Intriguing interiors

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

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

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!

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

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!

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

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.