Richard of York gave battle in vain

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

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?

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'

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

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

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

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.