Art on the run

Tacita Dean: Film

2011-11-15T18:59:00.000Z

I walked over Hungerford Bridge yesterday because I wanted to get to the south bank of the Thames. I didn't want to stay on the north side with all the traffic and noise.

I'd enjoyed lunch earlier in Soho at the Freelance Media Group's monthly meeting and it was great fun chatting and eating especially as it's held at the Groucho Club. Then I had a quick catch up with my friend who helps runs the group over a cup of tea in a nearby café.

When we parted company what I really wanted was some silence and inactivity. As I walked over Hungerford Bridge a heavy mist settled over the Thames and I could barely see the outlines of office buildings behind St Paul's Cathedral. And with the mist came silence. I turned left at the Festival Hall and walked along the river bank towards Blackfriars Bridge. There were few people around and the Christmas Market stalls, not yet open for business, were being decorated with tinsel and lights. In a few days time I'll be able to buy gingerbread, clothing, bags, notebooks made from recycled paper and more food than I can point a stick at but not yesterday or indeed today.

There was a lone busker singing along to digital music stored on her laptop. It sounded quite pleasant but I walked passed without throwing any change in her cap. There were a few second hand book stalls set up outside the British Film Institute. I had a brief look but didn't feel like lingering and turning any pages.

As I reached the OXO tower a tug sailed by towing a barge with containers, probably full of household waste, in the direction of the Thames estuary. The sound it made boomed across the river and briefly penetrated the silence. I had to leave the Thames Path at Blackfriars Bridge and shortly afterwards I entered the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern.

Tacita Dean's installation Film is on show at the far end of the Turbine Hall. This venue used to be a power station and the Turbine Hall is vast. By the time I'd reached the bench provided for viewers to sit on to watch Film I'd become accustomed to the lack of light. I had to walk slowly and tip-toed around other viewers. We sat in a straight line and it reminded me of monks observing a religious service in the middle of the night. The silence was interrupted by clanging coming from somewhere else in the building.

Tacita Dean is an artist who uses film in a similar way a painter uses paint. Film has sprocket holes, there are 24 frames a second and 16 frames in a 35mm foot. Images can become distorted, the emulsion can get scratched and film is expensive. Stocks of it are becoming increasingly hard to find. In fact some companies have stopped making it altogether because digital recording with its special effects have taken the film industry over.

Apparently Tacita has no time for digital recording preferring instead the subtle nuances of physical film. She labouriously filmed and spliced together this film that lasts 11 minutes, but feels in the darkness a lot longer, a combination of moving and still images and it feels like a homage to traditional film making. She combined footage of waves in water with bubbles and fountains, along with escalators and blocks of colour in primary colours. I quote from her: 'Film is a visual poem. I found its rhythm and metre from the material itself... Film is about film, and in the end, I let the material's intrinsic magic be my guide.'

Having watched this film, which is on a continuous loop, spellbound for more than 11 minutes I left Tate Modern as dusk was falling so it was almost as dark outside as it had been inside. As I walked over the Millennium Bridge towards St Paul's the brightly lit windows of the City of London school and adjacent offices echoed the images I had been watching in Film just a few minutes before.

The Poster King - Edward McKnight Kauffer

2011-10-28T18:45:00.000+01:00

In the summer I joined the Islington Arts Society. This was partly to expand my circle of artistic acquaintances and partly to get the opportunity to exhibit my art.

One of the benefits of membership was an invitation on Wednesday evening to visit the Estorick Collection to see the exhibition The Poster King - Edward McKnight Kauffer and listen to a talk by the curator.

The core of the Estorick Collection is work from the Futurist movement and also includes modern Italian art dating from 1895 to the 1950s. Almost the first thing the curator did was to ask a question of himself: What is an artist born in Montana in the United States and settled in England doing on show in a gallery designed to promote Italian art? The answer, which is a bit tenuous, was that Edward McNight Kauffer drew a lot of his inspiration from Fauvism, Vorticism and Constructivism and this includes the work of Italian artists.

I'm familiar with Kauffer's poster designs for the London Underground encouraging passengers to explore the Surrey Hills in their spare time or rush to the Winter Sales or visit the Natural History Museum. I had no idea though that he had been at the forefront of commercial art when it was in its infancy in the early years of the 20th century.

His talent was spotted when a very young man by Joseph E McKnight, a professor at the University of Utah. This man became a benefactor and paid for Kauffer to continue his education in Paris in 1912. As a mark of gratitude Kauffer eventually incorporated his benefactor's surname into his own. At the outbreak of WWI Kauffer had to leave France and made for England and in 1915 received a commission to design posters for London Underground.

There were examples on display of finished artwork for some of the posters which I found fascinating. Having been a graphic design student in the 1970s I could appreciate the labour involved in creating these works. Whereas I recall struggling and failing to create anything worthwhile Kauffer had set the standards for commercial art for the rest of us to follow 60 years before.

Kauffer's heart appeared to lie in the pictorial side of posters rather than the typography. I know to my cost that doing typography well is very difficult to achieve and there are two examples on display where he had to patch over mistakes (I would love to have seen what was underneath).

The work Kauffer did for London Underground led him to receive commissions from various companies and publishing houses. this included work for Shell and BP - by this time the typography was being done by someone else - so Kauffer could concentrate on developing ways of incorporating new technology like photo-montage into his images. By 1925 Kauffer was so famous there was a retrospective exhibition of his work, and he was only 35. He continued being very productive until the outbreak of WWII when, as a US citizen and with commissions becoming scarce, he and his wife returned to live in the US.

It appears he did this with much regret and, although he continued to work, the last decade of his life didn't live up to the success he had enjoyed while settled in England.

Well rounded cabbages

2011-10-27T11:07:00.000+01:00

Saturday saw us at the Tower of London and on Sunday we were swanning around Chichester in West Sussex. What a contrast that was. On Saturday evening my sister-in-law spotted a review in the paper of an exhibition of Edward Burra's paintings at Pallant House and on Sunday morning that is where we headed.

To my shame here is another artist I had never heard of but apparently Edward Burra (1905-1976) was one of the most individual and celebrated artists of the 20th century. Like Tracey Emin's work you find yourself drawn into his paintings even if you find them repellent or menacing.

A lot of his works are very large watercolours using several sheets of paper joined together. I don't think I've seen watercolour paintings this big before with such intensity and depth of colour. According to one of the printed notices on the wall his friends said he would begin painting at the bottom right hand corner and work his way up to the top left hand corner. He had such a fantastic sense of composition and storytelling that you find your eyes going round and round a painting while you explore it to the point of feeling travel sick.

Because of the size of these works I assumed he must have used large brushes. This assumption was crushed when we got a chance to look at some of his brushes and palettes on display in a cabinet. They were tiny! So that made me wonder just how long it took him to complete one piece of work and there was a lot of work on display.

In his youth he was fascinated with the dark side of humanity and it is present in very ordinary looking scenes, for example sailors buying coffee in a café. He uses perspective in an odd way which is disturbing. A lot of the work is sexually ambiguous and he was fascinated with soldiers, sailors and prostitutes and particularly their well rounded behinds. As I moved from one painting to another I got the feeling that these characters were following my every move.

In time Edward Burra turned to still lifes and landscapes. Apparently he had a photographic memory so could recall a view when he was back in his studio. I wish I could do that. One still life depicted well rounded cabbages that recalled the well rounded bottoms of soldiers climbing into a truck in an earlier gallery. He managed to instill menace into these cabbages and I felt they were following me around too! A still life of flowers in a vase appeared to have eyes that followed us around as well.

His depiction of the English landscape was not in the least sentimental and in one showed the pollution being belched out by lorries and motorcycles. Of all his work these were the works I most liked. There was one charming painting he probably made towards the end of his life. It is a collection of portraits of local characters including a self-portrait of him standing away from everyone else eating a Cornish pasty.

Trip to the Tower

2011-10-23T22:49:00.000+01:00

Yesterday we had a trip to the Tower of London. This visit had been in the diary for weeks and yesterday finally arrived complete with glorious autumn weather.

In the bad old days prisoners used to arrive at Traitor's Gate by boat so we opted to do the same. We travelled on a Thames Clipper which I always enjoy. This is a fleet of catamarans that plough their way up and down the Thames at regular intervals, usually used by commuters, and they are free of irritating commentary. You simply look out of the window which is what our two young companions were happy to do.

The last time I visited the Tower I was eight years old so really don't remember anything about it. This time I was only too happy to try and take in as much as possible. The Tower is part of the Historic Royal Palaces. These are palaces that the Royal Family don't actually live in any longer.

The Tower is over 1,000 years old. When you enter the site it is like arriving in a small self-contained town. Outside the site modern day London exists with traffic streaming past. Inside the site people clearly live there in apartments with their cars parked outside their front doors. Since it was a nice day someone had their washing out on a washing line. There were signs of pot plants and garden chairs. However on the other side of these apartments is a moat. A moat for heavens sake! (It is drained and grassed over these days.) I found these signs of normal suburban life quite disconcerting.

My limited knowledge of the Tower was all about high status prisoners being tortured before being executed. This did happen but what I didn't know was that the Tower was an important administrative centre where records were kept. It was where coins were minted and weapons were stored. The course of the old Roman wall runs through it.

I could wax lyrical about the crown jewels, the architecture and the grounds. I could laugh about the numbers of historical re-enacters who were milling or marching around wearing authentic costumes but I will desist from all this.

Instead I'll stick to two aspects that I found fascinating. One was the armour that was made to measure for various kings, most notably Henry VIII. By looking at his suits of armour you could get a sense of the man that wore them. You could see just how much weight he put on over the years as his waistline ballooned. There was also a sculpture of his face and he really was an ugly old brute but he was a big and immensely powerful, ugly old brute.

The other thing that surprised me was how many exotic animals used to live in the Tower. They were part of the Royal Menagerie.The only wildlife living there now are ravens. Apparently it was common, centuries ago, for monarchs to compete with each other in the giving of exotic and extravagant gifts. I was astonished that one of our kings had a pet polar bear that was allowed to fish in the Thames. There are beautiful metal statues around the grounds representing the different types of monkeys that were allowed to roam freely. There were lions and a grissly bear called Martin. To my modern-day mind this is quite ridiculous but was quite normal then.

This continued for over 600 years. Eventually the animals were rehoused in the 1820s in the new London Zoo because too many visitors were either being attacked or left for dead by some of these animals. I am very glad on this visit we only gazed at life-size sculptures of exotic animals that included an elephant and maybe a panther or two and not the real thing.

Richard of York gave battle in vain

2011-10-21T21:21:00.000+01:00

The title of this post is a mnemonic for the continuous spectrum of colours of red, orange, yellow, green, blue indigo and violet and it is also the title of an exhibition curated by Cornelia Parker which is currently showing at the Whitechapel (I think this becoming my favourite art gallery).

I paid my second visit to this show today and before my first visit I must admit that I had never heard of Richard of York gave battle in vain. I would have expected to have run across it at art school but then again I don't recall lectures on colour so maybe that's why I'm learning about it now.

These works are part of the Government Art Collection which totals, according to the booklet listing the pieces, more than 13,500 works of art.That's quite a collection and they are spread across the known world in government buildings and embassies and so on.

Cornelia Parker, whose own work is concerned with collecting and collections, chose to select around 70 works of art and arrange them by colour around the room and hang them in the style of the old Royal Academy exhibition. This means that some of them are hanging very high up indeed near the ceiling, and there is a general feeling of a lack of space. I quite liked this approach.

My favourite image, this time round, is the same as my favourite image from my last visit. Interestingly enough my companions were different on each occasion and we were all in agreement that Graham Crowley's Blue Lane (2003-4 oil on canvas) was a compelling piece of work and we'd have all like to take it home with us.

I enjoyed seeing some works that are hundreds of years old cheek by jowl with contemporary pieces. The drapery on Lady Anne Rich's portrait (1626) was mind boggling but so too was the complexity of Grayson Perry's enormous etching Print for a Politician (2005). I also enjoyed Darren Almond photograph of Flatford @ Fullmoon (2000) and Hamish Fulton's No talking for seven days (1993).

This exhibition is on until 4 December 2011 so I've got time to go and see it again. The following exhibition begins on 16 December 2011 and it's titled Travelling Light and the works, from the Government Art Collection, have been selected by Simon Schama.

Got my dates wrong

2011-10-02T16:46:00.000+01:00

Yesterday I wrote about the first time I saw Pre-Raphaelite paintings in a real gallery. I remember being quite dazzled by them, seeing them in the flesh so-to-speak and it caused my little heart to flutter. This was because I'd been introduced to the movement having watched a tv drama about them on the BBC and wasn't prepared for a real life encounter with them.

I wasn't 17 as I wrote yesterday, I was in fact 18 years old. At this stage in my life I was old enough to get married without permission, vote in an election and serve in the armed forces for my country. Quite the adult you might say except I was so ignorant about art history it took the BBC to teach me about the Pre-Raphaelites. I have discovered on Wikipedia that the series was called The Love School if you want to go and check it out and it was broadcast in 1975.

Just a couple of weekends ago I had the chance to go to the Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery for the first time. It was built in 1885 and it has a huge collection of paintings, silver work, cast iron work and it is also home to the world's largest collection of Pre-Raphaelite art.

By the time I had navigated my way to the galleries where they were hung I had enjoyed watching some short films about how artists make their art, wandered around the building taking in the architecture and read any number of small notices naming and describing artworks. So I was feeling a bit wan by the time I had stumbled across Burne-Jones.

Now I am no longer 18 years old I can view these paintings a bit more dispassionately than I could more than 30 years ago. My heart doesn't go pitter patter and I find some of the subject matter a bit cloying but I continue to be impressed with the standard of draughtsmanship. It was like a master class in understanding perseverance given the scale and detail of some of the works. It's always tempting to imagine that famous artists had numerous apprentices to help them do the grunt work but that may not be the case at all.

When I left the museum I felt in need of a lie down. Now, with hindsight, it is the quality and quiet presence of the art that remains with me.

Did you go to art galleries when you were a child?

2011-10-01T16:02:00.000+01:00

I began thinking about this question today when I was visiting the Whitechapel gallery in Aldgate, east London.

I was there with my husband and a friend and we were in the Rothko in Britain exhibition which is upstairs in the part of the gallery that used to be a public library. It is a small room and there is one of his paintings on display plus quite a lot of his personal correspondence laid out in two cabinets that you can spend time reading. There are also photographs of his exhibition at the Whitechapel from 1961.

These are grainy black and white photos of people looking at the work and it includes a small boy, maybe about five years old, having a good look at a painting from its right hand edge plus another one of a younger child in a pushchair.

I often see small children being taken around galleries now but I don't recall ever being taken to any as a child. I do recall in the mid 60's being taken to Stonehenge by my parents and later on historic houses and areas of outstanding natural beauty.

I did a very small straw poll of my companions and they only began visiting galleries when they were old enough to decide for themselves what they wanted to do. In my case I was about 17 and I believe I saw the Pre-Raphaelites for the first time.

Tracey Emin - 'Love is what you want'

2011-06-19T20:36:00.000+01:00

This afternoon Graham and I had a mini holiday swanning around our home town which also doubles as our capital city, London. After we'd had lunch in Islington we abandoned our original plan of joining in the World Literature Weekend because we would have been too late getting there having spent too long in the Compton Arms setting the world to rights with some friends from Union Chapel.

So we jumped on a bus heading towards Waterloo and got off near the South Bank Centre. We decided, since we were there, that we might as well go and see Tracey Emin's exhibition Love is what you want. Neither of us have been what you'd call mad fans of her work but we were prepared to give her a go, so to speak. And the exhibition was amazing.

If the job of an artist is to shed light on some aspect of the human condition that often remains concealed Tracey does that in spades. She mines her personal history and puts it on display for all to see and it's often very confrontational and painful to look at. She is described as a natural storyteller and she says of herself that 'writing is the backbone of everything she does'. She creates blankets with appliquéd words sewn onto them which recount episodes from her family history. She works in neon too so her words are lit up in pinks and blues.

She's made short films which are both funny and poignant and being short deserve watching more than once. Her output is staggering and it includes sculpture and drawings, large and small and collections of memorabilia. I'm often tempted, when visiting an exhibition, to skip over some items and leave with a general view. But in this exhibition I found I was drawn into her work and left feeling emotionally wrung out by the descriptions of sexual abuse, abortions, looking for love, losing love, living alone, the loss of fertility and seeing her beloved Nan's (grandmother) dead body for the last time.

Following this we needed therapeutic coffee and cake and headed to the Members' Bar in the Festival Hall nearby where I made the sketch below. Thanks Tracey, great show!

View over the river Thames from the Festival Hall

Making art is constantly puzzling

2011-05-01T15:59:00.008+01:00


Boats, Lyon April 2011 (detail)

I've just noticed that I haven't posted anything here since last September which is about eight months ago. That's partly because I've been concentrating on my drawing project Drawing my way round London and partly because I haven't had much to say... until now (I take a long time to think).

I would love to be able to make art fast. Just toss off one piece of artwork after another, frame it and sell it. Then get on with the next one. But I've learned over the years that I can't work like that. It's as though I have to work at the pace the artwork wants to proceed at and that can been dead slow.

Impromtu Kafe, Lyon

I do keep on drawing regularly and trying out new ideas and very often these turn out to be interesting studies rather than anything I'd want to hang on a wall but they are valuable none-the-less. I made this image of boats (above) just the other week while on holiday in France. I used oil pastel on acrylic paper and then worked into it with white spirit. I like the result but it is only a study. I made the sketch on the left at a café we stopped at while we were exploring the artisan quarter of Lyon.

Then yesterday evening I made these quick sketches of other customers at the Lauriston bar/restaurant near where we live. These quick portraits are none too flattering but I just wanted to see if I could capture a likeness without trying too hard. Sadly one of these women looks like an old hag which was unintentional since she was probably in her twenties.

Then every so often though something will coalesce and I'll produce something worthwhile that I can be proud of like this view below looking from Corbridge in Northumberland that I was happy to frame and hang on our sitting room wall.

Ferry across the Mersey

2010-09-24T17:44:00.000+01:00

Albert Dock, Liverpool in the rain

Last Sunday afternoon I took refuge in Tate Liverpool having got soaked to the skin in a sudden downpour that took me completely by surprise while I was exploring the Albert Dock. I was in Liverpool for a few days working at the Liberal Democrat conference being held at the Arena and Convention Centre near by and grabbed the opportunity to get away from politics and enjoy a bit of culture and time on my own in the afternoon.

I left my soaking wet coat in the cloakroom and tried to dry my hair using the hand dryer in the ladies' toilets. But I still felt rather damp so decided to make my visit to the gallery a leisurely one so I could dry out properly. When I'd reached the first floor of what presumably had originally been a warehouse I took a moment to glance out of the window to look at the Mersey river made famous by the song Ferry across the Mersey. I still found the view exciting in spite of the bleakness and grey sky so took a moment to sketch it and make some notes.

I was thrilled when I went into this gallery to see my all-time favourite artist, Mondrian, represented by one of his vertical/horizontal paintings. I have found his work inspiring ever since I was introduced to it at school when I was 16 years old and am always happy to meet him again, so to speak. Marta will be interested to note that there was a 'nude study in blue' circa 1899-1900 by Henri Matisse that had a still quiet quality to it that was very appealing.

There were a couple of Picasso's (he's probably my second favourite artist after Mondrian) and I particularly liked the 'seated woman in a chemise' 1923 that was also rather serene. More recent artists were also on show like Carl Andre whose work has always been very controversial. Here they had on display his '144 magnesium square' 1969 which consists of 144 squares of magnesium laid out on the floor. I noticed that no-one was stepping on it but just carefully walking around it until a couple of children walked on it. When I saw them do it I joined in. There was another exhibit on the floor by Richard Long who makes 'art made by walking in landscape' that was also very intriguing. I think the last artist's work I looked at was a piece by contemporary artist Rachel Whiteread before I headed to the café for a restorative cup of tea and piece of cake.

Art in hospitals

2010-07-29T17:00:00.000+01:00

Years ago I was an outpatient at St Thomas' Hospital in London. Fortunately I wasn't particularly ill or anything so this meant that while I was traipsing along corridors and up and down stairs to make various visits to different departments I could revel in the display of artwork on the walls. They seemed to have quite a collection and this was news to me - I didn't know that hospitals might be repositories for the creative arts.

Some years later I was visiting an elderly friend who was a patient at the Middlesex hospital. She wasn't in great health but she was very keen for me to see the hospital chapel and offered to take me on a visit. So I followed her as she hobbled out of the ward in her dressing gown and headed towards the lift. Eventually we reached the door of the chapel and went in and it was like entering Aladdin's cave. My strongest memory of it was lots of glittering mosaics everywhere - it looked very Art Deco and it certainly lifted my spirits.

The old Middlesex hospital has now been demolished and a new glass and concrete hospital has been built nearby. While doing a bit of internet research for this blog I came across a site with photos of the interior of the Art Deco chapel and the author said that it was going to be demolished along with the rest of the hospital which made me a little sad.

What I hadn't noticed on that visit were four very large oil paintings that took pride of place in the reception area. Fortunately paintings, even very large ones, are portable and they are currently on display at the National Gallery. Yesterday I went to see them.

They were painted by Frederick Cayley Robinson. He was a mature artist by the time he received this commission which pleased me no end. The whole project took from 1915 until 1920 to complete and the group as a whole is called 'Acts of Mercy'. You can read the reasons for the commission by following the link to the National Gallery above which is interesting in itself.

The two paintings which I found most moving are: Orphans I and Orphans II. They show a group of girls, identically dressed queuing up for food in a refectory (I bought a postcard of each of these paintings which don't really do them justice but are good reminders of what was in them). The girls look sombre and tired and every face is different and individual. I imagine that the artist would have had access to an orphanage and could spend time making detailed sketches of the different girls. I found this attention to detail refreshing because very often you see the same face repeated over and again when an artist wants to create a crowd scene.

The paintings are very atmospheric and full of tension - they're not the kind of thing you'd want hanging in your living room. You'll read on the National Gallery website that they are reminiscent of Leonardo's The Last Supper and they also recall Dutch 17th century paintings which seems to be an accurate observation. In the exhibition they have hung some Italian masters (sorry, I didn't jot the names down) alongside these paintings to show the Italian influence on Frederick Cayley Robinson.

It's just dawned on me that I found these paintings have a similar intense quality to them as do Wilhelm Hammershøi's who I wrote about back in 2008. You can read that post if you click on the label: intriguing interiors below.

My ongoing drawing project

2010-06-10T19:44:00.000+01:00

My ongoing drawing project that involves me traveling to every station on the old North London line and drawing at least one picture when I get there now has its own blog and you can find it here. I began it in 2005 and hope I finish it this decade!

Our Parisian finale

2010-06-05T10:28:00.011+01:00

We were serenaded below the window of the apartment on our last night

So by Saturday, our last full day on this short trip, our batteries were really running down. After breakfast we pottered off to Musée de Cluny and revisited the famous medieval tapestries of the Lady and the Unicorn but even their sumptuous detail and workmanship couldn't hold our attention for long - more coffee was calling.

We wound up at a nearby cafe, sitting outside in the gloom, near a young American couple. They were with a female friend who was hogging their conversation: yak, yak, yak. The guy in the couple seemed to be withdrawing into his coat, his girlfriend was nodding politely - we paid and left.

We realised that there was no hope of finding a post office nearby to send our two cards to our respective mothers so pressed on towards the Metro. Our plan was to trek over to the Hôtel national des Invalides to see the tomb of Napoleon. Something else I've never done. This was where I got really quite excited because, after traipsing around endless tunnels and up and down stairs, we arrived at the B-line platform and got on a suburban train for two stops. These trains have two decks (like double decker buses) and it felt like we were going off on a long trip into the unknown.

Our suburban train ride was soon over. When we were back up on street level we walked down a very long, wide avenue where at the end there is a building that dwarfs everything around it. This, as Graham told me, is the Hôtel national des Invalides. Thinking this was too much to tackle on an empty stomach we headed off towards a district where we hoped to find a restaurant. We found several and enjoyed an excellent meal for a cold day.

Now we were fortified and ready for Napoleon and his tomb. It struck me that to get to any destination in Paris you have to walk miles. Before we could get to old Boney we walked through a gate, along a path, through another gate into a huge courtyard with cloister-like walkways. In the courtyard there were groups of military type young people pacing around as if in rehearsal for some future event - we gawped at them for a bit. Once through the courtyard we carried on walking and walking until we got to the imposing front door of the chapel for Napoleon's tomb.

What a weird place this is. Unlike most Christian churches which run from West to East, this runs from North to South. Napoleon was a short man but you wouldn't know it looking at his tomb which, I understand, has maybe five coffins stacked inside each other, and then placed inside this weird marble edifice. The tomb is in the crypt but can be seen from above. Surrounding the tomb are protective pagan goddesses and plaster reliefs depicting Napoleon in heroic poses. It was well odd but worth one visit.

And that really was enough. Time to return to our friends' apartment for the last time and enjoy the serenade from the band that was roaming around the neighbourhood.

We love the Tuileries

2010-06-04T10:08:00.011+01:00

A peaceful pause in the Tuileries

On our second full day of our trip Graham suggested that we visit the Musée de L'institute du Monde Arab. According to the description on our museum pass the institution was planned to raise and spread awareness of Arab culture and it has 500 works which shed light on the history of the Arab world. This sounded like a good start to the day - the sun was out and the institute was a short walk away so off we went with our hosts, Robert and Joan.

We arrived at the building. We were allowed in after a bag check. We walked up to the ticket desk waving our museum passes only to be told that the building was closed for refurbishment. We could see this was happening because there were any number of men feeding cables through ducts. The staff were sorry.

Being closed for refurbishment became a theme of the day. Later on we decided to have lunch at the large airy cafeteria in the Louvre where you can create your own salad but sadly it was closed. For refurbishment. So we made do with a sandwich we bought at a stall on a landing.

Then we thought that since we'd missed seeing Arab art in the morning we would check it out in the Louvre since we were there and we could see a sign more-or-less saying 'Arab art this way'. So we began walking in that direction and got hopelessly lost. We wound up in a gallery describing itself as Graeco Roman and nearly every exhibit was missing (obviously being refurbished).

By now we were fairly sick of the Louvre so headed for the Jardin des Tuileries on our way to Musée National de l'Orangerie. Now our mood changed completely and we had smiles on our faces again. I was fairly staggered by the size of the gardens. I know I have visited them before but they can't have made any impact on me because this felt like my first visit. The French do love their formal gardens. There are wide avenues to stroll along and wonderful arrangements of flowers in the borders. The grass is all roped off so you can't walk on it, unlike at home where we are likely to leave food left-over from barbecues lying all over the place. There are endless numbers of outdoor cafés serving delicious pastries and coffee. After sampling the food and drink we needed to visit the loo. Sorry, it's closed for refurbishment - (go find another one).

Refurbs aside we made it to l'Orangerie at the earnest recommendation of Robert and Joan. They had been knocked out by an exhibition of Paul Klee's art and some very large paintings of waterlillies by Monet. We had a sense of being underwater while we were there and I felt I wasn't so much looking at the paintings as being consumed by them. I could understand it when Robert had said that he had felt claustrophobic when he was in these galleries.

Paul Klee's work was a revelation to me. I have been familiar with his name for decades and really knew nothing about him. He was Swiss, he taught at the Bauhaus until the Nazis made life impossible for him, he was a talented musician and poet as well as a painter. Quite a lot of his work is on a small scale as is mine and I felt I was in the presence of a kindred spirit. He is definitely someone I'd like to know more about and this made me very happy.

Bonjour Paris

2010-05-31T17:09:00.007+01:00

A rainy Thursday in May, so much for springtime in Paris

In Charles Stross' The Merchant Princes series of books the characters are divided into clans and because these books combine science fiction, alternative reality and general all-round nuttiness the device these characters employ to move from one world to another, known as world-walking, seems entirely plausible. They stare at a design called a clan knot and before you know it they disappear through a portal and end up in who knows where.

I was reminded of this knotwork device last week as we were about to board Eurostar. We'd printed out our tickets at home and had to hold our own knotwork (otherwise known as a bar code) against a reader before we could pass through our own portal called security and passport control. Our train was on time, comfortable and included genial neighbours and was over before we knew it. Honestly, it takes longer for us to get to Newcastle than it does to Paris and in that sense Paris does not feel as though it is in another country.

Earlier this year I'd enjoyed reading Marta Szabo's account of her recent trip to Paris which you'll find here and it is a fascinating read as it was her first trip to the city. This was definitely not my first visit - and I'm beginning to feel as though it could become a second home - in that it has that comfortable old pair of slippers feel. We were staying with friends from Canada who every year for the last four years have rented the same small apartment in the Latin Quarter and they generously lend us the sofa bed. Whenever we see them, either in the UK or France, we always pick up where we left off. I hadn't seen them for two years but it might as well have been two weeks ago - there's always plenty to talk about.

We always buy a two-day museum pass and belt around the city on foot wearing ourselves out and now I am back home in London I'm recuperating by writing this while camped out on the sofa. One place I have never been is the Conciergerie. It began life as a palace and ended up as a prison that had the reputation for being one of the toughest. It held many people the State regarded as dispensable during the French Revolution including the Queen, Marie-Antionette and Charlotte Corday who murdered Marat in his bath. Most prisoners were there for only a short time before being sentenced and dispatched but Charlotte Corday was there long enough, and was presumably wealthy enough, to have her portrait painted before she waved farewell. Perhaps it took her mind off thoughts of the guillotine.

Only the lower part of the medieval halls exists now and it is a large space with vaulted ceilings built in a warm coloured brick. It is uncluttered by monuments and you can simply sit in it and soak up the atmosphere which is calm and peaceful, nothing like a prison but oddly more like large church.

Anyway, bye for now and more of our trip another day.

It's taken me five years to get to West Ham!

2010-05-21T17:26:00.011+01:00

I'm wearing my denim skirt, flat suede shoes with bare legs and I've just done what I've been trying to avoid and that's get stung by a stinging nettle. It reminds me of when I was a little kid and my parents banned me from exploring some rough ground near where we lived. I just had to go and see this place for myself and my legs got stung from top to bottom.

Anyway, today I am exploring East London Cemetery and trying to find a way of getting to the Memorial Park which is next to it without having to go the long way round via the main entrance to the cemetery and the road. I am out of luck and have to retrace my steps. Along the way I gawp at the elaborate memorials that a lot of local people see as a fitting way to remember their loved ones and I ponder that some of these marble and stone fantasies must cost as much as a house. It strikes me that selling memorial stones might be a good business to get into.

My reason for swanning around this part of London is that it is very close to West Ham station and it is the next stop on my continuing drawing project following stations on the Silverlink/North London line. I began this project nearly five years ago. I have 23 more stations to cover and if I want to finish this project in my life time I had better get a move on.

The drawing above is from Memorial Park facing the line of trees beyond which is the cemetery. My mother-in-law made me a present of some watersoluble sketching pencils which I haven't used before. I found working out how much water to use both tricky and intriguing and I've ended up with a drawing which is more lively than the park actually is. I'm off to Paris next week so I'll have another go with them then.
Au revoir.

You're so slow, speed up, work faster!

2010-04-29T15:51:00.010+01:00

I've always been a bit of a slow coach. I can remember my Mum commenting on it when she would walk me the mile to school and back when I about five years old. It wasn't that I didn't want to go, it's just that I travelled at my own speed, and fifty-odd years later I still do.

This proved to be a bit of a problem when I was doing exams as a 16 year old. I was never very confident at maths and I knew, during one exam, when I kept rechecking my answers, that if I'd only had another 15 minutes I could have got a higher grade. Still never mind, has always been my mantra.

These days I notice I walk slower than other people - no change there but I notice it more and more. They overtake me on the inside and power down the road. Me, I saunter along and enjoy watching the world go by and get there in the end - occasionally I'll speed up when I'm late for the bus but usually I'm content to wait for the next one. I also eat slower and drink slower than other people. A cup of tea can last all morning at work but that's often because I've forgotten it's there.

And not surprisingly I make art quite slowly - in fact dead slowly. Having worked for 30 years in publishing to strict deadlines I actually learned to speed up. It was a case of speed up or speed out but it took me years to learn the art of simultaneously thinking and doing. The endless 'have you done this?', 'have you done that?', 'it's needed now' used to make me anxious but not more productive. Finally I got the hang of it and when I was working in newspapers I became a bit hooked on flinging pages together, running on adrenalin all day and irritated by people who took their time.

But now I can see a real advantage to working slowly because creative endeavours can often take a very long time to come to fruition. For example this very day I have solved how to approach a portrait I have been struggling with for more time than I care to mention. I've already thrown one version of it on the scrap heap and I'm confident that the new approach I've settled on will result in a more satisfying solution. And let's face it: no-one else has a vested interest in whether I produce artwork or not so I might as well take my time and produce work I can be proud of even if it does take years.

River Sounding

2010-04-25T14:33:00.005+01:00

I began to shiver as the cold chill crept round my shoulders. I wondered about digging my jacket out of my bag and putting it back on. It had been lovely and warm lolling around on the terrace overlooking the Thames - warm enough to make you nod off and have a nap. Now we had walked downstairs to what looked like the route to some unknown dungeons.

Couple that with the general clanging of bells, the rushing sounds of water and clunks of gears changing every few seconds and I was ready to go back upstairs again to the safety of light and warmth. But we hadn't come to visit anyone in prison - we had come to experience Bill Fontana's River Sounding which is described as 'an immersive sound installation that creates an acoustic journey through little known subterranean spaces of Somerset House'.

Bill Fontana had spent several months amassing a collection of audio and video recordings from various parts of the Thames (which sounds to me like a great way to spend a lot of time outdoors and call it work) and then put an edited selection on display in the dark recesses underneath Somerset House. The result is an odd combination of meditative and eerie. In addition there are no gallery staff watching your every move which, in the confines of these small dark spaces, gave me a sense of freedom and liberation. It was certainly an interesting and different way to spend a Saturday afternoon.

If you click on the heading to this post it will take you to a short video at the Somerset House website.

Life got better after this

2010-04-11T16:58:00.007+01:00

Back in the bad old days when Margaret Thatcher was still the chief banana in our government (circa 1990) I had a grumpy Hungarian employer. He was tall, 50ish and had a patrician air about him. He used to stroll around the offices like a lord inspecting his estates and spying on his serfs - he always made me cringe a bit. He left a depressing aura in his wake which spoke of money worries, downturn in business and staff problems.

And I was one of those staff problems. In all the time I worked for him (and I wonder why I stayed for so long) I never settled in, never found my place, always felt awkward and certainly didn't get anywhere near achieving my potential. Potential, what's that?

I'd made an enemy of one of the directors who in the hierarchy of the company was one layer higher than me and one step down from the boss. He spent six months trying to dislodge me from the company and even in my depressed state I could clearly observe his tactics but was powerless to out-manoeuvre him.

During this period the grumpy Hungarian would periodically call me into his office for yet another telling off. He spelled out to me the official warning process, verbal and written which was the preparation for dismissal and I would nod my head. Two weeks later I would be back in his office - him looking for an improvement in my work, me having none to offer. Each time my grumpy employer would intone: 'you are no good, you are always ill' and sigh.

Eventually he gave me the stark choice of being fired or resigning. I chose to resign because I thought that way I would retain some self respect but it was a sacking in all but name. At our final meeting in his office on my last morning he repeated yet again: 'you are no good, you are always ill' and then to my astonishment asked me to keep in touch with him. I remained silent not trusting myself to speak while I thought 'you must be fucking joking' so at least that showed I had a spark of life left in me.

What's the point of sketch books?

2010-04-04T18:47:00.011+01:00

Bust of Eve Fairfax by August Rodin (1902-3) Bronze: at the V&A. Killing time before meeting for a family lunch.

I notice that my last visit to the world of blog was on 4 October last year - that was two whole seasons ago! I won't go on about the weather but I do feel more lively now spring is here and the days are getting longer.

Just yesterday we went on a walk through the fenlands of Essex. For the exercise and for the views. My husband took his fancy camera and his fancy tripod. I took my sketch book and pencils - they didn't see the light of day until we got home and I took them out of my rucksack.

I often do this. Carry my book and pencils with me in the hope that I'll add to its contents and decrease the number of blank pages. I'm currently working my way through a tiny book that I received as a present and I've just noticed that the first date in it is 28 December 2002. It's very nearly too small for me to draw anything in it. Two years ago I took it on holiday with me to Lyon in France and our host's young son thought that looking through it was the highlight of our visit. I was astonished.

Not surprisingly it takes me for ever to fill one whole book. I usually have a few books on the go at once and I recently managed to complete a rather nice square book which took me three patient years from start to finish.

My friend Cathy got me thinking about why I work in sketch books. She asked me if I use my sketches as a basis for something bigger, more permanent. Oh no, I replied. I make them and leave them. Sometimes I'll look back at them, sometimes I don't but I am careful to avoid judging the quality of what I produce. I accept it as it is. It could be scruffy, turned out in a moment or laboured and delicate. It doesn't matter.

But as I've thought about it I realised that I like to sketch stuff as I am on the move because that is how I learn more about where I am and what is around me and that makes my life more interesting. I've included two drawings from the current book for your amusement.Waiting to see the dentist - you could describe this as displacement activity.

Summer's really over now

2009-10-04T14:23:00.026+01:00

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

2009-09-12T17:57:00.009+01:00

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

2009-08-13T09:41:00.016+01:00

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

2009-06-17T19:50:00.002+01:00

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?

2009-05-21T17:15:00.009+01:00

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

2009-04-29T16:29:00.006+01:00

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

2009-04-09T21:02:00.007+01:00

'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.

This station is so devoid of interest I can't find anything to hold my attention

2009-03-31T18:22:00.011+01:00

I chose yesterday to carry on with my intermittent drawing project. I noticed that the date of the last sketch was 11 months ago so it's time I got on with it and if I don't get a move on I won't finish it during this lifetime!

For those of you have been reading regularly you will remember that I have awarded myself a travel bursary with the intention of travelling by train along the length of what was, and may still be, known as the North London line from North Woolwich in the east to Richmond in the west making sketches at every station along the way. Since I began this project the line has been truncated and now begins at Stratford which was a bit of a drag. Anyway I decided to stick to the spirit of my original decision and follow as close as possible the route of the old line until I get to Stratford and then all will be simple. Won't it?

So just like a proper train spotter I packed a sandwich and a flask of tea and headed towards the DLR (Docklands Light Railway). This should have been a straightforward journey to West Silvertown but instead proved to be a trek on foot round various building sites. When I was finally on the move the chief thing there was to look at en route were more... building sites. It was so dismal that even though the sun was out and I could see a few yachts sailing on the Thames with the water all sparkly it did nothing to improve my mood.

So I arrived at West Silvertown and it seems to consist of the Tate & Lyle sugar refinery and the Akzo Nobel Nippon Paint factory and a very large road with hardly any traffic. The station is new, enormous and was practically empty and it was so devoid of interest I couldn't find anything to hold my attention. But to fulfil my self imposed task I forced myself to draw something very quickly and that's the result above. I quite like it now I'm away from the subject.

Then I moved onto the delights of Canning Town. Canning Town station is similarly new and uninteresting except there are more people around which was an improvement and it also has a bus station which was also very large and mostly empty. I had the choice on leaving the station of taking the walking route to Excel where the great and the good will be gathering for G20 to sort out the world economy in the next day or two - none of them are going to be distracted by the views that's for sure. Instead I chose to turn left in search of something interesting to draw in downtown Canning Town.

This is a depressing town that appears to have been thrown up during the Victorian era and looks as though it could be blown away by a strong wind. I ended up in a very 21st century branch of Macdonald's nursing a cup of coffee despairing of finding anything of interest. I walked back to the station slowly and then spotted an interesting looking building which might well have been the town hall when it was built. It was more substantial than anything else neighbouring it and chimed with the public library next door to it so that view won my star prize.

Saturday we went for a walk!

2009-03-10T19:53:00.014Z

The fact that we went for a walk on Saturday shouldn't seem at all remarkable since that is an activity we like to do. The only reason it needs an exclamation mark is because I've been unwell since the beginning of the year and now I am finally better and a BIG hooray is all I can say to that.

We chose a route from Country Walks near London by Christopher Somerville, published by Pocket Books (52 walks within easy reach of London). We've lived in east London and had Essex on our doorstep for the last five years and we've barely explored this interesting county. We had to choose somewhere that we could reach by public transport since we don't own a car and this circular walk from a village near Romford which delights in the name of Havering-atte-Bower just fitted the bill. The middle part of the name is pronounced 'Atty' as was demonstrated for me by a man we met en route.

The guide book tells us that English monarchs used to stay at Havering Palace which was built by the side of the present village green and was well placed for hunting in nearby Hainault Forest. There were no signs of any Royals when the bus dropped us off but we were genially dismissed from the bus by a couple of old ladies who took it upon themselves to make sure that we alighted at the right stop. We promptly checked the return bus times as the bus only runs every 90 minutes and then headed into the church to see what there was to see. Unusually for an English village the church isn't particularly old. It's built from flint and looks in good condition and was finished in 1878. It was clear though when we roamed around the churchyard that there must have been an older church on that site as some of the headstones were quite ancient. All was revealed when we went inside and found an old engraving of a previous church that looked like a thatched cottage and it was demolished along with the Royal Palace. This had been St Mary's Chapel and was later rebuilt as the parish church and renamed St John the Evangelist.

That felt like a good start to our outing and we were so keen to get on with our walk that I quite forgot to look out for the old village stocks that stand on the corner of the green. We felt slightly hampered by not having an ordnance survey map with us which shows every bump and stand of trees in the landscape so we had to make do with the map in the book which didn't give us enough information. But it did get us to a very good pub called the Royal Oak which advertised itself as serving fresh fish delivered daily from Billingsgate Fish Market. We couldn't pass up this opportunity and thoroughly enjoyed sea bass with rice and stir fried vegetables - it was a cut above your usual pub grub.

Our route continued from the pub car park, round a sort of rubbish tip and down an alley behind some houses. Before too long we were strolling through some woodland and met a man who told us he used to live around there as a boy and hadn't been back in 30 years. He appeared to be on some kind of private pilgrimage and he soon left us preferring his memories to our company.

While I love nothing more than gawping at other people's houses especially ones that are built like modern day fortresses with gates, large dogs and numerous cars which are plentiful in Essex it was a joy to get into the countryside proper. This is where the walk started to work its magic. The air was clear, the sun was out and the act of putting one foot in front of the other and stopping every so often to look at the view improved my mood no end. At one point we had a very clear view of Canary Wharf and the office blocks in the City of London and we were walking through a field! This struck me as bizarre but we were only 14 miles away from the city.

My husband is the map reader in our marriage and he carefully followed all the directions and we obediently crossed streams and turned left and right when instructed. Or so we thought but we reached a road at the point where we expected to come out at St Mary's Church at Stapleford Abbotts so we had obviously gone very wrong. So we trudged along a road until we spotted what could be a church tower. The only trouble was that the public right of way marker pointing in that direction was contradicted by a 'private property' sign. What to do? Risk getting shot by an irate homeowner? We chose to be cowards at this point and went the long way round and finally reached the church that Nicholas Pevsner described as hideous. We weren't able to see what he found so offensive as the church was locked so we couldn't get inside. On phoning one of the numbers listed on the church door to see if we could get the key we learned that we could help out with a working party at the church on the following Saturday if we wanted to. Instead we sat on a memorial bench in the church yard and drank our tea from the flask and decided we would risk walking back to the main road via the public right of way and to hell with outraged home owners.

Just to let you know...

2009-01-28T11:32:00.003Z

... that I have shut my Etsy shop and am concentrating instead on selling my work at UK venues including Folksy - you'll see a button for that shop on the right hand side of this blog.

Market trading

2009-01-19T15:20:00.002Z

The two posts below have been copied from the blog I began with the idea of promoting Roman Road arts and crafts market. Sadly last Saturday proved to be such a fiasco with vans parked where our stalls should have been and so on and so forth that I and another trader decided to call it a day and cease trading there.

It's a little sad that this enterprise is now over before it really got going but I made some good contacts and got on very well with some new friends and that is always satisfying. I also got some valuable feedback on my artwork but frankly working outside in the freezing cold soon lost its appeal. I've decided that in future I'll only trade under cover or at a one off event when the weather is better and hey now I have Saturdays free which means we can enjoy weekends away again.

Saturday 3 January

2009-01-19T15:06:00.001Z

So, the weather was -3 degrees celcius when I left the house and it managed to rise to the dizzy heights of 2 degrees by the time I got home six hours later so the weather forecasters weren't wrong and they weren't exactly right either.

There were great hopes yesterday that there would be more people around Roman Road as the monthly Farmers' Market was also on. It was definitely busier than the Saturday before Christmas had been when the market had been as quiet as a graveyard but only two food stallholders turned up and they looked fairly cold and dispirited. That matched the number of craft stalls we had going which was also two. We decided we would stick it out until 3pm and I made my only sale of the day as I was packing up to go home.

That was my fifth Saturday trading at the market and, apart from the biting cold, I enjoyed the day chatting to Ruth next door and swapping tales and because I did make one sale I intend to be back there next Saturday so long as it doesn't pour with rain.

Forecast for Saturday 3 January '09

2009-01-19T15:04:00.001Z

This is a photo from my mobile phone camera of my very first stall.

The last few days have either been very cold, or slightly less cold, or windy but I haven't cared one way or the other because mostly I have been inside a nice warm house. But now I am checking the weather forecast for Saturday. This has become a preoccupation of mine since I became a stallholder at Roman Road arts and crafts market back at the end of November.

I've had two weeks away from the market because of the Christmas and New Year holiday and I'm getting prepared to spend the day out in the open on Saturday. Since the forecast is 3 degrees celcius and cloudy I will be wearing thermals underneath and over trousers on top along with hat, gloves and my amazing new Christmas scarf.

This will be my fifth Saturday as a market trader and I'm hoping there will be more potential customers around than there was on the Saturday before Christmas when the market was as quiet as a grave yard. I am an artist and I sell greetings cards based on my paintings and sketches plus some of my original drawings.

Roman Road market has been around for donkeys years but the arts and crafts market only started back in September and a few of the traders have loyally turned up week in and week out since the beginning. Sadly two of our traders decided to throw in the towel just before Christmas and we will miss them around the place. So I am hoping that it won't rain all day or be very windy because either of those eventualities will be driving me back home before too long.

The tale of the damaged vinegar pot

2009-01-02T17:29:00.013Z

This image is the latest in my series of random domestic scenes. For this sketch I used a Chinese brush and the same black Quink ink you might use in a fountain pen. While I was working on it I was recalling how it arrived in our house.

I am married to an academic and from time to time we have visitors to stay who hail from different parts of the world and are passing through London for some reason: they might be going to a conference for example. Very occasionally we've had the odd visitor who has arrived at our house and clearly can't remember how to leave. This can make me feel as though we have for a short time adopted them and this can either lead to rational negotiations with said visitor to work out a plan for leaving as in: "When is your flight home?" or "Wouldn't you prefer more privacy in a cheap hotel?" or I simply end up losing my temper and feel terrible for the rest of the day. We also enjoy having graduate students around because they are generally a lot of fun. They usually live in London and are only too happy to leave at the end of an evening so don't need to be elbowed out of the door by us.

The vinegar pot arrived by the usual academic route. It was carried to our house by my husband's colleague who lived nearby and asked, since he and his wife were off to far flung places to take up new work, if we would look after it. The vinegar is made from a culture of bacteria swarming around the bottom of the pot and every so often you fling red or white wine into it and it magically turns into wine vinegar over the succeeding days or weeks. We understand that this particular culture has been passed down the colleague's French wife's family and goes back as far as the French Revolution which would make it more than 200 years old. And we have ended up as its custodians. Mon dieu!

I do hope that the terracotta pot is not a treasured family heirloom because since we have had it we have broken the lid, mended it and broken it again. (You can see the remains of the lid in the bottom right hand corner.) We have improvised a new lid with a small ceramic dish. When we took possession of the pot it sported a tap that was held in place with a cork bung. In time the cork perished so parcel tape was wrapped around the pot many times to cover up the hole where the tap had been. This has resulted in a permanently leaking pot so it stands in a dish that we used to use for salad and it's likely to remain like this until we get round to buying a replacement tap with a plastic bung.

Since we have been looking after the pot for several years now it is always possible that this visitor will be a permanent fixture in our kitchen and who knows we may yet leave it in the care of our younger relatives and perhaps it will survive for another 200 years. What a fine vintage vinegar it will be then.

More random dosmetic scenery

2008-12-16T16:11:00.019Z

A detail of a drawing in pen and ink of garlic, lime, ginger and curry leaves in the kitchen waiting to be used - 16 December '08

As you can tell from the date of my last post it's weeks since I've written anything but, to tell the truth, I just haven't been inspired to write. But that has changed since last week when I went to visit my friend Hilary for a couple of days. Hilary lives in Swindon in the west country. If you mention Swindon to most people they will probably have heard of the place and they might say it's got something to do with railways. So here is a potted history of said town.

Swindon began life as a Saxon village and is mentioned in the Domesday Book (1086). For centuries it was a quiet market town and in time a quarry was established, a canal was dug and in 1840 the Great Western Railway arrived. This transformed the town from a sleepy backwater into the largest town in Wiltshire because it was chosen as a place to build railway engines and as a maintenance works. The town continued to be an industrial centre until the railway works closed in 1986 and now it's a sprawling town without a reputation.

You might think then that Swindon has nothing to offer culturally but you'd be wrong. We had a stimulating visit to the town's art gallery which owns a large collection of the best examples of British 20th century art outside London. We also dropped into a temporary exhibition run by a local art group who were showing their work in a disused post office and the quality of their work was higher and more interesting than most local art groups that I have seen and this all cheered me up no end.

The following day Hilary had decided that we would take a trip to Cirencester, a town about 17 miles away from Swindon and, according to the local tourist board, it had been a Roman town of some note and is now the capital of the Cotswolds. 'Yeah and so what' were my thoughts as I had only been there once before and thought it was a bit of a dump. I was about to have my prejudices challenged once again.

Hilary was keen to see an exhibition called Modern British Art and it was on at the Wetpaint gallery. There were works by Anita Klein, John Piper and Sir Peter Blake. There was even a piece of work by Damien Hurst which had so many numbers on the price label that my mind went into a spin trying to read it. There were some lovely ceramics and if I had had £45 to spare I would have bought a small ceramic dish for my husband; I was that impressed. This gallery is on the edge of the town near the only car park to have any free spaces in it. It is in a tiny building with interesting niches in the walls and it turns out that it had been a chapel in the past. The town had an abbey before the dissolution in 1538 and a faint air of an enclosed order still hangs around the place.

Finally we visited the New Brewery Arts Centre in the middle of the town. This refurbished site has artists studios where you can go and gawp while the artists practice their craft. There is also a gallery and a shop, which appeared to be more interesting at a distance than it was up close, plus a very popular café where we recovered from the labour of looking at art. The whole trip was very stimulating and encouraged me to get on with my own project of drawing 'random domestic scenes' around the house. The latest example is shown above.

Big day in the US, ordinary day in London

2008-11-04T16:10:00.028Z

Part of a series of drawings of random domestic scenes

As I write this the good people of the United States are queuing to vote for their new president and I'm following events on BBC24 which is analysing every blessed thing just to fill up the time. I've watched, again, Barak Obama vote (for himself) and seen Sarah Palin's denim clad legs in the voting booth while she voted for herself: it seems that John McCain managed to dodge the cameras as he arrived to vote (I'm assuming for himself). I'm hoping that Barak Obama will win because I have found George Bush's presidency extremely disturbing over the last eight years and I hope for all our sakes that Obama will be a more enlightened president than the outgoing one. And of course it will also be historic to have the first black president of the US.

So what have I done today since I didn't have any good reason for getting up at 6am? Well, I stayed in bed for a start and got up at a civilised hour. I've been working at home for the last couple of weeks and that's included doing a series of pen and ink drawings of random domestic scenes around the house plus building a website. I'm not very experienced at website design yet so I get stuck trying to understand html and css and stuff fairly frequently. That happened yesterday so in the afternoon I took myself off to Museum of Childhood in Bethnal Green, that great refuge from the rain and yes, it was raining again. My reason for going was that I fancied a walk so wasn't all that bothered by what I might see when I got there. On arrival I was rather tickled to spy in the foyer a modest exhibition of black and white photographs of Edwardian Outdoor Games by Andrew Pitcairn-Knowles.

Evidently the V&A own Pitcairn-Knowles glass negatives and I presume they were just stored away gathering dust in the archives so someone must have decided to haul some negatives out and make prints from them. They've been done on an ink jet printer: we have one of those at home. What I liked most about this small display, besides the charming images, was that Pitcairn-Knowles employed the latest in photographic technology in 1900 and here we are 100 years later reproducing those same images using technology which is common to us today. I also liked the way that a large national museum like the V&A thinks it is worth producing a small exhibition which will be of interest to a small number of people-it makes such a change to the big blockbuster exhibitions crammed with visitors. So that got a big commendation from me.

This afternoon I again got stuck with the website while trying to style up a form and gave up in disgust. So needing to get out of the house I mooched off to Hackney Public Library and popped into the very small museum they have there. (I would have put a link to the museum's website but it is really boring.) Apparently the Saxons were responsible for establishing Hackney way back in the dim and distant past but I was more interested in a temporary exhibition on the right hand side as you go in called Living under one roof-Windrush and beyond. It is part of Black History Month which oddly enough lasts for nearly two months! The exhibition takes its name from the ship called the Windrush that arrived at Tilbury docks on 22 June 1948 bringing with her many young men and some young women from the Caribbean who arrived in search of jobs and a better life. This was an important landmark in the history of modern Britain.

On arrival the new migrants encountered racism, conflict and discrimination in a cold, damp country that was still impoverished after WWII: not surprisingly they often felt homesick. They were frequently excluded from the social and economic life around them so in time they adjusted the institutions they brought with them, for example sitting rooms were often used for church services, and at the same time they began to participate in institutions to which they did have access like trade unions and bit by bit over the decades modern Britain emerged. The lives of some of the people who finally pitched up in Hackney, who are by now very elderly, are described in room sets. There is the kitchen, the sitting room and the bedroom and many of the items of furniture and family photos have been provided by the men and women whose lives are being described. I was born in west London in 1956 where many black people settled and I loved looking at these rooms today because they took me back to my childhood. The bent kettle looked familiar as did the gas cooker and the copy of Woman's Realm on the coffe table. The family photos and kid's school satchel lying on the floor in the bedroom, the bedspread and the rug on the floor. I know all these things, I've used all of them in my time. So today I feel I have learnt a bit more about the Windrush generation and I'm grateful to them for establishing the multicultural London I so enjoy living in 60 years later.

Preview of the new Saatchi gallery

2008-10-08T19:23:00.013+01:00

The new Saatchi gallery opens tomorrow, 9 October, in the old Duke of York's HQ at Chelsea Barracks in central London. Yesterday was press day for journalists and I was invited to go to today's preview. This is not because I am either famous or influential because I am neither but because I am one of the thousands of artists signed up on their website and occasionally I exhibit a piece of work in the 'showdown' competition; I assume that all their artists got an invite.

I have Jacqui Boyd Alden to thank for introducing me to the showdown. Jacqui and I went to the same small art college in Wiltshire back in the late 70s. We overlapped by two years, studied on different courses and would you 'adam and eve it'* we never met! We finally met this year on Facebook. Since Jacqui now lives on a different continent I went to the Saatchi opening for both of us.

I can't say that I have ever been a fan of Charles Saatchi. I've never completely forgiven him for foisting the likes of Damien Hurst on us but if it hadn't been him maybe another art collector would have done. Mr Saatchi is enormously wealthy and it is only the likes of him who could open a new and very large art gallery in the heart of London in the very week that the global money markets are reaching new lows. I set off on my visit at lunch time already feeling slightly jaded and to my great surprise I was completely smitten with the building. No expense appears to have been spared in the conversion from military barracks to modern art gallery. The galleries are well lit and well proportioned and there is an expansive quality as they don't rope off any of the exhibits. It is easy to find your way around from one gallery to another and no one gallery was very busy. My feeling was that the gallery is the work of art and might very well endure for decades to come unlike the previous incarnation at County Hall, which had been the home of the Greater London Council (GLC), on the south bank of the Thames which felt constrained, pokey, dark and unwelcoming.

Now for the art bit. Well I found a lot of the exhibition to be rather 'ho hum' which I sort of expected. Charles Saatchi has kicked off with an exhibition from Chinese artists. It is called The Revolution Continues: New Art from China. The BBC covered the gallery earlier in the week and so I knew I would be seeing a three-dimensional city scape of Western buildings made out of dog chews which looks better in real life than in a photograph. It is called Love It! Bite It! by Liu Wei, 2005-07 and is described as 'a comment on grotesque consumption and greed'. I didn't pick up on that but I liked the objects and was impressed with the skill needed to make them.

These Chinese artists are keen on making very lifelike sculptures of people out of resin. The first one you come across is of a man lying on his front spread eagled on the floor sticking his tongue out and appearing to lick the floor. This was made by Cang Xin in 2006 and is called Communication. This left me unmoved. The next figure lying on the floor in another gallery is called Angel by Sun Yuan and Peng Yu, 2008. This is an image of a very old man dressed as an angel and his wings look as though they are made of skin and bone and he appears to have crash landed on the floor; he might be dead. It is so lifelike it is grotesque so that got a reaction out of me! There are a group of nude bodies hanging upside down from chains from the ceiling. This exhibit is called Chinese Offspring by Zhang Dali, 2003-05 and this apparently represents China's immigrant underclass-they hang upside down to reflect their powerlessness. Didn't work for me. Moving on. The final exhibit of lifelike dummies did made me laugh. This is called Old Persons' Home by Sun Yuan and Penjg Yu, 2007. Here are lifesized sculptures of wizened pensioners that sit in electric wheelchairs. They resemble aged world leaders and move slowly around the gallery bumping into each other. Sometimes they have to be pulled apart by a gallery attendant. There was a clip of it on the BBC website which seems to have been taken down which is a shame because you have to see it to believe it.

Apart from these exhibits I found the endless paintings of Mao fairly uninteresting but there were two paintings that caught my imagination. The first one I found mesmerising and is called Seeds by Zhang Huan, 2007. It is a large, subtle, monocrome painting being 250 x 400cms and depicts shadowy people planting seeds in a field. The artist used incense ash, charcoal and resin on canvas to create this atmospheric work. The second painting is a very vigourous monocrome landscape in oil on canvas by Zeng Fanzhi called This land is so rich in beauty 2. After all this stimulation I was ready for some food so made my way towards the door.

Admission is free. The Revolution Continues: New art from China opens 9 October and runs until 18 January 2009.

*Cockney rhyming slang for 'believe'.

The perfect end to a punishing day

2008-09-03T20:22:00.012+01:00

I have often thought that it would be great to be a waterborne commuter. To travel to and from work by boat on the Thames and tonight I did just that and so I have achieved a long held ambition. Since I don't work in the same location day after day this is going to be no more than an occasional jaunt but it really cheered me up and helped get the day into perspective.

I must admit that the experience wasn't up there with the opening sequence to A Man for all Seasons which begins with Sir Thomas More (who I'm afraid came to a sticky end) being rowed up the river Thames from Hampton Court to, I think, his house in Chelsea. It's very early in the morning, there are no sounds to be heard except the oars slopping in and out of the water and you just don't know if you can bear the tension for another 120 minutes.

However, I had been toiling away for a few days in Westminster which is also very close to the river and it is but a short walk from Cowley Street to the Embankment pier. Here I found to my delight that a Thames Clipper was due in a few minutes. This river service is part of the London Transport network and you wait on a jetty that looks similar to an underground platform. I was queuing with some other work worn commuters and when our catamaran, the Hurricane, arrived we stepped onto a very modern vessel with airline style seating with little drop down tables in front and plenty of leg room. Up front there was a large television playing some adverts and at the back there was a bar.

I was going to stay on board until Canary Wharf and the voyage was due to take roughly 35 minutes. We passed landmarks that have been familiar to me ever since I moved to London and it was comforting to see them again from the vantage point of the river but all the time I could see 1 Canada Square (London's tallest building) up ahead which is where I would disembark.

As we navigated the stop at London Bridge there was a tall sailing ship called Gladys on our port side gliding gracefully by in the opposite direction. On our starboard side was the equally graceful Lady Daphne moored at a dock. Shortly afterwards we reached HMS Belfast, a small warship permanently berthed opposite the Tower of London. I recalled the last visit I'd made to the ship a few years ago with my husband and late father.

After we left the Tower behind us we picked up speed and raced past old warehouses that appeared to have been recently refurbished as expensive apartments and before I knew it we had arrived at Canary Wharf Pier where I took my leave of the river and walked towards the bus stop and headed home.

Postcard from Oxford

2008-08-26T21:22:00.010+01:00

Sketch of The Virgin and Child by Lorenzo di Credi (Florence c1457-1536) at the Ashmolean Museum Oxford 25.08.08.

We enjoyed a flying visit to Oxford over the weekend. I've only been there once before and that was about 20 years ago so it was all new to me and I was amazed at how much bigger it is than Cambridge (where I have been a lot). On Monday morning we had coffee and read the papers at a pleasant café and then when we'd had enough caffeine we paid a visit to the *Ashmolean Museum.

Fortunately they are refurbishing the museum so that immediately cut down the number of exhibits to look at, because let's face it, there's always too much information to take in at a good museum. Now, I am not particularly religious but I was very taken with the image of The Virgin and child I sketched above. I quite like the finished result but in my version the baby Jesus does look like a fat old man. In my defence in the original he has got a remarkable amount of hair, with a little quiff, for a newborn and a very fat face with a knowing expression.

In another gallery there were a number of busts of various Popes with grumpy faces all crafted by the same artist. I didn't take a note of his name but he was fond of drapery and managed to give a very convincing impression of silk robes fastened with delicate buttons all finished off with silken tassels and they were all fashioned out of marble. Amazing!

Before I go I must tell you about two very famous works of art. One is by Paolo Uccello (c1396-1475) and is called The Hunt in the Forest. He artfully employed perspective in this and composed it very carefully (which is something I could usefully learn from) and the other one is by Piero di Cosimo (1461-1522) and is called The Forest Fire. You can see small versions of the paintings here.

* You might like to know that they have lockers in the basement which they only open at the end of the day so you could for a modest price (not that I would ever dream of recommending it to you) stash your stuff there and pick it up later in the day when you finished sightseeing.

Intriguing interiors

2008-08-13T16:52:00.011+01:00

All around London at the moment are advertisements on the tube and on the buses promoting an exhibition of Wilhelm Hammershøi's paintings. It's the other exhibition on just now at the Royal Academy along with the summer show and they have called this exhibition The poetry of silence.

I admit that I have not heard of this artist before but I found the image that has been used for the advertising intriguing and seductive. Something about the image reminded me of the work by Gwen John (1876-1939). She was the sister of the artist Augustus John who led a colourful life and painted exuberant images of the women in his life amongst other subjects. By contrast Gwen John's paintings are quiet, atmospheric and introspective.

Hammershøi (1864-1916) was a Danish artist who was born into a comfortable middle class home and led an uneventful life until his relatively early death from cancer. He travelled extensively around Europe but it is the paintings he made of his domestic life at home in Copenhagen which made the biggest impact on me. Sometimes he would paint an empty room with open doors leading the eye out of the room and towards a different, unknown part of his apartment. Often he would include a female figure, perhaps sewing or darning or holding a tray or maybe playing the piano. And he obviously had a bit of a thing for people's back views because there are quite a few on display - maybe it saved him from having to chat to his subjects.

In one painting there is a figure is at the far end of a room leaning with one knee on a chair and gazing out of the window. I was dying to know what she was looking at and listening to but as a silent observer I will never know. His images are always very carefully composed and I had the odd feeling that far from merely looking at these paintings I was actually inside the rooms with him and enveloped by the heavy, silent atmosphere he'd created which was emphasised by the restricted pallette he employed.

By the time I left the exhibition I felt I almost knew what it's like to wear a long grey dress and wear my hair tied back in a bun and move around slowly. This wasn't an exhibition to rush round in a hurry - the images wouldn't let you. The experience was more like being a contemplative in an enclosed order and taking a stroll around the cloisters last thing at night. Very powerful.

The tyranny of the red dot

2008-08-07T14:45:00.013+01:00

I began this blog last year after I had been to the Royal Academy of Art summer exhibition. This year I haven't felt particularly drawn to go but decided on the spur of the moment that I probably ought to while I still had the chance as it closes on 17 August. So I went just yesterday afternoon but was close to changing my mind and returning home after I'd spent half an hour waiting for the bus. Eventually the no: 8 bus made an appearance and I was on my way. I usually enjoy being a passenger on this route because you pass so many interesting places but yesterday there were road works every which way and I wondered if there would be time to see any of the exhibits if I eventually got to my destination.

Get there I did and was very grateful for the icy air conditioning that was blowing through the galleries. The first gallery has been devoted to the late R B Kitaj, RA as a memorial to him. He died last year, at the age of 74, in his native America but he is fondly regarded in Britain because he lived here for about 40 years which always works for us Brits. We're also sort of fond of Madonna and Gwyneth Paltrow for the same reason, but I digress. His work was also very influential on his generation of artists back in the 60s. I particularly liked two of his works, which to my mind are large pieces, and one is called Pacific Coast Highway (across the Pacific) which he completed in 1973 and Catalan Christ (pretending to be dead) completed in 1976.

In the next gallery there was, amongst other things, yet another memorial tribute to a recently deceased RA and that was Colin St John Wilson who designed the British Library. He started out as a painter before turning to architecture and there were some rather lively paintings on display along with some sketches for the library and a scale model of the exterior of the library in situ near St Pancras station which I enjoyed scrutinising as I have spent many a happy hour in there enjoying the exhibitions and eating lunch in the restaurant.

At this point I turned left into a gallery that usually has prints displayed in it and this is where the red dots, indicating successful sales, run amok. As far as I can tell this is where the general public might, if they are lucky, get their works hung. This room and the small one next to it have work jammed in them so tightly you can end up with a crick in your neck trying to take it all in. It was in this small room that my head began to swim so I went back into the print room and started to look at the exhibits slowly. I noticed one large etching of a landscape had several red dots stuck on the frame. This print was signed by the artist and instead of being numbered in an edition it was described as artists proof so I assume that this artist now has to go ahead and print at least four copies of this etching to supply her customers and since printing an etching can be time consuming that will amount to a lot of work.

Two years ago I undertook some market research of the designs for my greetings cards which are now for sale to find out which were the most popular images. Most people I accosted were happy to fill in the forms but one woman felt it was important to tell me that if I was serious about selling my cards then I should include people and animals into my designs, particularly cats. This made me laugh at the time but she might have a point about the sentimental appeal of cats since the print with the most red dots on it was a small etching of a face of the most ugly cat I have ever seen (you can probably tell I'm not a cat lover). I can't imagine having it in my house but clearly many people disagree with me. The other print that was also doing well in the red dot stakes was a small sideways image of an angel.

This is when I began to feel tyranised by the red dots. I was getting tired by this stage and needed to edit the number of images I was looking at so ended up unwillingly concentrating on the pieces with the most red dots whereas if there hadn't been any red dots I would have made different choices. The only sensible thing I could do at this point was stagger off in search a restorative cup of tea and a piece of cake before heading home.

Cutting the virtual ribbon

2008-07-28T17:50:00.015+01:00

There's a shop on the corner near the roundabout. It's opposite the pub that sells pizzas cooked in a woodburning stove (which incidentally is very popular) and it's next to the estate agent's that used to be a beauty parlour.

I think the shop was empty when we moved here. At some point it became a tatty antique shop that was seldom open and hardly anything ever seemed to be sold. I think there was a hand written note taped to the window asking potential customers to phone for an appointment. At some point the shop closed down and the contents removed. Time passed and then some decorators moved in and there were clearly signs of activity. We asked ourselves 'who's moving in and what will they sell?' Blow me if it wasn't the same woman who had recently moved out and this time the shop became an upmarket antique shop. The owner appeared to have gone into partnership with someone because now there were two names painted on the window instead of one and the interior seemed to have been inspired by Martha Stewart.

More time passed but there didn't seem to be any more sales of shabby chic furniture than there were before - the only difference was that the shop looked nicer. Then more than a year ago the contents of the shop were removed yet again and this time builders moved in and began extensive renovations on the fabric of the building. I imagined that the lady who had occupied this shop had moved on elsewhere until I was told by someone working in the newsagents that this former seller of antiques had plans to turn the shop into a cafe and in time start baking her own bread because in the past this had been the site of the local bakers. This was all very interesting and my goodness didn't it take a long time to accomplish. We've watched as tons of rubble and junk were removed from the building. We've stood to one side as teams of builders have man handled reinforced steel joists in through the door way. We seen the planning application notice pinned to a lamp post and, finally, observed the shop fitters and the decorators once again transform this shop into something new.

So just recently the shop finally opened for business as a cafe and it appears to have been a success from day one. Now there are more people in and out of the shop in a morning than there were over several months when they were selling furniture - the difference is now you sit on the chairs while you drink your coffee and eat your almond croissant rather than just glance at them through a window. I was engaged in just this activity last week and, while the two 'yummy mummies' next to me discussed their pregnancies, I pondered on the efforts that must have been involved in completing this transformation. This is because I've been doing something similar but in a virtual context. I've been updating and spring cleaning my website. This is so I could launch my small range of greetings cards which you can see here and buy if the mood takes you and this announcement means that my very own shop is officially open.

The Olympics lifts my spirits!

2008-07-10T21:00:00.030+01:00

Today I have been down in the dumps and the weather here in sunny London has matched my mood as it has been raining 'stair rods' the entire day. The snails seem happy though and they are treating our garden wall like a motorway - every time I look there are more of them.

The reason for my glumness is two fold. The economic downturn is affecting publishers and they are employing fewer freelance designers for the time being so there is less work around and that's making me a bit anxious because that is the work I do to pay my way. The other reason is that I am in the throes of developing my website to allow on-line shopping (because I am about to launch my small collection of greetings cards onto the paying public) and the technical details I am having to learn is driving me to distraction.

Ordinarily I will clean the house when I come across a problem I can't solve as it helps to work off all my pent up energy and so far this week the top floor of the house is sparkling and the middle floor is looking much better too. By Friday I will be able to open the house to the public since I'll be so proud of its appearance. But by this afternoon this strategy wasn't working so I put on my wet weather gear, left the house looking like a hiker and walked across Victoria Park towards the Museum of Childhood in Bethnal Green. I enjoyed stomping along in the rain and looking in people's front rooms while I walked so this helped to cheer me up.

This museum is the east end outpost of the Victoria and Albert Museum (known simply as the V&A) which is in South Kensington in West London. The collections and exhibitions at the V&A cover the decorative arts whereas the museum in Bethnal Green allegedly focuses on childhood but it always feel rather adult to me. I think it might be quite boring for kids although there are compensating large open spaces plus the building has a good echo so it would be great for yelling and crying and running around.

While I was dripping water all over the floor in the foyer I noticed that there was an exhibition of Olympic posters going back to the start of the modern Olympic movement so I headed for the first floor and was distracted en route by a fantastic railway set. It was in a glass case which would be far too big for a domestic setting (unless you happen to live in a stately home). It included a model of a fictional village with a railway station. There were domestic houses and shops, including a fish and chip shop. One of the houses was dilapidated, the garden was overgrown and it had a skip outside full of rubbish so the house was obviously being renovated, so that was obviously fictional! There were trains ready to pull out of the station and if I had been prepared to put two 20 pence pieces in the slot I could have watched them run round the track. And I wasn't - how mean is that.

This exhibition of Olympic posters that I finally reached has been designed to coincide with the Beijing 2008 games. I was surprised by the number of posters but there have been a lot of summer games, winter games and Paralympic games over the years. The designs of the posters have an important role in defining the character of that particular games they are promoting and I was reminded of the Mexico, Sydney and Athens games as I walked around the exhibition. I was also surprised at how often some cities have hosted the games since 1900 but I wasn't surprised that some of them had to be cancelled because of two World Wars and the Spanish Civil War.

The posters for the Munich games in 1972 were many and varied and they were also poignant because I could remember the massacre that took place at those games. The designs for the Montreal games in 1976 were particularly interesting to me because that was the summer I graduated from art college. I was barely employable when I left college but like most of my peers I found work eventually so I was very interested to see what designers, who were rather senior to me, were working on for those summer games. I wondered how many ideas were binned in the process and if those designers were subject to the whims of their clients and had to make endless changes to their work in the same way that has been a feature of my own working life. Shortly afterwards I finished my tour and I felt quite cheered up and walked back into the rain with a lighter heart.

On my way to Silvertown

2008-05-04T17:00:00.012+01:00

It was great to have a day in the middle of the week to devote to drawing. I wouldn't spend the whole day grafting away but doing the drawing was going to be the focus of the day. I made a flask of tea, packed my rucksack and headed towards Hackney Central. I didn't have long to wait for a train and I knew it would stop at Stratford where I expected to pick up another train to Silvertown because that's what I had done three years ago.

In no time at all we'd arrived in Stratford and to my surprise there was no connecting train to Silvertown. I thought I must be wrong so checked the timetable. No, Stratford is the end of the line. It didn't use to be but it is now. I do vaguely remember the mayor, Ken Livingston, announcing on the tv news that this line had been absorbed into the 'overground system' but it hadn't occurred to me that they would chop the last five stations off one end of it. However, had I paid attention I would have noticed that the Docklands Light Railway (DLR) had been extended to cover much the same route as the one that had been axed.

I decided to travel to London City Airport on the DLR which is fairly close to where the old station of Silvertown was. So instead of just stepping onto another train at the platform I had arrived at I had to go upstairs and run along a passage and flap about until I reached the DLR platforms. Once I'd worked out which train to get on I then had to change trains once again before I was sure I was heading in the right direction. I began to enjoy the journey as we left the docklands behind and traveled through a developed landscape that I didn't know even existed. When we stopped at Pontoon Dock I spotted the Thames Barrier in the distant. As I've always been intrigued by this river defence I decided I would get off at London City Airport and then walk back from there to get as close to the barrier as I could.

Feeling like a bit of a fraud I joined other passengers at London City Airport and took the escalator towards check-in. I had a quick look round this tiny airport which was built on the old King George V dock and concluded that it's just like Gatwick or Stansted airports but fortunately it's too small to also serve as a full scale shopping centre. Having traveled as far as I was planning to I chose a spot outside to draw which you can see on the left. I was attracted by the concrete and the different planes of the walls, the train bridge above and the curve of the glass passage through which I had just walked. I didn't realise until too late that I'd chosen to sit in the smoking section until I was covered in cigarette smoke and that is what eventually drove me away. By this time I'd felt I'd done as much as I wanted to and so headed back towards Pontoon Dock. I had to guess the route since I couldn't see the next station or the Thames Barrier. I trudged along a main road, navigated my way round a very large roundabout reassuring myself that if I got lost I could always retrace my steps. After not very long I could see Pontoon Dock and the most striking thing was that there were so few people and cars around. Finally I saw sign posts for the Thames Barrier Park and even better, signs for a cafe. There were hardly any people in the cafe either and I enjoyed a cup of tea while looking at the Thames Barrier through large picture windows. The park does look a little like an architect's drawing with the type of trees you see every where surrounding office blocks but it is tranquil and peaceful and does provide a green frame for the massive engineered blocks that make up the barrier that protects London from flooding. I gathered, from an old geezer who buttonholed me while I was leaning on the parapet by the river edge and subjected me to an extensive monologue, that there is a small exhibition about the building of the barrier in a building on the south bank of the Thames. We were on the north bank and after my long winded journey earlier in the day I didn't feel like trying to reach the south bank that afternoon.

Drawing project continues!

2008-04-28T16:45:00.002+01:00

As I mentioned in a previous post back in February I planned to pick up the threads of an old drawing project, and a few days ago I did just that. I'm just beginning to realise what an enormous undertaking this is going to be if I'm to finish it.

Back in 2005 I decided to award myself a travel bursary and travel along the length of the North London railway line which runs from Richmond in the west and North Woolwich in the east. These locations are completely unlike each other and the only thing they have in common, and which links them, is the River Thames running through them.

The stations in between provide a variety of views ranging from transport hubs to Victorian housing and industrial landscapes. My plan is to do a drawing at or near each station. The view may well be mind numbingly mundane or might be full of interest - it does not matter. I also aim to go off at any tangent that might take my fancy and so the completed project will be a highly subjective view of one route around a large part of a very large city. Since I'm not a train spotter I won't be including train times or makes of carriages but, like many a train timetable, my timings will be sporadic and occasionally I might end up in an artistic version of railway sidings (in other words completely stuck).

Some people like to go on pub crawls and stop for a pint at every stop on the Circle Line on the tube (that's the yellow line on this map) and this project of mine is my version of a one-man pub crawl.

Watts Cemetery Chapel

2008-04-22T21:00:00.008+01:00

After we'd visited Watts gallery the plan was to visit Watts Cemetery Chapel just along the road and naturally we drove there instead of walking! Mind you, we might have been run over by passing traffic if we had attempted to walk because there aren't any pavements along the roads.

This small chapel has a reputation for its design and I had heard about it from my friend who I was with and lately colleagues too. To be honest I didn't know what to expect and you might like it and you might not. It is set on top of a small hill so your first view of it is from below. It is surrounded by the graveyard which is well tended and at first sight you might wonder where the occupants of said graves had once lived as there doesn't seem to be any housing nearby. You enter the cemetery through the Lych Gate, also designed by the Watts', and it ever so slightly has the feeling of a film set. Apparently this is a sort of overflow cemetery which was constructed in the 1890s when the parishioners ran out of burial space in the churchyard at St Nicholas Church in Compton which may explain why it feels so isolated. The Parish Council bought the plot of land on Budbury Hill from the Loseley Estate. Later on G F Watts and his wife, Mary offered to design and build, at their own expense, a chapel in keeping with the site. The exterior was completed in 1898 and the interior was finished in 1904.

The exterior is covered in highly decorated terracotta tiles. The tiles were designed by Mary Watts and she took her inspiration from Christian Celtic art and although the design is a bit fanciful it is also very cohesive and works well in three dimensions. The tiles were produced by more than 70 villagers, friends and craftsmen and women using clay from a seam that was discovered in the grounds of the Watts' house called Limnerslease. This story gives the impression of a community working together towards a common goal which is all very nice but for all I know the participants might not have been given much choice in the matter.

The exterior is a complete contrast to the interior and it left me momentarily speechless when we went inside. I didn't notice the floor which is made of oak parquet because I was too busy gawping at the decoration on the walls which is a blast of art nouveau intensity. The space inside is circular with just enough room for a coffin, a minister and a few mourners. There is a bell rope for tolling the single bell which rings the note 'C' which was tempting to pull but a notice asks visitors not to as it is solely for the use at funerals. As I spun round to look at everything I had the feeling that I was being drenched in a waterfall of symbolism. It included winged messengers (angels), cherubim and the Tree of Life spreading its branches and roots around the space. Bunches of grapes wrestled for space with various flowers and to top it all there are two scrolling wrought-iron arched doors.

Our exit from the chapel was hastened by a bad tempered cat that seemed to be living there and it was quite a relief to get back outside. We wandered around the graveyard and pondered the inscriptions on the stones and enjoyed the feeling of peace and tranquility which was present. Just before we left we walked up and down the cloister, also designed by Mary Watts, which had a Mediterranean feel to it and led me to feel I was back visiting Pompey! Oh it was good to get back on the train because I knew where I was and where I was going.

G F Watts. Who?

2008-04-13T16:55:00.006+01:00

Last Thursday a friend of mine invited me on a jaunt to the countryside so that we might spend a few hours catching up on several years news and visit what the Daily Telegraph has described as 'one of the most beautiful small galleries in Europe'. This gallery being Watts Gallery.

G F Watts (1817-1904) was a celebrated artist and was considered to be the greatest painter of the Victorian age. I gather he lived and worked in London but had a country retreat in Compton near Guildford in Surrey. Watts Gallery first opened to the public on 1 April 1904 and apparently it is unique because it is the only purpose-built gallery to show a single artist's work. I find this fact alone surprising. Sir John Soane's museum at 13 Lincoln's Inn Field's is devoted to his own collection but I've just remembered that it includes work by Hogarth and Turner as well as Sir John Soane's architectural drawings and models and is well worth a visit.

Evidently G F Watts works have inspired many people over the last 100 years including Nelson Mandela who had a print of Hope on his cell wall and contemporary artists like Antony Gormley and Gilbert & George have expressed their admiration for his work. So I have to admit that I had never heard of him and also that I had high expectations of his paintings which were pretty much dashed when we entered the first gallery.

In my last post I was commenting on portraits that lack life can look wooden, superficial and uninteresting. This was borne out in Watts Gallery. My friend and I agreed that the paintings with titles such as Sympathy, Ophelia and Found Drowned fell into this category. But those paintings whose titles were real names such as Miss Rachel Gurney were highly accomplished, satisfying to look at and appeared to provide a real insight into the character of the sitter. We found it difficult to believe that all these paintings, and there are a lot of them, had been made by the same hand since the quality varied so much but they are all attributed to the same artist so who are we to comment.

Well so far, so mixed. Then my friend led me to the area set aside for the sculpture. The space appeared to be like a garage or more likely a carriage house so it wasn't that big. In it there were two enormous plaster models on display. One is of the poet Tennyson with his dog which was cast in bronze and is set outside Lincoln Cathedral. And the other plaster model is called Physical Energy and depicts a rider on a horse and unlike some his tedious paintings with pretentious titles this sculpture is both energetic and powerful. There were three bronzes cast from this plaster model and one of them is in Kensington Gardens. We were told that it faces west and is north of the Albert Memorial so I will go and check it out sometime and see what it looks like cast in bronze and out in the open air.

Watts Gallery is 100 years old and is a listed Arts & Crafts building which was one of the first to be built of solid concrete and is now in a sad state of disrepair. It will be closing at the end of August '08 for two years when it will undergo restoration and the collection will be conserved. From November '08 a major touring exhibition will show 60 works by G F Watts in London at the Guildhall Art Gallery so you can decide for yourself if his reputation as 'England's Michelangelo' was entirely deserved.

The trouble with portraits

2008-03-22T15:05:00.005Z

Portraits have been much on my mind of late. That's because I've got one that I've made a start on and I'm not sure how to proceed. It's like getting to a fork in the road and wondering which route to take. The trouble is I've got to the fork in the road almost as soon as I have left the car park and I've been at this point for weeks now, if not a couple of months. I know that I'll eventually solve the problem just by sitting down and getting on with it.

Last weekend we were fortunate to spend the weekend in Paris. Since at least one member of our party had never been to the Louvre we decided to make that our first stop. The Louvre is so enormous you have to decide which galleries you want to visit and stick to it otherwise it's easy to get distracted en route and end up a quivering, exhausted wreck by the time you leave the building.

We decided to aim for the Flemish paintings which I think were somewhere on the second floor. I always like looking at domestic interior scenes from this era. They seem so peaceful and serene and there is never enough time to sit and gaze at them. I could easily live with one in my house. Once our party had gathered together after roaming free around these galleries we decided that if you haven't seen the Mona Lisa once, in the flesh so to speak, then you have to make that your next goal and be prepared to traipse along endless corridors to get there. So this is what we did and eventually we arrived in front of the portrait which is smaller than you expect. It is displayed in the centre of a large gallery and always attracts a lot of attention from crowds of people and the scene is reminiscent of pilgrims worshipping at a holy shrine.

Lunch beckoned and the consumption of food and drink and general conviviality revived sore feet and tired spirits. By this time we had spent about four hours in the museum and were ready to leave the building and get some fresh air. Here our party divided into three smaller parties and set off to do different things. I was in a party of two and we trekked along the Rue de Rivol i on our way to the Picasso Museum. I think that Picasso and Piet Mondrian have been the two 20th century artists who have influenced me the most. Not that I aim to create work like either of them but I find they always have something to teach me when I look at their work in a way that other artists don't.

I hadn't seen any of these Picasso pieces before I'd visited this museum. The work displayed here covers his entire working life, from his teens until close to his death, which is remarkable since he lived until his early 90's. What I was reminded of when I was looking at his work was how prolific he was and his exuberance and confidence is evident everywhere you look. Even though the some of the paint is faded and cracked the work is still full of life and that is the quality I would like to capture in my own work.

The following morning we visited Montmartre for a laugh before heading back home on Eurostar. It is described as Paris' last village and is the highest point in Paris. It is wonderfully tacky and touristy and you can get a fantastic view all over the city as well as a good cup of coffee. Everywhere you go there are artists touting for business for it is here that you can get your portrait done in pastels, or pen and ink, or charcoal in seven minutes flat for the cost of 30 euros. My niece was willing to have her portrait done while we were there and she stood patiently while a pastel portrait was produced in record time. I was impressed with the speed of the operation and the fact that it bore a passing resemblance to the subject, except she did end up looking like a Spanish Senorina, but I was mostly troubled by the absence of any life or energy in the finished product. That has given me something to ponder over the next few weeks.

Seven things people don't know about me (until now)

2008-03-04T15:20:00.002Z

I've been challenged by Jacqui Boyd Allen to write seven things people don't know about me. It's taken me about a week to think of that many. Actually I can only think of six and I hope I'll come up with another one by the end of the post.

1 I've worked in publishing as a designer since 1980. One of my ancestors from way back in the 19th century, Stephen Knight, was a publisher himself. I've no idea what kind of things he published and only the vaguest idea on how to find out. Paying a visit to the Public Records Office in Kew might be a good start.

2 My Dad was keen for me to follow him into teaching which has never appealed to me. But I have followed his interest in typography and calligraphy. When he was about nine years old his teacher taught him calligraphy the way monks use to do it and when he was about 16 years old he became very interested at school in printing and typesetting which has been my interest for the last 30 years.

3 The first thing I can remember designing and making was cardboard flip flops when I was about 10 years old. My friend Susan's Dad use to scoff at this but it amused the two of us during the summer holidays. We use to stand on some cardboard and draw round our feet. Then cut out the shapes and stick straps over the top to keep them on and then decorate them with glitter and stuff. When they fell apart we just made new ones. I remember it being great fun.

4 I enjoy political cartoons because they combine my interest in art and current affairs.

5 I prefer travelling around London by bus rather than tube because I like looking out of the window and watching the world go by. If I'm on the tube I'm more likely to study the people around me.

6 Since 1989 I have been studying meditation, intermittently, with the Arica School.

7 The older I get the more irritating I find music.

Goodbye winter, hello spring

2008-03-01T16:58:00.005Z

This morning, when I should have been getting ready to go to the dentist, I chose instead to inspect our very small back garden for signs of spring. And signs there were: the mint in its pot is beginning to sprout, the daffodils are growing apace. Our two snowdrops are looking very delicate and pretty and I promise to plant more bulbs in the autumn so they'll have some company next year. And the most exciting thing of all was one tiny purple bloom hiding under a shrub which was later identified as a crocus. This was great because I love to see them blooming in public gardens and churchyards; have always wanted some and now we have one. Since we didn't plant it the most likely way the bulb got into our garden was that it was dropped by a passing bird.

This is a real contrast with two weekends ago when we spent the weekend in Chesunt in Hertfordshire. We stayed in the youth hostel that is a spit and a cough away from the station and itself is right next to the Lea Valley Park. It was cold (for southern England). On the Sunday morning we left the hostel at about 9.30am dressed in all manner of clothing and were greeted with the sight of frost everywhere and the sound of silence. The park has many advertised attractions for walkers, runners, cyclists, anglers and birdwatchers and in good weather it's probably as busy Bluewater shopping centre but for us the attraction was the very lack of activity and the peace and quiet.

During the day we explored all sorts of places with names like Seventy Acres Lake, Fishers Green Lane, Hooks Marsh and Nightingale Wood and often we were entirely on our own. Occasionally we would meet a dog walker or have a chat with an owner of a narrow boat but mostly we spent our time lost in thought or admiring the views. Now and then I would catch the scent of Hawthorn blossom which is intoxicating and surprising because I have just read that it doesn't flower until May. I also spotted some Catkins next to the Hawthorn which was also a delight. But my abiding memory of that day was standing still and watching a duck waddle very carefully across a frozen pond. It wasn't in any hurry and it followed a wobbly course until it reached the bank on the other side and that was a great analogy for our day - we also took our time and followed a wobbly course around the park. This sketch is one I made the day before when we took refuge from the cold and sat in the Bittern Hide and watched the world go by.

Revived drawing project

2008-02-09T18:06:00.001Z

July 2005 was a demanding month for Londoners. I don't mean it was particularly hot that month although it might have been but I can't remember. I do remember watching the tv at work on 6 July when we all stopped what we were doing to find out which country was going to be awarded the 2012 Olympics. I can remember the astonishment and mild hysteria (in the office) when London was announced the winner and the Prime Minister, Tony Blair said that hosting the games would be 'momentous and tremendous for the capital'. There was major hysteria on the tv. I think the decision was broadcast towards lunchtime because soon after the announcement I left the building in search of food and, as I was wondering how long our elated mood might last, the Red Arrows swooped overhead in a celebratory flypass over the capital.

The elation ended around 9am the following morning on what is now known as 7/7. This was a time of great confusion. As is my wont I set off for work somewhat late. I suppose I got to Mile End tube station at about 9.30am. There were two trains waiting in the station but going nowhere and there were many people milling around the platforms. Before I had too much time to wonder how long it would be before the trains would start moving we were ordered up the stairs and out of the station. This was weird. I hadn't been involved in an evacuation since the IRA bombings and they'd ended some years before. Fortunately there are few steps at Mile End because the tunnel is so shallow at that point but even so progress up the stairs was slow as there were so many of us trying to leave. The mood quickly became silent and sombre and this was before any of us knew that three underground trains and one bus had been blown up by terrorists. So much has been written about that day there is little point adding to it so I won't.

Two weeks later on 21 July there were copy cat explosions on the tube executed by a different group of bombers and the only reason they are serving prison sentences and no-one was killed was because their bombs didn't so much go off but fizzled out. By now an all pervading feeling of anxiety was well established and there were police (some armed) patrolling every single railway station in London. This was just at the point when I was starting a new drawing project.

You might well wonder what terrorism has got to do with me drawing. Well nothing really but this project I had devised meant travelling to railway stations and drawing what I could see. I had decided to award myself a travel grant and my plan was to visit each station on what had been called The North London line but I think is now called Silver Link (this is an overground line not underground). I was to start at North Woolwich in the east and eventually finish at Richmond in the west and take in north London en route. Depending on how interesting or dull each destination proved to be I would either do one or two drawings. The plan was that all the drawings would be in mono (tones of black and grey). I would be able to work in pen and ink, or draw using graphite, or sketch in watercolour so long as there was no colour. The resulting work would fill one sketch book reserved for the purpose and when complete would be a record of a journey.

I was happy with this self-imposed structure and did begin the project on 1 August 2005. I travelled to North Woolwich and produced two sketches. The one shown here is of the Woolwich ferry which ferries people and lorries and cars back and forth across the river Thames and I was fascinated just watching the ferries come and go. What I wasn't too thrilled with was seeing so many of Her Majesty's police force prowling around every station I passed through. So I stopped this project almost as soon as I had begun it for this reason.

However for the moment things have calmed down and I'm ready to pick up my pen again and make my way to the next station on the line which is Silvertown. If anything interesting crops up during this visit I'll be sure to let you know.

Foot tapping to Stan at the Barbican

2008-02-03T16:15:00.001Z

I've just noticed that it's been nearly two months since I posted a blog and that seems such a long time ago but in fact wasn't much before Christmas. I have to admit that I've been busy like everyone else I know and I also haven't been inspired to write about anything 'arty' .

That changed just last week when we went to a Stan Tracey concert at the Barbican. Stan is a famous jazz pianist. He was born in Denmark Hill in London in 1926 and raised in Tooting in south London. My Dad also lived in Tooting in the dying days of WWII and it was where I lived when I first moved to London in 1979 so I feel Stan is a kindred spirit for that reason alone. By the way, Tooting has nothing whatsoever to recommend it. It is part of the sprawling mass which is south London but does boast a good selection of south Indian restaurants so if you find yourself in the vicinity enjoy a meal at one of them.

My husband sold the idea to me of going to a Stan Tracey concert a few years ago saying 'He's ever so good and we don't know how much longer he'll be with us' meaning he might peg out at any moment. So we went to see him perform and I became a Stan Tracey fan. Just like that. When he's playing the piano he looks to me like an old fashioned journalist thumping a news story out on an old manual typewriter but the sounds you hear are magical - it's quite amazing. Fortunately Stan's health has remained vibrant enough for him to keep performing so we've been able to see him twice at The Bull's Head in Barnes which is a great old pub right near the Thames but a pain to get home from once the trains have stopped running in the evening, and once at the Vortex jazz club in Dalston which I prefer because we can get there on the bus and it's small so you're practically sitting in the musicians' laps. The sketch shown above clearly is not of Stan, because I find he plays too quickly for me to draw him in action, but one of his fellow musicians playing the sax at The Bull's Head and is dated 28 February 2004.

The setting at the Barbican was a complete contrast to the intimate venues we've been to before. The Barbican is a rather grand concert hall with large, comfortable leather seats where people speak in hushed voices and, from where we were in the circle, the stage looked to be a long way away. It crossed my mind that this might be detrimental to the experience of listening to the music but the acoustics were so good the distance didn't matter. The evening began briskly with Stan playing with an octet of musicians. What I like about jazz is that every musician gets a chance to do a solo and at the end of their set they all took their bows, bobbing up and down to the audience, while Stan read out their names.

This was followed by a two-piano duet with Keith Tippett which was completely improvised and this was the first time they had performed together for 15 years. They didn't do any preparation for it and the result was remarkable. Here we had to have a break because I for one was emotionally drained and we came back refreshed for the second half. This was Stan with his Big Band and it was the first time I've seen a big band live and it was a complete contrast to the first half of the evening. It was big, noisy and vibrant. Stan closed the evening by playing a solo on the piano after everyone else had left the stage; just him and us - it was great.

Gestures and actions

2007-12-11T16:43:00.000Z

It's dusk and the sky is a lovely purple colour. I drop my gaze to just above the roof tops and the purple has drained away and I can see the remaining vestige of daylight. It is a yellowy turquoise and is rapidly turning to dark blue. The sky is clear so we might see some stars tonight. It is 4.46pm and in 10 days it will be the shortest day of the year, otherwise known as the Midwinter Solstice.

A number of traditions associated with the solstice have been incorporated into that other great festival which follows hard on its heels. The yule log and yule wreaths made from holly and ivy makes for a traditional Christmas and the pagan festival is now nothing more than a background note to the main event. Just the other day I was confusing the pagan with the Christian when I was browsing around Mysteries, a new-age shop in Covent Garden, looking for a Christmas present for a friend who's an atheist. Are you confused because I think I am.

That same evening I was part of a group celebrating the end of the autumn academic term. There was a festive air in the Palm Tree pub while we enjoyed eating, drinking and chatting about our holiday plans. Then we were busy pulling on our coats, hats and scarves and grabbing our bags to walk the short distance to the Chisenhale Dance Space. There was a sense of anticipation after we'd hiked up three flights of stairs and queued quietly and respectfully before piling into the performance space. There may have been an audience of about 100 sitting on the raised benches and I was tapping my feet impatiently wondering when the 'evening of new work and exploration' would begin as there wasn't much to look at.

Evidently the Chisenhale Dance Space has been a 'seedbed for research and development in movement arts and independent dance' for over 25 years. We were to watch the work of four artists and then answer questions put to us by them about the performances. Helga Stromberger's Body and Light was fascinating. She was exploring the potential of projecting video images onto dancers and she tried various combinations of movement and images including sound. This performance was most interesting and some of it was quite hypnotic. Like Helga's Body and Light, Rachel Oxley's Dilate employed a number of women dancers who remained isolated from each other but in this case the focus was on gesture, speech and movement and sometimes it was very amusing, but sometimes frustrating when, for example, we had to watch the dancers sitting on chairs which were lying on the floor and they couldn't get up. The performance by SOFt was a complete contrast. SOFt are a collective of five dancers who work regularly together exploring improvisation and their work was wonderfully physical and some of the arm gestures reminded me of Martha Graham's work from the 1920s.

It was the second performer of the evening who bored me silly at the time but paradoxically has given me more pause for thought in the few days since than any of the other dancers. His performance wasn't a dance in the accepted sense at all. It was a series of actions of locking and unlocking his imaginary bike lock and we, the audience, were supposed to be able to follow everything he was doing. He said he less interested in demonstrating gestures than in actions. I didn't realise there was much difference between the two but consulting the dictionary I read that gestures are 'postures or movements expressive of sentiment or passion' whereas actions are movements without the emotional component.

While the imaginary bike lock was being opened and shut I mentally returned to my visit to Mysteries earlier in the day. I'd entered the shop hoping to enjoy a few minutes of mindless browsing at the gifts and books I would never buy before I went in search of food. I often do this and occasionally buy a card or candle on my way out. The shop girls were busy chatting to each other very animatedly and weren't much interested in the customers. I began my journey around the shop by peering at the crystal jewellery on display in the glass case which never has any prices on show. Then I turned round and saw some china mugs. I was amused by the decoration and the message painted inside them. I wondered about buying one of them then decided against it. Then my attention was diverted by a massage glove hanging on a hook above my head and I reached up to take it down and inspect it more closely. There were more of the mugs hanging next to the glove and before I could get to the glove I managed to smash one of the mugs on the floor. This shocked me but didn't bother the shop girls who simply cleared the broken bits away and continued their conversation. On reflection I don't know whether I was using actions or gestures during this episode but the accident was certainly mindless.

The First Emperor

2007-11-25T21:29:00.000Z

It's Sunday evening and I'm sitting on the sofa writing this blog and watching 'Cranford' on television at the same time so I reckon that means I'm multi-tasking. I'm also surrounded by a sea of paper that's drifted into the house via the letterbox: some of it needs shredding, some needs filing and yet more of it simply needs recycling, but there is one piece of paper I won't be throwing out immediately. It is the brochure describing the exhibition that's pulling in the crowds at the British Museum and that's 'The First Emperor, China's Terracotta Army'.

Yesterday I was fortunate enough to be part of a focus group at the British Museum. This group spent most of the day, guided by facilitators, visiting exhibitions at the museum and discussing them afterwards. The results of these discussions will provide the museum staff with our opinions on what we thought worked well and what didn't. One of the threads that found its way into our conversations during the day was 'Isn't it great that we're getting to see the Terracotta Army as well!' The tickets for this exhibition are selling like hot cakes and rumour has it that visitors are queuing outside the museum every day from around 5.30 in the morning to snap up the 500 tickets that are released every day for sale. All our group had to do was turn up at the main gate at 9.15 am and be shown where to go and this made us feel very priviledged.

We congregated in the Great Court which is covered by a vast glass, domed roof which was installed in 2000 and is wonderfully light and shows off the sculptures to great effect but is very drafty to stand around in for too long. (Note for the future: wear more layers.) Once we had all arrived we were herded by our facilitators, gripping our notebooks and pencils in our hands, towards the entrance to the 'Terracotta Army' exhibition and encouraged to push aside the patiently waiting queue (remember they'd been waiting for hours) to arrive at the beginning of our journey 20 minutes before the paying public could go in.

Here we enjoyed, or endured, a nice piece of theatre. We had to navigate our way through a dark, narrow corridor with the only clue as to where we were going being the view of rows of books above us in the reading room to guide our way. Then we emerged into a lit area and had to ascend a flight of steps to reach the start of the exhibition which reminded me of climbing a pyramid. This served to create the atmosphere that we were entering a sacred space which was enhanced by the silence that surrounded us. There was the expected explanatory detail about the First Emperor who was born Ying Zheng in 259 BC and lived until he was 49 until 210 BC. He became the King of Qin when he was very young at the age of 13. The state of Qin was one of seven main states competing for power. Under his leadership Qin conquered the other states using highly developed weapons technology and military strategy. After his first campaign the King of Qin declared himself Qin Shihuangdi: First August Divine Emperor of the Qin. What a modest man he was!

As we proceeded around the exhibits we learned that the Emperor introduced reforms and enforced strict laws in order to govern his empire. Many of us were genuinely impressed that he established a standard weights and measures, a single currency and a universal script across the empire: all of this happened thousands of years ago. We were also surprised to discover that one of their measures for liquid is almost identical to our litre and that 'Qin' is pronounced 'Chin' which may be the origin for the name China. So we moved on past weapons, arrowheads and decorative glass vases but I was becoming impatient to see the warriors themselves. I skipped some of the exhibits so I could rush through the doorway that marked the division from life to the afterlife and finally gazed on the terracotta warriors.

There were about 14 in total - not the 7000 that the Emperor was buried with - but that didn't detract from the spectacle. The sculptures are life sized and originally would have been painted in bright colours. Every figure has individual features and their own personal clothing. One of them is a fat strongman which amused a number of us because he looked like a sumo wrestler. Another one had slouching shoulders and a concave chest. There was also an acrobat whose limbs were partially missing and there were life size horses pulling a wooden wagon. Archaeologists have also excavated civil officials and musicians, bronze chariots and birds in an area 56 km square. The tomb was more than 30 years in the making and once the Emperor had been buried the whole complex was concealed and seen by no-one until a farmer digging nearby found a terracotta head back in 1974. This exhibition deserves a second visit so next time I'll just have to go and join the queue and wait patiently like everyone else.

Please watch your step

2007-10-31T21:24:00.001Z

Thames Water Authority have been spending the last few months digging up our roads and pavements and replacing the decrepit Victorian water mains that provide our drinking water with nice, new, blue plastic pipes. We know they are blue because we can see them stacked up ready for use everywhere we go. As the engineers finish one section of road they move onto another, or they might start again on the same section of road they just completed. This work is likely to continue for months to come so every time we leave the house we have to watch where we step since the surface we're walking on might have changed overnight!

Last weekend we had a guest to stay who was keen to visit Tate Modern and we were happy to oblige. This entailed skirting the red metal fencing surrounding the various excavations in the roads and walking on heavy plastic covers laid over holes in the pavements to get to the bus stop for the 388 bus. I always find this bus route an interesting ride because it takes you through Hackney to Bethnal Green and then through the City of London and on to St Paul's Cathedral which is where we got off.

Tate Modern is on the opposite side of the Thames to St Paul's and the quickest and most scenic route to cross is to go via the Millennium footbridge. This is an elegant, steel suspension bridge described as a 'blade of light' and is the first bridge to be built across the Thames since Tower Bridge in 1894. However it's got the nickname of the 'Wobbly Bridge' because of an unexpected swaying as a result of the numbers of people walking across it in the first two days it was opened. Consequently the bridge had to be closed to the public in June 2000 and modified to eliminate the wobble and reopened in February 2002. So now it is safe to cross and you can enjoy the view while you walk. It only takes a couple of minutes to make the crossing and you'll notice to the left hand side of the Tate the Globe Theatre which is a reconstruction of the theatre where Shakespeare's plays were performed during his lifetime. Since the theatre is open to the elements, having no roof, it has a short season which ends in the autumn.

As we approached the Tate we could clearly see Louise Bourgeois' sculpture of an enormous spider. I have seen this piece on display inside the gallery where it seemed dwarfed by the size of the Turbine Hall but outside it seemed to have more impact because it is clearly larger than anything else near it and made the humans walking around it look a lot like ants milling around.

So finally we had reached our goal which was the installation in the Turbine Hall that has been causing so many comments in the last few weeks. It has become known as the 'crack in the floor' and several visitors managed to fall into it in the first few days it was open to the public, so presumably they weren't looking where they were going! It is the work of a Colombian artist called Doris Salcedo and is called 'Shibboleth'. A shibboleth, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is 'a word used as a test for detecting people from another district or country by their pronunciation, a word or sound very difficult for foreigners to pronounce correctly.' It is, therefore, a way of separating one people from another. I've been quoting from the text written by Martin Herbert published in the accompanying leaflet and he continues: 'For Salcedo, the crack reveals a 'colonial and imperial history [that] has been disregarded, marginalised or simply obliterated...'

I was obviously too shallow to understand any of this while I traced the length of the crack from one end of the hall to the other. I didn't get at all the 'untold dark side of the history of racism' while I examined the crack. I happily crossed from one side of the crack to the other in my short journey. I admired the skill it must have taken to create it and wondered how she managed to embed the chain-link fence into the crack that is clearly visible, but I didn't feel I was being encouraged to 'confront discomforting truths about our world and about ourselves'. However I did think it was time for lunch once our visit was over.

Off to Avebury

2007-10-01T21:19:00.001+01:00

So yesterday, Sunday, saw us travelling to Avebury. We were spending the weekend with friends of ours in Swindon and this trip was our Sunday outing. Avebury is in Wiltshire, nearer to Marlborough than Swindon but still only a short drive away through rolling countryside. I enjoyed being a passenger in the back of the car having the leisure to look at the leaves on the trees, which are turning to red and gold, in the clear, autumn light while our friend drove and navigated diversions on the road.

Avebury is a World Heritage Site and is one of Europe's largest stone circles and some of the stones are impressively colossal. Unlike Stonehenge which is two miles west of Amesbury (also in Wiltshire) and is on a small, contained site, Avebury extends in a large straggling sort of way across a number of fields. It accommodates a pretty little village and some roads run round some of the larger stones. Apparently the stone circles were constructed 4000 years ago and originally comprised more than 180 stones. Where the stones are missing pointed stone markers have been put in their place so you can see the shape the circles would have made.

I have to confess that I'm not that interested in speculating what the original purpose of the Avebury stones might have been since the circles were created so long ago, but I do find the maps of earth energies you can buy in the village shop that some people have taken the trouble to dowse, and map, entertaining. What I do enjoy about the place is the atmosphere of tranquility and peace inspite of the numbers of people, and grazing sheep, you meet along the way traversing the various paths. At one point I was passed by a large party, who may have been one family, complete with young and older people and at least one dog. They were so close to me that as they walked I could clearly hear their conversation. Within a few minutes I saw them in the distance walking in a line from right to left, up and down a small hill and they suddenly looked more like pilgrims en route to a destination known only to them and their conversation was completely private. We finished our stroll to the site with a visit to a stand of old, knarled beech trees that have roots that extend so far from the base of the trunks that they have formed an interlacing pattern. It was like standing under a tent and every so often some people would leave the protection of the trees and others would join them.

It seemed natural at this point to visit the Red Lion pub and I quote "it is the only Inn the world positioned within an ancient stone circle and is said to be one of the top ten most haunted locations in the world". They apparently have a resident ghost called Florrie who "is said to have had her throat slit by her husband after he caught her with another man and threw her down the well with a boulder thrown on top of her". The said well is in the bar and is safely covered with a glass lid. Frankly it looked to be a tight fit for any but the slimmest adulteress to end her days in but no-one seemed to care one way or the other since eating lunch was the chief activity going on.

Open House

2007-09-22T20:51:00.000+01:00

Last weekend was Open House across London. This meant that us commoners could gain access to buildings which are generally closed to the general public. This is a once-a-year treat that is, I understand, available across Europe at this time of year and snooping around otherwise closed buildings can be a lot of fun.

In past years we have queued for an hour and a half to visit the Foreign and Commonwealth Office which gave us a chance to chat at length to friends we hadn't seen in a while. We've also trekked around pumping stations in East London and a hospital in Bromley-by-Bow. They were all very interesting. Last Sunday we chose to visit Charterhouse Chapel. It was a pleasant afternoon and we walked there from Union Chapel in Compton Terrace, Islington. We basically traveled south via Upper Street gawping at all the restaurants as we walked. We reached the Angel and joined St John Street where it meets Pentonville Road and then continued south.

We carried on, passing yet more restaurants until they petered out to be replaced with 1960s office blocks. They were all empty because it was the weekend so this part of the street was pretty much deserted and it felt as though we were trespassing on a film set. We passed City University and eventually reached Clerkenwell Road. I thought we were nearly there by then but no, St John Street carried on further yet. We finally turned left when we reached Charterhouse Street which led us to Charterhouse Square.

I can't really recall much about the square except that the road surface is cobbled which makes it picturesque to look at and awkward to walk on and there is a garden in the middle of it. I admit I wasn't really paying attention because I was distracted by seeing real live people forming a queue outside a gate. We joined them and it turned out that the chapel wasn't going to be open for another 10 minutes so we had to be patient and wait until we could go in. While we waited we were given information sheets to read and we learned that the chapel was built by Sir Walter de Manny in 1349 to commemorate the thousands of Black Death victims who were buried in the square which had been purchased by him as an emergency burial ground. 'Oh, so that's what the nice garden is for', and, 'are there people buried under my feet as I stand here?' are a couple of the thoughts that passed through my mind.

In 1371 Sir Walter founded a Carthusian priory on the site and the chapel became the priory church. Following the dissolution of the monasteries in 1545 the chapel was demolished to make way for a new, private house for Sir Edward North. So when you pass through the gate into a garden you can see marked out on the grass the layout of the original church and the tomb of the founder, who is still buried there, and a memorial to the brothers and lay brothers who were executed by Henry VIII for refusing to accept the Act of Supremacy.

Then you are directed towards a door which takes you to the Chapel Cloister. My experience of cloisters, which I admit is limited, is that they form four sides of a square around a small garden and are open to the elements. This may well have been the case when this monastery was founded but this cloister is more like a wide corridor leading to the present chapel and was glazed in 1847. It is full of commemorative plaques to various former pupils of Charterhouse School which is now located in Surrey. The building above the cloister was destroyed by a fire bomb during the Blitz in 1941 and later restored. Within the doorway that leads to the chapel is what remains of the wooden door which resisted the fire in 1941 and saved the chapel from ruin.

As I entered the chapel my first impression was, 'isn't it small and dark?' There are box pews and it looks as though the officers of the church, the choir (if there is one), the organist and congregation must all sit on top of each other. When my eyes had had a chance to get used to the view I decided it was rather cosy and could seat a good many people in comfort. My attention was drawn to a memorial on the wall to one of Thomas Sutton's executors. It has a portrait of the said gentlemen that is in relief. He looks rather splendid in his robes and ruff and has the same name as, and looks similar to, a good friend of ours which is remarkable because this man died in 1614!

The main function of the Charterhouse, is now as a home to 40 male pensioners, known as Brothers, some of whom were there to answer our questions, and so it seems the site has gone full circle with Brothers still in residence six centuries after the original priory was founded.

Wandering in Wiltshire

2007-09-15T12:18:00.001+01:00

Thursday lunchtime found us sitting on a bench eating pasties and gazing at the Wiltshire countryside. The view included, about a mile away, the A30, beyond which is a clearly marked DANGER area, where Her Majesty's armed forces practice blowing stuff up and is close to, if not part of, Salisbury Plain. The weather was glorious and I discovered later on that I looked as red as a beetroot having caught the sun and not used any suntan lotion.

Our goal was to get to Roche Court to see a sculpture exhibition of Anthony Caro's work that was due to end in a few days time. We'd got this far on our journey by first taking the bus from Salisbury. Then, not knowing the area, we stayed too long on the bus and found ourselves stranded in what might as well have been No Man's Land. We had in our possession an Ordnance Survey map, no 131 if you're interested, bought the day before specifically to avoid getting lost but initially it was no use since we couldn't find where we were on the map so couldn't get our bearings. The result was a rather longer walk than we had hoped. We were finally put on the right path by two nice ladies who were doing some gardening and after that we were able to enjoy the day. It turns out that had we had our own helicopter we could have landed it on the front garden at Roche Court if we'd given them advance warning of our arrival!

Straw soaked in disinfectant by the main gate reminded us that Foot and Mouth is back in the country and that Roche Court is a working farm as well as venue for art exhibitions. The main house appeared to be a Georgian building but visitors are not allowed in the house. Visitors are allowed to roam around the large expanse of garden where a lot of sculptures are displayed, in the walled kitchen garden where there are more sculptures and in the small contemporary gallery, which joins the house, and was showing some abstract works by Sheila Girling. I had expected to only see the Caro's on display in the garden but a number of other artists had work on show which made for a more interesting visit. Barbara Hepworth was included as was Richard Long. There were a few odd pieces that looked like fairy tale characters from the Brothers Grimm but they were offset by pieces that I found more interesting and were abstract pieces inspired by the human figure.

I realised I was getting a bit tired when, in the walled kitchen garden, I paid more attention to the structures that the runner beans were growing up than the artwork next to them. However the things that really impressed me here were a couple of very large amphorae lying on the ground. I don't know if these were really, really old but I know this kind of thing was used in ancient Rome to contain oil or wine and I liked to imagine that they might be ancient.

We completed our visit by sitting on one of the exhibits and having a chat. It was a piece called 'Harbour' by Oliver Barratt - I hope he didn't mind but we just needed to have a sit down before embarking on our return journey to Salisbury.

On the Arundel Gallery Trail

2007-09-01T19:51:00.001+01:00

Bank holiday Monday found us on a smart new train out of Victoria Station and heading south towards Arundel in Sussex. We were going to sample the Arundel Gallery Trail which is held during the Arundel Festival towards the end of August every year. The idea was to go and see our friend, David who I'd shared a stall with at our local Midsummer Festival. He was showing his woodcut prints and drawings along with three other artists in a vacant shop in Tarrant Street which was at the heart of the gallery trail and so was a good place to exhibit.

Arundel lies close to the South Downs and the countryside, as you approach by train, is distinctly different from anything we usually see in the Lea Valley and is well worth a visit. The town has its very own castle which is rare and was established at the time of the Norman Conquest. The castle has been extensively restored over time and frankly looks too good to be true. Being sited on a hill it dominates the view of the town from the train station and provides a good landmark to follow as you walk into town. The castle has been home to the Dukes of Norfolk, the premiere Catholic family in the country, since way back in the 1500s. The town also boasts its own cathedral which is, I understand, what normally defines a city but since it's a Roman Catholic cathedral that may not apply in this case.

We approached the town from Queen Street which meant we had to cross the River Arun and as we did so we were offered the chance to buy an entry into the duck race and the plastic yellow ducks were all lined up and ready to go! I quite fancied the idea of joining in but by the time we went back some time later it was all over - shame. Never mind, since what we really wanted to do was go visit art. The trail is an art 'open house' event and you can pick up a brochure with a map in it and trot up and down streets entering participating houses and shops on a whim and without an invitation. It's great fun and provides a fantastic opportunity to snoop round posh Georgian houses. A couple of the houses had jazz music playing in the background which competed with the live Rock and Roll playing in the town square - I must say I preferred the jazz. There was the usual mix of interesting work and tat and some work had the desirable little red dots placed underneath indicating they had been sold.

We particularly liked some sculptures in what estate agents would call a well appointed garden in Maltravers Street. There were some sculptures of individual fish on metal spikes pushed into the lawn which, when displayed in an untidy row, resembled a shoal of fish which we rather liked and I can't remember the name of the artist and there was also a display of large copper pots made by Mike Savage. It would have been nice to buy one of these pots but we don't have room in our very small garden. Another artist's work which made a favourable impression on us was by Andy Waite. While we didn't like everything on show in his house we very much liked some of his large landscapes, especially those which had been inspired by the local landscape and you can have a look at some of them at his website. Arundel is a small town and it seems that everyone knows everyone else so I took the opportunity to introduce myself to Andy and tell him that many years ago I spent some time lolling around in his kitchen when David had lived there. Oh, how time flies!

And finally Henry Wellcome himself...

2007-08-25T21:01:00.001+01:00

So now I moved onto an adjacent gallery housing some of the many art objects collected by Henry Wellcome during his lifetime. It was quite chilly in the gallery and that matched the creepy feeling I got when I looked at some of the exhibits. The first to catch my eye was a Chinese torture chair. It resembled a large, upright dining chair with arm rests but the arm rests were pointy blades, and the seat of the chair had blades on it as well. Next to that was a birthing chair which looked almost as bad as the torture chair but without the blades and next to that was a dentist's chair which, although very old, was recognisable as a dentist's chair I may have sat in myself.

Henry Wellcome was born in 1853 in Wisconsin and died in 1936 in London. He established the pharmaceutical company, Burroughs Wellcome & Company with his colleague, Silas Mainville Burroughs. Henry Wellcome was an entrepreneur, philanthropist, patron of science and a pioneer of aerial photography. He bought very widely anything to do with medicine and you can see some of it in this gallery. One of the glass cases which intrigued me was full of prosthetic limbs. There were arms and legs in all shapes and sizes with straps for keeping them in place and they were highly decorated in an attempt to match the real thing. I've no idea how comfortable they were to wear and it's hard to imagine they were anything like the ones made today.

The collection includes many small diagnostic dolls used by Chinese doctors and Japanese sex aids. I gawped at Napoleon's toothbrush and wondered if that was his only toothbrush or if he replaced them as often as we are urged to. I seem to remember that there was a pair of Florence Nightingale's slippers and a sample of George IIIs hair was somewhere but sadly I can't recall it. I do remember the oil paintings which included one of a woman giving birth and one large painting of a surgeon gazing towards a window while holding a woman's heart in his hand after he's completed a post mortem on her. At this point I felt a bit queasy and was ready to leave the building.

Moving on

2007-08-18T17:43:00.001+01:00

At this point we leave the beating heart thumping gently and ascend a metal spiral staircase to the next exhibition called Medicine Now. (I forgot to mention that all this is free to Joe public.) This exhibition contains human remains but it's nothing to worry about because when you see this exhibit it doesn't look like something you'd have a conversation with, or for that matter, share a cup of tea with - it just looks like a scientific illustration that just happens to be human shaped.

The human body, rather than medical implements, is at the heart (pardon the pun) of this exhibition. Near the entrance is a large transparent perspex model of a body with all the internal organs on display neatly decked out in different colours. There are labelled buttons on a board in front of this object and when you press, say 'Spleen' a little object lights up so you can see where it is in relation to 'Liver' or 'Lung' or 'Small intestine' which looked enormous to me and I could have spent quite a long time playing with this but my attention was diverted by a television screen. Here I was able to watch excerpts from programmes, dating from the 1960s up to the present day, about attitudes to medical problems. It began with a patronising discussion about children with Downs Syndrome which I found shocking and then covered all sorts of other things including, I think, cloning and Dollie the sheep.

When I felt in need of a sit down I plonked myself on a Sound Chair. When you do this a recording starts and I listened to one on malaria and another on obesity. Fortunately they also provide a written transcript of the text in case you can't hear everything. Following this I voluntarily stood in front of a camera which photographed my face and compared it with the previous 50 faces it had shot. Then the image of my face was distorted to make it fit the 'average' face and I looked even weirder than I normally do.

At one end of this exhibition there is a browsing area including something they call the Forum. This isn't a market place where people set the world to rights but a wall displaying visitors artwork. You are invited to choose a word or two printed on the back of a large card then turn the card over and write and draw about those words. I chose the word 'fever' and produced something that was fantastically dull but, unlike mine, a lot of the cards on display were really interesting and witty.

There were also plenty of pieces of artwork that artists had made in response to all things medical including a large, subtle piece that could have been mistaken for an embroidery but on closer inspection it became clear that it had been made from over-the-counter drugs and carved into the shapes of the parts of the body that particular pill was intended to help. Next to this was one of my favourite parts of the exhibition. You have to listen to it on headphones and it was a couple of minutes from a comedy sketch by a comedian who has MS and he was describing his neighbours reaction to his walking stick - it was very funny and I would like to have heard the whole thing.

More later ...

Wellcome

2007-08-15T18:28:00.001+01:00

On Tuesday we took a short walk through Hackney to catch the number 30 bus. This time we were heading west towards Euston Square which is beyond Kings Cross! I enjoy this bus journey because you travel through different areas of London which have their own distinctive qualities.

After you've left Hackney, which is known for its diverse ethnic culture including Turkish and Vietnamese restaurants, you get to Dalston which is currently suffering from some urban blight but in its favour is home to the Vortex jazz club, where we tapped our feet to Clara and the Real Lowdown last Friday, and a Polish deli. Before long you're approaching expensive Islington. This used to be a working class district but now it helps to be a millionaire. Having turned left at Highbury Corner you find yourself in Upper Street which is almost exclusively filled with restaurants. This is a great place, of an evening, to sashay up and down the road showing off to everyone else who is showing off.

On reaching the Angel, Islington (which has a revolting piece of public art at the N1 centre) you turn right into Pentonville Road. There is a prison of the same name but there's no sign of it in this part of the road. From here its downhill to Kings Cross, one of our mainline stations and then the bus carries on past the British Library arriving at Euston Station, another mainline station. This is where you get off and walk a short distance to an imposing building which houses the Wellcome Collection.

This was my first visit and, being rather ignorant, I was just vaguely aware of Wellcome being associated with medicine and drugs. Little did I know that it also owns a staggering collection of art, much of which relates to medicine and there, in the foyer, was a hanging sculpture of a body by none other than Antony Gormley.

So we start with The Heart exhibition which is on for another month. You begin in Egypt where you learn that the heart was seen 'as the centre of intellect, character and emotion'. Moving on you are introduced to Galen (129 - 200 CE) who was an ancient Greek physician and philosopher whose ideas about the workings of the heart endured for more than a thousand years. Then, and this really amazed me, there were a few anatomical drawings of the heart by Leonardo da Vinci, no less, and these have been lent by Her Majesty the Queen. So those pretty much knocked me out and I ought to go back and have another look at them. Then you learn about William Harvey (1578 - 1657) who graduated from the University of Padua in Italy. He was a great fan of dissection and the results of his many experiments to do with the heart and circulation of blood, when published, challenged Galen's well established model.

At this point I went and sat in a small cinema which was showing a film about heart operations conducted at Papworth hospital in Cambridgeshire with a sound track of Billy Graham, the preacher, sermonising about the siginificance of blood and the heart in the bible. Since I am rather squeamish and didn't have a cushion to hide behind I got up and left when the surgeons were firing up the electric saw so I never did find out what happened to the patient.

And this, dear reader, is where we leave the 'heart' for two more exhibitions which I'll cover in my next post.

Another day, another walk

2007-08-06T14:08:00.001+01:00

On Friday evening three of us decided it would be nice to take a walk together on the following day, Saturday. The temperature was cool when we made the decision but come the next morning it was a different story and the weather was forecast to be about the hottest it's been this summer. True, we haven't had a glorious English summer this year but I still think that 30° C is hot for walking - others no doubt will disagree.

One of our party was keen to meet early in the morning so we could be out for the whole day but there was shopping to be bought and chores to be done so we compromised and met at around noon at Hackney Wick station. Our plan was to amble roughly north along the Lea Valley Park as far as Springfield Park, which is a distance of about three miles, with no particular plans in mind after that. We hadn't done this walk for over a year and were curious to know how the area may have changed in the mean time. This is because part of the Lea Valley Park is being incorporated into the 2012 Olympic site and this will change the area's appearance. However the only change we could see were blue hoardings that have been erected on the east side of part of the tow path restricting, but not impeding, the movement of cyclists and walkers for a short distance.

So far, so good. No sign then of the Olympics spoiling our weekend pursuits at least for the time being. Our walk took on a pleasant pace and we paused every so often to look at something, or pick a berry, or take a swig of water and there were few other people around to disturb the peace. At some point I remarked on the sight, on the opposite bank, of a partly submerged canal boat still tied at one end to a post on the canal side. My companions didn't find the sight of a sunken boat remarkable, and, while I would have liked to have stared at it for longer wondering who had left it in that state, they kept on walking.

So with Hackney Marsh to our right, which is apparently to be turned into a coach park for the Olympics and no longer available for football matches, our destination for lunch was not far off. First of all we had to pass the Middlesex filter beds and nature reserve. We recommended visiting this on our return to our friend but in the event did not go back that way and so the opportunity on this occasion was lost.

Here we crossed Cow Bridge and got onto the west side of the canal and headed to the Princess of Wales pub for lunch. I always find this pub a slightly depressing place because it is full of photos of Diana but today we chose to sit outside and so didn't have to look at them. While we were waiting for our food we looked over the canal to a recently restored building which has an air of a Lutyens country house about it. Far from being the home of an affluent industrialist it is the office from where Thames Water authority are coordinating the upgrading of our leaking Victorian water mains which will take who knows how long to accomplish. There is another pub next door to the Princess of Wales which has a nautical theme and I think we should try it on our next visit. There is a chance that the food might be better than the lunch we had which looked nice enough but didn't taste of anything much.

So on to Springfield Park which we reached by continuing along the canal and it's entrance is just past the Anchor and Hope pub. The park used to have some rather elegant villas in it and one remains with a café in it. There are formal gardens in it where a wedding party were having their photographs taken and acres and acres of lawn where people were sunbathing and picnicing. The park is on a hill so you can get a good view of the Walthamstow Marshes and since most of London is so flat it's nice to get above sea level occasionally and this is where I chose to sit and do this drawing.

Yes, I'm lost

2007-07-30T15:28:00.001+01:00

I think I'm standing all alone. All I can see in front of me is white stuff. I'm beginning to panic slightly and can feel tension rising in my chest then someone's elbow suddenly hoves into view. Almost hits me in the face. Then there's a laugh and the owner of the elbow just as suddenly disappears. I have no idea where I am. I try to remember where the doorway is and the friend I came in to this space with! So, do I go on into the unknown, or make my way back through the unknown to the doorway that represents safety?

No, I'm not leaving yet, I think. I'm going to be brave and keep on exploring this space but I feel more or less paralysed by fear. I reach my hand out to find the edge, the glass that's defining this space and suddenly the experience is too frightening and I need to leave. The white stuff is like a dense cloud, sort of like wet cotton wool and is all encompassing - it feels as though it is inside me as well as outside me. The experience is so disorienting and my expectations have been so thoroughly turned upside down that the white cloud actually feels heavy to move through and all I can see is white, white, white.

I'm not describing a nightmare, nor I am stuck in a blizzard. I have been experiencing Antony Gormley's White Light which is on at the Hayward Gallery on the South Bank in London. This exhibit is a cloud-filled glass box where you can lose yourself and is definitely the hands on part of the exhibition since that's the only part of your body that will give you any idea of where you are and only then when you bump into something or someone.

I can't describe it better than Antony Gormley so I quote: 'Architecture is supposed to be the location of security and certainty about where you are. It is supposed to protect you from the weather, from darkness, from uncertainty. Blind Light undermines all of that. You enter this interior space that is the equivalent of being on top of a mountain or at the bottom of the sea. It is very important for me that inside it you find the outside. Also you become the immersed figure in an endless ground, literally the subject of the work.'

So if you fancy trying out the modern day equivalent to a ride on a ghost train the exhibition continues until 19 August.

Recent work

2007-07-24T16:27:00.000+01:00

I've added a new section to my website devoted to recent work which you can see here. I will add work to this area as I complete it.

Are you lost?

2007-07-22T18:53:00.002+01:00

"Are you lost?" the man asked. "No", I replied "we're puzzled". And we were because we were trying to find the beginning of a walk. We were planning to walk along part of the route of the river Wandle beginning near Wandsworth Town train station and finishing 4.5 miles later at Merton Abbey Mills, near Colliers Wood Station.

We were following the route described in Gilly Cameron-Cooper's book Walking London's docks, rivers & canals and cursed ourselves for leaving the A to Z at home which at this point would have been more useful. We began to get our bearings after we'd crossed four lanes of traffic, which is part of the Wandsworth gyratory system, and found Smugglers Way which took us close to the river Thames. Feeling more confident we got on to the Causeway which we learned from the guide book 'was once the road to the village square over the marshy delta of the Wandle'. Evidently the Wandle was great for water power and was one of the best rivers in England for driving mills and this gave rise to all sorts of industry being established on its banks. In the early 19th century the many mills were powering industries like 'lavender and leather processing and the production of beer, gunpowder, chocolate, textiles and paper'. In fact the Ram Brewery, which had been a commercial brewery since the reign of Queen Elizabeth I and later bought by Youngs in 1831, has only recently closed for business.

After our fleeting sight of the river Wandle we came upon a modern day industrial site where we were directed to turn left. This was impossible as the way was blocked by a building so we trudged on until we found a local map in a bus shelter which put us back on the right route. This involved recrossing the gyratory system and here our walk proper began. We circuited the Ram Brewery premises which was full of parked vehicles and appeared to be functioning but there was no sign of human life. We wondered what's going to happen to the place now: more than likely it will end up with expensive flats built on the site.

We decided to give the town museum a miss and pressed on to King George's Park and the Wandle Trail, leaving the road works and building sites behind us. The Wandle disappears under Wandsworth's famous Arndale shopping centre and we picked it up again in the park which is a very pleasant, manicured municipal green space with an impressive willow tree, tennis courts and playgrounds for the kids. The further we followed the Wandle Trail the less built up the route became and we could enjoy the rhythm of walking and breathing fresher air. This wasn't to last long because our way was blocked again with industrial buildings and we had to make our way through a large housing estate, which had amazing repeating curved arches under which we walked, to Garrett Lane and then into Earlsfield.

Earsfield was once a rural village and presumably Garrett Lane had been a country lane before the opening of the railways. Now you have to use your imagination because there is concrete and tarmac as far as the eye can see. We decided this was a good as time as any to stop at a pub, and it was pouring with rain, so we ducked into a cavernous bar which it turned out was called 'the puzzle'. Once we'd rejoined the trail we entered the part of the walk which felt very much like being in the country. Our pace slowed and we had time to stare and listen to the sounds of the river. This may not have lasted much more than a mile but the impact it had on me made it feel like the greater part of the walk. Before too long it was time to start navigating our way around Colliers Wood. We couldn't walk through much of the Wandle Meadow Nature Park due to flooding but we could see it and it looked like a lake.

According to our map the end of our walk was in sight but, like the start of our outing, we had much circumnavigating to do before we reached our goal. We found ourselves traipsing through an out-of-town retail park where many centuries before Merton Priory had existed until the Dissolution in 1538. Instead of walking through cloisters, or attending church, or getting fish from the fish ponds we found ourselves passing PC World, fast food joints and filling stations. Still surrounded by retail outlets built in the 1980s we were puzzled again as to how to get to Merton Abbey Mills but we carried on until we saw a small area of old buildings with many sign posts saying 'Merton Abbey Mills'. So there it was, at last and we gratefully sat at a table at Mama Rosa's Italian Trattoria to eat a delicious Italian meal while reading about Emma, Lady Hamilton, Admiral Lord Nelson and William Morris, the pioneer of the Arts and Crafts Movement, all of whom had lived, loved and laboured on this same site in previous generations.

Website update

2007-07-16T11:48:00.001+01:00

This is just to let you know that I have updated my website, which previously had three images on it and now has over 50 images, and you can visit it here.

A short stroll to the canal

2007-07-09T12:48:00.001+01:00

As I enter the park through the gate I leave every day life behind me. I'm standing under a tall avenue of plane trees which are as high as a church and extend as far as my eye can see to my left and my right. The branches provide slowly moving shade and a similar tranquility that you might find in a cathedral.

I leave the protection of the trees and enter the open country of the park and am exposed to the sun which feels hot. There are few people around, most walking dogs, and I can hear dried leaves crackling underfoot. I pass the bandstand which stands empty in a stand of trees. Occasionally I see someone practicing martial arts in there but not today. As I move on I spy one or two cyclists in the distance; then feeling a breeze hear it whistling through the trees. Now I am approaching the canal - the object of my walk - and become aware of a number of crows standing on the grass which reminds me of Alfred Hitchcock's film The Birds. This feels slightly menacing but is swiftly replaced with the intoxicating scent of Honeysuckle which I luxuriate in but oddly can't locate.

Here I leave the park and walk onto the tow path of the Hertford Union Canal. I am aiming for the Top Lock as opposed to any other lock. There's one narrow boat moored by the side of the canal and I can just discern the people on it talking. I can hear more birdsong now I am by the canal but they are having to compete with the sounds of crashing coming from the industrial units opposite. Two very large birds swim gracefully by and I wonder if they are swans or ducks as I turn left towards my goal. While I am enjoying the sounds of bees buzzing, birds whooshing and butterflies fluttering silently by my eyes are distracted by a number of industrial plastic sacks lying in the water by the side of the canal. They look as though they have been there for a very long time.

I forget the bags as soon as I spot the blackberry bushes and hoping for a free treat (although this is only July) feel mildly disappointed when I see that none of the fruit is ripe yet. Then my butterfly mind is occupied by another new sight which I've never seen before. It's on the opposite bank and set in a housing development. It's a sculpture and at first glance it looks like a horse pulling a carriage. On the other hand it could just as easily be a horse towing a rowing boat and what I had thought was the awning of the carriage could also be describing a wave of water. I can see there is a small notice by the sculpture, but I will have to wait until I've worked out how to get over to that side of the canal before I can read it, and that won't be today.

I continue my stroll towards the Top Lock accompanied by the drone of an aeroplane and in the distance I can see the constant stream of traffic on the A12, which although not a motorway might as well be one. The traffic noise is drowned by the torrent of water rushing through the gates of the lock and it smells seaweedy which strikes me as odd since we are inland. I have reached my goal but find I have to share it with a couple who are having a romantic moment. They are oblivious to my presence but I am aware of them so leave them to their privacy. I can come back another day.

It's raining, it's pouring...

2007-06-30T13:36:00.001+01:00

The sky is grey, outside is wet and I'm probably going to spend most of this weekend indoors. Being indoors is making me feel all introspective and I've been reflecting on one of my reasons for making art which is to capture experiences I have had. I find it easier to do this when the experience is actually happening - like painting a view while looking at it - rather than trying to remember later on what the experience was like.

The rain has reminded me of the time we went to a music festival in Bethnal Green and it was lovely and sunny when we got there. I'd gone prepared to do some sketching and I had my travelling watercolour set with me and my little camping stool. I set up camp in front of the sound stage and, ever conscious of opportunistic thieves ready to steal my belongings, I began to sketch what I could see.

Before long I attracted an audience of my own who were keen to watch me over my shoulder while I worked. I found this unsettling but was resigned to it since this often happens if I work outside where there are people around - you briefly become public property. What I wasn't prepared for was one man with his small daughter who took up a position slightly behind me and to my left and behaved as though he was my personal security guard and even directed other members of my 'audience' where to stand with an imperious wave of the hand. Since I wanted to get on with my task in hand I didn't bother to remonstrate with him; instead I hoped he would get bored and leave me alone. This did not happen but in this instance I was saved by a downpour which you can see made the paint run (sketch shown above) and made those of us caught in the rain head for the nearest tent. Although it's not possible to see it in my painting when I look at it I can remember the feelings of claustrophobia and the lack of freedom I felt when I was hemmed in by my group of onlookers.

The day of the midsummer fair

2007-06-24T10:35:00.000+01:00

Saturday dawned overcast and a bit drizzly in Hackney. Still, that was a lot better than the rest of the country has been putting up with during 'blazing' June with many places ankle deep in water. Saturday marked the day for the Victoria Park Traders Association summer fair and I was going to share a stall with a friend. This would be my first experience as a market trader and my stock-in-trade was my greetings cards that I've produced from sketches I made during the '90s; you can see a selection on the left. I undertook some market research last year and found out which were the favourite designs so I was happy with my selection of cards. By the time my co-stall-holder, who was planning to sell his wood cut engravings, had driven up from Sussex the sun was shining and there were patches of blue sky and we quickly set up our stall.

The area for the site of this fair is known these days as Victoria Park Village. This is a misnomer - there never has been, in the traditional sense, a village in this area of London. As far as I know there was one in Bethnal Green and there was one in Hackney in the centre of the present town. The place we now know as London is a collection of towns and villages plus the City of London and City of Westmister which over the centuries have merged into one enormous city. Many of these locations have retained some of their former atmosphere, architecture and street names and have a sense of history which can add charm to your visit or conversely they consist of miles and miles of identical houses, parades of shops, roads and tube stations which you feel you'll never find your way out of. Help!!

Anyway this modern day village of Victoria Park, which really means in, estate agent's shorthand, an area of affluence with rising house prices, is in the borough of Hackney and takes its name from Victoria Park which is in the borough of Tower Hamlets next door. I've always felt a bit cynical about this 'village' tag but I was to have the cynicism wiped off my face during the course of the day because there really does exist a feeling of community, warmth and general good will in the area and I, along with my fellow stall-holder, were beneficiaries of this bonhomie.

The stall on our left was run by a lady who used to run a flower shop around the corner until she started a family. She was selling rather elegant pots and plants and flowers. We didn't find out her name but did keep an eye on her stall several times during the day including the time when she went to sing with the band who were providing some of the entertainment. The stall to our right was run by two friends who'd studied fashion design together. They were selling children's clothes and accessories and when it rained on and off during the day we'd all help cover the stalls in plastic. We didn't find out their names either, or reveal ours for that matter but that didn't seem important at the time.

We treated the day as a holiday, sat in garden chairs, read the paper, drank coffee, chatted and watched the world go by. Occasionally someone would stop and scrutinise our work and even engage us in conversation but sales were thin on the ground. To be fair hardly any the other stall holders were making much money as far as we could see except, of course, the food stalls which were constantly busy. Everyone was hungry, including us. The best part of the day for me was meeting all my neighbours as they drifted past our pitch and who had no idea that I paint or design and were all very interested in what was on display. This included the local shop keepers and even my French teacher from evening class so while I didn't make any money to speak of I finished the day having made more acquaintances and feeling more at home in the place I call home.

Midsummer Fair next weekend

2007-06-16T12:35:00.000+01:00

This is a public service announcement. The Victoria Park Village is having its midsummer fair next weekend on Saturday, 23 June from 12 noon until 6pm and I will be sharing a stall with my friend David. We will be selling our artwork along with many other people selling food, drink and playing music and, so long as the weather holds up, it should be a good day. If you happen to live in London and fancy an afternoon out here is a map reference.

Visit to the Royal Academy Summer Show

2007-06-09T21:44:00.001+01:00

I am bent on visiting the Friday evening preview of the Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition and remind myself all day, at work, that that is how I'm going to spend the evening. The claim is that the Summer Exhibition is traditionally the start of the Summer Season which is news to me. In previous centuries the exhibition was very fashionable and it was considered an honour for an artist to be able to exhibit there. In recent decades the exhibition fell into a decline and became a byword for mediocrity but now it has sharpened up its act. The show is the world's largest open submission art exhibition, which means anyone can submit work providing they fill in the forms and pay the fee, and I can say from my own experience there is a very strong chance that your work will then be rejected and you'll simply be out of pocket but you will have a nicely framed piece of work to admire.

The Royal Academy of Arts was established in 1768 and its original home was in Somerset House which is on the Strand but eventually it moved to its present home at Burlington House in Piccadilly. Burlington House has a very large and grand courtyard and I like to think of visitors in the past arriving by carriage, but this is 2007 and I arrived on foot having travelled most of the way from Holborn on the number 8 bus which terminates at Victoria Station. Burlington House was originally a private Palladian mansion that was greatly enlarged in the 19^th century and the feeling I get when I enter the building is that I'm visiting a very grand, aristocratic family home - what with the big staircase opposite the entrance, the paintings on the ceilings and the marble here, there and everywhere - and I sense that it's time to kick back, relax and take it easy. This was nigh on impossible on Friday evening when the foyer was more like a crowded tube train during rush hour!

I deliberately avoided buying the list of works and their prices since I didn't plan to buy anything apart from a drink and made do with reading the panels with explanatory text that are near the entrance to each gallery. Sadly I found a lot of the text tediously pretentious so attended to the work on display instead which is after all what I was there for. The piece of work that I really wanted to see was David Hockney's 'Stand of Trees'. In fact it is one landscape painting made up of 50 separate paintings and occupies the end wall of the largest gallery. I'm never sure whether I actually like Hockney's work but I did find this one fascinating; I spent some time trying to see how he built up the layers of the painting and I did this while enjoying a sit down and a glass of pimms. This painting was all the more interesting because I'm trying to resolve a problem I'm having with a landscape of my own and I'm hoping that studying the Hockney will help me solve it (a detail from it is shown here).

As usual I can never look at all the exhibits in one visit because there are simply too many to see so I belted round the other galleries in my haste to find the exit and en route I paused in the gallery devoted to architecture which I always enjoy although don't always understand. While there I spied, on a ledge by an architectural display, a temporary installation of empty champagne flutes and discarded pimms glasses complete with swizzle sticks, bits of cucumber and mint leaves and I thought there's an opportunity for some pretentious witticisms but I just couldn't think of anything.