the formal qualities of a drench

 

 

fanal

 

 

 

Fanal: an obsolete term for a small lighthouse, a beacon, a ship's lantern.

Found these old maps at a car boot several years ago and rediscovered them in my vast book shelf. Beautiful, beautiful quality of line that just deserved some small mention.

And whilst on the subject of oceans and clifftops and shorelines, this looks like it's going to be really interesting and may well help me with my (very) slowly blossoming ideas about the infinity of the sea and it's customs and tales…

The Ocean with Richard Hawley tonight at 23:30 on BBC Radio 2.
(Why so late?! Some of us have to get up at 6am to work. I hope they do a podcast…)

various unfilled spaces

Pieve di Cento, Vasco Ascolini, 1986  © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Fireplace, Jean-Eugène-Auguste Atget, 1905 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Photographic study, Lady Clementina Hawarden, 1862 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

the duties of cloth

Cotton sleeve puff stuffed with down © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Cage crinoline © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Dress fabric from Robinson's Mourning Warehouse © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Some more visible spaces / voids / absences / vacancies all found in Search the Collections at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 

you used to love the animals

Images from Wallander, Monday's 9pm BBC1

 

Woman: …You used to love the animals.

Wallander: The animals… yes.

(The camera jumps to the doors opening and Wallander appears through them, looking into a room.) 

That's right, I remember. The place was full of animals.

(Wallander looks round the room. The camera pans with him.)

Woman: My husband's great talent was taxidermy. Until his eyes got too old. And his fingers.

Wallander: And what happened to the animals?

Man: Well. We had to throw them out. Rotten. Like everything else.

(The woman smiles.)

janus

a likeness to a strange beast

All images © The Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences (St Petersburg), The State Hermitage Museum & the State Russian Museum, University of Amsterdam.

two undulations

All images © The Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences (St Petersburg), The State Hermitage Museum & the State Russian Museum, University of Amsterdam.

the wild things

All images © The Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences (St Petersburg), The State Hermitage Museum & the State Russian Museum, University of Amsterdam.

We went to see Where the Wild Things Are the other evening. I loved it despite what some of the critics have said. These images from The Paper Museum of the Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg reminded me of the beasts and of Max's animal suit.

a successive kindling of eight lights

A Beginner's Guide to Hanukkah, by Jonathan Safran Foer.

I know I keep putting his stuff up here, but I just love his work. Humorous, erudite, thoughtful. 

A small Christmas gift.

ghosts of stockings revisited

   

I've become interested in the idea of the 'paper museum' lately and will upload a series of images from The Paper Museum of the Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg over the next week or so. Chiefly my interest lies in the idea of a museum that exists as it's own documentation: a record of items collected, drawn on paper. I'm not sure whether my idea of a paper museum is a well-coined concept, but I certainly need to look into it when timetables allow. In the meantime, enjoy some stocking and foot-related attire - and if you ever find a copy of The Paper Museum (it's in limited supply and expensive to buy) then do spend some time with its contents. Absoloutely lovely.

All images © The Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences (St Petersburg), the State Hermitage Museum & the State Russian Museum, University of Amsterdam.

top four in london

See these:

Pure Beauty - John Baldessari at Tate Modern
Authority to Remove - Jill Magid at Tate Modern
Ed Ruscha at the Hayward  
Passing Thoughts and Making Plans - Artists using photography as part of their process (including Rachel Whiteread, Tacita Dean, Cornelia Parker, Richard Wentworth & Sarah Jones) at the Jerwood Space

studies in indirect communication vol. vii

Can you believe I don't even seem to have the time to take photos of bits in my studio these days. Let alone do anything else to them. So what an excellent birthday present from scb: a hotel room on the 9th floor overlooking a blustery bay, no work, wifi and photos and scans of stuff that needed to be put on the blog. 


I've been making some drawings from last year much bigger and using Hammerite on paper instead of graphite. I love the various qualities it can create from high gloss to something that feels more like a rain-filled and glowering cloud on the horizon. My wall is beginning to look like some sort of thunderous cartoon dialogue.

harvest jamboree

In a previous post I showed all the old Ladybird books depicting images of farmers and crops and cattle. We're currently thinking that it'd be really lovely to celebrate all things autumnal and harvest-like and have a sort of harvest festival-come-harvest-moon celebratory meal.

The harvest moon is next Monday and my big, bombastic efforts aren't terribly likely to materialise for that, but I'm hoping that some way through October - or maybe November - we'll put on a big feast for some of our friends. This is all very steeped in that Victorian tradition of creating elaborately themed dinners, in which guests would partake through fancy-dress.

In preparation for this I've been buying old plates on which I hope to draw with my porcelain pens. All themed, of course. There appears to be a blue/gold/off-white link emerging in the plate choices. And I like that it'll all be a bit mismatched.

Now I just need to get drawing…

sit back

Sometimes you read something and when you finish, you sit back and breath out a satisfied sigh. Because someone has done it. They've put into words what's been spiraling around in your head for a long time. Suddenly a few things seem to make sense.

Download a .pdf of About the Typefaces Not Used in this Edition by Jonathan Safran Foer here. You'll need to scroll down a little bit to the second paragraph of the main body-text. Alternatively read the piece on the Guardian's site here. But you don't get the illustrations.

anatomy of flight

I found these a few weeks ago in the Castle Drogo shop and after buying two for some small friends, I ended up buying six for me because I couldn't decide which ones were best. They reminded me that after In Absentia I wanted to make paper bird beaks to stop people from talking. They also employ colour very creatively, which I probably wouldn't have: I always imagined they'd be made with a good, sharp HB pencil.

not the window frame

 Christian Frederik Hansen (1756-1845), Stadthaus G.F. Baur, Hamburg-Altona 1801-1805, 'Fensterrahmung'.

 

Guess what? More interested in the emptiness of the window frame…

season's yield

I remember harvest festivals being a big thing when I was at school: collecting food in assembly to send to 'the poor children in Africa'. At about the same time I was probably looking at books something like this, and although I wasn't much inspired by the contents then, I find something about them rather lovely these days. It's probably nostalgia.

We were thinking that it'd be lovely to revisit this harvest tradition and have a feast with friends to celebrate Michaelmas and the harvest moon. There are some lovely old rituals associated with these historically important days in the calender that I thought could inspire some interesting drawings that I could use in some way for the feast. 

More soon.

eleven missing days

In the history books, nothing happened in British history between 3 and 13 September 1752. The change from the Julian to Gregorian calender in 1752 meant that 11 days were lost from history to compensate for the slight inaccuracy over the years of the Julian calender. Many people protested this change, believing that it would shorten their lives.

absence to liberation

Click on this image to see it larger.

I made these years ago and just stumbled across them again. Sometimes it's nice to revisit old work and see that although the physical qualities of the work may be quite different, there are themes that reappear time and time again.

banana chips

A parcel from an old student, Huda Abdul Aziz, arrived the other day... Thank you!

chained books

From 'Books & Printing' by John Cutforth. Blackwell's Learning Library 1978.

off camping!

the 17 rooms theory revisited

Last year, in this old post I wrote about a friend saying that I was like a house with 17 rooms. Yesterday when I cleared a cupboard for the car-boot, I came across this in a folder of drawings I made when I was a kid. 17 rooms indeed. Fancy that.

billow

ganseys & knit-frocks

'Excuse me. Do you remember any knitting like this?'
'I should think I do - my Granny knitted hundreds.'
'Can you tell me anything about them?'
'She only knitted for her own. They were masterpieces and they were all different. She knitted a hole in the front…'
'What for?'
'For the pocket watches. All her boys had one (jerseys). Uncle Willie lost his, couldn't find it anywhere and Granny was mad. She had a stall every week at Rock and Padstow markets. Twelve months after, Granny saw a man wearing Uncle Willie's jersey. "Here", she said, "you' got my boy's jersey on." "I hab'n," he said. "Yes, you have," she said, and called a policeman to arrest him. "How do you know this is your boy's jersey?" the policeman asked. "You make'n lift up his arms," said Granny. "You'll see I knitted a 'W' under one arm and an 'S' under the other and my boy's name is Willie Steer - what's his?"

Image and text: Cornish Guernseys & Knit-frocks, Mary Wright, Polperro Heritage Press, 2008.

I find myself back at names. And despite trying to turn my head away from using the sea as source material for my work (it's a bit obvious isn't it, if you're based here, by the water) this, and the previous post about sailors gold earrings are intriguing. They make a comfortable pair.

mariner's law

'Do you know why sailors wear gold in their ears?' Uncle asked me. 'It was the law, long ago, that a sailor had to have on his person enough gold to bury him should he wash ashore. So the seaside folk wouldn't be out of pocket at the funeral expense.'

Ahab's Wife, or The Star-Gazer, Sena Jeter Naslund, The Women's Press, 2000.

ronnie's

the majestic silence

You know Phaedrus, that's the strange thing about writing, which makes it truly analogous to painting. The painter's work stands before us as though the paintings were alive, but if you question them, they maintain a most majestic silence. It is the same with written words; they seem to talk to you as though they were intelligent, but if you ask them anything about what they say, from a wish to know more, they go on telling you the same thing over and over again forever.

The text read was nothing but its words, in which signs and meaning overlapped with bewildering precision. Interpretation, exegesis, gloss, commentary, association,, refutation, symbolic and allegorical senses, all rose not from the text itself, but from the reader. The text, like a painted picture, said only 'the moon of Atheus,' it was the reader who furnished it with a full ivory face, a deep dark sky, a landscape of ancient ruins along which Socrates once walked.

Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading

spectacle

My new tent. It has a hook to hang my glasses on when I go to sleep.
And - at last - a proper porch.