Let's skive with Turner

JMW Turner, The Val d'Aosta, 1840s
Oil on canvas, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

... and so we did. Just as well, seeing that tomorrow would have been too late (and not a day for skiving anyway... facilitating PhD students on how to become effective).

So: there was at points nothing to see and yet the paintings were so full of everything. Talking about Turner... hm, dunno... while happy to take Twombly apart (well, a bit), Turner is something different altogether.

So, while I'm getting over introductory shyness and am sussing out some of the obvious and less obvious links why this has been a phantastic day out in Edinburgh, here's some of my favourites.

JMW Turner, Landscape with River and distant Mountains, c1845
Oil on Canvas, Walker Art Gallery, National Museum, Liverpool

This week's plan 1

... I've been looking forward to this for a while - since I stumbled into Tina Mammoser's explorations of lines for some of her coastal landscapes.

So, London for the rest of the week, and I'm sure I can sneak away from work for some of this:

Oeuvre de Cy Twombly (musée d'art contemporain, Berlin)
Originally uploaded by dalbera

... well, from today's location to tomorrow's...

For more of Cy Twombly at the Tate Modern, see here

Bits and Pieces write-up part 2

Joan Eardley, Rottenrow, 1956
Oil on Canvas, 94x164cm
Private Collection

As promised, here is a commentary on the fourth and final part of the Bits and Pieces workshop about Joan Eardley. At the centre of this fourth part were again children scenes, but this time very much in the shape of complex street scenes with a lot of activity and well-developed composition.

The exhibition tour focused exclusively on the Glasgow room of the exhibition: a series of somber interior pieces and some of her lightest, and most complex compositions of street scenes: groups of children playing, skipping ropes, pushing prams, holding arms and hands.

These street scenes share a number of common elements in terms of composition - as you can see from the two images I've included from the catalogue: A fairly linear composition of road, pavement and shop fronts provides the urban, highly-structured yet dynamic backdrop for various groups of children.

Joan Eardley, Children in a Glasgow Back Street
Oil on Canvas, 74x140cm
Private Collection

The figures, not unlike the backdrop, are composed of what appears almost incidental and random colours, marks and textures. In both scenes, it is difficult to disentangle the actual work process - what shapes, marks and textures were laid down before and after each other. This sense of spontaneous development is all the same held together but a strong composition.

There is in fact a third, and later street scene, in the room - my personal favourite - the pavement is sloping upwards to the left corner, the children are in lighter, almost pastel colours, angled too - and in fact, the whole scene - titled Glasgow Back Street with Children Playing - is marked by a greater sense of abstraction: rythms of colours and shapes moving through a group of children where only the faces are discernible (unfortunately it's too large to scan): but, go and have a look for yourself.

The exhibition room with these street scenes also includes a number of interior scenes, a few years earlier, the four scenes depict Angus Neil - close friend and frequent sitter - in altogether more sombre and structured paintings. Yet, again, each features strong bursts of colour to offset the muted greys and a glorious sense of detail. I have included The Table as an example, and although the catalogue reproductions are pretty good, you need to think of the yellow in the top right as bright and shiny, and the red stripe in the left background as vibrant too. I very much like the contemplative calm of the model playing off the lived in/off table and the sun-lit window.

Joan Eardley, The Table, 1953
Oil on Canvas, 61x91.5 cm
The MacLeod Collection

I seem to be running out of time again and yet have to write about the workshop session and my impressions/insights from the series. So, again: more to follow.

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Bits and Pieces Collage Workshop: write-up

Sanna Head, Ardnamurchan Pen and ink on paper (24x30 cm) (week two)

The last session of the workshop alongside the Joan Eardley exhibition had been last week. And while I had posted the most recent collage from that session (here), I wanted to write a bit more about the workshop itself.

It ran for four session of 2.5 hrs each. We had begun each session with a tour around the exhibition, focusing on a few aspects of Eardley's work and in particular her work process.

Week One provided an overview of themes, approach and a closer discussion of her paper-based works: gouache, pastels and pen and ink; on the basis of this, we started doing stick and ink drawings of photographs of children. These, in turn acted as starting point for some simple collage of urban landscape and children's faces/figures - working with simple materials such as sugar paper, newspaper and oil pastels.

Pen and ink with pastel drawing 24x30cm (week one)

Week Two concentrated on landscapes: her landscape paintings, how she added and included mud, grit and grasses to achieve textures and the importance of composition within these. The activities themselves were again twofold: pen/stick and ink drawings of landscapes to bring out textures, vary these textures to strengthen the composition of the overall scene; we then prepapred with acrylics a number of papers - with various textures, tones and values as basis for the following week.


.... which I unfortunately missed. It included a tour around her seascapes and the assemblage of a whole series of impressive landscape collages which you can see in the photo. Secondly, people worked with soft pastels on sandpaper to develop colourful childrens' portraits.

Landscape collages and childrens' portraits (pastel on paper) (week three)

I will actually write about the last and final session later: I want to include some more of Eardley paintings in this as well as some of the various points I took from the sessions. So: more to follow...

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Virtual museum visits

August Strindberg, Town Oil on Canvas, 1903 Nationalmuseum Stockholm

... to the Stockholm Nationalmuseum at night introduced me to some new painters. I have already briefly mentioned August Strindberg's experimental photography in a previous post. He has also painted a series of dark and brooding seascapes - high waves, dark clouds and the emotions flying all over the place. - There's much more to say about his landscapes... but above is a brief taster, and here's another one:

August Strindberg, Stormy Sea, Buoy without Top mark
Oil on Board, 1892
Stockholm Nationalmuseum

The second Swedish painter I discovered is Eugene Jansson - also painting from around the late 19c, Jansson produced a whole series of evocative, enticing and melancholic cityscapes and landscapes. Many of them in various shades of blue, they are at the same time full of light and lightness.

This one here just made my new desktop background: those icey blues just sing even in their 72dpi flatness.

Eugene Jansson, Sunrise over the Rooftops. Motiv from Stockholm
Oil on Canvas, 1903
Nationalmuseum Stockholm

And here's another one:

Eugene Jansson, Hornsgatan at Night
Oil on Canvas, 1902
Nationalmuseum Stockholm

Thank you, J.! Such good suggestions!

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Upcoming Joan Eardley exhibition

The National Gallery in Edinburgh is going to hold a major retrospective of Joan Eardley - a Scottish figurative and landscape artist whose work presents an important contribution to the move towards abstraction in mid-c20th European and Northamerican art.

Joan Eardley, Children and Chalked Wall 3,
Collage on Canvas,
National Gallery of Scotland
GMA 853

I'm very excited about this, as Eardley has been one of the most fascinating artists I discovered during the last year. The exhibition will open on November 6 and last until January 13 in the National Gallery complex.

Eardley's studio was located during the late 1940s in Glasgow's Trongate in the East End, and from here, her works of the children of the East End give powerful testimony to the life in inner-city tenements... a kind of visual urban ethnography of postwar Glasgow.

From the mid 1950s onwards until her death at only 43 in 1963, Eardley divided her time between the small fishing village of Catterline on the Scottish north-east coast and Glasgow.

Joan Eardley, Catterline in Winter
Oil on Board
National Gallery of Scotland
GMA 888

The energy within these landscapes, the palette used by her - just see the neutrals with which she painted Catterline in Winter, and the markmaking and texture within these paintings are terrific.... and I probably leave my attempt at art critique as that for the time being. I've just been to a geography conference, and still need a bit of distance to talk about the complexity of landscape and culture that doesn't run counter with my academic self ;)

As for the Eardley exhibition - they are offering a short course during the exhibition. Called Bits and Pieces, it is based on one's exploration of the exhibition and on experimenting with collage (that's the bits and pieces bit) both for landscape and figurative work. That'll mean trecking across the Edinburgh after work, but it will be more than well worth it, even just for having the opportunity to explore the exhibition four times! I will write more about this in due course and am currently just savouring the anticipation.

More on Picasso on paper - Le taureau series

Le Taureau series - Eleven lithographs,
Pablo Picasso
December 1945-January 1946
(Image from Leal et al, 2003, p. 364)

The second instalment from last weekend's visit to the Picasso on paper exhibition is, just as much as the first post on Picasso's Papier Colle, inspired by the artist's method and discipline of exploring abstraction. Within the space of six weeks, Picasso worked in the atelier of the printer Fernand Mourlot on a successive series of lithographs. Christine Piot, one of the co-authors of the already mentioned Leal et al. 2003, Ultimate Picasso, observes the extent to which this series

"reveals that Picasso liked to add, combine, and stick things together just as much as he like to strip, undo, prune, and purify." (p. 360)

The extent to which Picasso was moving in toboth directions throughout this series is fascinating - I had sat down to sketch most of the bulls to figure out for myself the extent to which he kept reworking forms, shapes, masses and lines throughout the series.

Another lithograph of a bull - this time a head facing left - only revealed itself to me once I moved away from it (and my own sketch):

Head of Bull Turned to the Left
Lithograph 1948
(Fine Arts Museums of Francisco)

Picasso on paper - exhibition

Eventually - and not before time, seeing that it was the last day of it - I managed to get across to Edinburgh to visit the Picasso on Paper exhibition at the Dean Gallery. Exhibiting over 140 paper-based works by the prolific artist, the exhibition provides an excellent insight into Picasso's draughtsmanship, his varied printmaking techniques and the innovation with which he approached media and subjects.

The exhibition covers a wide span of his working life - from pastel drawings from the 1890s, the pre-war era cubist work, many etchings from the Vollard suite of the 193os, 1940s lithographs and some fabulous multi-coloured linocuts from the 1950s through to drawings and etchings from the last decade of his life.

Many of the works are on loan from the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, which holds an extensive collection of the artist's graphic work.

I had taken my sketchbook with me - but once we were there I quickly suffered from a good dose of artist admiration (which isn't quite the word but you hopefully get was I mean), but took out the sketchbook out to do a number of quick shadow shapes sketches.

I enjoyed the sense of artistic and technical development coming through his works - exploring different type of print techniques, mixing them up (e.g. by scraping on lithographs), and while my understanding of print techniques isn't good, I found Picasso's continuous search for something different, stretching the boundaries of what is known, done and understood fascinating.

Let me illustrate with an example from his cubist work - daily meetings with George Braque led to an exploration of collages and geometric minimalism - how little information is needed to denote a sketch as a human head?

Described by Brigitte Leal, in The Ultimate Picasso, as 'papier colle revolution', Braque's interest in materials was taken up by Picasso throughout 1912 and 1913. Here painting and collage influenced each other mutually.

Leal illustrates how the use of ready-made materials such as newspaper cutouts introduced an anonymity to the works - making art for the cubist not dependant 'on the painter's hand' (p. 162). In the process

the form no longer depends on a drawn or painted structure; papier colle has taken its space. Cutouts and assemblages alone define the spatial composition. Here color 'working simultaneously with form,' Braque put it, takes priority, disrupts the two-dimensionality of space.

Moving this further, Picasso created a series of head within which the capturing of a simple pictorial essence became the key. Only few reference points help distinguishing between different objects - such as this head and guitar here:

Head, Papier Colle, Pablo Picasso, 1913
Private Collection

Guitar, Papier Colle, Pablo Picasso, 913
Private Collection

Leal (p. 170), again:

The painter is playing with the ambigous nature of the clues: the same triangular bases for both, the same bands of black and blue glued paper to stabilize the forms without mimicking the subjects, and the use of the double curve that usually evokes the guitar to form the head.

There's more to follow on this one - notably Picasso's process of abstraction through a series of lithographs.

Constable and Turner at V&A

In the end it took me two visits to the V&A to find the paintings I was looking for. On the first day I, mistakenly, thought there would be late opening, so just as I finally found the two galleries with Constable's oil sketches and Turner and Constable's landscapes, the museum was closing - I wonder if that had anything to do with my endless browsing through the museum shop beforehand ;)

Yesterday, however, before I went back home and made sure I would get to look at the sketches.
Having posted one of Constable's cloud studies in the earlier post, I was curious to see with my own eyes and try to find out more about this clouds/sky studies. Much of the sketches were donated to the museum by his daughter in the 1880s and give rich insights into his working and study practices. They are often painted on paper/card and he kept these as reference material for his larger paintings.

As for record keeping, these were the additional notes Constable wrote on the back of the cloud study #82:
'Looking S.E. noon. Wind very brisk. & effect bright & fresh. Clouds moving very fast. With occasional very bright openings to the blue' Dated Sept. 5. 1822

I'm interested and intrigued how such studies - of which Constable said, according to the museum notes, to have completed over 50 reasonably large ones by October 1822 - are becoming part of ones working repertoire - the one when one knows how to present and represent a cloudy but fresh evening sky in summer. It reminds me also of how my life drawing tutor - with a keen focus on human anatomy - stressed again and again that observation is just one part, the other part is knowing and understanding anatomy.

With all this talk of working knowledge, reflexivity and experience, my geography friends will laugh - it is plain clear that I've just been to a conference and my head is full of academia talk. But, hey, isn't it nice to be able to make those connections? More to follow, I suppose.

Here, for some exploration of the gallery if you aren't in London is the V&A website who offers a rich resource and also some virtual tours through its various room:

Constable's oil sketches in room 88
The sketches are mainly on the left hand side and you can zoom in close to look at them

Turner and Constable's landscapes in room 87
Three of Turner's seascapes are on the left here, with Constables landscape paintings to the right

The virtual tour uses Quicktime software to allow you to move around and zoom in - it works pretty well.

Museum visit - V&A Museum, London

John Constable (RA), 'Study of Clouds', 1822. Museum no. 590-1888, V&A Museum, London

I'm currently in London and have a couple of hours free this afternoon. In the West End, I'm planning on going to the Victoria & Albert Museum to have a closer look at some of the English Romantic landscape painters - notably Constable and Turner and their ways of representing skies and clouds.

I've come across them for my cloud studies, but also in Christopher Bellinger's new blog where he has been writing about Constable himself called 'skying' - the study of skies and clouds. I do like the term a lot - so much in fact that I will need to have a closer look at his studies myself. I've come across some of the online resources and images by him - notably one painting available at the V&A. It is this one at the start of the post.