the Scottish painter as hell-bent on rich, expressive colour.The other side-the draughtsmanship is most certainly there.She was lucky enough to live at a time when Scottish art-schools were still so old-fashioned as to insist on a concern for drawing. It is incredible in one sense that she was not RSA until near the end of her life. But then again I have a hunch that she was her own person and maybe wasn't much bothered. She was content to live,study and work in the north.Lucky Sylvia I say!

Her obituary can be read here. And the RSA site accessed with this link. I first heard of her when she had an exhibition in Alnwick in 1969.The amount asked for the cheapest item would at that time have bought you a reasonable,low-end 35mm camera.But I doubt if the camera would be working now. I think the moral is that decent art is always cheap and a good investment.You can read my review of a new book about Sylvia Wishart here.