Where am I now and where do I go to next?

Route map of the North London Line from Drawing my way round London

Where am I now and where do I go to next are two questions I am asking myself a lot at the moment and they have nothing to do with getting from A to B. I've completed two contrasting art projects and now I feel at a bit of a loose end. I would love to get my teeth into something new but nothing intriguing has yet appeared on the horizon. So instead of kicking my heels at home I visited Tower Hamlets History Library & Archives to learn a bit about life in the Jewish East End in Whitechapel in the late 1890s and that included looking at maps.

Map of my route along the Hertford
Union canal.

As it happens Drawing my way round London and 805 steps along the Hertford Union Canal did both involve travelling and map-making. Having spent a long time drawing these maps it made me think about how we use them. In my case I wanted to show a simplified route of where my art was taking me and to make it easier for the readers of my blogs to follow.

The exhibition Maps and the 20th century: Drawing the line at the British Library was worth visiting and is ending in a couple of weeks. It shows many types of maps that I have never seen before. For example I was very struck by a huge Soviet town plan of Brighton from as late as 1990. I always try and read the labels on maps to try and get a handle on the geography but these were in Cyrillic which made these familiar names completely foreign and I found that a bit disturbing.

Some of our own collection

I enjoyed seeing the original rough pencil sketch for the London tube map from 1931 which was hand drawn by Harry Beck. This basic design has survived for nearly 90 years and has been flexible enough to undergo numerous changes over the years and works just as well on digital platforms while retaining the original characteristics we have become so used to. I also became nostalgic for the A to Z maps of London which were originally compiled in the 1930s by Phyllis Pearsall, a British painter and writer. For years I used never to leave home without one and now we just rely on Google Maps to direct us.

An example of a different kind of map was produced by the Ford Motor Company as a souvenir of a trip you could take through the Ford Rouge Plant in River Rouge MI in 1940. This was a diagrammatic map of the progress of iron ore to the finished car. And as a complete contrast from any other exhibit there was an Escape Map dress on display. At the end of the war there was a surplus of military 'escape and evasion' maps which had been printed onto silk in order to be lightweight, more durable than paper and silent when opened. This dress was made using military maps of South East Asia which may have come from an RAF airfield in southern England. This reminded me that my Grandmother made my aunt's wedding dress from parachute silk in the late 1940s because there was so much of it available.

My foray into maps may or may not lead to a new direction for my artwork but it has been fun exploring them and if I fancy browsing any more unusual maps I can pore over The Map Book edited by Peter Barber that I was given as a birthday present.

Happy New Year

I am writing this on New Year’s day 2017. This is the time of year when we have the leisure to review the past year and many of us optimistically make resolutions for the year to come knowing that they might last no longer than the fire works that explosively marked midnight. We always hope that this new year will be more peaceful than the previous one and 2016 certainly held plenty of moments for me that I am happy to see the back of and also memories that I will treasure.
 
So this has got me thinking about seasons since we have just past the winter solstice, or the shortest day in the year for those of us living in the northern hemisphere, and can begin to look forward to longer days with more light. Here is one definition of seasons that I read this morning: a season is a division of the year marked by changes in weather, ecology and hours of daylight. I can’t disagree with that but in my review of my life I realise that I have recently come to the end of a personal ‘season’ which I think began roughly in February 2015 and ended in November 2016.

I am an artist but I was trained as a graphic designer. I practised as a designer for around 35 years and for the most part it kept a roof over my head and food on the table. I did not have a stellar career but I know that my work was often appreciated and occasionally I made the most all mighty cock-ups. For many of those 35 years I had a hankering to develop my life as a artist and slowly, slowly I began to concentrate on that side of my life.

It is common for those of us who describe ourselves as artists to follow a path which goes something like this. Produce, produce, produce work of varying quality and exhibit, exhibit, exhibit anywhere and everywhere it in the hope that sales will follow. This strategy of spreading yourself too thin can occasionally be successful but it doesn’t work for me.

Back in early 2015 I was offered the opportunity to rent part-time desk space at Fish Island Labs in Hackney Wick. This proved to be a turning point for me as I needed to experience a form of retreat and really consider what the hell I was doing as an artist. Hackney Wick is walking distance from my home yet feels a million miles away from anywhere in spite of its proximity to the QE Olympic Park.
 
To all intents and purposes I was doing much the same things as normal. I was still socialising, visiting art exhibitions, hanging out with friends, going to the hairdressers but internally I was experiencing my own winter. This was a prolonged period that I needed to live through before I could see the green shoots of spring. I didn’t feel very productive since I only completed two paintings but I redesigned my website, finished and launched my ebook of drawings around north London and undertook a series of drawings along the Hertford Union canal before the property developers change it beyond recognition plus I recognised that my life as a designer is well and truly over and that I am an artist.

Last September marked my 60th birthday and I threw a big party. It was a great success and all my guests enjoyed it. Now I see that as my way of announcing that my period in retreat was coming to an end but I still had a couple of months to go before all the loose ends were tied up and I could leave Fish Island with no regrets. 

Looking back I can see that my personal ‘seasons’ tend to overlap each other like an untidy pile of paper and they don’t begin and end neatly one after another like a tidy ribbon which might explain why I don’t feel a need to celebrate New Year because I’m not sure when my new year begins or when the old one ends. 

Happy New Year!

Postcards from Canada: 9

Yesterday's sketch completed 

Fabiola complaint

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

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

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

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

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

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

What makes art ART?

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

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

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

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

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

More random dosmetic scenery

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.