356 NIGHT WAVES by KENNETH DRAPER

ROYAL ACADEMY OF ART SUMMER SHOW

 Night Waves, mixed media, 85 x 40 46cm

"My work always creates a dialogue between sculpture, painting and drawing. The explosions in my new work ...respond to the piercing beauty and ravaged landscapes of my home in Menorca". Kenneth Draper

What is the best use for photography? 
Photographing other pictures says David Hockney  in The Artist's Eye: looking at pictures in a book. It is the only time it can be true to its medium, because, like the photographs that result, paintings are flat two-dimensional objects. People and landscapes and nearly everything else in the universe, are uncompromisingly three dimensional, full of knobbles and curves and inlets and complexity.

Nowhere is this more true than in trying to use a photograph to capture the beauty and strength and freshness of sculpture. Sculpture demands not just a visual but a physical engagement, only coming to life when you walk round it. You cannot see it all at once. It's like chasing shadows.

Night  Waves is displayed on a white plinth, roughly at table height.At first I took time to linger on the complexity and beauty of the base; then the dancing curls and whirling curves, captured and poised as lightly and briefly as birds or waves. At the top is magical space. The artist talks of 'frayed edges' in his works. Here they fizz and vibrate as if solid metal melts into the surrounding air.
 

Wohl Central Hall. Royal Academy of Art

To feature this work - and a few others - I have broken my rule of never writing about art which is only accessible by paying to see it. This summer's Royal Academy of Art Summer Exhibition, a selection co ordinated by Michael Craig Martin, is the best I've seen,  It starts in the courtyard where visitors are confronted by a towering formation of steel ‘clouds’, created out of 8,000 tetrahedrons by Conrad Shawcross, before climbing Jim Lambie’s kaleidoscopic stairs leading up to the Main Galleries. which I'll feature in my next blog.

www.kennethdraper.com/current_exhib_text.html
www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibition/summer-exhibition-2015
www.michaelcraigmartin.co.uk/
www.hockneypictures.com/
conradshawcross.com/
www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/lambie-zobop-t12236

355 MAGNA CARTA EMBROIDERY (Wikipedia version) by CORNELIA PARKER

BRITISH LIBRARY

Question: What is this man doing?

Answer: Stitching a section of an embroidery 13 metres long and 1.5 metres wide which  replicates the Magna Carta's Wikipedia article as it appeared a year ago  on the charter's 799th anniversary.

2015 is the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta, a treaty setting out joint rule between Bad King John and  the Turbulent Barons - or so the story goes. One version of events is that the King outfoxed the barons by reneging on his promises. But the story never ends. There was a report yesterday that a letter found in Lambeth Palace Archives shows 'the truly revolutionary nature of what happened in 1215' and that the king did not take sole charge of the new peace - the first glimmer of shared power showed through..

Cornelia Parker with a section of the tapestry (photo) Tony Antoniou

The British Library chose  the brilliant  Cornelia Parker to celebrate the event. She has the ability to transform some of the most ordinary objects into something compelling and extraordinary (for example a garden shed in Cold Dark Matter: an exploded view at the Tate). Sometimes she contains things beyond our control and makes them into that which is quiet and contemplative. In this case she turns a unique, revolutionary charter into somethng as commonplace as a piece of embroidery.

 Over 200 people helped to create this piece. They included over 40 prisoners supervised by Fine Cell Work, a social enterprise group which trains prisoners in paid, skilled creative needlework;  members of the Embroiderers' Guild who tackled the the detailed pictures, emblems and logos; civil rights campaigners, MPs, celebrities, the Royal School of Needlework, Hand and Lock - and some present day barons.

Jarvis Cocker who stitched the words "Common People" (photo) Joseph Turp

The artists says "These very different people each have their own opinions about democracy today and I thought carefully about the words they should stitch. For instance Baroness Warsi, Eliza Manningham-Buller, Julian Assange and numerous prisoners have stitched the word 'freedom' but each has their different relationship to it". Jarvis Cocker, above, stitched "Common People".

  http://www.bl.uk/events/cornelia-parker-magna-carta-an-embroidery#sthash.J0Kx6Du1.dpuf

www.bl.uk/magna-carta/800th-anniversary-programme

www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2015/may/14/magna-carta-an-embroidery-cornelia-pa... 
www.frithstreetgallery.com/artists/works/cornelia_parker

www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/cold-dark-matter/introduction 

www.royal-needlework.org.uk/news/story/161/rsn-helps-create-cornelia-parker-s-magna-carta-an-embroid.
www.finecellwork.co.uk/ www.frithstreetgallery.com/artists/works/cornelia_parker
www.embroiderersguild.com/ 

www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00ptsjd       (Jarvis Cocker)

All these people have their own opinions about democracy today and I thought carefully about the words they should stitch. For instance, Baroness Warsi, Eliza Manningham-Buller, Julian Assange and numerous prisoners have all stitched the word ‘freedom’, but all have different relationships to it.”

The bulk of the text of the Wikipedia page has been embroidered in various prisons by inmates under the supervision of Fine Cell Work, a social enterprise that trains prisoners in paid, skilled, creative needlework. The detailed pictures, emblems and logos that punctuate the text have been fashioned by highly accomplished members of the Embroiderers' Guild, a national charity that promotes and encourages the art of embroidery and related crafts, alongside embroiderers from the Royal School of Needlework and the leading embroidery company Hand & Lock.

“I love the idea of taking something digital and making it into an analogue, hand-crafted thing”, says Cornelia.

- See more at: http://www.bl.uk/press-releases/2015/may/cornelia-parker-unveils-13-metre-long-magna-carta-embroidery#sthash.m9x78lrP.dpuf

All these people have their own opinions about democracy today and I thought carefully about the words they should stitch. For instance, Baroness Warsi, Eliza Manningham-Buller, Julian Assange and numerous prisoners have all stitched the word ‘freedom’, but all have different relationships to it.”

The bulk of the text of the Wikipedia page has been embroidered in various prisons by inmates under the supervision of Fine Cell Work, a social enterprise that trains prisoners in paid, skilled, creative needlework. The detailed pictures, emblems and logos that punctuate the text have been fashioned by highly accomplished members of the Embroiderers' Guild, a national charity that promotes and encourages the art of embroidery and related crafts, alongside embroiderers from the Royal School of Needlework and the leading embroidery company Hand & Lock.

“I love the idea of taking something digital and making it into an analogue, hand-crafted thing”, says Cornelia.

- See more at: http://www.bl.uk/press-releases/2015/may/cornelia-parker-unveils-13-metre-long-magna-carta-embroidery#sthash.m9x78lrP.dpuf

355 MAGNA CARTA EMBROIDERY by CORNELIA PARKERCornelia said, ‘I wanted the embroidery to raise questions about where we are now with the principles laid down in the Magna Carta, and about the challenges to all kinds of freedoms that we face in the digital age. Like a Wikipedia article, this embroidery is multi-authored and full of many different voices. - See more at: http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2015/05/magna-carta-an-embroidery.html#sthash.6Zrdqeif.dpuf

Cornelia said, ‘I wanted the embroidery to raise questions about where we are now with the principles laid down in the Magna Carta, and about the challenges to all kinds of freedoms that we face in the digital age. Like a Wikipedia article, this embroidery is multi-authored and full of many different voices. - See more at: http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2015/05/magna-carta-an-embroidery.html#sthash.6Zrdqeif.dpufvcvncncm,n

Cornelia said, ‘I wanted the embroidery to raise questions about where we are now with the principles laid down in the Magna Carta, and about the challenges to all kinds of freedoms that we face in the digital age. Like a Wikipedia article, this embroidery is multi-authored and full of many different voices.’ - See more at: http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2015/05/magna-carta-an-embroidery.html#sthash.6Zrdqeif.dpuf

Cornelia said, ‘I wanted the embroidery to raise questions about where we are now with the principles laid down in the Magna Carta, and about the challenges to all kinds of freedoms that we face in the digital age. Like a Wikipedia article, this embroidery is multi-authored and full of many different voices.’ - See more at: http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2015/05/magna-carta-an-embroidery.html#sthash.6Zrdqeif.dpuf

Cornelia said, ‘I wanted the embroidery to raise questions about where we are now with the principles laid down in the Magna Carta, and about the challenges to all kinds of freedoms that we face in the digital age. Like a Wikipedia article, this embroidery is multi-authored and full of many different voices.’ - See more at: http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2015/05/magna-carta-an-embroidery.html#sthash.6Zrdqeif.dpuf

Cornelia said, ‘I wanted the embroidery to raise questions about where we are now with the principles laid down in the Magna Carta, and about the challenges to all kinds of freedoms that we face in the digital age. Like a Wikipedia article, this embroidery is multi-authored and full of many different voices.’ - See more at: http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2015/05/magna-carta-an-embroidery.html#sthash.6Zrdqeif.dpuf

354 RECALLING THE DOG by JON BUCK

Coded for Colour  until 27th June 2015

Pangolin Gallery N1 9AG

Recalling the Dog, 2015 Bronze Edition of 5 246 x 284 x 46 cm (c )Pangolin London

 'The craving for colour is a natural necessity just as for water or for fire. 

Colour is the raw material indispensable for life'. 

Fernand Leger, On Monumentality and Colour

Coded for Colour charts Jon Buck's intriguing journey from his early  brightly-painted resin sculptures to this striking and monumental bronze. Recalling the Dog is the highlight of the present exhibition, on show here for the first time and illustrating new techniques developed by Buck as he continues to explore colour as an important fourth dimension. He uses multiple layers of paint rubbed back in areas to give an almost thermal image of the sculpture. It appears to throb and fade, challenging our senses of sight and touch. His 'naturalism' is pared down to the brink of abstraction in an attempt to capture what Buck calls "the essence of the thing and ultimately to delight the viewer and stimulate the senses to maximum effect”.

Once upon a time Sir Anthony Caro released his sculpture Early One Morning on the world.  Until then we knew what a sculpture was. It was usually made of precious materials such as marble, silver, gold or bronze. It could be 'read' i.e. it represented a person or a place, an idea or a value. And it was so special it was often lifted high above the viewer, mounted on a base or pedestal which seemed to mark it out as untouchable. . Caro broke the rules.  In the early 1960s he began to make purely abstract works: sculpture constructed and welded in steel and aluminium, using beams, girders and other found elements, and painted them  in bright colours. Such works caused a sensation.

Decades later here is another innovation: a new and striking monumental bronze. With  highly inventive chemicals,  raw pigments, and finally with paint Jon Buck has pushed the boundaries of what can be achieved with a medium usually associated with dull bronze patinas. He releases bronze from its centuries-long  constraints.

Repository, 2011, Bronze, Edition of 10, 70 x 38 x 17 cm 
(c) Pagolin London

Repository is a joy to look at but there is more. "Powerful images elicit a feeling, an emotional response, first and foremost, and only then does that evoke an opinion, a thought or an intellectual quest". Perhaps the shape and the colour remind us of a beating heart? Perhaps it is a funeral urn? We know that a repository is specifically designed to contain treasure, sometimes briefly, sometimes for eternity. It may contain a hoard of  precious jewellery, hidden and unworn, stacked underground in vaults, safe, they say, from heists and hooligans. Or a repository may guard something of no intrinsic value at all, like paper or parchment. But a scrap of the Magna Carta or the archives of, say, a Nobel Prizewinner, make the paper or parchment precious, with a value hard to measure and impossible to reproduce. 

Mind Map (below)  is 'a mix of a scientific and mythic response to ourselves, our history and the world we inhabit', at a time when new insights into finding our way round our 'minds' confront us with hitherto unimagined exploration. 

Mind Map, 2009, Bronze, Edition of 10, 45 x 51 x 37 cm
 (c) Pangolin London

www.pangolinlondon.com/
www.pangolinlondon.com/exhibitions
www.gallery-pangolin.com/related-links

jonbucksculpture.com/

353 HAYWAIN WITH CRUISE MISSILES by PETER KENNARD

PETER KENNARD, Unofficial War Artist

IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUM  until May 30th 2016

I visit hundreds of galleries and other art spaces and am used to discovering variety. Some artists have a particular interest, say landscape, and move gracefully from photography to painting to video. Others stick to one medium, such as glass, but do with it things no one else has done before. But never have I seen so much innovation and passion as in the 5 smallish rooms on the upper floors of the Imperial War Museum, which Peter Kennard's work  is occupying. 

Haywain with Cruise Missiles 1981 Original Photomontage (c) Peter Stannard

The exhibition confirms his status as an artistic outsider, determined to make work which exists  outside the normal channels of the art world and that directly connects with the public.  The original photomontage  Haywain with Cruise Missiles, transforms the warm green peace of the Suffolk countryside into a terror zone. Alongside are displayed posters, pamphlets, badges, placards and T-shirts, lest we forget.

"That sense of ripping into an image, unveiling a surface, going through that surface into an unrevealed truth, is at the core of photomontage. I sit in a room with the tools of my trade and try to pummel these pictures into revealing invisible connections".

Peter Kennard

Newspaper1 1994 80x58x10 (c) Peter Stannard

Each room could have as its motto 'And Now For Something Completely Different', a catch phrase from the hugely successful British TV comedy programme Monty Python's Flying Circus, later made into a film. For example, the fourth gallery recreates a 1997 installation, Reading Room, consisting of 8 wooden lecterns each bearing 2 photographic images of faces photocopied onto the financial pages of newspapers. Using charcoal the images are smudged and blurred so as to appear to merge or dissolve into the stock market figures. 

On the left is a raw and visceral image using carbon toner, charcoal, pastel on newspaper and wood. Claw-like hands reach out to destroy, to eliminate. You can almost smell the charred paper and hear the scratch of the nails as they dig and rip though the news. 

London's Imperial War Museum tells the story of those who have lived, fought and died in conflicts involving Britain and the Commonwealth since the First World War. Drawing on both the exceptional and the everyday, people. places, ideas and events are used to tell vivid personal events as well as create powerful physical experiences. They reflect war as both a destructive and constructive experience, and challenge us to look at conflict from different perspectives

www.peterkennard.com/ 
www.iwm.org.uk
www.iwm.org.uk/exhibitions/iwm-london/a-family-in-wartime
www.iwm.org.uk/exhibitions/iwm-london/lord-ashcroft-gallery

352 HELTER SKELTER by DAVID PRICE

DREAMLAND

Art  First, 21. Eastcastle St

Helter Skelter, 2015, oil on panel, 40x50cm (c)DavidPrice

 When David Price moved his studio to Margate in 2011, he was fascinated by the ruined remains of Deamland, an abandoned amusement park, one of many constructed at English sea-side resorts in the last century, and modelled on a park of the same name in Coney Island, USA, built nearly a century earlier.

"Dreamlands" were popular because they captured  all the spontaneity and thrills of a touring fairground, but their permanent, refined and elegant structures opened up unimagined possibilities: Helter Skelters; Carousels;  a Tunnel of Love where boats  slowly edged their way through dim caverns. At night rainbow-coloured electric lights, thousands of them, turned the scene into fairy land. Well brought up children had to take a nap in the afternoon so as to be awake when this magic happened. There was even space for practical jokes and naughty fun -  you exited from the Ghost House through a door at the front, on an upper floor, at which moment a gust of wind would suddenly blow ladies' skirts well above their knees. 

David Price paints deserted, crumbling buildings, each signalling decay and abandonment. But by a special sort of magic they are  majestic and capricious, celebrating a time, if not of Utopia, of hope of a more democratic and meritocratic future.  

 Helter Skelter is especially intriguing. The viewer is presented with a grid which almost serves to turn the work into a hologram, a three-dimensional image.  You have the immediate experience of peering into the distance through and beyond that which  confronts you. Could that pattern be stained glass or tracery or a mathematical puzzle? Or "just paint"?

Right:

Tunnel of Love 2015 oil on panel, 50x40cm,

 (c) David Price

Ghost House, oil on panel, 74cm diameter,
(c) David Price

   
























The three  images here convey energy, wit and intimacy, not least by the artist's use of vibrant shimmering colours. The exhibition publicity refers to the work of Piranesi, an 18C Italian artist famous for his etchings of Rome which were a 'celebration of architectural wonders and human artifice as much as they were a meditation on chaos and decline'. Could you say that Piranesi was imagining Rome as a corrupted theme park?

P.S. In 2011  Margate's Turner Contemporary Art Gallery, designed by David Copperfield,was opened, representing a serious cultural investment on the Kent coast


 “The brilliant thing about Turner Contemporary is that it has given people hope that things are going to change here and also put Margate back on the map.” Tracey Emin
 

 www.artfirst.co,uk
www.artfirst.co.uk/david_price/index.html
www.turnercontemporary.org/
www.getty.edu/art/collection/artists/804/giovanni-battista-piranesi-italian-1720-1778/

351 BULLETS REVISITED #27B by LALLA ESSAYDI

Bullets Revisted#27B chromogenic print 122x153cm Image courtesy of the artist and Kashya Hildebrand Gallery, London

KASHYA HILDEBRAND GALLERY, 22 East Castle Street

Sometimes artists, such as the British Orientalists, know not what they do. Nearly a decade ago Tate Britain held an exhibition of their paintings entitled “The Lure of the East". Bored, gorgeously-clad concubines lounge in the secret depths of a harem. Watercolours, oils and sketches dating from the late 18th to the early 20th century represented the heyday of British artists' love affair with the Middle East.

But their work has been unpicked and reconstructed by later generations in ways they could not possibly have foreseen. In this astonishing exhibition The Dangerous Frontier Moroccan photographer Lalla Essaydi confronts this delusion head on, with her uniquely dramatic, beautiful and original works. They are colourful, exotic, beguiling and technically brilliant. And they expose imperialist fantasies as the stuff tabloid images are made of.

Essaydi's photographs are the result of a complex performance-based medium; painting. calligraphy, interior design, costume design, stage directing and finally photography. Her imaginative and powerful final blow is to present her work showing the uncropped white borders of the film, with the Kodak brand name visible. Her signal that the settings and identities are fabricated mocks the orientalists'  fantasy scenes which were meant to show reality. 

Bullets Revisited #44 chromogenic print 152x121cm Image by courtesy of the artist and Kashya Hildebrand Gallery

There remain two more surprises. The art of calligraphy was a male-dominated realm. But Essaydi paints intricate calligraphic texts over every available surface: walls, clothing even the models themselves. And she uses  henna dye, used exclusively by women to decorate themselves on special occasions such as weddings.

Lastly what we see are  models and their surroundings  adorned with sparking gold fabrics and metallic materials in shimmering luxury. Or do we? They are but trompe d'oeil images: bullet casings, carefully cut and polished, have been hand-sewn on the models' clothes, jewels and beds, a military juxtaposition which is a chilling reference to the hidden violence endured by some women in some cultures.

www.kashyahildebrand.org
lallaessaydi.com
www.tate.org.uk/search?f=im_vid_50:2210

An entertaining article by Rachel Aspen includes the reaction of Victorian British women to orientalist paintings:
www.newstatesman.com/art/2008/05/british-orientalist-paintings

And a book: Lalla Essaydi: Crossing Boundaries, Bridging Cultures,

350 AS A GENERAL RULE LET THE ARTIST BE SENT FOR by SHEILA WALLIS

What I Tell You In The Dark

 at

The Crypt, St John's Church, Waterloo

The title is the advice given to the families of the newly-deceased by Southworth & Hawes, the acclaimed Boston daguerreotypists, who were masters of the process and known world-wide for their beautiful compositions. I'm writing this just after reports that more than  200 strangers attended an Edinburgh funeral to say good bye to an unidentified baby boy, whose body was found swaddled in a blanket nearly 2 years ago: a contemporary way of recognising and honouring an untimely death.

Sheila Wallis' art understands the vulnerability of  every human being, our internal and external conflicts. Perhaps her compassion and honesty as an artist are not unconnected with the fact that she was born at the height of the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

She works within the tradition of orthodox, realist painting. She began with self-portraiture out of economic necessity. In 2009 she won the coveted Threadneedle Prize with a nude self-portrait. Gradually her work acquired a new freedom:  a delicate but powerful ability to convey how vulnerable we are without being exploitative or cruel. We have all  experienced family care and concern, love and loss, the things we can choose - and those we cannot escape. More recently she has been inspired by early post-mortem daguerreotypes which are linked  inescapably with our own transient temporal existence.

  After winning the Threadneedle Prize, Sheila gave up her job working for the NHS in order to concentrate on painting, deciding that...

“...it’s time to take my art more seriously.” Of her latest work she says "The seeming alchemy of the Victorian daguerreotype, captured by the earliest cameras and fixed onto prepared plates. is as unique as any watercolour. My project is to discover if these once private heirlooms might be made to speak of the more universal human themes of longing and limitation'.

www.sheilawallis.comsheilamarywallis@icloud.com
stjohnswaterloo.org/
www.london-se1.co.uk/places/st-johns-waterloo
www.threadneedleprize.com/ 

You will find an interesting description of  daguerre history and process in
daguerre.org/resource/history/history.html