Grantchester Artists Show: I bought art!

On Friday, I went to the Grantchester Artists Show in the Grantchester Village Hall.  And I bought two paintings!

There was live music (a good-mood-spreading electric jazz'n'rock guitarist), champagne and art.  And lots and lots of people.

Detail from Katherine Firth's Garlic & Onions, oil on board

Tess Recordon's painting Winter  (oil) and
Penelope Hayes' 2gether (ceramic)

Most exciting of all, I found two paintings that I loved and I bought them!

Alan Coulson, From Chanctonbury Ring

This is Alan Coulson's acrylic painting From Chanctonbury Ring.  That red dot is mine!  This is a very small and very atmospheric, totally lovely and mysterious sun-and-shade-drenched landscape.

Vera Rosenberry, Osprey and Chair

This is Vera Rosenberry's watercolour painting Osprey and Chair.  The red dot is also mine!  There is a quirky predator bird, an enigmatic shadow, magical perspective, a chair painted in loving detail, a circular moon that draws the shadows rather than casts them, and an overall wonderful dream-making atmosphere. 

My paintings in situ!  You can see their respective sizes. :-)

I am so excited about my two purchases.  I pick them up later today.  There is nothing quite like the rush from art buying, an economic transaction like no other as it also involves the soul and the heart.

Detail from Vera Rosenberry's Chough and Chair
(a chough, pronounced 'chuff', is a bird from the crow family)
Don't you love this chough's expression?

I loved this local show because it enabled me to buy art I could afford from artists who were actually there.  I had a lovely chat with Vera Rosenberry who studied art in Boston and lives in Cambridge; she is also an illustrator and member of the Cambridge Drawing Society:  Vera Rosenberry.  I just missed Alan Coulson but found out that he is a retired molecular biologist who loves painting (not to be confused with the London-based portrait artist Alan Coulson):  Alan Coulson, the scientist.

Unfortunately, I'm posting this a little late for my readers to rush out and visit but I absolutely recommend a visit to the next Grantchester Artists Show.

Shall I post pictures of what these paintings look like on my walls?

My five favourite works at the Cambridge School of Art Degree Show 2013

In my Pick of June a few days ago, I listed the Cambridge School of Art Degree Show (at Anglia Ruskin University).  I've since been to have a look and here are my

Five Favourites:

(one nude man, one ball in the sky, one ligature, one Cambridge street, one unicorn)

Tom Hiscocks, My Space II, perspex
(winner of the Suparee Gazeley Award)

First off, there was this amazing life-size perspex man.  I entered the alcove and that is what I saw:  a shimmering nude figure.  Then I went up close and the 3-D contours dissolved into a jumble of planes and sharp edges:

The light plays on and in and through the ghostly outline.  Here I am gazing into the rib cage, genitals and the tops of the legs...

Next, I saw this lovely unassuming little work in a downstairs corridor:

Susie Johnson, Appropriation, framed paper sculpture

This reminds me a bit of Joseph Cornell, and a tiny bit of Joan Miró.  I like the way the objects cling to the frame, the music-like bounce of the paper roll, and the jaunty position of the red ball.



Next, this typography booklet caught my eye:

Daniel Silva, Hybrid Type and New Ligatures
(typography)

The scribbles and the careful typeface were strangely compelling.

I loved this page about designing a ligature for the word of.  It made me think about fonts and serifs, about the work typographers do, about the strange magic of script and text.

Now for some Cambridge-themed art:

Crista Wright, ink-based illustration
(Round Church)

I quite liked the clean sharp lines and the blocks of primary colours.  Also the way Cambridge seems oddly empty and formal.

Half Hergé and his ligne claire,  half Ernst Ludwig Kirchner.

But where is this scene?  Do you recognise it?  If so, do let me know in comments!!



And finally, the pièce de résistance:

Yes, it's a unicorn!

Madeleine Taylor, The Sky is Blue (the wall label contains this quote by Leonard Cohen:
"Even damnation is poisoned with rainbows.")
(winner of the Frontroom Graduate Award)

I couldn't believe my eyes when I rounded a corner and there it was, matt black, shoulder-height, with a long flowing man and tail, and big blue eyes.  It just stood there.  

And it has little feathers on its fetlocks!

Its horn juts into my space, like a delicate narwhal's tusk.  Extraordinary to find such a thing at an art exhibition.  (Eat your heart out, Jeff Koons.)

More posts on wild art:

Dinosaurs by the Chapman brothers

Seven reasons why the Snowy Farr sculpture fails

Permalink:  http://artincambridge.blogspot.com/2013/06/my-four-favourite-works-at-cambridge.html

Audubon's Birds of America in the Cambridge University Library

Twenty of us gathered round five tables pushed together at the University Library.  On the tables:  two volumes of John James Audubon's Birds of America, published between 1827 and 1838.

These books are extremely rare (only 200 or so copies exist), extremely fragile (ordinary readers cannot usually ask to see them), and extremely huge.  It takes two assistants to turn the pages, and each time they do so, the paper crackles.  The size is called 'double elephant folio' -- a very unusual and very expensive format.

Ed Potten, Head of Rare Books at the Cambridge University Library, gave a brilliant talk on the books.  Here's what I learned:

The Birds of America contains 435 plates in total.  Each plate is based on a watercolour painting by Audubon.  The watercolours were initially engraved onto copper plates by the renowned Edinborough firm of W.H. Lizars.  But most of the watercolours were transferred to print by the London printers R. Havell & Son who used the newly rediscovered aquatint process.  The 13-year-old John Mason painted 50 of the background scenes.

Ed Potton reads out information about Audubon.  The volume is opened to the turkey page:  the bird is life size!

At bottom right, it reads 'Engraved by W.H. Lizars Edin'

Each plate is hand-coloured with watercolour.  This means that all the copies differ slightly from each other.

Ed Potten opened an earlier book for us to show us how Audubon revolutionised wildlife illustration.  This Histoire naturelle des oiseaux (1771) shows static birds:

From the 1771 Histoire naturelle des oiseaux (Natural History of Birds)

By contrast, Audubon's illustrations are action-packed.  Here a rattlesnake attacks a mockingbirds' nest.  He has turned 'scientific' imagery into an exciting story.

Critics complained that such scenes were not realistic.  How would a rattlesnake manage to climb up so high?

But it's a bit like the dinosaur art at the Sedgwick Museum:  ultimately, we don't care that it's not realistic.  We want drama and beauty in our art.

It's odd that Audubon's plates are so dynamic -- considering that he did them from dead birds.  Audubon collected his specimens by going out and shooting them.  It wasn't unusual for him to come home with 50 dead birds in a day.

He then dissected and stuffed the birds.  His studio was crammed full of these stuffed birds.  One visitor noted that Audubon's house smelled of "dead meat".

Audubon's watercolours still exist:  the New York Historical Society owns them.  The copper plates, though, were destroyed in a fire.  The Birds of America was a publishing sensation, and the smaller version of it a bestseller.

What a privilege to have seen these lavish, rare (and completely insane) objects of material beauty.  Thank you, Cambridge Festival of Science!

More information:
The Birds of America page at Wikipedia
The Birds of America page at the National History Museum (London)


More at this blog:
Arty events at the Science Festival 


Permalink:  http://artincambridge.blogspot.com/2013/03/audubons-birds-of-america-in-cambridge.html

Behind-the-Scenes at a Science Museum: Behind every great dinosaur, there's a great artist

On Saturday, I went to the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences, as part of an outing to the annual Cambridge Science Festival.

But (pssst) I was not interested in the science.  I was on the hunt for art.

Because here's what I discovered:

Nobody's imagination is fired by bones neatly arranged by palaeontologists.

Nobody's imagination but the palaeontologists' themselves, of course!

Dr Sattler and Dr Grant (Jurassic Park)

 Dr Ross Geller (Friends)

The rest of us, it seems, need blood and guts, T-rexes tearing herbivores limb from limb, Jurassic reptiles anachronistically attacking humans, and general monster mayhem.

We want our fossil digs to be transformed into exciting figurative stories.

© Errol Swanepoel, photo of West Coast Fossil Park dig

Enter Bob Nicholls.  

Bob Nicholls is a "palaeoartist" who paints pictures and murals, makes 3-D models and works with multi-media.  You can hear him talk about his life as a dinosaur fanatic at the Sedgwick Museum on Thursday, 21 March!  I have a ticket and look forward to an evening of tooth, tusk and claw.

And enter Richard Hammond.

This model of a Compsognathus longipes was made by Richard Hammond.  Richard Hammond is now a 'senior character artist' for computer games at Lionhead Studios in Guildford.  But in the 1990s, he was a natural history model maker.  (I had not even realised that either of these artistic careers existed...!)

The museum label explains:

"We do not know if Compsognathus had down, bristles or feathers, but the patch of elongate scales over the shoulders (greenish in the model) have been placed there to highlight this possibility."

The grammar is ambiguous but I'm assuming the 'possibility' refers to feathers.  Hello, raptor bird.

An 1820s vision of 'Ancient Dorsetshire'

Then there is the fantastical painting by local artist Robert B. Farren, based on the even more fantastical sketch by the geologist Henry De la Beche.  I have loved this painting for years.

Portrait of the geologist as an elderly man

The same painter, Robert B. Farren, also produced this portrait of Adam Sedgwick, pioneer geologist, for whom the museum is named.   It hangs above cabinets full of little stones and shells.  Sedgwick wears the robe of a scholar of Trinity College.  I like the way his hand spans the entire Earth.

3-D Sedgwick

Here is Adam Sedgwick again, as a life-size sculpture, looking benevolently down at us from his niche.  He holds a hammer and a fossil.  I wish I knew who the sculptor was.

And Darwin, too

A bust of Charles Darwin hovers high up on a wall.  The sculptor is Anthony Smith who also made the Darwin sculpture in Christ's College.

Anthony Smith, Bust of Charles Darwin, 2009 (commissioned for the Darwin bicentenary)

Vitrines are beautiful, too

Earlier I said that our imaginations are not fired by bones and stones.  But this is not entirely true.  The old Victorian glass cases with their hand-lettered labels and geometric patterns have their own aesthetic charm.

Jannis Kounellis knows this:

Jannis Kounellis, from his 2002 exhibition at the Contemporary Art Museum Ghent

More on Cambridge dinosaurs:  Dinosaurs by the Chapman brothers

Permalink:  http://artincambridge.blogspot.com/2013/03/behind-scenes-at-science-museum-behind.html