Charles Keene a Victorian artist with "Punch"

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,  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.

A father remonstrates with his son and comes of worst.

He drew on any scraps of paper which came to hand and sometimes with improvised, home-made implements. Here are two of his gently satirical drawings from Tate Britain.The first shows what is probably a variation on the perennial theme of the landscape painter who has to deal with naive or irritating observers. Daumier did many drawings on this theme and Keene like Daumier did not make up his own captions.

In the second drawing we have what could be described  as "the superior servant theme". The scene is a railway station or ferry terminal and the gent leaning on the post perhaps the coachman- is so impressed with his own importance that he doesn't want to get involved with dealing with the luggage-the lower servants can do that.He most certainly doesn't want to soil his uniform. His mistress on the left seems slightly agitated or concerned but he isn't bothered.

Imagine Keene's  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.

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

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.

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

why I wouldn't buy this "Picasso"

 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
UPDATE:An example of this reproduction was offered at Anderson& Garland on August 09,2016. as lot  16. It did not sell.

dunstanburgh, lovely dunstanburgh.

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.