JAMES HOLLAND

The Goscut

2012-02-07T07:14:00.000-08:00

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.

Close Harmony in Edinburgh-Sylvia Wishart

2012-02-02T09:18:00.000-08:00

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 but 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.Wishart held 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.

JOHN GRAHAM LOUGH

2012-01-25T05:01:00.000-08:00

The Hatton Gallery has a useful small exhibition devoted to the Northumberland born sculptor John Graham Lough.
Studying Lough's work is made the more difficult because of the many items have been lost-often in the C20 due to municipal neglect.

The exhibition comprises small marble carvings by Lough based on Shakespeare with the addition of documentation about the the major projects and large photographs of the works in situ at Blagdon. The smaller works are surely the most successful. Some of the exhibits are on loan whilst some of the smaller items belong to the Hatton Gallery. There are no drawings.

Lough's reputation is not what it was in the C19 when he produced his monuments such as the Stephenson and the Collingwood which are among his least successful projects.His work does not compare favourably with that of earlier British sculptors.But Lough was professional enough to get some major commisssions-and not just in the North-East . He was working in the period between the age of Flaxman, Chantrey or Westmacott and that of the New Sculpture .

Rupert Gunniss says that it was the Milo which convinced him of Lough's greatness. I cannot agree.The Milo is not a common subject in art and it is not one of Lough's most successful works. The anatomy doesn't quite work, it is somewhat tortured and crude.The pose may relate to the Laocoon

or equally to some of Blake's over defined anatomies such as The Body of Abel found by Adam and Eve in the Tate.

But as the subject is Milo of Croton that might be justified by the fact that he was an ancient athlete famous for his strength.

Lough's widow had intended his work to be preserved as a kind of study centre and this was the intention behind her donation to the City of Newcastle.Lough's celebrity was greater then than it is now and the City was fulsome in its appreciation. But as the years drew on municipal and public interest declined The works long festering at Elswick Hall were given away, placed in public parks and so on. Marble sculpture-I ask you if that was wise? It is far too easily vandalised.
THe exhibition ends on February 18 2012.
For further information about Lough see: John Graham Lough,1798-1876 a Northumbrian Sculptor; by John Lough and Elizabeth Merson,The Boydell Press, 1987.
I'm sorry that there are no captions to these images. First comes Lough in his studio-he is on the ladder, then the Laocoon and last the Blake.

Ford Madox Brown at Haltwhistle

2011-11-20T09:59:00.000-08:00

My photograph of the Brazen Serpent Window at Haltwhistle has appeared in the book of the current Brown exhibition at Manchester . I am sure that a reassessment of Ford Madox Brown's curious art is long overdue. I don't really think he improved with age and there is a certain world-weariness about the later art which seems slightly depressing.The decorative side is seems to come into greater prominence. The Manchester Murals are striking in this respect.

Bosanquet window

2011-11-17T10:33:00.000-08:00

We went to Rock the other day.I had not been there since I was young. It was a delight to see the church again . It is a fairly decent,small Norman building with many artistic and intellectual associations.(David Jones, Ben Nicholson etc from the time when Helen Sutherland lived here). The intellectual links come from the Bosanquet family who were archaeologists, administrators and active in charitable work.The church has an excellent late window by Leonard Evetts from 1991.This window commemorates four members of the Bosanquet family.Robert Bosanquet and his wife Ellen, his son Charles and his wife Barbara.The older Bosanquets are remembered in the left hand panel where you can see a Minoan double axe, a Greek temple and a circular Greek motif-RCB excavated in Crete.In the right hand panel reference is made to CIB's activities as first Vice-Chancellor of the University of Newcastle by display of the university's coat of arms.CIB's birth in Athens is hinted at by the appearance of the owl from the rebverse of an Athenian tetradrachm.I have not worked out the significance of the eagle yet It may relate to Barbara Bosanquet who was American. In that case the images at the top of the left hand panel would relate to her mother -in-law.(PS Will get a better picture when I visit next).Here is a detail of Athena's owl-it gives abetter impression of the window.

St Martin's Church, Brampton, Cumberland: Window by Burne-Jones

2011-11-16T01:43:00.001-08:00

St Martin's Church, Brampton, Cumberland, a photo by James Holland on Flickr.

I have just read Fiona MacCarthy's book on Burne-Jones. What I like about Burne-Jones is his work s a designer (sort of)and his humorous drawings. But there isn't that much on the stained glass-we hear that he made some but nothing significant about the manufacture-can you imagine B-J grozing away? I cannot. As a painter he is alien to me -it is more like heraldry than art.We do have one of his better works in Newcastle but all those people with their pointy chins are boring. The female portraits with their huge eyes are quite repellent. This is a kind of historicist, hot-house painting which I cannot admire.
The book is a typical MacCarthy production and is perfectly readable.The index is decently done. She uses the word mouvementé like a new toy-too often.She is maybe a bit credulous about the use of ox-gall and might have been clearer about the position of Legros in the Victorian art world. Steer is named with Sickert as being a painter of urban squalor-a very odd duo they would be. Sickert yes, Steer, no (page 298).The place name Assonan should most likely read Assouan the French name for the place in Egypt which we call Aswan.

The BM has recently published a selection of Burne-Jones' funny drawings (and also a book on Eric Gill). Both seem to be nicely produced and the price is reasonable. You can read about the Burne-Jones here.
The Last Pre-Raphaelite: Edward Burne-Jones and the Victorian Immagination
Fona MacCarthy,Faber&Faber 2011.

Emin

2011-05-20T02:24:00.000-07:00

Of Emin's tampons I have heard enough,
Bring me a canvas by Prunella Clough.

Charles Keene a Victorian artist with "Punch"

2011-04-22T09:12:00.000-07:00

One of my favourite artist biographies is George Layard's ~~Life and Letters of Charles Keene of "Punch".~~
It came out in 1892-the year after the artist's death. This portrays the artist as an obsessive collector: of old music, clay pipes, antiquities and so on. Keene played the bagpipes and the smaller, sweeter, Northumbrian pipes. His correspondence with the remarkable Joseph Crawhall II of Newcastle is most enjoyable. Crawhall was an interesting artist in his own right and loaned his ideas book to Keene, thus helping furnish him with ideas for cartoons. Keene incidentally was a fervent Tory but was always uneasy about doing political cartoons. His illustrations deal with social and artistic situations.

As an artist Keene was appreciated by artists such as Pissarro and Menzel. High praise indeed, especially when coming from Menzel who was one of the most brilliant and prolific draughtsmen of the C19.

In Keene we value his, literally, keen observation of gesture and pose and of the fall of light on clothing.

He drew on any scraps of paper which came to hand and sometimes with improvised, home-made implements.

Imagine his studio full of props and costumes and also including mirrors used to study a pose or expression-for he used himself as a model. There would usually be a fug of pipe tobacco, smoked and resmoked. (He also collected old-clay pipes). By now, if you did not already know, you may have guessed that he remained a bachelor throughout his life. His after-work amusements included membership of choirs and glee-clubs. Keene loved to sing.

decorated easter eggs.

2011-04-21T11:10:00.000-07:00

I recently found a box of Easter Eggs which I had decorated long ago in my salad days. Some were painted and with others I used a mixture of resist and scratching into the surface. But the egg I was most pleased to find was the dyed egg made in the traditional Northumbrian manner. It is illustrated here and I will tell you how it was made.

The technique is very simple. Layers of vegetable material are wrapped in a small parcel of cloth which is tied up, loosely with thread, string or wool and then boiled for 40 to 60 minutes. During this time the colour from the plant material should transfer to the egg. It may be that any small flowers which are held nearest the egg will act only as a resist or stencil effect. In any case the beauty is in the accidental design and this is what I like about the technique. Do not try this if you do not like the creative accident.

In the past the cloth wrapper might have been made from material which was dyed with non-fast colours and this would have added to the decorative possibilities. If you have similar material then go ahead and use it.

One of the problems with this technique is that it is quite hard nowadays to find a light coloured egg which will show the effect to advantage. It seems that all eggs are now designed to be brown as customers believe that this suggests health/quality. In fact I probably wouldn't use the onion skin medium unless I could find a white or very pale shelled egg. You can see here the red/orange colour you get with onion skins which doesn't show up clearly against the brown of the egg shell

I learned this method of dyeing eggs from my Granny. Eggs were sometimes rubbed very lightly with butter to enhance the colour effect.

What sort of plant material can you use? The traditional choice is onion skins as an envelope within which there can be seasonal flowers. In Northumberland this could be the yellow whinn. Some have said that spinach will give a green effect- but it did not work for me. You can also use old tea leaves or coffee grounds to colour the water. I used leather dye in the egg shown below. It was a recent experiment.

Coloring eggs at Easter is common throughout Europe. In some cases the folk designs are bold patterns but their symmetry is not for me.

When I made the old eggs I blew some of them-the painted ones- as some boys used to do when collecting eggs. The eggs which were boiled can survive with careful handling and will not smell unless they are broken . After a few years you will have a shell with a dried up egg rattling around inside it. Break the egg then and it will smell odd.

Humble Humbrol

2011-02-27T12:21:00.000-08:00

George Shaw paints the suburbs of his youth, the Council Estates where so many of us have grown up. He uses Humbrol enamel paints which evoke nostalgic thoughts in the artist-and in this writer. This medium allows Shaw to achieve an ultra-bland surface to his paintings (on panels). What he says about nostalgia is fair enough. But when he contrasts enamel paints with oil paints which he sees as being more appropriate for religious or High Art then we are on the level of whimsy. Oil paint is nothing more than a traditional medium which can and has been used to paint grand or humble objects. It is as basic as Humbrol enamel or egg tempera .

Another peculiarity is his concern with titles. He found himself a good one in the title for the show which apparently comes from Hardy. It is "the Sly and Unseen day". In fact it is condensation of Hardy's phrase , " a day which lay sly and unseen among all the other days of the year"*.The artist told The Observer that he had chosen "bumptious" titles for his deadpan, photographically dependent paintings in order to prod the viewer into thought. Well, the most obvious thought is why does he distract the viewer with these pretentious titles? What you see is definitely what you get and the results lack life. It seems that the titles are trying to force something which isn't there in the unrelenting banality of the images. A room of drawings was due to open but was not available at the time of my visit.

The George Shaw exhibition is on at the Baltic Kunsthalle in Gateshead. I wouldn't recommend a visit to this dismal place. If a gallery could be "hired to depress art" then this is it. I rarely visit it on my own initiative but feel that I must accompany friends who visit from out of town.

*Chapter XV: referring to Tess's musing on the unknown day when she will die.

why I wouldn't buy this "Picasso"

2010-06-30T11:29:00.000-07:00

Firstly this product was not authorised by the artist himself. The Picasso estate may have allowed the reproduction to be made but the artist never gave his consent. I suppose it may be that they are marketing a little of the artist's mystique. Well, Picasso is dead, you may say-he could not give his consent-this precisely is my point. He is buried at Vauvenargues and has been these nearly 40 years.

Notice that I call this a reproduction, not a print. Picasso actually made prints throughout his career and the originals cost an arm and a leg as they say. Well more than an arm and a leg, you are talking in tens and hundreds of thousands of pounds for linocuts cut by the artist, or etchings or engravings where the design was incised or drawn onto the plate by the artist. And another thing: the edition numbers on Picasso originals reflect the fact that they were made with the traditional techniques of the artists' print-in other words by hand. Nothing like it happened here and the vendors can rely on the fact that there doesn't seem to be a legal definition of the word "print". From the point of view of artist printmakers a print would require considerable input from the artist whilst being printed by himself or with close supervision of experienced craftsmen.

This print is produced on reasonable quality French paper and I am sure that the advertiser can be confident that the printing inks are as good as they say they are. But personally I would not want to buy this item because of the factors listed above. Authorisation from the original model is neither here nor there. Numbered certificates of authenticity are just trappings. What is not stated here is if the 595 copies represent the whole number of "prints" produced. Are there another 595 available say in France and another 595 available in the USA-I have no idea. This form of marketing has been known in the promotion of teddy-bears.

To me this is a high quality reproduction of a drawing but not a print. Obviously the sellers disagree but I would say that if you want to buy an original work you can get a print or a painting original from a living artist for less than you are being charged here. But some living artists also sell reproductions to make money. When next you go into a cafe or art gallery and perhaps see a "print" by an artist and it is signed in pencil with the number 325/550 or such like, please be advised that what you are seeing is possibly a reproduction. They can call it a print if they like . To me the original work was the watercolour which was reproduced. Artists' prints tend to have smaller edition sizes rather than larger as a rough rule of thumb . If you want to buy a print I would advise that you find out about the techniques used .I would be astonished if this image of Ms David had any significant resale value or gained value as an investment. Caveat emptor as they say.

There is a typo? in the item's description. Picasso lived at Vallauris not Vallouris.
For further info on printing and editions take a look :here

dunstanburgh, lovely dunstanburgh.

2010-05-20T10:58:00.000-07:00

This last few days I have been twice to Craster in the evening and walked along to Dunstanburgh to enjoy the bright yellow whin and the long shadows cast by the declining sun. Saw quite a bit of wildlife in the boggy area near the castle . There were two swans and various other geese and ducks, lots of tadpoles too. No legs yet that I could see. Caught a glimpse of a very big bird making off; possibly a heron. The bracken has just come through and has the curled look of a bishop's crozier.

the sculptor's business

2010-05-07T03:05:00.000-07:00

Queen Victoria by Alfred Gilbert, 1903, Newcastle

I have recently been rereading biographies of C19 sculptors-Alfred Gilbert and Auguste Rodin.

Their contrasting circumstances and characters and the ways in which they made their careers shed much light on the idea of the public sculpture.
As characters they could hardly have been more different. I would say that Gilbert was a self-dramatising extrovert and that Rodin tended more to introversion. Their families suffered considerably either way. Both men were extremely hard working and both were laws unto themselves when it came to working on commisssions.

Rodin had the advantage of working in a culture where the state was highly interventionist and considered it important to provide studios where sculptors could work on government commissions.The French sculptor could rely on a culture richly endowed with craftsmen. The pointers, mouleurs and bronze casters were all readily available He did not need to rent anywhere special to work on the Gates of Hell. Gilbert had to find his own workplace and his extravagant construction of a home and studio must have been one of the major factors which led to his insolvency and residence abroad.

To some extent Rodin and Gilbert shared a tendency to throw themselves into their work. Gilbert had a tendency to either wish to carry on working after an object was accepted and paid for-or to draw out a commission so long that he upset his patrons became quite irritated with him. The best example is the tomb of the Duke of Clarence which dragged on for years and must have seriously alienated the Royal Family.

Rodin could drag things out too. This is illustrated through his attitude to the Balzac monument which was commissioned by a literary society. Rodin became obsessed with the project and consulted every possible visual and documentary source-even to the extent of travelling to Balzac's native region to look for similar physical types. All this turned out expensive for Rodin when his patrons became more and more anxious and eventually the commisssion was cancelled . And in the end the extraordinary image was too much for the literary society. They got someone else to do the work.

Gilbert was quite likely to spend his fee and procrastinate when reminded that work was due. Rodin had a tendency to quote vague or inadequate fees in his enthusiasm for a project. His financial extravagance in older years was the purchase of antiquities -or what he thought were antiquities for exorbitant prices.

Alfred Gilbert, by Richard Dorment, 1985
Rodin:the shape of Genius,by Ruth Butler, 1993.
Rodin:by Frederic Grunfeldt, 1987.
Just how Butler manages to omit Rodin's encounter with the Cambodian dancers bemuses me still....

the permanent way

2010-05-04T05:31:00.000-07:00

A little while ago there was a big sale of railway posters at Morphet's auction rooms. They were gorgeous and very expensive images. Most of them advertised the charms of this or that resort and did so with considerable skill. But one image struck me forcibly as it relates to an aspect of railways with which my family had some connection.

The poster design at right, by Stanhope Forbes shows platelayers adjusting the track and this was the work done by my grandfather James Shell .The poster was also a surprise to me because it didn't seem to fit with what I knew of Stanhope Forbes an artist who was painting sentimental pictures in Brittany before Gauguin ever set foot there.

The photograph above shows a group of platelayers working near Linton in Northumberland and it was probably taken in the 1940s. My grandfather is standing second from right.

Silverpoint drawing-how to do it

2010-04-01T09:35:00.000-07:00

I like silverpoint drawing. It is an unusual technique which few artists use.It encourages delicate and controlled working for it is almost impossible to erase a mistake.

Silverpoint works because the silver is rubbed off the drawing point as it strokes the the the ground on which you draw . What you need to make a drawing is a piece of silver wire, the means of holding it comfortably and a prepared surface on which to draw. Any artist possessed of a little initiative can easily arrange these things.

I bought my silver wire from a jeweller in Newcastle.I first approached a silversmith in Carlisle but he gave me the brush off and seemed quite pompous about the whole thing....maybe he thought I was wasting his time. When you buy your wire explain what you want it for and an intelligent craftsman is likely to be more sympathetic and maybe interested-and will understand that you are not a competitor. An inch of wire will go a long way.Two could last a lifetime. As you can see from the illustration I mounted my wire in a plastic penholder. In the UK this is called a mapping pen. The nib was removed and the wire held in place with epoxy putty.When making your silverpoint bear in mind that silver is relatively soft and pliable so do not make it too long.Not more than about one half of an inch should protrude from the holder.

And now for the drawing surface-the ground as connoisseurs would call it.I use a fairly smooth paper and coat it with white gouache. The gouache should be quite thin and flowing. You should not aim for a plaster like surface. A chalky look to the paper will be enough. You might wish to tint the gouache slightly- a pink effect is sometimes found in Renaissance work.But go carefully-silverpoint produces delicate marks which darken somewhat as the silver on the paper tarnishes over the years.I have sometimes uses a dilute acrylic paint as the ground for silverpoint. This has the advantage of being waterproof but I do not think that it is as receptive to the silverpoint as a more chalky surface.You might consider adding some acrylic gel to the gouache if you want a slightly more waterproof surface-but the look should still be matte.

On a personal note my first attempt at silverpoint was made when I was a schoolboy. An old silverplated spoon made a rather awkward drawing implement and some white watercolour served as the ground.

Raymond Mason

2010-02-26T06:31:00.001-08:00

BMAG Collection Centre Raymond Mason
Originally uploaded by steve & lynda
A Tragedy in the North

Just yesterday I was rereading Raymond Mason's collected writings, At Work in Paris: now ,today I opened my newspaper to read the sad news of his death in Paris on 14 February. He was utterly unique and there was no one remotely like him on the UK or French art scene.

Mason is an artist who interests me because he had a highly original view of sculpture and was an excellent draughtsman.That he was also an excellent writer/speaker is also evident from the book I mentioned.I took it up because I wanted to refresh my image of Henry Moore whom Mason knew. Moore comes across as a genial but sometimes pompous soul who is concerned for his status and obviously saw himself as the leader of the first eleven of UK sculpture. Given the way many of his acolytes developed this was not necesarilly a good thing.

This contrasts with the line being put forward by theTate Britain who are trying to stress a darker more disturbing side to Moore's work. I don't see it myself and I will need some convincing for it seems to me that the curator has let his imagination run away with him and manufacturing something which cannot reasonably be found. Compared to Miro, Masson or Picasso he is far too genteel and the post war work of Moore is not evidence of a great old age.

But let me praise Mason for his remarkable drawings of townscapes and human anatomy. Let me also praise him for his willingness to make sculptures which deal with the disasters and sadness of contemporary life. The sculpture of the Tragedy in the North (the aftermath of a mining disaster) is too much in 3D to be called a relief and it is painted in the colours of life. I have often thought it grotesque and clumsy but even if that is the case it has a Hogarthian vigour which is unusual nowadays. My preference is for the earlier reliefs such as theBarcelona Tram .

Let me finish by mentioning some of the other texts in Mason's book. There is a beautiful essay on Cartier-Bresson -Mason seems to have known everyone in Paris - which describes Mason's experiences as sitter and observer of the photographer at work. There is a memoir of Dubuffet which is striking to say the least. He appears as very intelligent, generous,mercurial and irascible.There are also texts on Picasso, Giacometti,Balthus and various important dealers. Regarding Giacometti we find that Mason approves of James Lord's biography-his opinion differing from that of Sylvester.

At Work in Paris by Raymond Mason, Thames & Hudson 2003

Poem

2010-02-20T09:53:00.000-08:00

Ellingham
Bellingham
Eglingham
Edlingham
Beltingham

(the words all end in a "jum" sound)

how to paint like a Pre-Raphaelite

2009-12-03T12:50:00.001-08:00

Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
Originally uploaded by Martin Beek

If you want to paint like a Pre-Raphaelite there are one or two technical points which will help you achieve a rich, detailed and lustrous surface. One of the most interesting of the group from a technical point of view was William Holman Hunt and I am going to explain the method he used when painting Our English Coasts 1852 (Strayed Sheep) which is in the collection at Tate Britain.The illustration shown here is a detail from
A Converted English Family., as Flickr does not have an adequate illustration of Our English Coasts. It was made by my Flickr contact Martin Beek who is a remarkable painter/photographer based in Oxford. Martin has a considerable interest in the Pre-Raphaelites and his Flickr photostream is a constant delight for anyone interested in British art and architecture.

To obtain the kind of surface that Hunt aimed for you should certainly consider the following:

Use an oil rich painting medium.
Use sable rather than bristle brushes for your detailed work.

The advantages of an oil rich painting medium are that you have a buttery medium which dries to a lustrous, enamel like surface. Hunt said that his formula was:to use equal quantities of walnut or poppy oil,copal varnish and turpentine.
These materials may be obtained from good art material shops.

The advantages of sable brushes are that they give much finer, neater lines than you can get with bristle brushes and with broader brushes they can give a softer. more even touch.

Hunt worked on a white ground, which also helps if the paintwork is thin and the ground can reflect light through it.He said that he would cover the underdrawing on his canvas with a thin layer of spatula applied white oil from which most of the oil had in fact been removed by allowing the paint to stand on a newspaper. Before applying this thin layer he added a drop of varnish.

So he sometimes was painting wet into wet-and with a very light touch.

You can get further detailed information on Hunt and from: Completing the Picture: materials and techniques of twenty-six paintings in the Tate Gallery.This was published by the Tate Gallery , London in 1982. No overall author is listed but the foreword is by Allan Bowness.The actual section on Hunt is by Christine Leback Sitwell.

why paper grain matters to an artist

2009-12-01T13:07:00.000-08:00

Have you ever tried to fold a large sheet of paper preparatory to tearing or cutting it into two pieces? If you produced a neat clean fold then you were folding with the paper grain. If the paper cracked and was difficult to fold then you were working against the grain. It is a fact that most paper is made by machine nowadays and the pulp fibres tend to lie in a consistent direction. You can also find grain in artists' quality papers.

The nature of paper grain has long been known to bookbinders who regularly paste papers with a variety of glues. If the papers being glued do not have their fibres running in the same direction then the tensions within the book will tend to warp it.

These tensions can occur in different degrees when making collages or mounting drawings. If the paper is not treated properly it will not be possible to glue it in place without wrinkling and distortion occurring.If you want to make thin pasteboard-which can be very strong, then you should assemble the layers so that the grain of each sheet lies in the same direction. I will say more on this when I write about the making of glue and the practice of gluing paper .

There are many ways of determining paper grain. Which way does the paper fold easiest? That is the direction of the grain. This method works with large sheets of paper. Imagine a rectangular sheet. If it folds easiest from short side to short side then the grain runs parallel to that side and vice versa. If you have only a small square of paper then moisten it and see which way it tends to curl. The direction of curl is parallel to the grain.

the GIMP

2009-11-28T10:46:00.000-08:00

This is one of my latest works made using the GIMP. You can see more of them-along with my paintings, drawings and photography by clicking through to my website or to Flickr.

At the moment I am taking photographs and working with the GIMP program to make digital art. I like the GIMP, it is free after-all and it does a great job for me. It allows me to create projects which give the impression of being sculptural works which appear to exist on a large scale.

I take photos of objects or forms made out of any materials which can be cut, shaped or modelled and then transform them with the GIMP. Some of the objects are intended to be works in their own right but many more are very temporary and impermanent. As time goes by I have built up a collection of images and textures which can be used to enrich the digital work.

heist

2009-11-28T06:45:00.000-08:00

I have made a resolution not to read any crime novels which feature the word heist in the publisher's blurb.It seems to me that a heist story now means something like a robbery involving a comic and risible mcguffin. I have had enormous pleasure reading Ian Rankin's Rebus series several times over but rather less from one of his latest offerings, "Doors Open". In this an unlikely trio of successful people decide to commit the perfect crime within Edinburgh's art world. Not much time is wasted on the process by which each one decides to join the plot. The success or failure of the heist partly depends on an accomplice being able to reproduce exactly a group of paintings which belong to the National Gallery of Scotland. There are problems with this conceit:it is impossible to make reproductions such as these. And secondly they have to be made within a short-but unspecified time. Neither is likely to happen but for the purposes of the story we must believe that they did happen and that the results were convincing.
This objection may seem like pedantry and I suppose that any zoo-keeper looking at a crime story which featured the practices and procedures associated with looking after animals would be likely to find weaknesses in a complex plot involving the treatment of the same.The general reader will presumably overlook the details and move on.

Doors Open, Ian Rankin, Orion 2008.

2009-11-10T11:59:00.001-08:00

euan uglow

2009-09-05T10:37:00.000-07:00

The recently published catalogue of Euan Uglow's oeuvre contains some surprises. Firstly it confirms that he is a much more competent painter within his own very narrow focus than his friend and mentor Coldstream was in his. (There was an artist whose reputation came because he was well connected and one of the great and the good rather than for any quality as a painter.) Uglow's portrait work lacks any attempt at insight into character, but you could say the same about Cezanne's portraits which are also exercise in style.The faces in Uglow are often a little too mask like. Some of the nudes hold strikingly memorable poses and no doubt he will have been accused of sadism towards models. There are a few works which will be long remembered- the diagonal nude is perhaps the most successful and any artist should be satisfied with that. What I frequently like about the later work is the colour which is something personal and striking. He had no feeling for landscape whatsoever and the formalism/parallelism is to be seen early on.

Seurat

2009-09-03T10:07:00.000-07:00

I have been interested in Seurat since my schooldays. I cannot recall if my art teacher , Mr Hunter, mentioned his quasi scientific attitude, most probably he did. This interest was greatly helped when the Northumberland Library Service bought two books on the artist which I requested and wanted to consult. They were Herbert's book on the drawings which was a very attractive book design for its time and Homer's book on Seurat's use of colour. I'm not sure how much of the latter I understood. I have been re-reading Homer and can see why it occupies an important but much criticised place in Seurat studies. It is too dogmatic but it is also a useful collection of material for anyone interested in colour in C19 art.

Discussing colour is extraordinarily difficult and optical mixture/fusion is as tricky as they come. One problem is that Homer, and most writers on Seurat do not seem to understand the importance of the size of the dot and the fact that this is crucial to the greying effects said to be observed in The Models and other late works. We have problems in perceiving the colour of dots: they can only appear to be greyish at the distance where fusion may be expected to occur. In other words the colour of dots seen at a distance cannot be clearly perceived by the human eye, at increasing distances their true colour cannot be observed and they will tend to look grey. Juxtaposed dots of differing colours will function in a similar way and it seems to me that there will be a fusion of coloured greys. The importance of dot size has been known for almost 40 years though it is not mentioned in any of the standard works which I have to hand.Webster, in his well known article on Impressionism has nothing to say on this matter.

Homer is obsessed with the ideal viewing distance for paintings and may have derived this preoccupation from Webster. On that score I can only say that we experience paintings as we can. A wall-painting may force a distant viewpoint, a large canvas allows one to move about and to experience it in different ways. It would have been useful if he had avoided sentences like this.

"As a result of the growing uniformity of Seurat's pointillist technique, optical mixture could take place much more easily, and thus his paintings tended increasingly to operate as luminous screens that emit colored light". (page 165) There is no emission,reflection is the main phenomenon here only.

Seurat and the Science of Painting",William Innes Homer, The M.I.T Press, 1964

the iraqi picasso

2009-08-29T11:45:00.001-07:00

Boucher Diana
Originally uploaded by baroque.rococo

The painting, originating in Iraq, was not painted by Picasso. It is not of museum quality and probably dates from around 1900 . The pose is derived from a painting by Boucher in the Louvre-Diana leaving the Bath. This would be obvious to any first year art-history student.

The majority is often wrong

2009-08-25T00:57:00.000-07:00

The English language changes through ignorance, there is no doubt about it and I am sure this is not an original observation. One corruption or transformation which has been going on for the last two years at least is in the misuse of the the word majority. This is a word which in its usual use refers to number. We now see it by extension being used to describe the greater part of an object as in, "the majority of the South Front...." in material on display during the restoration at Stowe. This grates on my ear . Journalists are using it in this ignorant way. Here is an example from Oliver James," The great majority of depression is not major but what is known as minor....." So where was the sub-editor?

(September 3, 2009: I have an earlier example of the casual use of the word "majority". W Homer, in his 1964 study of Seurat writes of colours "which occupy the majority of the water area."(page 68).

Palmer forged

2009-08-07T07:09:00.000-07:00

This illustration shows a forgery of a Shoreham period work by Samuel Palmer. It appeared with two others in the catalogue of an exhibition presented by a prestigious London gallery in 1970. The forgeries were accompanied by quality works by English watercolourists. The gallery had no intention to deceive but was itself deceived. Once again the forger of the painting had provided a forged provenance for the works.A provenance is nothing more than a history of where and with whom the work has spent its time since its creation. This helps to give persuade the buyer that reputable, perhaps very reputable people, have been custodians of the work. Where the provenance is genuine one can learn something about the history of collecting.

This forgery was the work of prolific British forger, now dead, I am inclined not to name him because his action was despicable. No, I dont have much sympathy for dealers and art historians, and anyone can make a mistake. In this case some doubts were raised early on.

What concerns me is that the forger is a traitor to any sense of solidarity which might exist among artists. He-and it is usually a he, knows that his forgery is not in the same league as the work on which he parasitises. The forger is usually found out eventually but meanwhile he shits on the reputation of a fellow artist. Compare the fake Palmer with the real thing and you can see how crude the forgery is. It may be argued that this Palmer forgery is in the style of the artist, but it is only a crude approximation. It is a garish travesty of an artistic moment when a burgeoning sensibility (Palmer's) made a creative leap such as our forger could never have manifested.

Alan Sorell's Archaeological Illustrations

2009-08-03T11:15:00.000-07:00

Not long ago my local Oxfam yielded up a copy of Alan Sorrell: Early Wales Re-Created which was published in 1980 by the National Museum of Wales. The name of Alan Sorrell is certainly well known to anyone over the age of fifty who has more than a passing interest in British archaeology; for it was he who was the illustrator of choice for all those Ministry of Works guidebooks which my generation brought home from visits to ancient sites. Sorrell's dramatic images showed high quality reconstructions of places as they might have looked during the time when they were inhabited. When I was young I did not appreciate these drawings but I have a different opinion now.

When I studied the book I found a postcard inserted beside Sorell's drawing of the Roman villa at Llantwit Major.It showed another artist's reconstruction of the same site. What a contrast! Perhaps the previous owner had thought so too. Sorrel's drawing is richness itself compared to the work of the unnamed postcardist. He adopts a very high viewpoint so that you see over the villa and the surrounding countryside; lines of vision shoot off into the far distance-to vanishing points outside the image itself. High viewpoints are common with Sorell: he deploys his perspective with panache-and of course he came from a period when art students were likely to learn it in a serious manner. His drawing is filled with incident: humans, animals and nature enrich the scene . The miserable art of the postcardist is timidity personified when compared to that of Sorell who uses as all his painterly skills to produce a living work of art. Sometimes I have thought that his work looks a little harsh but just as often I remember that he had to explain what was happening and consider how work would look when reproduced. He was also a muralist and muralists look for clarity. I would say that since Sorell there has been something of a decline in this type of work. The illustrated leaflet for the mesolithic house at Howick was a case in point. There the drawings were more akin to something from a very rudimentary comic.It is good to see that there is a website commemorating Sorell here . His wife, Elizabeth Tanner was also an artist of quality. Both were fortunate to study at a time when the ability to draw was valued.

The Chicago Faun

2009-06-24T03:15:00.001-07:00

The Art Institute of Chicago - Paul Gauguin - Faun
Originally uploaded by cerdsp

The Art Institute has one of the finest collections of 19th Century art in the world. But it does not have a sculpture by Paul Gauguin. For a brief period it thought that it did have one but this turned out to be a forgery. The object was forged and so was the provenance yet scholars felt able to identify it as the earliest surviving ceramic by Gauguin. They also had knowledge of an authentic drawing -apparently rather slight-which suggested the faun to them (and to the forger). This image can be seen on page 14 of Gray's book on the artist's sculpture and ceramics. It shows the first page of the Album Gauguin now in the Louvre. This sketchbook is concerned with projects for ceramic work and some of these do survive and are undoubtedly by Gauguin. This provided clear evidence that Gauguin thought about an image of a faun. So it was possible that a similar ceramic would one day be found. This along with the forged provenance suggested that an unknown work by Gauguin had been found.If you look at the illustration in Gray you will see that the faun's pectoral area suggests femininity as much as masculinity.

It is extremely easy to be wise after the event but the Art Institute's advisors should have noticed the poor quality of the modelling of the faun and compared it with the early family portrait busts by Gauguin .These show a bland and sophisticated modelling. These works exist as marbles which must have been realised after the original clays by the artist, realised by a praticien a highly skilled craftsman and not by Gauguin himself. It is of course the case that Gauguin was consciously attempting a primitivism in his work and that is the reason we admire his ceramics so much. But do look at the modelling of the chest and arms. Gauguin would not have been satisfied with something so slapdash . Primitivism is one thing but incompetence entirely another. Some will say that those who authenticated the work were influenced by the very fact that Gauguin ceramics are not easy to obtain.

It is sad/amusing to relate that at one point Gauguin did offer to work as a praticien. This can only have been in a moment of desperation or fantasy. It is even more improbable than the idea of James Joyce as a cinema manager.

Museum Studies

2009-06-20T06:16:00.000-07:00

The new museum in Athens is opening this weekend. There have been a few articles in the press and photos on the web but it is hard to get a good impression of the building and its displays. My first thoughts about the exterior is that it is gross/crass. Regarding the display of standing figures, well they should not be dwarfed by the architecture around them.

Regarding the moral blackmail which the Greeks are trying to use over the Elgin "marbles" I will say that the sculptures should stay in London . The suggestion that they could be loaned to Athens if British ownership was admitted was a foolish one to get into and one wonders if it is really the BM 's opinion. Repatriation of the "marbles", however much sentiment may urge it, would not be a good move from the point of view of museums in general. It has been allowed in the case of body parts from indigenous peoples or after looting during major wars. It would be a major operation to move these sculptures. They should not be moved except for conservation purposes. Maybe it was all a storm in a teacup.Perhaps Italy will ask for Veronese's Marriage at Cana to be sent back from the Louvre.The case seems to be similar.

The genius of Steve Bell

2009-05-19T02:35:00.000-07:00

Steve Bell is undoubtedly the finest cartoonist working for the Guardian/Observer group. The Guardian has indulged him as he learned to draw and matured as an artist and for this one is truly grateful. His work seems to fit best with the tradition of clear, hardhitting imagery. I would hazard a guess that the improvement in Martin Rowson's work owes something to Bell's influence.

Today's cartoon is not one of his best.

It is a parody of Holman Hunt's The Scapegoat.

It shows Speaker Martin as the latest outcast, stumbling in his robes and adjacent to the head of our lamentable Prime Minister. There is the traditional, "apologies to...", inscribed at the side.

Cartoonists probably don't do their best work when there is an "apologies to..."situation. They are taking someone else's symbolism and bending it to their own theme and there is an inevitable collision between the original symbolism and the adaptation-which can of course be interesting in itself. The suggestion here is that the Speaker is literally a scapegoat and indeed you could make out a case for this. How many of those turning on him are without sin? His performance yesterday was indeed pathetic. And who would want the support of Sir Stuart Bell?

When I say that Martin Rowson's work has improved recently I mean to say that it is often clearer and more direct than it used to be. But there is still too much of the more complicated symbolism and lurid, heavy handed clumsiness. He isn't very good with likenesses either.

Brinkburn Priory

2009-05-03T04:52:00.000-07:00

It was thirty years ago that we first visited Brinkburn, just after it was opened after being taken into the care of English Heritage. As a building it is worth a visit: it is also enjoyable because of its secluded site. You approach it down a gently sloping track which yesterday abounded in primroses and speedwell. You are lead down into the valley where the Coquet runs around the site. Brinkburn is also worth a visit because of its mature trees, many grow high on the steep banks on the opposite bank of the river. In winter this situation would have reduced the already small amount of sunlight available.

What do you see when you get there? You see the 12th century Priory and the much later house partly built from monastic outbuildings and sited over the ranges between the church and the river. The house has a large extension by Dobson. You can enter and see the dilapidation .

The church itself is empty of most of the usual church furniture and this helps to emphasize the severity of the building.The north door is well worth a look for its late Norman details. Perhaps the most interesting object inside the church is the tombstone of Prior William who died in 1484. I did not photograph inside the church as a small choir were practicing there.

The weather was extraordinary and this would be an excellent spot for a picnic and a safe spot for children to play. I am not surprised that someone thought of holding a music festival here. Artists wishing to redo the Turner view would definitely have a problem due to the growth of trees since his time and difficulty in getting to his viewpoint.

Old Libraries and New

2009-04-24T07:15:00.001-07:00

In June of this year there opens the new City Library of Newcastle. This is the third City Library in living memory. Any literate Novocastrian over the age of about 55 can remember the Victorian library which stood on the same site. Then came Basil Spence's version from the late 1960s. When that building had outlived its usefulness (said who?), a new one was designed by Ryder and built by Kajima . Thus was lost the opportunity to commission a noteworthy building demonstrating civic pride. It would surely have been possible to find an architectural firm which could have made the statement without making it overblown or turning the project into an "ideas store" .

The aesthetic nullity of the new library is unbelievable. It contrasts unfavourably with the more humble suburban library at Jesmond which was opened in 1963. This one has a circular book/reading room and was designed by Harry Faulkner Brown and Partners.It fits comfortably into a small corner site and is reasonably well lit. The only disadvantage is that (if I remember rightly) it does not have a public lavatory).

Libraries are in the news at the moment,there are the planned closures of several of them in the Wirral and now-according to "The Guardian" there is the suggestion that piped music should be supplied. The mind boggles but boggle it must. One recent proposal was that booksellers should choose what goes onto library shelves. Judging from the state of my own local branch that may already be happening.

Malcolm Fraser in Berwick

2009-03-27T11:41:00.000-07:00

Yesterday; wandering back from a visit to Holy Trinity in Berwick with my friend David we came across an interesting new office development. A photographic exhibition was being shown inside so this gave us the chance to make a visit. It turned out that the building was more interesting than the photographs and we were glad to look around. This building-which has quality written all over it, is the work of the Malcolm Fraser practice which has produced some fine work in Edinburgh; the Scottish Poetry Centre being perhaps the best known. So there are now two worthwhile recent buildings in Northumberland: this office development and the new observatory at Kielder. Both feature wood in their construction or cladding. Newcastle has nothing recent to offer of similar quality. The new City Library appears to be a monument to banality and have even less going for it than the dreadful housing on the Quayside. I do not think Newcastle has had a building of real quality since MEA House by Ryder and Yates.

Unfortunately the Berwick building, which has offices to rent by the month, was almost totally unoccupied: another sign of the times. You can access the Berwick Workspace from the alley beside the Berwick Advertiser building and also from Walkergate.

Calligraphy by Li Yuan-Chia

2009-03-13T09:34:00.000-07:00

Wei wu wei; act without acting is a Daoist aphorism here written by the Chinese artist Li Yuan-Chia. I never saw him practicing his calligraphy but I do know that he did not use the traditional ink stick and stone. He used instead a large bottle of indian ink as purchased from Thurnam's in Carlisle. Paper for practice was provided by old newspapers which were then used to light his stove.

Whether this frugality would be classed as a Daoist characteristic I do not know. One presumes that would be the case; showing off doesn't fit with the image of self sufficiency and frugality such as Li exemplified.

And frugal he certainly was: a visitor, calling by arrangement on a winter evening might find the house in darkness. But he answered the door pointing out that one did not need light to think by. Li did not usually go far from home but sometimes went out on his scooter-with a kind of home-made apron fixed around his legs to protect himself from the breeze.

Visit the LYC Foundation

The naming of children

2009-03-09T12:22:00.000-07:00

C J Sansom's Shardlake novels convey a distinct impression of the disturbed and disturbing atmosphere during the reign of Henry the Horrible when conscience was literally a matter of life and death. In"Dissolution" there is a scene where the Tudor problem solver visits a family who have adapted to the new times by giving their children names such as Zealous, Perseverance and Duty.

I was strongly reminded of similar practices in other tyrannical situations. A Chinese parent at the time of the so-called Cultural Revolution would be placed in a difficult situation. Give a child a generation name and you were backward. Best just to call the child Hua (China) and be done with it. No criticism was then possible.No doubt there would be similar patriotic names in the Soviet Union.

Recent reading

2009-03-09T08:19:00.000-07:00

On Saturday morning in Blackwell's I was tempted by their 3 for 2 deal. But I couldn't find a third book. I have been wanting to read "Cabinet of Equals" since I first heard of it. My partner's interest in Lincoln has certainly rubbed off on me. My second choice was to have been "The Rest is Noise" which is Alex Ross's account of 20C music. But, what to do? I couldn't find a third choice. In the end I left it.

Imagine my delight on finding a copy of Ross's book in my local library later on the same day. It is an excellent read -I was tempted to say that it is journalism of the highest class but in a way that would be unfair. Yes, I have skipped the sections on music in America but I will read them. If they are half as good as the pages on Schoenberg they will be very good indeed. There are plenty of amusing and piquant anecdotes such as the passage in which Ross lists the occasions when Schoenberg and Stravinsky were known to have been present at the same event/meeting in Los Angeles and never met.

The problems of bookbinding

2009-03-01T08:44:00.000-08:00

Peter Hunter-Blair has a story about the bible text known as the Codex Amiatinus that prodigy of the Northumbrian golden age which now resides in the Laurentian Library in Florence. He notes that one scholar who was allowed to consult the volume found that it was delivered by two men struggling under its weight because it is so massive. It weighs 56 kilos. This makes one wonder about the physical struggle which must have been part of the binding process-if not for the sewer at least for the person who constructed the housing for the book. The Codex Amiatinus must have been one of the largest insular manuscripts ever made and it could not have been manipulated with the ease with which the Stoneyhurst Gospels could be handled.

Imagine also Abbot Ceolfrith setting out from Wearmouth/Jarrow on his way to Italy with this monster on June 4, AD 716. It is now the oldest surviving copy of the Vulgate-the Latin Bible.Of the other two bibles made at the same time only fragments remain.

Peter Hunter-Blair,"Northumbria in the Days of Bede".

Signs of the times

2009-02-22T12:39:00.000-08:00

Six months ago our local evening paper would boast that it had 900+ jobs available in its Thursday supplement. Last weeks supplement featured a third of that number and this appears to be the norm.

On another note, and just possibly saying something about Newcastle, I have been interested to observe the lack of sales of finest Spanish jamon in a local delicatessen. When the product went on display, well before Christmas, the price was £20.00p for 100gm. The ham is still on sale but the price has dropped gradually to £9.50 for 100gm. I doubt if 300gm has been sold in total during the months this admirable product has been on sale.

De Kooning

2009-01-14T11:20:00.000-08:00

I have been re-reading some of David Sylvester's art criticism and one of the topics is Willem de Kooning. Looking also at Hess's 1959 paperback on the artist. The quality of the illustrations is very poor but then, so it seems to me is the quality of the work. When it was made, Excavation may well have seemed raw indeed. But the work that followed it-including the Woman series now seems distressingly inept. The photographs of the early stages of Woman I are the work of a truly clumsy painter who is trying to suppress the bland and mannered side of his art. That aspect of his work was commonly present when he dealt with figures . Artists make art out of chaos but there is a limit to what can be done and Woman I is abandoned rather than completed.

Careen and Cohort

2008-11-03T12:30:00.000-08:00

The meaning of words certainly does change. Careen seems to have lost its correct meaning for many people and to be synonymous with the idea of bouncing about. The received meaning is connected with the idea of a ship leaning to one side in a dock or whilst sailing. But the casual meaning also has a long history.

Even the distinguished American writer James Lee Burke uses the word cohort to mean a companion-or possibly a subordinate companion rather than a military grouping.Thiss can be found in his Montana set novel "Bitterroot". As if one person and a another were fellow horts. Co-horts indeed.

What a difference a tag makes

2008-09-15T10:58:00.000-07:00

I put this image up on Flickr. It is a small sculpture I made out of various materials a few years ago. It is usual to add tags to the image so that people can find groups of similar themes. The last tag I thought of-in my innocence-was "fetish". I thought that the work might suggest some kind of cult object. You can imagine how astonished I was to see the number of times ''anthropologists'' clicked on the image. No doubt they were disappointed.....

Dunstanburgh from the West

2008-09-15T10:48:00.001-07:00

Taken from the track on the western approach to the castle which passes through the marshy ground which protects the castle for much of its inland facing aspect. I cannot help thinking that the long narrow pool is so regular in shape that it must have been excavated on purpose. It may have been a quarry and then become available for defence.

Current Exhibitions

2008-09-15T10:13:00.000-07:00

Much is written about Bacon, Rothko and Hirst at the moment. It is hard to take the last two very seriously. I have some respect left for Bacon and there was a time when he was worth looking at and there seemed to be some integrity left. It now seems to me that Bacon became a "method" painter. By which I mean that he found a formula and stuck to it because it was the easy thing to do-and the quickest way to manufacture work. But just as a symphony would be unendurable if the direction was to play at ffff for several movements there are problems in painting where everything is blasted out .

As for Rothko. He was always a timid painter in terms of colour combinations. The early work is dreadfully weak and clumsy and the colour field represents an easy way out. In a way I am not surprised that Howard Hodgkin is envious of Rothko. But then Hodkin has so little to recommend him as a colourist. His work is certainly crass in comparison to the Indian miniatures he loves. I'm not suggesting that he should have used their palette-though Rothko might have learned something colourwise from them. A tame critic or two was certainly helpful in Rothko's case. They were able to excite themselves over very little. But the message has been conveyed and the art-loving public has been educated into seeing the numinous aspect of Rothko - at least this appears to be the message of the article in yesterday's Observer.

From the same newspaper I learn that Peter Conrad has had a moment of conversion: he now sees Hirst as a "thinker". Is Mr Conrad really so impoverished?

Self Portrait at Howick

2008-08-11T06:09:00.000-07:00

What the Cyclist told me

2008-08-11T05:58:00.000-07:00

I've got me yellow fleece

And me lycra shorts,

I have a helmet

Like a second skull,

What business is it of yours

If I ride on the pavement?

They force us !

And you say I'm a vehicle,

Well fuck you mate!

Art and Photography

2008-07-24T05:39:00.000-07:00

Looking at Aaron Scharf's "Art and Photography" the other day I thought. Is that it? It seems to me that the influence of photography on art is insignificant. The influence is all the other way. Writing about the Durieu photos which Delacroix owned is just a footnote to art history. As Sickert wisely said.The only artists who should use photographs are those who have no need of them. In other words use photographs as an aide-memoire if you wish.

A Poor Sense of Colour

2008-07-16T01:58:00.000-07:00

There is something distinctly old fashioned about much landscape photography in Britain-especially that of the amateur with more equipment than he can manage. Photographers oftene seem to be lacking in any modern sense of colour. So much of what they produce relates more to a landscapist such as J C Dahl than to Monet or Seurat. There is considerable gloom along with occasional flashes of something more lurid.

One of the problems is HDR. I'm not sure that it lives up to its name in providing a High Dynamic Range. I have rarely seen an HDR colour image which wasn't weirdly lurid. Maybe Dunstanburgh and Bamburgh should be patrolled so that anyone carrying a tripod can be turned away .

The situation is made worse by the camera magazines which serve the male concern for technical matters and a hierarchy of cameras which fit into grades such as "prosumer" (sickening isn't it ?), professional or amateur. Beginners, perhaps lacking confidence go on to repeat the latest cliches of the genre. Art students are no different and many of them never grow out of it. I am sick of photographs which show a misty milky sea floating round some rocks. There is often a pinky/blue sky to confirm that the neophyte got up at dawn. Dunstanburgh and Bamburgh should be patrolled and anyone carrying a tripod should be turned away. As Degas might have said, "Landscape photography is not a sport". Never underestimate the herd instinct.

And another thing....that ridiculous remark to the effect that, "From today painting is dead". I could replace it with a question. There are times when I am tempted to ask,"When will photography come to life?"

Self Portrait

2008-06-08T10:30:00.000-07:00

Variation on a theme by an old friend- Colin Miller LRPS.

The Aln near Alnmouth

2008-06-01T11:06:00.000-07:00

Love at the Laing

2008-06-01T10:27:00.000-07:00

The Laing Art gallery in Newcastle is showing another of its themed exhibitions. There have been several in the series and all feature heterogenous works , mostly from the National Gallery. This allows the organisers to throw in anything they have available. The exhibits are shown in the Laing's wretched galleries with their thoroughly unpleasant and inadequate lighting. At the National Gallery these works have better visibility: here they are drained of life.Its not a matter of conservation.

There was a time when the Laing was co-host to major exhibitions on Claude and on Cezanne drawings. Such were the days....(The elitist days of the past-I don't think!). Now we have NewcastleGateshead peddling the unsustainable vision of a major cultural capital. Never was hype and fashion so ill founded. In this The Baltic features but it is an institution which has lost its way .Though it seems to me that it never had a way in the first place. From the fashion for foreign directors- just like Tate Modern and just the same in not staying long- there doesn't seem to have been much direction or coherence.

The Sculptor's Studio

2008-05-20T04:01:00.001-07:00

Spring Poems

2008-05-10T03:08:00.000-07:00

It does not surprise me to learn that Chinese poets wrote "Spring detaining poems" in order to preserve the memory of a brief season of glory after a harsh winter.

2008-05-10T03:04:00.000-07:00

2008-05-10T02:48:00.000-07:00

By the Tod Burn

2008-04-30T07:34:00.000-07:00

Yesterday,on the south bank of the Coquet between Pauperhaugh and Weldon Bridge and by the Tod Burn. It is definitely Spring in Northumberland. Celandines, Speedwell and Primroses are all out. Ramsons are flowering. Heard the sound of a Woodpecker. Many new lambs in the fields.

The intense and milky sunlight and pastel colours would have delighted Pissarro and Sisley.

made with THE GIMP

2008-04-27T06:55:00.000-07:00

Venus in Furs

2008-04-27T06:43:00.000-07:00

In the Mirror

2008-04-27T06:40:00.000-07:00

Spring at Naworth

2008-04-27T06:38:00.000-07:00

Dunstanburgh-small acrylic on paper

2008-04-27T06:33:00.000-07:00

Howick:the quiet shore

2008-04-27T06:32:00.000-07:00

2008-04-27T06:27:00.001-07:00