Summer's really over now

It's Sunday afternoon and I've made camp on the turquoise coloured futon sofa, which I'm rather fond of, in the sitting room. It can get a bit uncomfortable after a while since it's not exactly comfy - it has been described by one of our friends as the Japanese torture bed - but anyway here I am sniffing away with an autumnal cold.

There have been complaints over here in the UK about our summer because earlier in the year the Met Office rashly promised us a barbecue summer. The implication being that we would be enjoying a succession of hot summer days and we would be assailed with the smells of lighter fuel, burning charcoal and cremated sausages all summer long. Needless to say this didn't happen but we did have some spells of beautiful English weather and one of those times was when we went on holiday to Norfolk in late August.

We stayed in a tiny self-catering cottage on a working farm in Wymondham where the only sounds we could hear was birdsong, and at night it was so dark you couldn't see to the end of the driveway but the stars and planets above were clearly visible. We aimed to explore as much as we could of Norfolk in one week which was a bit ambitious and I aimed to do a drawing a day and almost managed it.

The sketch above was made from the Berney Arms Pub which claims to be the most remote pub in the county. We arrived there on foot having travelled by train which dropped us off at the smallest station platform I've ever seen and we had to request the train to stop, like a bus. I found that very amusing and it's the first time in my life I've spoken to the driver of the train I've been on. While we drove around Norfolk in the car we often saw massive wind turbines creating electricity. They look futuristic and very imposing but when we were walking around Norfolk we frequently came across the remains of old-fashioned windmills that drove water, or ground wheat. The one I have sketched above isn't a working windmill any more but it is complete and serves as a reminder of how hard people used to labour to get anything done.

We decided early in the week that driving around Norfolk was a waste of time so we stuck to train trips for the rest of our stay. This meant we spent quite a lot of time during the week waiting at Wymondham Station for trains to Norwich so that gave me a chance to commit a sketch to paper. The station has retained its 1950's/60's characteristics to appeal to the tourists and is something like a memory from my childhood. It even has a Brief Encounters style restaurant but we didn't try it in case the food tasted like something from the 1940's!

The one day we needed to use the car was the day we did a circular walk which more-or-less began and ended at Wiveton. It had taken us so long to get to the start of our walk we decided to start with lunch and so sat outside at the Wiveton Bell where I had a good view of St Mary's Church and was able to knock off this sketch while we waited for our food. I can't remember what fish was on the menu but I do know that it was the first time I have ever eaten Samphire. It is pronouced samfer and grows on coastal, tidal and salt marshes around the North Norfolk coast. I believe it is also known as Poor Man's Asparagus and I remember seeing it growing wild when we were on our walks.

So that's my blogging postcard from my summer holiday and I've enjoyed remembering our week getting back to nature.

One & Other

Last Monday lunchtime, as I was leaving one job and walking to the next, I remembered that I had not been to Trafalgar Square to see Anthony Gormley's art project One & Other since it had begun back in early July so I thought I'd better get there and check it out.

Anthony Gormley explains the idea of One & Other far more eloquently than I can and the website is well worth looking at so I suggest you go and take a look at. It doesn't matter if you are living thousands of miles away from Trafalgar Square because you'll get a much better view of the fourth plinth than you do when you are standing nearby as I found when I ate my picnic lunch sitting on a wall near the National Gallery.

There has been a debate running for years now about what to do with the empty fourth plinth in the north west of Trafalgar Square. There is the famous statue of Lord Nelson on top of his column with four lions at the base of the column protecting it. There are two fountains with mermaids and dolphins that people like to paddle in on hot summer days and there are three bronze statues of General Sir Charles James Napier in the south west, Major General Sir Henry Havelock in the south east and King George IV in the north east.

So Anthony Gormley came up with his idea and frankly I find the idea much more interesting that the reality. The hour I went to visit the plinth there was someone on it trying to have a party all by herself: it was extremely tedious and a bit sad - it was much more interesting watching passers by. Any way as I write this there is some bloke on the plinth dressed up as a daffodil and wiggling his bottom! Enjoy.

Fabiola complaint

Following my blog titled: 'What makes art ART?' (21 May), where I grumbled about the Fabiola exhibition Marta made the sensible suggestion that I tell the National Portrait Gallery what I think about it. So I have and this is my letter to them. I am hoping to get a reply and if I do I will post it here for your amusement. The important thing to me is that I feel better for having written it and I will stop fuming about it.

I have always enjoyed my visits to the National Portrait Gallery which have often been made at lunchtimes or when I've been on the way to somewhere else. The NPG has become part of my cultural life. I have nearly always been favourably impressed with the standard of craftsmanship and appreciate being able to drop in on Henry VIII and people currently in the public eye on the same visit.

So for the first time I have to write and say how disappointed I was with Francis Alÿs' exhibition 'Fabiola'. I find the accompanying leaflet justifying the exhibition both pretentious and incomprehensible. This quote just sums it up for me 'By installing it in the National Portrait Gallery, he solicits the kinds of aesthetic and historical questions typically addressed to Old Master artworks, questions, pertaining to authorship, iconography, function, originality and uniqueness.' I'm sorry, but this strikes me as a load of old baloney considering that the content of the exhibition is a job lot of amateur paintings collected from junk shops and they don't rate such high blown praise.

The leaflet mentions that this installation has also been exhibited in New York and Los Angeles so I can only assume that a good number of art curators in the western world have been collectively conned into thinking this is material worth throwing good money at.

This experience won't stop me from visiting your fine gallery but I will be prepared to question future exhibits more in the future than I have in the past.

Post script written on 24 September: The exhibition has now closed and I never did receive a reply. I wonder if my complaint was even read by anyone - I suspect not.

View of the River Seine

I've been thinking for some time of including an image into the header of this blog. So now I have. This image is based on a sketch I made while sitting on the bank of the Seine in Normandy not far from Monet's garden at Giverney. It is acrylic on canvas and hangs on the wall in my Mum's sitting room.

What makes art ART?

Yesterday I had a job interview and had some time to kill before my appointment so I drifted into the National Portrait gallery near Trafalgar Square. I'd already had my lunch, been to the bank, done some window shopping around Covent Garden and was getting a bit bored and wanted to find somewhere dump my portfolio and have a mooch around. I considered going up to the top floor to look at the Tudors because I haven't seen Henry VIII for really quite a while but chose to stick to the galleries on the first floor since I had my eye on the time.

Tucked away in two small galleries away from the corridor full of photos of famous people there is an exhibition entitled Fabiola. It consists of around 300 paintings, tapestries, and a collage made from beans and lentils of the same subject who was a fourth-century Christian saint known as Fabiola who evidently is the protector of abused women and patron saint of nurses. She is shown as a young woman in profile, facing left and wearing a crimson veil. Apparently all these images are based on a 19th century painting by an artist called Jean-Jacques Henner which is now lost. They were created by anonymous craftspeople and artists who were mostly amateurs and all the pieces on show were made by hand and not mechanically reproduced.

There is a comfy seat in the middle of the first gallery which looked very inviting so I sat on that with several other people and began to inspect the images of this woman on the walls. It was like looking at wallpaper because you are looking at what is basically a repeating pattern, young woman, profile, crimson veil etc which made me feel as though I was drifting into a trance (or perhaps it was the effects of my lunch). I roused myself before I fell into a deep sleep and went into the neighbouring gallery where there were yet more of these images on display and I began to think 'yeah and so what'.

I suppose you could describe this exhibition as an installation because the artist whose name is attached to it, Francis Alÿs, hasn't as far as I could tell actually created anything in these two rooms. It represents his collection which he acquired over a period of 15 years from antique shops and flea markets in Europe and the Americas which for all I know also represented a bit of an obsession. The accompanying brochure seems full of bullshit to me and here is an example: 'In the eyes of its creator, artist Francis Alÿs, this ensemble of artefacts invites investigation as a collection. Bla, bla, bla.'

I like to leave an exhibition feeling stimulated and if possible inspired to go home and produce more work but this left me feeling duped and asking the question 'why did the National Portrait gallery, which has an international reputation, fall for this? It had nothing really to impart about portraiture and if this artist had a collection of used toothbrushes collected over 15 years would they have also put that on display?' It made me think of the 'emperor's new clothes'.

Child shoe designer

I've been roaming around other people's blogs today in an effort to avoid sorting out my paperwork. On one of them, that I reached somehow through the Folksy site, the author was showing off her favourite party shoes.

This reminded me of a time when one of my enthusiasms as a child was shoe designing. It was great fun and I think this period represents the start of my adult life as a designer. It must have been in the summer time because wearing Scholl sandals became very popular among the neighbouring adults. Having a look at their website just now made me giggle and frankly the designs haven't changed much. They are called exercise sandals.

Anyway I was much impressed with these items of footwear and since I was about 10 years old there wasn't any chance of me owning a pair I decided to make my own version-out of cardboard. My friend Susan, who lived in the same road and was a couple of years younger than me, and I laboured away drawing around the shape of our bare feet while standing on thick cardboard. Then we cut the shapes out and fashioned wide straps to keep them on which we must have glued underneath the cardboard soles. The best bit was when we decorated the straps with glitter and stuff thereby making far more interesting sandals than any grown-up was likely to own and hey presto we had our very own version of Scholl sandals. They would last a few days before they fell apart and then we'd make some more.

Susan's Dad thought we were completely mad and for some years afterwards I think it was the only thing he could remember about me but what he clearly didn't understand was how much fun it was making them and then re-making them when the old one's wore out. I wonder whatever happened to Susan and her Dad?

Tuesday, 10.30am - Nora phones

'Heather hi, bla bla bla, yada yada yada, I'm visiting London now with my niece, Zoë and we'd thought we'd visit the Whitechapel. I want to see Guernica. Have you seen it?'

'No I haven't.' (I thought Guernica was in Madrid).

'So when shall we meet? How will you get there? So, fine we'll meet at 2.30pm then. Bye.'

So at 3.15pm I arrived breathless at the doorway to Whitechapel Gallery that is actually next to Aldgate East tube station, not Whitechapel as you might expect. In the interests of economy I had decided that I'd walk to the gallery from home not realising that it would take the best part of an hour to get there but I'm sure the walk did me no end of good.

The Whitechapel Gallery has just reopened its doors after a major refurb. When I walked through the main entrance it seemed to me oddly like it had before its refurb but freshly painted in nice white paint. The great thing was it was completely free which was fantastic because I had a vague recollection that I had had to pay to see an exhibition of Lucian Freud's work there. But hey, perhaps I was wrong and maybe that had been free too. I also expected my visit to be oh so pretentious and arty and it was nothing of the sort. The work was very accessible and a lot of it was interesting so I reckon I was feeling very prejudiced towards the place before I even got there and it did me no harm to have my preconceived ideas turned on their head.

The gallery Nora whisked me into was the one I stayed in for longest. The painting of Guernica was painted by Pablo Picasso as his response to the destruction of the Basque town Gernika by the Nazis and Fascists in 1937 during the Spanish Civil War. The version on display here is a life-size tapestry of the painting which has been on display at the United Nations Headquarters in New York since 1985. It is a powerful image and takes up most of the space of the far wall in the gallery. This tapestry forms the centrepiece of an art installation which is made up of a few separate pieces which all have something powerful to say about the horrors of war. These works have been selected by Goshka Macuga who is a London-based Polish artist and the exhibition is called The Bloomberg Commission. While I found Guernica very interesting there was a film playing on a continuous loop which was a documentary about life and death in Iraq with copious numbers of dead bodies and injured children which was eye opening and unlike anything you'd see on the evening tv news.

Once I'd felt I'd had enough of death and destruction and said goodbye to my friends I had a quick visit around the rest of the place. What I hadn't appreciated was that the old public library next door had been absorbed into the gallery thereby increasing the floor space enormously. I will look forward to my next visit when I can pay closer attention to the spaces upstairs with fresh eyes.