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...

Brooklyn Sketchbook Project 2013 -- yes or no?

This is just a very quick post to ask a question. To anyone reading this who made a sketchbook for the Brooklyn Sketchbook Project this year, are you going to do it again for 2013? The new project is already open for business and you can buy your sketchbook.
     I poured my heart into my sketchbook but it has only been 'borrowed' by two people on the tour so far and has only one comment on the website. There are so many thousands of sketchbooks on the tour that the odds of your individual sketchbook being taken out and looked at must be pretty slim. Too slim? I just can't decide whether to spend the huge amount of time it takes to make a sketchbook or whether to save that time for something else. The best way to look at it is as something you do for yourself, so that it doesn't matter whether or not many or even any other eyes fall upon it. However, I think we all know it feels good if other people see what you've done.
     I'd more or less decided not to do a sketchbook this time round, then I saw my little sketchbook in a video the Brooklyn Art Library people had posted on Vimeo and that has almost given me a change of heart -- but it still doesn't mean more than three people have seen the insides.

a glimpse of 'Audrey'

 I would really love to know what anyone else is thinking.
    

Poundland -- I've seen the light!

All this for £9...

When the Woolworth's on our high street closed, the shop space was empty for a very long time and it felt as though it was dragging the whole town down. Then, at last, the site was split into two smaller shops and both opened. One was a Peacock's, which closed about a week after it opened when the chain got into difficulties. The other was a Poundland, which filled me with despair as it didn't feel like the right sort of shop for the town. I only went in it once, last November, to look for things to put in the kids' advent calendar and it was depressing. I vowed never to set foot there again.
     Then... yesterday I was catching up with all the blogs I follow and saw Sue's fish slice challenge. I find it hard to resist challenges, specially arty ones, but that meant going back to Poundland to purchase said fish slice (the challenge is to transform it -- Sue does amazing things with enamelling and cutting).
     Mentally pinching my nose, I stepped back inside the scorned shop. The first things I saw were some cool Royal Family masks for the Jubilee. I'm no royalist, but I found myself thinking, 'Hmm, those would be a good bit of ephemera to buy and store away for 100 years' time...'. Then I saw a very nice stripy tea towel in the colours I particularly like. Then three packets of ibuprofen for £1. Then I found the metal utensils for Sue's challenge -- a set of 3 for £1. Surely just the metal is worth that? (Oh no, now I'm suddenly having dark thoughts about the cheap labour that makes all these things -- that wasn't part of the planned post...)
     It suddenly seemed as though I was no longer in Poundland but in a specially created Janestore, stocked with items uniquely suited to my tastes. In the weird selection of CDs I found two I liked. In the even more random selection of books was a perfect book for me by an author whose book on the Rolling Stones is next on my bedside pile. Then, finally, I grabbed three huge packets of plastic straws, just because the colours were so beautiful -- in my mind art projects spiralled out like kaleidoscope patterns.
     All this for £9 -- it doesn't seem possible. So although I know it was just the chance coming together of my profound randomness and Poundland's randomness to make a happy moment, I won't sneer at Poundland too readily in future.
     And why don't you join in with the Fish Slice Challenge? It could go viral...

More scary clowns...

Of all the posts I've ever posted, the one on scary clowns has had the most views. So, to scare all those clown-phobics out there -- just a little bit -- here are some more creepy clowns.

I absolutely adore this louche chap. And he wobbles too...

The rest of today's boys are from a Funny Face board game. I like them because they look to me as though they're based on real people.

Look at the sadness in those eyes...

In this game all the eyes, ears, mouths, noses and bow ties pop out and you spin a pointer to see which body part you replace next. By swivelling eyeballs and mismatching ears you can make some real grotesques. But the moveable parts have never been pushed out in my set, so I intend to keep them mint, I think. They're so beautiful, I've half a mind to frame them and hang them up.

Which one do you like best ... or fear the least, children?

"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...

Away Down to Lamorna

Last week we were lucky enough to stay in a rented house down by the sea at Lamorna Cove in Cornwall. The hedges were full of blossom and the broom was out, splashing everywhere with bright yellow. Above is the view from the path above the house.

We were right down in the cove at the end of the wooded valley where quite a lot of artists have lived or stayed in the past. At the Village Hall the artists' group started by Samuel John 'Lamorna' Birch was still going strong and having a show which included work by Lamorna Birch's grandson and his wife -- they still live in the same house that Lamorna Birch owned, which I think is the white house towards the top right of my photo above. I talked to the lady looking after the exhibition and she lives and works in the 1920s studio built for Laura Knight by Alfred Munnings. I spotted it from the road later and it looked beautiful. I was so envious! Apparently a film crew had just finished filming Summer in February which is a novel based on the arty goings-on in Lamorna Cove in the 1920s -- I've just ordered the book. It sounds wonderful and I'm looking forward to the film as well (out in September)
     Alfred Munnings' own house has been converted into a very lovely upmarket (but friendly) hotel called The Cove now. We ate at the restaurant there one evening and were so taken with it that we went back another night. These are the gorgeous drinks we had before we ate:

Mine was the capairinha with all the limes. Hooked on those now. The middle one was alcohol-free for Dora with sorbet and strawberries...
     We had the writer A.N. Wilson as a neighbour for a week which was interesting but we all kept ourselves strictly to ourselves -- no 'Tamara Drewe'-ish vibes! I can't help but think of Posy Simmonds when I go down to Cornwall.

These giant triffids were growing in the stream just outside the house. Gunnera, I thnk?

We had a pretty free-form week, dotting about here and there. St Ives  was not the same as I remember it from Christmases there with my Mum when it was wonderfully quiet and mild -- this time it was crazily busy but we went to the Tate to see the exhibition by Simon Fujiwara who, his Japanese heritage notwithstanding, grew up in Carbis Bay, just along from St Ives. It was a very strange assortment of installations based on fictionalised aspects of the artist's life. The room I liked best was where he had created huge models of lighthouses taken from paintings by Alfred Wallis. These reminded me strongly of the lighthouse that appears at the end of Marianne Dreams, one of my absolute favourite childhood books.

We had some beautiful walks, which almost killed me, so unfit am I (in spite of continuing to run round and round downstairs nearly every morning...). Some were along the coastal path and some ventured inland. This painting by Lamorna Birch really captures the sun and the fresh air of these walks:

We even came face to face with a real cow when we had to cross a farmyard:

Of course I fancied myself in a pair of 'artist's trousers' painting en plein air, like this chap...

portrait of Stanley Gardiner by Richard Copeland Weatherby

... but I only got as far as drawing a few shoes one rainy morning.

spooky derelict engine shed nr Cripplesease

We went to view an art sale in Penzance, thinking that if there was a picture we really loved we might go to the auction and see if we could get it -- we used to be keen on auctions before we had kids. It was a big sale with about 500 paintings, some of them by well-known artists such as Wilhelmina Barns-Graham and Terry Frost, but they all looked a tiny bit shabby and insignificant, hanging cheek by jowl in the auction room. It was very interesting to view the pictures in that non-museum context -- you could handle most of them and really scrutinise them. The estimate prices were quite high and the only one I felt any feeling for was this one by Wilhelmina Barns-Graham:

But the estimate was £2-3K and that was out of my price range!

Mousehole from Raginnis Hill by William J. George

We went to Mousehole one day -- absolutely lovely, much closer to how I remember St Ives being. And to Cape Cornwall which, in a similar way, was how Land's End should really be, but it's just a bit further up the coast. That was beautiful too. We saw General de Gaulle having a float in the sea there:

Penzance is nice, with some mad second-hand emporia, and a very nice place to have breakfast: the Artist Residence (also a hotel -- looked very cool). It was a very lovely coincidence that while we were there I was reading Patrick Gale's novel, Notes from an Exhibition which is set in Penzance and is the story of a woman artist and her family. I can't recommend this novel highly enough for anyone who loves art and/or Cornwall. It was the best holiday read I could imagine and even includes the author's personal tour of Penzance in the back.

St Michael's Mount seen across Penzance Harbour

Well, I think that's about it. I'll just finish off with a few stray photos.

fishing nets

crow on a roof in St Ives

shadows on the wall in our holiday house

Giveaway results

Thanks so much to everyone who left a comment for the giveaway. It closed last night and tonight Dora drew the names out of a bowl for me.
     So here are the results:

I'll just use your comment-tag-names:
Notebook: Kitsch and Curious
Ladybird book: Menopausal Musing
Hanky: Linda
Purse: Colleen
Hat pins: Joanna
Cactus candy: Ellen
Needlecase: James
Papier poudre: Jee
Little letter: Printed Material
Belemnite: James

Congrats everyone. If I need your postal address I'll get in touch via email in the next couple of days.

Jane x

PS Lesley -- I made those muffins just now -- very nice, quite peppery. Easy to do. I'll try to remember to include a copy of the recipe when I send your bits and pieces.