The Foreign Path

 

Right - Canary wharf - I have always said I should not allow myself to be impressed by Mammon, but when you are here on a a warm June day  it is a bit awing.

 

Not my main reason for going to the Great Wen though - here's one set of reasons:

 

 

 

...and here's the book:

 

 

This show was at the |Imperial War Museum and I had forgotten what a weird place it is - or maybe since I visited it a long time ago my perspective on its exhibits has changed somewhat. Anyway Kennard (thanks Liam for first introducing me to him) has not lost his edge and the most recent piece -designed for the show - was a room of numbers and images which was deeply chilling

It's unpleasant to hear Tony Blair blatting on in his oily manner when you think of Kennard's image of him from the Iraq War:

 

 

The catalogue is a lovely piece of work with a very interesting binding

 

My other main reason for the trip was these:

 

 

 

 

 

 

The younger among our viewers might not know who this is but she was at the forefront of sculpture along with Henry Moore and it is great to see Barbara Hepworth's work again getting its due recognition at Tate Britain. I first saw it t and open air exhibition in Battersea Park in the 1960s and have always been a fan.

Needless to say  a visit to Tate Modern was de rigueur and needles to say there were a couple of really interesting shows. The first was a full retro of Sonia Delaunay:

 

 

 

 

 What surprised me about this was the depth of her involvement with textile and fashion and how extensive were her colour studies, let alone her painting practice; I got the feeling at times that she she sacrificed herself somewhat for her husband - Robert Delaunay - but maybe I am being a little judgemental.

 

The other show I saw here was another retro of Agnes Martin with whom I was not familiar.

 

 

Her work is brutally uncompromising in its geometric abstraction with grids and stripes but very delicate in its colour sense:

 

 

 A review of the show in the Guardian made the point that her work did not reproduce well in print and consequently she was not as well known as other Abstract Expressionists,  a group of which she considered her self a part (insofar as she attached herself to any group -she rejected the whole art world in later life and retreated to Arizona where she produced her last masterpiece a few months before her death at 92.

 

The other exhibition I visited merited two shots, the last being just before I left on the final morning:

 

 

 

This is just the list from The RA summer show and it is huge - if you ever go you will need at least two visits -the first for a survey and the second to go and look at specific pieces: eg six aquatints by Norman Ackroyd and a full room devoted to Tom Phillips book A Humument ( all its variants and editions with the original art work); also it is much better to go firs thing in the morning before it gets too crowded. What really drew me back though were the two large rooms of print -wow!

 

A high point of the trip was the morning spent in the Print Room of the British Museum where I had work by Kathe Kollwitz, Eric Ravilious and Eric Gill brought to my desk and I was able to spend time doing drawings from these (my scanner isn't working so I haven't been able to get my drawings onto the screen but will do if this changes). The atmosphere is so wonderful in there and one is made so welcome.

 

It was quite an intense trip but writing about it at this remove has been good because it has allowed me to think back and to enjoy it again. Btw went to Intagllio Printmakers and bought two burins, a roller and two small but beautiful copper plates ( I'll show the results of that later.)

 

Here are a few recent works:

 

 

This is my A5 note/sketchbook for the coming year which I made earlier in the summer

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is the book which will be called Handscapes and is a collection of etches I made on copper at the Printmakers during the summer - I printed them at home and bound them into a book  - reasonably happy with the result.

 

Just to finish  -this is small aquatint from one of those copper plates I mentioned - there was no previous line etching with this but I wasn't aware of the strength of the acid and I was too cautious - each stage should have been bitten for longer.... the learning process.

 

I will be back with more summer work

The Printed Path

 Earlier in the summer(??!!) in bought this book on the basis of a review that I came across in the Guardian Review (Saturday - a great place to find all sorts of books). I have already read a great deal of Barnes' fiction starting a long time ago with Flaubert's Parrot. He is an avowed Francophile with an interest in the literature and art of France of the turn of 19th/ 20th century and this is manifest in this collection of essays which extends from Gericault to Braque, but including a side-order of Oldenburg, Freud and Hodgkin.
The essay that prompted me to write though concerns Félix Valloton (1865 - 1925) , a Swiss whom became assimilated into France. Here's just one example to start:

The Lie, oil on canvas, 1898

Valloton, despite not being French, became one of the  Les Nabis  a post impressionist avant-garde group which included Bonnard and Vuillard. Here I must declare interest in the the whole group that followed the Impressionists  such the Fauves and the Nabis have always intrigued me. Valloton, however, was unfamiliar to me. I had heard his name but would not have immediately recognised his work.

Now, after Barnes' essay - Valloton: The Foreign Nabi (Guardian, 2007) - and a followup on the imagery I cannot understand how I could have passed it - simply through its not being shown, I imagine. Here are some of his landscapes:

Sunset, oil on canvas, 1918 

Lake Leman, effect of evening, oil on canvas, 1900

Evening on the Loire, oil on canvas, 1923

La Grève Blanche, oil on canvas, 1913

Looking at these landscapes it is possible to see where contemporary Irish artists such as George Callaghan might have come from.

Valloton was extremely prolific and was also an accomplished portraitist:

Self-portrait, oil on canvas, 1914

Women with powder, oil on canvas, ?

The tones, the detail the flatness of the image all appeal and the approach is so different to the almost fantastical element that appears in the landscapes. When we move to his nude work which Barnes almost universally hated the same flatness can be observed:

African Woman, oil on canvas, 1911

The Abandoned Book, oil on canvas, ?

Admittedly,some of the other nudes are rather blocky an in others the influence of Ingres is rather painfully obvious; nonetheless,  I could see here where Lucian Freud might have come from both in the way of finishing faces and in the tone values used.

But here was the clincher for me:

These are example from a series of woodcuts called  Les Intimités. These are quite small but very intense in there use of large areas of undifferentiated black such as this one entitled Money:

 Equally the landscapes in woodcut are very dramatic: 

Prior to this wood had mainly been used as engraving for illustration but it would hardly be too dramatic to assert that Valloton changed the perception of the woodcut. This could be partly due to the infatuation with Japanese woodblock prints which had become very popular in France. There is evidence for this influence equally in the flat areas of colour used in many of his paintings and particularly The Lie with which we began.

Perhaps my enthusiasm for Valloton derives from my attachment to printmaking, but its not just that. I feel that Valloton has been unjustly neglected and I would advise first reading Barnes' essay , then seeking out the images foe oneself.

In passing I could also recommend Barnes' little book The Pedant in the Kitchen -a collection of his kitchen articles from the Guardian which are an absolute hoot.

 

Resurrection

Honestly.....I know it looks like three months since I wrote any thing here but it really isn't -I got as far as drafts on a number of occasions but they never made it to publication -there was always  a book or a piece of work or a trip to somewhere (anywhere!!) that called and the draft was lost.

Anyway here I am now ready to get at it. New - last  - year coming up: three weeks today(2 days ago!) - so it was time that one began to get head in order. There is a lot that I could talk about  - very intense gallery visit trip to London at the end of June; visit to Ballyferriter in the south-west which produced some interesting photos; a number of visits to Limerick Printmakers to avail of summer membership; printmaking at home; making a note/sketchbook for the coming year; organising a bookbinding weekend in Cloughjordan ( about which more later), but let's just start with  few pictures:

 

 

Right, what are we looking at  - if the theme of the past was being pursued it could be suggested that this was flayed skin and the axons of major nerves dragged out of a limb - that probably would seem somewhat gothic but after all that was a major part of thinking in what has been happening recently; however that would all be a bit of wishful thinking - still before explaining perhaps a few more gothic images are in order:

 

 

...and finally to explain where all of this came from....

 

 

...suitably dark and forboding ...

 

Alright, enough of the coyness - this is Smerwick Harbour on the north side of the Dingle Peninsula and was the site of a major massacre of Spanish sailors at Dún an Óir in the 17th century - their ghosts are still there.

The top images re of seaweed that I picked up on a late evening walk to a small beach near Ballyferriter, which reminded me of skin immediately. I hauled it all the way back here for photography.

 

That's a start - Ill give a little of the London trip next post