Catching up

part of my homage to Richard Hamilton's 'Swingeing London', 

acrylic on canvas, 40 x 50cm

I've been pretty invisible on my blog recently but I haven't been idle. I don't have too much time around the edges of my job, so I've been trying to use it more productively. I've been continuing with what's turning into a series of paintings of people being intruded upon in cars and other vehicles. First there was Charles and Camilla getting mobbed on their way to the Royal Variety Performance. Now I'm edging closer to the painting that is inspiring this whole project, Richard Hamilton's 'Swingeing London 67 (f)'. I've been back to some of the original paparazzi photos of Mick Jagger and Robert Fraser handcuffed together in the police van in 1967 and have painted my own version -- the first of several I'm planning to do, all different. I painted this one in black and white, which is a good challenge.

Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, acrylic on canvas, 30 x 23cm

I've also done this one, which is smaller scale, in sepia tones. I like the image because you can actually see the camera taking the picture reflected in the car window.

Skater Girl, acrylic on canvas, 30 x 23cm

Third is this little painting which is the first in what will be a short series of sunny skaters.
I recently joined the countywide artists' forum (Hertfordshire Visual Arts Forum) and it is already proving valuable as they email through lots of opportunities to submit work to exhibitions. Some of these are really tantalising, some less so.
     I am very happy to be able to report that my friends Ben Fletcher and Karen Pine liked the portrait of themselves that they very kindly commissioned me to do. The whole thing was highly enjoyable. I started off feeling that I needed to find out a little more about Ben and Karen to inform whatever approach I was going to take. As they're both psychologists, I thought it would be interesting (and fun) to turn the tables on them and do a psychological 'experiment' on them. I devised a questionnaire and printed out three copies. They had to fill in one copy each, separately, seal it up in an envelope and then complete the third one together. The idea was to explore individuality vs coupledom with a view to making that a theme of the portrait. Obviously it wasn't a serious 'experiment' in any real sense but the answers they gave me were genuinely fascinating, revealing an incredible closeness between the two of them. My original idea was to do a painting of the two of them, a single image, but split across two canvases. Each of them would dominate one of the canvases but there would be a strong pull between the two halves as they would naturally make up one larger picture. However, when I went to visit Karen and Ben to do more research and take some photos, they told me, in the nicest way, that they were hoping I'd do something other than a painting... Yikes! This turfed me out of my comfort zone but turned out to be a good push in another direction -- directions, even, as I ended up making two pieces for them.

Ben and Karen under their trees, mixed media, 20 x 29cm

The first is a montage constructed inside an enamel dish. The main individual elements are painted in soft pastel.

Ben and Karen represented, various objects in perspex drawers

The second piece isn't figurative but nonetheless represents Ben and Karen. It's a set of five perspex drawers (from the 60s, I think), about 18 x 12 x 18cm. Each drawer contains objects relating to an aspect of Karen and Ben's personalities or their life together.

It was very exciting, not to say nervewracking, showing them how I had portrayed them, but they could not have been more positive. It was unbelievably thrilling when they liked both pieces. I won't forget that feeling for a long time.

The last thing I've made recently is a completely redone version of a little book I made to go with my explorations of old postcards. It's called 'Incidentals' which refers to the people who are captured on picture postcards without their permission.

It's just struck me that it's a little bit like an arty version of Where's Wally. You get the full postcard and then a 'hidden' (or just small) person or persons, plus an imaginary monologue of what's in their head/s. It pleases me anyway. I could spend my whole life delving into the world of old postcards.

Final final thing to catch up on is that Dora and I finally made Scandinavian Kitchen's recipe for Kladdkaka and it was absolutely delicious. It looks like brownies and it is similar, but more chewy and with the slightly different flavour from the Scandinavian cocoa powder. Highly recommended, as is the Scandi Kitchen blog.

I'm stuck into another 'inside the car' painting now, featuring Danni Minogue...

"Wicked cathedral" -- a day of art

Yesterday I had a day in London doing galleries. It started very instructively. I got the train into London at 10.30 and it was full of Arsenal fans going down for the home match. Across from me were four Arsenal supporters, all men in their forties or fifties with buzzcut hair and football shirts. At a certain point I heard them start talking about Banksy so tuned into their conversation. They were big fans of Banksy and knew about the latest Banksy pieces to be discovered. One of them had seen the film, Exit Through the Gift Shop (very good film in my view). Then they moved on to Van Gogh and how he had never made any money from his art while he was alive. Finally they had a good old chat about Gaudi, Barcelona, Parc Guell and Gaudi's 'wicked cathedral'. I recount this not to laugh at them but, on the contrary, to celebrate their awareness of and enjoyment of art, a happy thing.

Ron Mueck's woman carrying sticks

So I managed to get to five galleries in total yesterday, but two of them only had four artworks each on display. First I went to see Thomas Ruff at Gagosian then I walked a couple of minutes round the corner to Hauser & Wirth to see four new sculptures by Ron Mueck. The gallery director was giving a talk about the work, so at least I found out that Mueck's name is correctly pronounced 'Moo-eck' (and not 'Mook' or 'Merk' as I had tentatively thought). There's a debate about whether Mueck's incredibly lifelike but smaller- or larger-than-life pieces are 'not really art' because they are somehow 'just models', but I like them very much. There's no 'shame' in an artist aiming for realism and the pieces carry 'meaning' in just the same way as a photograph or a realistic painting might. In the new show, there was the woman carriying a bundle of sticks, pictured above, whose pale, blotchy skin was scratched by the jagged wood she was struggling with. What context should we imagine for her? Is she a primitive woman or someone living in a naturist commune in the backwoods of America, perhaps? She stood so beautifully on her pudgy feet, tipped back to counterbalance the weight of her load but solidly grounded. The other pieces were a half-sized man with his arms outstretched on a lilo who, having been mounted on the wall, resembled an odd kind of crucifixion, a very small model of a boy in jeans examining a stab wound in his side, and a huge chicken hanging upside down from a hook. Apparently Mueck makes all the items that his figures are adorned with himself -- their watches, sunglasses, clothes and so on. Everything looked absolutely authentic but on an altered scale. I don't think it would be enough if one's only question on seeing this art was, 'How does he do it' -- but it evokes a strong sense of presence and you feel a connectedness to these imaginary people as you stare at them. There's an element of the uncanny, too, but more of a sense of shared humanity (pace the chicken).
     Next I went to a gallery I hadn't heard of previously, Pippy Houldsworth, just off Regents Street. The gallery was hosting a show where artist couples collaborated on a piece together. It was very lively and stimulating. In some of the work you could see two different hands at work, in others the collaboration was completely enmeshed.
     Gallery 4 was Lucian Freud at the National Portrait Gallery, still really busy well into its run. Since I've started trying to paint people, I couldn't not go to this. You don't need me to tell you he was an amazing painter. Just his ability to mix colours was extraordinary. Looking at his images of nudes, both male and female, completely laid open, the artist I felt he connected to was Sickert, who had a similarly consuming gaze. There were some incredible late paintings where the 'bodies' were just laid around the artist's studio like corpses, in one case there was an extra body sticking out from under the bed where the main model lay with a dog. The paint gradually took on a rather terrifying blistered appearance as though it was reacting on the canvas, bubbling and scabbing. It was very powerful. You felt the rather fetid atmosphere of the studio with its grubby mattresses and piles of rags and it seemed like a ward in a field hospital where the 'disease' of art was being battled like a burning fever.

Finally I caught the bus to the Serpentine where Hans Peter Feldmann has a show. I've had my eye on Feldmann for a while as he is interested in things I'm also interested in -- found images, things grouped into sets, little books of found images. Quite a lot of the people at the show seemed to be rather nonplussed by it. I overheard quite a lot of people expressing disappointment or confusion. (I was also very amused by a woman who was 'mmm'-ing so enthusiastically to what her friend was saying that she was virtually singing: 'Mmmm...mmmm...MMM...MMMMM'.) A lot of the work did seem rather inconsequential. The room, pictured above, where rotating discs with arrangements of odd objects (an Eiffel Tower, a doll, little figurines) cast ever-changing shadows on the wall was rather gorgeous. You imagine a child watching it as they went to sleep and being captivated. His latest thing is to acquire old-master-ish portraits and repaint the eyes with a squint or add a red nose. Hmmm. It was the sort of show where you think, 'Damn the art world -- why isn't this me?' But it isn't.

Absolute final port of call was the actual Scandinavian Kitchen that I had the mail order stuff from before. This time I was able to buy fresh cheese as well as tons more crispbreads and some more sweeties (I am LOVING Skum Banan, a mallow & chocolate banana not done any favours by its name). Why can't I live next door to this place? I also got the proper scandinavian cocoa powder to make the addictive-sounding cake on their website at the moment -- Kladdkaka...

Scandinavian Kitchen

I'm cooking a meal for two friends next week and one of them gave me a lovely Scandinavian cookbook, Scandilicious, so I'm going to cook some things out of it. That gave me an excuse to order some bits and pieces from the Scandinavian Kitchen, a shop in Great Titchfield St in London that also does mail order.

I only had one or two things in my 'basket' to start with but then I got to the checkout and saw the delivery price. So I thought, I'll just see how many more things I can get before the delivery charge goes up. I added some jam, two more packets of spelt crispbreads (soooooo good), all the time checking the delivery cost, some chocolate, another box of crunchy cereal -- still the same. In the end I thought I'd better stop as that wasn't a very rational way to shop, but it meant I had quite a few nice things in the box when it came. I wonder what the rosehip soup will be like..? The 'Plopp' chocolate bars were to make the kids laugh.

Jarlsberg and fennel muffins

I'm going to do a soup with these cheesy muffins, then something with a couple of posh salads and maybe ice cream for pudding if I can get an ice-cream machine this weekend. I feel an ice-cream maker is something that will add a little happiness to all four of our lives, so why not?

Chrissie, if you're still looking for a recipe for semla buns, there's one in this book so I could send it to you...

Don't forget to leave a comment on the Giveaway post before 2nd April if you haven't already (thanks if you have!)...