Howard Theatre, Downing College: murals

Here is a nice thing to look at when sitting in the Howard Theatre of Downing College in Cambridge:

This mural appears above the theatre's stage. (Those red seats, by the way, are fiendishly comfortable...)



A company called Hare & Humphreys carried out the design.  Their website refers to it as a painted canvas of the "Three Graces" but this is patently not true.

This is Apollo and the nine muses (count them: more than three; in fact, ten -- I'll get to that).  And the painting upon which this is based is the German Neoclassical painter Anton Raphael Mengs' mural of Apollo, Mnemosyne and the Nine Muses, painted in 1761 for the Villa Albani-Torlonia in Rome.  Here is the Mengs:

© Wikimedia

Mnemosyne (which means 'memory') is the mother of the nine muses (Zeus was the father).  I take her to be the seated woman in white and blue.

Interesting variations:
•  the globe -- it appears to be mostly blue in the Mengs and has green continents in the Howard Theatre
•  Apollo's eyes -- appear to have been gouged out at some point in the Roman mural?
•  sandals -- is the Howard Theatre Apollo barefoot?

The nine muses are also on the pediment over the main entrance to the Fitzwilliam Museum (but that is food for another post).

The ceiling of the Howard Theatre is painted to look like a Renaissance or Baroque sky (also done by Hare & Humphreys).  It is quite lovely and reminds me of Mantegna and Tiepolo.

At any rate, sit in the theatre and be transported to another realm.

British painting at the new Heong gallery: Is it abstract?

There is a new gallery in town.  It is the Heong Gallery.  Where is it?  Go to Regent Street in Cambridge; opposite Parker's Piece and across the road from the Pizza Hut, is Downing College.  Walk through the main entrance across the gravel path and past the Porter's Lodge; turn left.  And there it is.

Heong gallery, the entrance façade

It's in the old stables and was wonderfully re-purposed by Caruso St John Architects.  It opened on 6 Feb 2016 with an exhibition of British painting in the 50s and 60s.

I visited as part of the  symposium Generation Painting: Abstraction and British Art 1955-65, held at Downing on Sat, 5 March.

Now, the concept of 'abstraction' is interesting in the context of the current exhibition.

Detail from Patrick Heron's Soft Vermilion with Orange and Red: April 1965, 1965 (oil on canvas)

Above is a detail from a painting whose very title shouts "Hey, I'm abstract! Look at me! No figurative content in me!  No illusion to be seen here! Just plain old real paint.'  Except not quite, perhaps?  Because why is the vermilion 'soft'?  And why is the word 'April' part of the title?

As was pointed out by one speaker during the very interesting symposium, these 1950s/60s painters from Cornwall (Patrick Heron lived in Cornwall when he painted this) remained attached to the light and sea and atmosphere of their landscape.

And David Hockney's absolutely wonderful Hollywood Garden (1965) is definitely not abstract.

Detail from David Hockney's Hollywood Garden, 1965, pencil and watercolour on card

There are some witty references to abstraction, and there is a play with the tension between surface and depth, the horizontal line and the vertical shapes, like starlings on a wire, the drooping umbrella, the bush like a boulder.  At the symposium, Martin Hammer (University of Kent) was brilliant on Hockney:  "our involuntary urge to recognise."

Allen Jones, Parachutist, 1963 (Fitzwilliam Museum)

Detail of the preceding

Allen Jones's Parachutist (1963) is a wonderfully witty and juicily 'painterly' juxtaposition of the overtly figurative and the ambiguously abstract.  Are those vertical shapes stripes of yellow, green and blue, like the stripes in a painting by Morris Louis?

Great sky lights at the Heong Gallery

A picture window onto Downing lawns that looks like a literal picture, next to an actual picture by Roger Hilton, January 1962 (tall white), 1962.  Below is the same picture window viewed from the outside in.

Heong gallery, viewed from the Downing lawn

Visit the show! It's fantastic!  And so is the gallery.  Totally free, too.
The catalogue costs £12.

Open:
Wed 10 am - 8 pm
Sat, Sun, Bank Hols 10 am - 6 pm

Exhibition: Generation Painting 1955-65
British Art from the Collection of Sir Alan Bowness

Ends 22 May 2016.

Airplane art at Duxford

Avro Vulcan.  Mission Black Buck.  1957.  (detail)

Hi everyone!  I've been so busy with life that this blog has been sadly un-updated for a while.  :-(   And I'd been looking forward to my 'blogiversary' post!

Because yes, Art in Cambridge is one year old!  I started this blog on 13 September 2012. I can't believe I made it this far. I'm still immensely fond of my very first blog post on the Chapman Brothers' dinosaurs (a sculpture which, sadly, is no longer at Jesus College -- I hope you got to see it while it was still here).\

Well, that date came and went.  I'll write a little after-blogiversary post anon.  :-)

Super Striker - BAC TSR2 (tactical strike reconnaissance aircraft) passg thru sound barrier during flight trials at Boscombe Down 1964

Anyway, what I have for you today is just a little offering from Duxford Air Museum.  Or, as it's officially called, the Imperial War Museum Duxford Cambridgeshire.

I went to Duxford for a work event last week.  And what was the first thing that greeted me upon entering the Duxford Conference Centre?  Yes, you've guessed it:  not airplanes but ART!

Art of airplanes, in fact!

Lots and lots and lots of it. All up and down the stairs and in the conference break-out rooms:  paintings upon paintings of airplanes.

Mosquito Attack - De Havilland Mosquitoes in low-level sortie over Dutch canals in 1944

Coastal Patrol - Avro Anson over the Needles

They're oddly vertigo-inducing, these birds' eyeview airplane picture.  It's not a viewpoint much found in painting.

Who's the artist?  One Mark Bromley, a graphic artist with British Aerospace.  You can see more pictures painted by him here.

There's a curious thing about airplane art.  Each painting is signed but in Duxford the plaques do not tell you the artist's name.  Instead, they tell you in great detail about the type of aircraft shown.  It's all about the PLANES!

This one intrigued me most.  But it's not by Mark Bromley.  It's signed French but you try googling 'French artist airplanes'...  So I wasn't able to find out anything about 'French'.

BAE Systems Taranis Unmanned Air Vehicle Demonstrator May 2007

Airplane painting from the sky was invented by the Italian Futurists in the 1920s; they called it aeropittura.  Here's my favourite:

Tullio Crali, Nose Dive on the City, 1939

Happy flying through the weekend!


Permalink:  http://artincambridge.blogspot.com/2013/09/airplane-art-at-duxford.html

Good Friday

Alfred Wallis, Crucifixion,
or Allegory with Three Figures and Two Dogs, 1932-4
photo:  © Kettle's Yard, Cambridge
Source: BBC Your Paintings

It's Good Friday.  Today, 1,980 years ago, Jesus of Nazareth was crucified on the cross by the Romans, at the place called Golgotha (or Calvary) just outside Jerusalem.

If you're interested, you can read about this in the Bible.  Try the New Testament, Gospel according to Matthew, chapter 27.

Alfred Wallis has changed the usual iconography in mysterious ways.  The man with the cap seems like a remnant of a Roman soldier.  But who are the dogs?  And why are two crucified men standing on top of one another?


Other seasonal posts:

• Christmas
• Durga Puja


Permalink:  http://artincambridge.blogspot.com/2013/03/good-friday.html

Another boring still life

This is part 3 and the final installment of my mini-series on How to look at boring art -- and why.

Last time, I looked at Mélanie de Comoléra's Vase of Mixed Flowers.

Today it's the turn of:

Jan van Os, Vase of Mixed Flowers.

Jan van Os (1744-1808, Dutch), Vase of Mixed Flowers.  Image source © Fitzwilliam Museum.

I gave myself 5 minutes with this painting -- but ended up doing 8!

Title

The full title on the museum label is: Vase of mixed flowers, including poppies, Crown Imperial, tulips, roses, auricula and gentian on a stone ledge with a bird's nest, grapes, melon and peaches, with a garden behind.

I'm starting to think that these descriptive list-like titles say something about these flower still lifes. There is no hierarchy in this title, just as there is no hierarchy among the objects depicted. Poppies, peaches, roses, eggs -- all are treated with the same careful detail.

What a difference to the kind of hierarchy found, for example, in a portrait or in a religious altarpiece!

A Young Draughtsman, by an unknown painter, 1767 , ©Fitzwilliam Museum

This young man is clearly more important than the sketchy landscape behind him or the plants under his feet (nobody can identify these species...) There is a definite hierarchy: the human figure is more important than sky, rock or grass.

Not so in the flower still life.

Format

The format is vertical; that is, the painting is taller than it is wide. This is a 'portrait' format, suited to humans standing upright, and we associate the vertical format with the 'human'.

(We tend to associate the horizontal format with landscapes. And reclining nudes.)

So the flowers are treated here a bit like a portrait.

Comparison

The format is the same as that used for Mélanie de Comoléra's still life.



The composition is also similar: we have the light falling from left, the ledge ending at left, the items not cropped by the edge, the same profusion of flowers.

Of dead flowers. We're not in a living garden. These flowers have been cut from their roots and will soon die.

In addition to the flowers, we also have some fruit.

But we also have some humorous signs of animal life!

Fauna

See the black mouse in the foreground? It nibbles on a piece of fruit (or a nut?).

And see the nest with its four eggs among spiky stalks of straw.

Notice also the butterfly.

My sketch of the Van Os

Texture

Look at the velvety peachy texture, the glistening grapes, each with a white highlight. They are ripe to bursting. The cut-open melon shows a sign of human intervention but the melon is now left... to rot?

Jan van Os, Vase of Mixed Flowers.© Fitzwilliam Museum.

The trivial

Remember how the title echoes the non-hierarchical nature of the still life?

This is not about power, action, emotion, history, prayer or plot. This is about the minuscule, the trivial, the un-important, the proliferation of material things. Perhaps there is some symbolism hidden away somewhere but mostly I find myself baffled by the thing-ness of the objects and struck by the virtuosity of painterly skill.

The art historian Norman Bryson had this brilliant insight (in his book Looking at the Overlooked:  Four Essays on Still Life Painting (1990):

'still-life is the world minus its narratives, or better, the world minus its capacity for generating narrative interest.'

Gallery 17

Gallery 17 is full of these kinds of flower still lifes.

Jan van Os's picture is the second from the left, above the bust on the right-hand wall.

All the still lifes here are painted to a similar formula. The same botanic species of flower recur. Everywhere, the vases are barely visible: the flowers stand up, as if by themselves.

There are scores of these pictures. Clearly, flower still lifes were incredibly popular!

The Fitzwilliam website informs us that Gallery 17 houses the collection of Major The Honourable Henry Rogers Broughton, 2nd Lord or Baron Fairhaven, of Anglesey Abbey near Cambridge, donated to the museum upon Fairhaven's death in 1973.


Permalink:   http://artincambridge.blogspot.com/2013/03/another-boring-still-life.html

Why I hate Gallery 17 (in the Fitzwilliam Museum)

Gallery 17, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; photo © Fitzwilliam Museum

Gallery 17 is the name of the room with flower still lifes in the Fitzwilliam Museum.  

The Fitzwilliam's Gallery 17 website informs us:  

"This gallery contains a stunning collection of flower-paintings by Dutch, Flemish and French artists from the 17th-19th centuries."

But, alas, I don't find these paintings stunning at all...   I tend to dash through this room with eyes fastened firmly on the exits straight ahead.  But even as I rush along, I can't help noticing, in passing, the blurred masses of dullness:  wilting flowers, dead leaves, browned stalks, meticulously detailed chrysanthemum petals, tulip petals, poppy petals, the petals of flowers whose names I don't know and never want to learn.  Endless acres of this tedious stuff, from floor to ceiling, all herded into this one uninspiring room of the Fitz.

Photo © Fitzwilliam Museum

Why stop?  Why not hurry onwards to see Rembrandt, Rubens, Raphael?  Lush nudes, cute babies, gorgeous landscapes, challenging abstract paintings?

Why stare at a still life?

As promised in my last post which was all about how to look at a boring painting -- and why, I went and tasted a dose of my own medicine:  I went to the museum to be bored.  To be bored, but also determined to have at least one interesting thought about my boring painting.

I chose to look at two flower still lifes.  I gave myself ten minutes per painting.

The first one I chose is this Still Life with Boring Flowers -- whoops, sorry, I mean:

Vase of Mixed Flowers, painted by Mélanie de Comoléra,

probably between 1800 and 1850.

Mélanie de Comoléra, Vase of Mixed Flowers, image source:  © Fitzwilliam Museum

It's of course immediately interesting that the picture is painted by a woman.  Try going to your local museum and counting the number of works of art made by women...  Unless your local museum is the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, I will bet that you're going to find precious few women artists.

Works by women are also few and far between at the Fitz so let's be thankful for this one!

Title

The full title of the painting, as listed on the label next to the picture, is Vase of Mixed Flowers, including poppies, auricula, daffodils, hyacinths, asters, carnations and a foxglove on a marble ledge with sprays of auricula and roses, copied after Jan van Dael (1764-1840).

Two things about this title:

1)  A title should not be a list of every single thing we can see.

2)  What a pity that our joy at finding a woman artist is here tempered by the information that, oh, it was only a copy after a man's painting.  Still:  if there was call for a copy, the painting must have been popular!

Flora

The gardeners among you will recognise all these flowers but the only species I can identify are the roses and the poppies.  All else is an airless, stifling profusion of petals, blossoms, leaves, tendrils and stems, crammed together against a dark background.

Some flowers are seen from below or from the back.  Some (like the poppy at the top) unfurl in bud form next to their full blooms.  Many of them are so top-heavey that they seem on the verge of wilting.  Thus, in the midst of bursting life:  the imminence of death.

To me, these fat flowers are sickly in their fertility and slick colourfulness.

We see different shapes and colours:  velvety pink; waxy green; tight buds in clusters; palest pink and white; yellows, reds, blues.

Do these flowers even all bloom at the same time?

Fauna

There is a butterfly at right, tiny and brown next to the pink, blue, white and yellow cacophony in the vase.

And there seems to be another murky butterfly creeping around among the foliage at left.

Space

The flowers are all stuffed into a vase: how can it hold them all?  And the ledge:  where is that positioned in space?

In among the thicket of vegetation, there's a kind of jungle perspective.  

The shape of the bouquet respects the edge of the canvas.  No flower is cropped.  

Whites and yellows are grouped along the centre.  Darker colours sit around the edge.  And pink anchors the composition below.

Frame

The whole picture is surrounded by an ornate gilt wooden frame that echoes the flower motif with its own vegetal ornaments and arabesques.  Reproductions always never include the frames of pictures which is a pity because it makes every picture look like a postcard.

Here's my sketch of the painting with the frame included:

Who was Mélanie de Comoléra?

Almost nothing is known about this painter.  Her dates are variously given as 1789-1854 or 1800-1860, or as 'active 1816-1854'.  She apparently worked in Sèvres (France) and London.  Her art teacher in Paris (probably in the early 19th century) was the Dutch floral painter, Gerard van Spaendonck,  who also taught other women to paint flower still lifes:  the Marquise de Grollier, Thérèse Baudry de Balzac, Henrietta Knip, Madame Peigne and Madame Vincent (see Germaine Greer, The Obstacle Race:  The Fortune of Women Painters and their Work, 1979, page 244).

Gallery 17.  Mélanie de Comoléra's painting is at left, above the cabinet.

Tune back in for the next installment of how I studied a boring painting.  Coming up next:

Jan van Os, Vase of mixed flowers, including poppies, Crown Imperial, tulips, roses, auricula and gentian on a stone ledge with a bird's nest, grapes, melon and peaches, with a garden behind.

Permalink:  http://artincambridge.blogspot.com/2013/03/why-i-hate-gallery-17-in-fitzwilliam.html

Two paintings by Justin Hawkes. Landscape? Or abstract art?

Two paintings by Justin Hawkes.  Seen at the Williams Art Gallery, Cambridge on 25 Nov. 2012.

1.  Landscape Tension

Justin Hawkes, Landscape Tension (red glow), acrylic (behind glass), 40 x 68 cm.

Landscape Tension is aptly named:  there is a tension here between abstraction and the illusion of a 'real' landscape.

On the one hand, we see a landscape.  The horizontal format encourages us to see one.  (Not for nothing is this format known as 'landscape format' by computer printers.)  We read the dark scribbly line in the bottom quarter as the horizon.  With bushes and trees (and perhaps the spires of buildings?).

Above the horizon is the deep orange glow of a sunset.  (Or sunrise?)  And above that is the strangely opaque sky.

Justin Hawkes, Landscape Tension (detail)

On the other hand, however, we see five rectangles, stacked one above the other.  The top rectangle is a matt teal; the two below are a dirty dark orange and a jewel orange; there follow a dark brown and a dark brownish-blue one.

Between the dark brown and the jewel orange rectangles (or broad stripes), there is an uneven line that blurs the boundary between brown and orange.

There is no depth here, just flat rectangles of colour.

Landscape or abstract shapes?  Duck or rabbit? 

The point is:  every painting is both at once.  At once an illusion of three-dimensional space.  And a reality of colour shapes on a flat canvas.

2.  Montage

Justin Hawkes, Montage watercolour composition, 14 x 8 cm.

Montage.  A tiny watercolour.

A vertical format.  Also known as 'portrait format' but we don't see a format.  We see a landscape.  Or what we think may be a landscape.

It's also two rectangular pieces of drawing paper, stained with orange-brownish watercolour.  The pieces of paper are separated by a torn edge and pasted onto a mount.

Justin Hawkes, Montage (detail)

The white uneven line is reminiscent of the horizon in Landscape Tension.  But here it is not only an illusion of a boundary: it is a real boundary.  A real bit of torn paper.  The white colour is the colour of the paper mount underneath.

The motif of torn paper reappears in the artist's sketchbooks.

Justin Hawkes, page from sketchbook 

Williams Art Gallery

I saw these paintings last November.  (I know... it's taken me ages finally to get this post together!)  They were part of an exhibition by the painter Justin Hawkes at the Williams Art Gallery on Gwydir Street.

Williams Art Gallery on Gwydir Stree with Justin Hawkes exhibition, seen from Hot Numbers Café

Meet the artist

I was also lucky:  I met the artist and asked him some questions.

•  I asked Justin Hawkes what got him started as an artist.  He said that he was inspired by Cézanne when he was around 15 years old.

  

•  And what did he think were the differences in painting in acrylics and in watercolours?

Justin Hawkes told me that the challenges of the big acrylic canvases lies in resisting the masculinity of the kind of colour-field painting produced by Ellsworth Kelly. 

The challenge of the watercolours, by contrast, lies in resisting their prettiness.

Justin Hawkes does not want to fix a moment, like a photographer wants to do, but wants to allow for time.

From Justin Hawkes's artist statement:  

'The relevance of late Mondrian remains important to me.  I work to avoid my paintings becoming a mishmash of styles because as well as responding to this influence I feel a need to develop a direct line to nature.'

'Paintings evolve from a consciousness that is aware of what they are and what they are about -- simultaneously.'

How about you?
What do you see first?  The landscape or the abstract shapes of colour?

Find out more:

Justin Hawkes' website, incl. upcoming and past shows, and an image gallery

Related posts:

Patrick Thurston: exhibition of photographs at the Williams Art Gallery

Alison Litherland: paintings of cows

Paintings © Justin Hawkes.  Images used with permission of the artist.

Permalink:  http://artincambridge.blogspot.com/2013/01/two-paintings-by-justin-hawkes.html