More looming fruit....

I think one or two of my most die-hard and dogged readers paid heed to my pitiful whining last post and signed up to my Artfinder profile, for which I am profusely grateful.

The very lovely Katyboo knocked me over with a feather by writing an entire blog post about me (which feels all kinds of undeserved - it made my chin wobble and I ended up doing that double-handed face fanning thing while trying not to cry too much).  I was deeply touched.  She is a very kind and lovely person, and I'm very proud to call her my friend.

Sadly, we don't see that much of each other because we live a few hundred miles apart, although we have managed to coincide in That London a couple of times, and it was a shame that last week I actually found myself not too far away from Leicester (where she lives).  However, the circumstances were not really conducive to meeting up as TLH and I were driving up to Macclesfield in Cheshire to attend a family funeral, and it was a sad and stressful few days that didn't really lend itself to conviviality.

The death had been rather sudden - my mum's youngest sister (aged 62) had gone into hospital about 8 weeks ago suffering from heart palpitations.  Investigations showed shadows on her lungs.  Up until that time she'd (more or less) been fine.  The shadows were inoperable Stage IV lung cancer.  Six weeks later she was dead.  She hadn't even had time to start any chemotherapy.  It was so quick it was shocking.  But, on the other hand, it's better the inevitable end came quickly.

My mum is (was) the oldest of 5 siblings, one of whom lives in the Netherlands, the other in Canada, and they both managed to get to the UK to say goodbye before she died.  We've now got to the stage where we only see that side of the family at weddings and funerals, which is a shame, but is, I think, generally the way that families go these days.  It was really lovely to see my aunts and uncles, and some of my cousins, again but sad given the circumstances.

Anyway, we set off the day after the funeral and really just wanted to get home so even though it did cross my mind that I could've had a small detour to have a cuppa with our Katy, I just wanted to get back.

Still, the weather was lovely and I was pleasantly surprised with how beautiful the countryside is around Knutsford, Macclesfield and Poynton.  And we managed to get in a visit to Jodrell Bank where my brother (who is a brilliant photographer) took some fab high-definition photos of the radio telescope:

And a really cool selfie in front of the infrared camera monitor they had there (I'm probably going to paint this as a portrait of him - look at the colours!!):

It was also lovely to get to spend some one-on-one time with him, as I don't get to see him often enough, and when I do, it's invariably with loads of small (and not so small) kids knocking around, demanding his attention (well, he is their dad, after all).  So to be able to spend two entire evenings with him, laughing like loons and knocking back the vino without interruption was a real treat.

But I seem to have sidetracked - I've finished another painting!  I'm really pleased with how this one has come out.  It's another in my 'Looming Fruit' series (I'm sure there's a joke about Fruit of the Loom in there somewhere...) and has more than a touch of the Dutch Old Masters about it.

As usual, I took a few photos as it was progressing - weirdly, seeing a photo of the painting as it's going along helps me to 'see' it better, and spot what's going wrong or what needs doing next.

Anyway, this painting was of three apples, set slightly off-centre.  The lighting is very strong and the background is pitch black, so it's very dramatic, and this is how it progressed:

The bottom photo is the finished version but the colours of the apples look a bit washed out - the real colours are more like the penultimate one.

I'll probably be putting this one up on Artfinder too but at the moment I'm rather enjoying looking at it in my sitting room!

I've started my next painting already - cherries tumbling from a pail - which is slowly coming together, and I've got another three, no, four, paintings planned, not to mention the Russian icons paintings I'm thinking about (have I told you about those?  Can't remember...) so I'm going to be pretty busy.

Plus it's my forty-eleventh birthday this coming Wednesday, and TLH and I are off to London on Thursday to take in the British Museum's current exhibition on Vikings, followed by a trip to the theatre to see Jeeves and Wooster starring Robert Webb and the utterly brilliant Mark Heap.  I've promised Katyboo I'll tell you all about about it!

Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2013 & 'Souzou: Outsider Art from Japan'

Yesterday saw our (now) traditional trip up to London to see this year's Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy.  We've been going for several years now and I usually try to do a blog post about it, illustrated with copious photographs taken ninja-style (it's not allowed).

I had every intention of doing the same thing this year, but things didn't quite turn out as planned.

But I'm getting ahead of myself here.

We drove up to London.  We always seem to do this now.  It's not necessarily quicker (sometimes it is, but it wasn't yesterday...) but it is cheaper than going by train and getting a railcard, for e.g., it would cost us £21.70 each for a railcard (= £43.40).  Yesterday we went up in the Smart Car which probably used about a fiver in petrol.  We parked right close by to the British Museum and paid £37 for parking.  £37 + £5 = £42.  Plus we had the benefit of being in our own space and not having to share it with everyone else = priceless.

We had an extremely quick and easy drive into south London, then things got very gnarly around Nine Elms where roads had seemingly been closed at random with no diversions!  Got a lot of people very confused, that did.  We eventually crossed using Battersea Bridge instead of Waterloo Bridge which was actually quite interesting because it's not a route we usually use and it's always good to see new stuff.

We parked up in a car park in, I think, Museum Street at 4 minutes to midday.  Our plan was to try and get round the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, the British Museum's Pompeii & Herculaneum Exhibition and the exhibition of Japanese outsider art at the Wellcome Collection in Euston.  An ambitious timetable, I think you'll agree.

We'd already checked the intertubes to see what was going on in London in case there were any roads that were going to be closed off, etc.  TLH had seen that there was some sort of Triathlon event happening that was going to affect roads but that was way over around Canary Wharf so wouldn't affect us.

As we were walking from Museum Street towards Chinatown, we noticed there were really quite a few side streets in Soho that were being closed off with metal barriers.  There were lots of people with neon yellow safety vests and clipboards.  Something was happening.  Eventually, as we passed another neon yellow-clad group, I scrutinised the lanyard thing around someone's neck and spotted the word 'Pride'.  Hmm.

Research on the 'tubes had completely failed to reveal that the huge annual gay Pride Parade was going to be taking place that afternoon.  Right through the centre of London.  London was going to be full of fabulous.  I hoped we'd be able to see some of it.

I was starving hungry and we couldn't decide where we wanted to eat.  We wandered past Kettner's to see if it had improved any since our last disappointing visit there back in 2010.  Short answer - 'no'.  Saturday lunchtime on a sunny day in June when London is packed with rainbow warriors and the place was completely empty.  And it was open (we checked).

So off to Chinatown we went, to a restaurant that was the first place TLH took me when we first started 'courting'.  It used to be called 'China China' but is now 'Wan Chai Corner'.  It's at 3 Gerrard St, and since we were there last they've started serving dim sum!  Hooray!  I LOVE dim sum and hardly ever have it because there's nowhere near where I live that does it (I should really just buy my own and do it at home, shouldn't I?)  We stuffed ourselves with crispy fried salt & chilli pepper squid; prawn & chive dim sum;  pork, shrimp & peanut dim sum; fish ball noodle soup and lovely, lovely char siu bao (Cantonese barbecued pork filled bun - they're both sweet and savoury!)  I'm going to be hard pushed to want to eat anywhere else next time we're in London.

We then headed off to the Royal Academy.  Due to the forthcoming Pride parade heading along Regent Street, past Piccadilly Circus and into Haymarket, that end of Piccadilly was blocked off to traffic, which meant that at about 2pm on a Saturday afternoon, we were able to walk up the middle of the road:

I hadn't prebooked tickets for the Summer Exhibition this time so there was always the concern that the place would be packed and we'd have to wait for hours to get in but no, bought tickets and went straight in.

As soon as we got through the doors, I realised that taking photos was going to be tricky as there weren't very many visitors.  Plus as I'm now creating art myself instead of just looking at it, I sort of wanted to look at the pieces with my own eyes, rather than through the lens of a camera.  And it's always stressful having to dodge the gallery staff, and the thought of having to do that again this year was, frankly, a bit sigh-inducing.  Still, I'd have a go.

It didn't last very long.  I got into the second room, having taken a couple of shots in the previous one, and had scanned it for staff.  Thinking I was okay, I'd taken one shot, then moved in for a close up when suddenly there was a hand in my viewfinder.  A very cross, short (that's how I missed her, she was tiny) steward practically shouted at me 'No photographs!  And I think you know it...' very bossily.  So I just turned away and sighed internally.   This was going to be hard work today.

I headed into another room and found a totally delightful piece that I really wanted a picture of.  Trouble is it was painted on a button and only about an inch across so would necessitate me going right up close to it in order to get it in focus.  And, yes, there was a gallery steward (not the same one) leaning against the door frame practically opposite.  I would have to wait until he moved on.  I ended up waiting for about 10 minutes before he finally did and I got my shot but I decided that photo would be the last of this trip as I really couldn't be arsed to wait around for the stewards to go walkabout just so I could get a picture, at the risk of me finally getting thrown out if they did keep catching me.

I decided I would compromise a little, though, and marked with an 'x' in the catalogue those pieces that I liked, then I could look them up online and see if the artists had websites with images on them.

There were a few but, out of necessity, I apologise for there not being as many photos in this post as I would normally like to give you, but I hope you understand my reasons now!

Anyway, onto the pictures:

 'Etna', oil by Fred Cuming, RA. (£28,000).

'From the Arabian Nights', oil by Tom Phillips, RA. (£39,000)

'Everything meets here', pencil by Jessie Brennan (£7,200)

 'Study for a battle', giclee print by Cathy de Monchaux (£550).  This, incidentally, is the piece I was going in for the closeup on when the gallery Gauleiter caught me, and I managed to take a photo of the floor grating instead:

This was the final picture I got to take.  It's called "#1 from The Runaways series" by Hannah Battershell (£200).  I loved it.  Click on the link to see more of her button work.

I have to say I found this year's exhibition very much a mixed bag.  I definitely got the feeling there were less pieces overall than usual, which isn't necessarily a bad thing.  And I thought there were a lot of prints and etchings which is only to be expected when you find out that one of the curators of this year's exhibition is Norman Ackroyd.  There were quite a few pieces I could quite happily have taken home with me, and quite a few that made me wonder what the hell the curators were thinking.

Some of the others I liked were:

'Venice - Mouth of Italy', ink and watercolour by Adam Dant (£31,200).  This is the artist who did the painting at last year's exhibition of a map of London as a medical textbook illustration that I loved.

'My heart a wounded crow', mezzotint by Sarah Gillespie (£600).  A mixture of the endearing and the Gothic.

'Titania', oil by Miriam Escofet (£13,500).  If I'd had the money, this is the one I would have bought.  Exquisitely painted, with unbelievably fine detail.  I stood in front of this painting the longest.  Her website is just fabulous too - check out her recent work and try not to cry at the sheer beauty and skill of this artist.

 Grayson Perry had an entire room to himself to show his six-tapestry series 'The Vanity of Small Differences' which he created in conjunction with a TV series about the British class system last year.  He's such a clever man.  There's a huge amount of detail in the tapestries and the more you look at them, the more you see:

After the compulsory visit to the gift shop, we decided to schlep our way up to the Euston Road to the Wellcome Collection but first we had to get across Regent Street.  Which was, of course, cordoned off as the parade was passing along, so we stopped, ate some ice-cream and watched a very noisy parade of hugely happy people pass by for about 20 minutes before we could cross the road.

We went to see their current free exhibition 'Souzou - Japanese Outsider Art' which ends today.   My lovely blogging friend Antonia - a woman of great style and taste - recommended this unreservedly.  And it was, indeed, brilliant.

So what, exactly, is 'outsider art'?  The Collection's website describes it best: "‘Outsider Art’ has since become an internationally recognised term, commonly used to describe work made by artists who have received little or no tuition but produce work for the sake of creation alone, without an audience in mind, and who are perceived to inhabit the margins of mainstream society. The artists in this exhibition have been diagnosed with a variety of different cognitive, behavioural and developmental disorders or mental illnesses, and are residents or day attendees of specialist care institutions." None of these pieces would be out of place at the Summer Exhibition, and quite a few of them were a damn site better.

Again, this is another place that won't allow photography, but I bought the book anyway, so I'll take photos of the things that really caught my eye:

This clay piece is about 4 feet high and covered in spikes.  There's something very African about it.

These figurines are made from cloth, sellotape and fabric and are about 12 inches high.  We particularly liked the crab-headed doll (bottom right picture).

These were brilliant - very Chapman Brothers.  Tiny little invented anime figures made from metallic bag ties.  About 2 inches high.

These figures look 2D from the picture, but they're figures that will stand up and are created from card, and based on box construction.  About 6 inches high.

These were terrific.  Created by a guy who works in a printing facility and who collects small amounts of india ink with which he creates his pictures.  These are big, about 3.5 feet across.

Big images in reality, these are made from charcoal which the artist then rubs out.

This fabulously spiky creature is a representation of an Okinawan Lion.

The artist really likes food and has decorated cotton pyjamas with images of his favourite foods - in this case salmon roe sushi rolls and roast chicken!

In many ways, the most traditionally accomplished artist on display also produced the most disturbing artwork.  Large paintings full of sexual imagery that were hard to look at but impossible to ignore.

I then took TLH upstairs to look at the permanent collection of shrunken heads, torture chairs, trepanned skulls, flying phalli (phalluses?) and ancient surgical instruments.  Stopping then for a recuperative bun and tea, we decided that we were all arted and walked out and there was no way we were going to fit in the British Museum's Pompeii & Herculaneum exhibition, but seeing as it's on until September, we decided to make it a later date.  London, we love you with all your noise and people and sights and smells but, ooh, you make our feet hurt!

We got back to the car at 5.15 and pulled up onto our driveway at 6.30, which is pretty impressive.  We got back in time to catch the evening's coverage of Glastonbury which confirmed my firmly held opinion that the Rolling Stones really are quite shite.

And on that bombshell....

Not so different after all...

I'm feeling almost normal this morning, which is a grand thing, especially as we're off to see Harry Hill tonight and Julian Lloyd-Webber tomorrow.  One will be larking around with a giant inflatable sausage, the other will be playing Elgar - I'll leave you to guess which.

So, to catch up a bit more - I've been 'doing a thing' or two, both jointly and severally with The Lovely Husband.  When his last contract finished at the end of last year, I made a list of the exhibitions in London that I rather fancied going to, in the hope that we'd get to at least one or two of them.

One of them on my list that I was most definite about seeing was the new Ice Age Art exhibition at the British Museum.  I'm a member there so I get to see all their exhibitions for free, which is always a bonus!  On 15 February, we drove up to London in the Smart Car again.  I think this will now be our preferred method for getting to London because, of course, the rail fares went up again in January and it is now most definitely cheaper for us to take the car.  Which is bloody stupid, but there you are.

My plan originally was that we would park somewhere very central, then hop over to the Hayward Gallery to see if we could get in to the Light exhibition that they're currently running, then grab some lunch in the small Wahaca restaurant in the shipping containers on the South Bank, then trot over the bridge to the British Museum for the Ice Age exhibition.  Good plan, non?

Except, like eedjits, we didn't prebook tickets for the Light Exhibition and the queue was waaaay outside the door.  We didn't feel like waiting around for a couple of hours so decided to come back another day - it's on until 28 April so, theoretically, there's time yet.  Walking back to the bridge, I noticed that the rather fantastic tugboat hotel was still sitting perched atop the Queen Elizabeth Hall:



As it was mid-morning it was much too early for lunch so we decided to head off towards the BM, and swing past a Cass Art shop (for some supplies for me) on the way.  We went to the one in Soho, then decided we might as well go to the Covent Garden Wahaca instead for lunch, where we arrived at about midday and just got seated before the queue started forming up the stairs.

We accidentally drank margaritas and beer:



And ate lovely, lovely Mexican food.

We then had a quick wander round Chinatown as TLH wanted to replenish our Ramen stocks.  It was still wearing its finery from New Year celebrations (I'm sorry the pictures are so dark, not sure why this was as the day wasn't especially bright...):



Then off to the BM we went.  The exhibition itself is in the space upstairs from the Reading Room (which, I believe, is going to be returned to a reading room again when the new BM extension is opened) which confused me a bit as I went round the central area a few times trying to find the entrance!

The exhibition had only been opened a few days when we went and was, needless to say, quite popular.  It was just about okay, though, if you were prepared to wait a few minutes in order to get close up to a case in order to get a really good look at something.  Which I highly recommend.

The artefacts in this exhibition are portable art.  In other words, small items that could be easily moved around, rather than cave paintings.  The exhibition is small, which is only to be expected.  The oldest of the items on display is 40,000 years old, and the most recent probably about 15-20,000 years old.  And, let's face it, you aren't going to find much stuff around that's that old now, are you?

What they did show was extraordinary.  The oldest object is a flute made from the bone of a Griffon Vulture.  So people had music then.

Just look how delicate this thing is. This is the original.  A reproduction has been made and proved to be playable.

The other thing that totally blew my mind was that there were ceramic figurines in the exhibition.  Human forms shaped from clay and fired in, well, a fire.  This means the first ceramic artefacts made by humans were art objects and not vessels.  Just think about that for a minute.  They used clay to make art and not cups or bowls.  Of course, there is the proviso that absence of evidence does not equal evidence of absence, it may just be that there are cups and bowls older than these figurines that haven't been found yet.  But these items were special - they must have been to have lasted so long.  They were kept as a precious object and, in some cases, buried with their owner.

This ceramic female figurine is between 30-20,000 years old.  The observation of the maker is so good they've even included rolls of back fat:



Also about the same age is this extraordinary sculpture in mammoth ivory of a pregnant woman.  She is six inches tall and incredibly delicate.  Picasso was obsessed with this little figurine:



The fact that some of these items are found as grave goods indicates that people at the time had a concept of death and an afterlife.  Other questions that I asked myself as I was going around the exhibition were who made them? Men? Women? the elderly?  There are indications from modern anthropological studies of modern hunting societies that, in fact, there is a lot of 'downtime' involved in hunting, a lot of leisure time, sitting around waiting for the animals, so there would be plenty of time for observation and practising drawing/carving.

Also there was no paper at this time; the only surfaces available to paint and draw on were cave walls, flat stones, antlers, bones.  But these items/drawings are accurately proportional, and drawn with an economical use of line.  They are perfect.

The animal figurines are tiny and just beautiful, lovingly carved and professional.  They are very confident and practised - the sculptors knew these animals well, and respected them.

This mammoth ivory figure of a female bison ('The Zaraysk Bison') is about 22,000 years old and is exquisite.  The care taken in carving the head and muzzle is just amazing:

This little diving water bird is just under 2 inches long, made from ivory and about 32,000 years old:

They even had what could loosely be interpreted as toys for children.

This is made from mammoth ivory and is a jointed puppet of a man.  It is also over 20,000 years old. There are holes where the limbs could be attached and, presumably, made to move.  How amazing is that?



As I'm getting older and closer to menopause I'm finding myself becoming more emotionally overwhelmed by things.  This has come as something of a shock to me as I've always considered myself to be very controlling of my emotions.  I found myself moved to tears at the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood exhibition at Tate Britain back in January by one particular painting.  I've sniffled through the odd orchestral symphony.

But there was one piece here which practically had me sobbing.  Totally unexpectedly.  It's not one of the main pieces, not highlighted in any way, in fact, blink and you'd miss it.  But it really connected with me.  This is it:



Like I said, not overly exciting at first glance.  If you look closely you'll see that it's a ptarmigan that has been engraved on reindeer antler.

This is a ptarmigan:

So I was looking at the antler piece, thinking that it looked like a really modern sketch, something I would do, and I envisaged myself drawing it, observing the bird, attempting to make the mark of the smooth curves on the surface of the antler and I suddenly, joltingly, 'connected' with the artist who had drawn this and I realised that, despite the distance of 30,000 years, we weren't so different after all.

It was almost overwhelmingly emotional for me and totally, totally unexpected.  I started to well up and knew that if I didn't stop thinking about this too much I would break down in wracking, heaving sobs!  Fortunately the exhibition is dimly lit so I could surreptitiously find a tissue and get control of myself.  But this was an extraordinary piece of art.  I'd go back again just to see this one little piece of antler again.

Needless to say, I would urge you to RUN to this exhibition if you get the chance - these items are more precious than rare jewels and it's such an opportunity to see them all in the same place at once.

And take some tissues.