Li Yuan-chia, ‘Axe and Shears’, 1993

‘Axe and Shears’

Li Yuan-chia (1929-1994)

Tinted photograph mounted on Rice Paper

360 x 390

1993

£25.00

2013.010

I bought this directly from Li in 1993. I had an overpowering sense of standing next to a great but almost completely ignored artist, one who didn't fit with established narratives and someone from whom I could really learn.  The meeting and the build up to it was in every way challenging and it wouldn’t have happened without the intervention of Simon Cutts who has made a number of suggestions which, when followed up, have resulted in collecting something brilliant. Its my title by the way not Li's.

People talk a lot about LYC Museum, the gallery Li ran until 1982. They talk of the transforming effect it had on their lives. I never went when it was open and didn't even know it was there.

When I spoke to Li about it he regretted the level of commitment he had made to it feeling that although it had in a sense, the sense of being a service to others, been an art work it had distracted him from his other work and contributed to his isolation.

He would, he said, be interested to do a show at Abbot Hall only if Northern Arts Board would pay him £32,000 to compensate him for the way in which they had ‘treated’ him. I struggled with this feeling that that they had ‘treated’ him to years of funding and that perhaps they might not welcome these words on an application form. But this is the sort of arm lock I've got used to, the sort that can switch from banter to a shut door in the blink of an eye. 

I met Li because; through Audrey Barker I was introduced to Simon Cutts. Simon had possession of Audrey’s accumulated collection of LYC catalogues. He later gave them (without her permission) to Iniva. 

He suggested to me that I might like to write a pamphlet for the Coracle ‘Little Critics’ series on the way in which Li used publishing as a platform for artists’ practice.

Fine I said, the only problem being that I didn’t know and had never met Li and had never been to the museum or seen any of its shows. He gave me a selection of 'Little Critics' in a nice little box to have a look at.

Nothing much happened for about 18 months, I kept it in mind. I collected as many catalogues as I could find from antiquarian and specialist book shops, finally hitting paydirt at the fabulous Michael Moon’s bookshop in Whitehaven where I was able to order LYC Catalogues by shelf length. I probably have a complete set now including a large book on Winifred Nicholson published under the imprint of LYC press.

I called at the museum a number of times at the beginning of the decade. It had a very derelict appearance.  Sometimes I knew he was in but he just wasn’t answering the door. It was a major effort because at the time I didn’t have a car and the visits I made were on the back of the visits I was making to the area researching ‘Banks Head a Painters Place’ about the Nicholsons and their guests at Banks in the late 20’s in a selection of rented and borrowed vehicles. Everyone said he was difficult to deal with. He was.

Finally on possibly the third attempt he opened the door and he let me in. I wanted to see his work I explained… I had a commission from Simon Cutts… I knew Li’s early work from material in private collections and indeed from the Abbot Hall Collection and of course I knew of the renewal of critical interest in his work since Rasheed Araeen had included him in ‘The Other Story: Afro-Asian Artists in Post-war Britain’, at the Hayward Gallery in 1989. I found out as we talked though that Li had been frustrated that he had been unable to interest the organisers in the work he was making now.

Because of this he refused to discuss anything historical and especially the museum and its publishing with me. The ‘Little Critic’ died.

He marched me tantalisingly past a room full of older work (Hanging Disks) and sat me down in the kitchen. 

He began to show me his photographs and all around us were the scenarios he had been photographing.

I knew instantly how fantastic and original they were. How powerfully they expressed the way he saw things. I recognise in them the basis of the formal language of the New British Sculpture of the 80’s particularly those artists of that generation represented by the Lisson Gallery which both Audrey and Li had been associated with a decade earlier. I could also see how intensely symbolic, poetic and reflective they were and that they proceeded from another unfamiliar (to me) tradition. 

When I later showed them to Audrey she was struck by the way they reprised something of the ‘Moon Show' which Li had installed at the Lisson gallery in 1969. She vividly recalled an arrangement of leaves and a swing.

I knew I would buy some straight away; In fact I cooked up the idea of setting up a standing order. I could see Li needed income and thought this arrangement might suit him and not empty my pockets so rapidly. I asked him how much he wanted and he settled on the astonishing figure of £25 each, a price that I have always regarded as a personal gift.

I bought two, both using the motif of a hatchet and shears supporting each other and intended to write to him with my suggestion about buying more. In fact I contemplated writing to him and suggesting that I come and work for him as an assistant. I also contemplated how I would explain this madness to others. Even now I feel robbed of opportunity by his death.

As he prepared them for me he carefully stamped and numbered them . This one is [LYC 248/93|Banks, Brampton Cumb. CA8 2JH. England.] He mounted the photographs on rice paper and recorded details of the work in a book. He showed me how they were to be framed in black. I visited him at the museum a number of times but before any of my plans could be articulated or explored I learned that he was ill. I visited him subsequent to the diagnosis of the cancer that killed him (he had ignored early symptoms) and I visited him again in the Cumberland Infirmary shortly before he transferred to a hospice to die.

As well as being in a good deal of physical discomfort he was in turmoil really not wanting to die and insecure about his will. He worried that he could not rely on the contacts he had named in his will to execute it as he wished. He described the will as a mistake but died weeks later without changing it.

One of the things that troubled me most about Li’s death was the way in which people moved in on him claiming territory and controlling access to him. Audrey was desperate to see him before he died and shamefully was not assisted by someone who later briefly became a trustee of the LYC foundation. 

The LYC was full of Li’s work. Most of it was removed after his death to Iniva who produced in 2000 ‘Li Yuan-chia: Tell me what is not yet said’ with essays by Guy Brett and Nick Sawyer. The exhibition (Curated by Guy Brett) toured to Camden Arts Centre and to Abbot Hall, after my time there and presumably not in exchange for £32,000!

Much to my surprise the exhibition and book recognised the importance of this late work which was featured  very prominently.

There are plans for the LYC Foundation to develop at Banks. I really hope that one day this happens.

Links

INIVA

Third Text

LEAP LEAP

LYC Foundation 

Kenneth Rowntree, ‘Breton Morning’, undated

‘Breton Morning’
Kenneth Rowntree (1915 – 1997)

Acrylic on Card

196 x 196

Undated

£150

2013.009

This is one of the two pictures given to me by Kenneth Rowntree. It is a retrospective copy of another picture. ‘Breton Morning’, 1965. illustrated in: John Milner, Kenneth Rowntree, Lund Humphries, 2002.

On the surface of it, it’s an abstract and I could easily go on about formal language, picture planes etc. but in fact, as related over our lunch, at some length, it is an erotic fantasy.

I mentioned in my previous post about the other picture (Acomb Grey and Green) that while he had been talking his wife Diana had become irritated; it was in fact at this point in our conversation that I noticed her irritation had reached its peak.

Rowntree told me that in the sixties at Newcastle University he had had a secretary. She always wore a close fitting black polo neck sweater and a short blue dress.  In this picture she stands to the left, her head is missing, as are her legs and arms which have been cropped from the picture hinting at close physical proximity.

In some versions her breast is sculpted out of the surface as a concave dish. The white triangle in the bottom right is a tent in which he fantasised that they had spent the night, my version is garnished with a coffee stain in the bottom right, and the rest is landscape and sky.

I have no idea if it’s true but I like lies - an artist friend of my father’s once told me as a child that the reason Flemish painters always did cows standing in water was that they couldn’t do feet. I have chosen to retain this pearl of wisdom and will carry it to the grave. Stories are always best when told to the credulous.

Links

Breton Morning (Harry Moore Gwynn Fine Art)

Fry Art Gallery

Kenneth Rowntree, 'Acomb Grey and Green' undated

'Acomb Grey and Green'

Kenneth Rowntree (1915 1997)
Pencil and Acrylic on Card
190 x  222

Undated

£150.00

2013.08

I organised an extra showing at Abbot Hall of Kenneth Rowntree’s mid-nineties Oriel 31 retrospective organised by Michael Nixon. 

In preparation for the show he invited me to his house in Corbridge (two shop fronts knocked together in Front street) opposite the Black Bull for a lunch. He was something of a bon viveur and lunch was very nice. He had wonderful art on the walls, a superb Ben Nicholson with an airmail motif, a Pasmore and a great big watercolour of his own showing a red box car. He was a terrific story teller and spoke about how they had come by these works, much to the irritation of his wife Diana who had probably heard each successive iteration of these accounts practiced to perfection on their guests.

After lunch we drove a less than straight route to his studio above the town in his little French car, rolling suspension, rolling landscape. If wine had not been taken it would have been alarming but it seemed smooth as if the world turned underneath us. He was so hospitable and showed me an enormous quantity of his work - some of which we agreed to add to the Oriel Show.

Over lunch we discussed the announcements and publicity for the show and he produced two pictures, small copies on card of ‘proper paintings’ but made by hand. These would do to send to the press he said; they would be better than photographs! It didn’t matter if they were lost, he didn’t want them back, I could keep them. I was astonished but he was sincere. I was slightly embarrassed by this because I knew that the process involved in printing would prevent them and us from using them as he intended and I didn’t want to reject them. This one is a retrospective copy of ‘Acomb Grey and Green’ in the collection of Northumbria University Gallery.

Rowntree had been professor of Fine Art at Newcastle University well before my time there as a student and we talked about the school.

I love Rowntree’s painting it’s a paen to ‘Modern’ Britain, the one that was born with the ‘Skylon’ and buried with ‘Get Carter’, via the other country that was also lost in the Second World War and so beautifully commemorated by the War Artists Committee – Rowntree included.

Unlike many of his contemporaries Rowntree was inspired by fellow departmental staff Victor Pasmore and Richard Hamilton to embrace modernity becoming ‘a bridge’ between the painterly Euston Road formality of Laurence Gowing (also a Professor at the Department) and these, last gasp of credibility, English moderns.

I’m not sure such a bridge was actually needed.  

This later work has never been well liked or received and Rowntree is better represented in public collections by the work he did before the war and for the war artists committee. Rowntree’s comfortable life and security of tenure meant that he didn’t have to strive to maintain critical subscription for his work. Fogeys who like the early work regard him as an artist who 'went off'.

He is however celebrated with a superb biography by art historian John Milner who worked under him and also later became Professor at Newcastle. I wish that as a student I had learned more and had greater insight into John’s knowledge. I suspect that the biography is a way of repaying the mentoring of the older man.

Links

Tate Gallery, Kenneth Rowntree

Richard Calvorcoresi's Obituary

Kenneth Rowntree by John Milner

Acomb Grey and Green, University of Northumbria Gallery (They have spelt it incorrectly.)

Paintings in Public Collections by Kenneth Rowntree

Thomas A. Clark, ‘Evening Light’ undated

‘Evening Light’

Thomas A. Clark (b. 1947)
Enamelled Plaque

222 x 302

Undated

Purchase from Cairn Gallery

£150.00

2013.007

I bought this on the 15 January 1997 in ‘Art97’ at the Business Design Centre in Islington from Thomas who at the time was running the Cairn Gallery in Gloucester. He didn’t really look like he was enjoying the event.

In black writing on a dark blue ground (that you really have to make an effort to read) is written:

You are invited to sit here

for a while and remember

a place, a landscape or

a quality of evening light.

It’s a poem (a sentence) that has been made rather than written, being conceived of as an instruction to the reader.

Cairn Gallery had support from the Contemporary Art Society to be at the Art Fair and represented a quiet, well-mannered alternative to the attention seeking horror of the cast flayed corpses on show at the hideous Jibby Beane Gallery (Plod took an interest thereby helping the hype) and the frantic jizz of the YBA thing going on downstairs and of course in the wider context of the bigger jizz going on in the country at large.

The cynical ‘enabling’ (exploitation) of ‘aspiration’ (greed) by the newly elected government which to me carried echoes of Thatcher’s mobilisation of the ‘yuppies’ a decade earlier, was similarly buzzing around the whole country from its epicentre in Islington.

I actually hate art fairs and at them I tend to seek refuge in material that is quiet in nature or which distracts from what is actually going on. This year I managed a whole 25 minutes in Elizabeth Price’s installation at MOT at Frieze thinking at the time that it was good, but now wondering whether it was mainly because it was darkly lit, intensely seductive and comfortable to sit in.

Cairn Gallery were on my radar because Abbot Hall, where I then worked as Curator, had just presented a show of James Hugonin’s paintings. The Clarks also had an association with Simon Cutts and Coracle who I knew through Audrey Barker. I recall that James and I discussed at length the need to re-frame some of James’ paintings that had just been shown there replacing jarring mitred corners with butt joined corners in the occasional style of Ben Nicholson. James had these works re-framed for our show with Alan Harvey who I also used at that time.

In the file I have on the plaque (which has been left untended until today) there is a Goods Pass Out form from the art fair. It doesn't record what I paid for it, or when it was made. I think it was made around that year and I paid about £150. The file also contains a Cairn Gallery pamphlet ‘In Praise of Walking’ (1988) and I’m wondering whether that too should become part of the ‘Transparent Collection’ simply because it is fantastic - it was a giveaway.  

‘Evening Light’ was one of a number of similar plaques that Clark had made and installed in public and private places. At the art fair it was appropriately close to a chair and on bending down to peer at the plaque I did feel invited to sit down and do just that. It is an experience I repeat almost daily.

Since then the plaque has always been on the wall somewhere in our houses.  For the last 8 years it has been next to the chair at which I eat my breakfast. I love it because it constantly invites a reverie disengaging the here and now. On Cairn editions website there is a short essay ‘On Imaginative Space’. If instructions on how to look at it were needed, these are they.

Since 2002 Cairn Editions has been based in Pittenweem. It’s not very open but you can go if you want, ring first.

Links

Cairn Editions

Scottish Poetry Library

Oxford Poetry (Thomas Clark)

Ned Owens (James Edward Owens), Manchester Races, 1950.

'Manchester Races'

James Edward (Ned) Owens (1918 - 1990) 

Pencil on tinted paper 

1950

540 x 640

£800 (£500 for drawing and £300 for the frame)

2013.006

Ned Owens ran the Mid Day Studios in Manchester's Mosely Street with his first wife Margot Ingham from 1946 until its closure in 1951. This drawing, a gift from Ned’s second wife Pat, would have been made at that time while he also taught at Manchester School of Art.

Its is an atmospheric picture in which the racegoers seem only to wait for disappointment... in silence.... sharing each others pain. It hangs in our dining room where it serves to depress any over-excited conversation. 

The Mid Day Studios operated a gallery and held exhibitions which Margot and Ned organised. Margot was regarded as something of an art dealer and had a presence in the Manchester art scene of the time. He did the donkey work and she did the schmoozing.

Among the exhibitions they mounted was L.S. Lowry’s first one man show in 1948. 

Lowry went on from this to be represented by Manchester based art dealer Andras Kalman. 

I remember Pat showing me a small Lowry which depicted the interior of the studios cleared for an exhibition, probably a study for a larger better known work.

Latterly she kept these artworks around her at the caravan park in Gatebeck near Kendal where she lived. 

She had been intending to give the painting to Manchester City Art Gallery but I advised her not to, feeling that given her circumstances, she should probably not be so generous to an organisation that had the means to raise funds, which could afford to pay and to sell it to them instead. She duly did this, justifying this ‘selfishness’ by doing so well below market price (my head is in my hands). Still it is great to have friends that want to invest in public institutions. I do respect Pat for that. She was great fun and I am also proud to have survived her terrible driving which was recalled with some affection at her recent funeral.

Ned Owens did not fare well after separating from Margot. He suffered from depression and produced, in the few paintings that survived and which he did not later burn on a bonfire, a bleak testament to his illness. The white painted Bourlet frame in which I keep the drawing was among 6 salvaged from this bonfire by Pat who disapproved of, and was shocked by, Ned's destruction of his own work. 

Owens was brought up in South Tyneside and I also remember Pat showing me a painting called the 'Rag Pickers' based on a memory of his childhood there on one of our visits. It showed two children picking up rags for clothing in the shadow of a colliery. It is one of the most movingly painful pictures I have ever seen. 

Pat claimed that Ned never escaped the psychological impact of the horrific poverty that scarred his childhood and that as a consequence of this experience never developed the confidence to pursue his career as an artist effectively. Pat kept what remained of his work in the second bedroom of the caravan. 

I met her through an art group ‘Talking about Contemporary Art’ (TACA) that I had set up at the Brewery Arts Centre in Kendal and which she joined - more of this meeting when I get round to the other drawing she gave me.

After his divorce from Margot he declared (with that bonfire) that his career as an artist was over, meaning that a period of his life, that part spent with Margot and the aspirations he had had to recognition as an artist was over.

Seeking new direction he took a job at what was then the 'Manchester Guardian' in 1958 as an illustrator producing cartoons, illuminations and illustrations for feature articles. If you read the paper during this period you would have seen his work almost daily.  He retired seventeen years later when the Guardian relocated its head office and operations to London in 1975.

Ned developed his drawing style for newsprint using harsher contrast, a more linear drawing style and later Letraset Ben-Day half tones. This material formed the bulk of the folios that Pat had kept. She was anxious to make a disposal of this material that would protect his legacy as both an artist and a journalist. He had been proud of his work at the Guardian and was a committed member of the NUJ.

On her behalf I approached the Guardian Archive then based at Farringdon Road and brokered the arrangements that led to 151 of these drawings being deposited there permanently as a gift - as I recall it was settled over a lunch at the rather weird Crooklands Hotel.

The only other substantial collection of Owens drawings is in the possession of the Chaplin family. 

Owens was invited by publisher Frank Graham to illustrate fellow Guardian journalist Sid Chaplin’s exquisitely sensitive 1971 collection of essays ‘The Smell of Sunday Dinner’ which documented life and conditions in the Durham Coalfields and the industrial North East.

The suite of drawings commissioned for the book in Owens' - for print - style was given by Owens to Chaplin and hung in Chaplin’s House. 

In Owens’ house however, his copy of the book contained a letter from Chaplin apologising for a subsequent book being illustrated by Norman Cornish after Owens had been offered the work on the grounds that Graham felt it would sell better because he was more famous.

Pat said that this had been a hard knock and Chaplin said he regretted it.

Links

Guardian Archive/Ned Owens
Mid Day Studios by LS Lowry
Paintings in Public Collections by Ned Owens

Peter McGlynn, 'The Books Nobody Reads', 2007

'The Books Nobody Reads'

Peter McGlynn

Laser Print

330 x 450

2007

Gift from Jamie Warde Aldam

No Commercial Value

2013.005

My proposal to the Story Gallery that they should commission me to catalogue my own library took the form of a PowerPoint presentation (see 2012.004 previous post 4 January 2012).

I also sent a copy to my friend Jamie Warde Aldam who despite, or perhaps because of, working in advertising said he had never seen PowerPoint used this way. It was a bit odd.

Jamie, amongst other things, edits the Hotspur Magazine, Parish Magazine of Healey St. John. 

Given that its strapline is ‘Hotter than Hell’ it would be fair to say that it’s not quite like other parish magazines because it’s mainly about Art. Our parish magazine is called the Lyvennet Link. It doesn't even pretend to be 'Hotter than Morecambe' although it does carry a page long column called Maulds Meaburn Weather in which the wetness of the year has been remarked upon in exhaustive detail. Its coverage of the arts though, has been rather limited. 

Jamie commissioned Peter McGlynn, based in Newcastle upon Tyne and who I have never met, to turn the PowerPoint into a cartoon strip, a task for which considerable ‘licence’ was taken. The trapeze artiste and the stovepipe hats for example were not of my invention. But who cares, I love it. It appeared in an issue dated December 63^rd [yes] 2007. ’Forgotten Books Number’.

We still have the ‘Blackpool Beach Library’ by the way. It’s a wheelbarrow which was then used to barrow borrowing books about the beach but which today is full of the most fantastic 10 year old compost. I have been planting bulbs, late. I’m trying to give them a bit of a boost.

After yesterday’s post I have an astonishing 164 page views and an offer for ‘Some Los Angeles Apartments’. I had not intended to make an offer of sale but part of the transparency of this project is about money which I have always found to be a useful way of describing value. However as I think about getting into this it seems less useful than I thought.

Oh and also a rhetorical offer to commission me to catalogue my own library... If only the organisation concerned can survive the year, given the government's war on all that is decent in the arts and elsewhere, and pay for me to do this kind of stuff. Good luck to those concerned, I wish them well and I loved working with them when the sun shone. If only we had fixed the roof. Its bloody raining now. 

'FVGIT HORA. QVANDO LVDIS'

No link today!

Ed Ruscha, 'Some Los Angeles Apartments', 1970

'Some Los Angeles Apartments'
Ed Ruscha b. 1937
Self-published book
180 x 140
1970
Bequeathed to me by Audrey Melville Barker
£800.00
2013.004

Its fantastic of course and its mint, museum people use these sorts of specialist terms all the time. Its part of a library bequeathed to us in Audrey's will. In these days of google one does not have to look far to find the same wording endlessly trotted out - this (following) has been lifted from Amazon by someone who lifted it from somewhere else. 

'Second edition (1970; originally published 1965 in an edition of 700 unnumbered copies). Soft cover. White matt wrappers with title printed in lime green on cover and spine, with glassine dust jacket. Photographs, artist's book concept and design by Ed Ruscha. Unpaginated (48 pp.), with 34 black and white illustrations printed by Anderson, Ritchie & Simon, Los Angeles. 7 x 5-1/16 inches. This second edition was limited to 3000 copies. [Originally published in 1965 in an edition of 700 copies.]'

Audrey and then husband Dennis subscribed to these publications which were mailed out them at their home in Lanercost and I have some others in the series sadly not including the fantastic 'Twentysix Gasoline Stations' which Ruscha made in 1963. Our library is in the unheated barn and at the mercy of mice (This year I have mounted a determined defence) and I have been thinking of ways of cataloguing it and housing it that reconstruct Audrey's house and defend against mice. e.g. 'Books acquired by marriage to Dennis' (Deathly boring), 'Books kept mainly in the toilet', 'Books bought on trips to London occasioned by the inconvenience of sitting on the New Collaborations panel' and so on. The reason its here now within reach of the blog is that there are a selection of things that I feel I just can't leave in the barn. Tomorrow I will catalogue Peter McGlynn's drawing which was commissioned by my friend Jamie Warde Aldam. It is based on a proposal I made to the now defunct Storey Gallery (It was politely ignored) to basically sit in their gallery cataloguing the library and making shelves/crates etc. etc. and pass the time of day with anyone who came in while I did it perhaps even getting people to help and possibly not finishing the job. I'd still be up for this if anyone would like to commission me to sort out my own library. 

Links
Some Los Angeles Apartments (Getty Museum)
Ed Ruscha (Getty)

Grizedale Arts, 'Mug', 2003.

'Mug (Roadshow)'

Grizedale Arts (Adam Sutherland/Mark Titchner)

Glazed Stoneware

80 x 130

2003

Purchased for a few quid, possibly a fiver.

2013.003

Until I read Paul Scott's comments on my last I was going to list something else but now I feel (forgive the pun) that its time to mug up on craft! 

Around the turn of the millennium I was a trustee of the Grizedale Society, which during this time became Grizedale Arts. It had a simple problem its founder, Chief Forester, Chief Executive and Chairman Bill Grant OBE (pause for breath and to stifle any thoughts regarding the conflicts of interest that this list evokes) was finding it 'difficult' to allow a successor to succeed him owing to a case of undiagnosed 'possessive megalomania'. Two lesser souls had tried and failed and the Arts Council who worked at arms length (from which distance they doled out the cash that kept us afloat) were not happy. They had said that if this one didn't stick we'd be looking for bucks elsewhere.* 

It was explained to me on appointment that my job therefore was to be 'of the visual arts' and to support the appointment of a third director specifically in one meeting so conflict ridden and ghastly that I won't forget it in a hurry. As it turned out the third appointment was belligerent enough to see the old bugger off. 

Step forward Adam Sutherland! 

For me it was a dismal tour of duty mainly involving long, very long, drives to the middle of nowhere, cutting short a days paid work for a nights unpaid work, haggling over childcare with Lynn and meeting in an unheated visitor centre/theatre which would end just as the pub was shutting and with it any prospect of nourishment before midnight. I observe without comment that the standard of hospitality has significantly improved now that I have left.

Adam met Grizedale's challenges head on and with brilliance. He wasn't then supported by the staff and fellow travellers he works with now. He sought out opportunities for conflict and confrontation believing that antagonism and antipathy were the best basis for a communicative and curatorial strategy focussed on change and relevance.

Gone were the insipid and inclusive call outs in Artists Newsletter 'to do something in the forest' (not too far from the path) and in were the 'apply if you dare' adverts in Art Monthly. Not to worry walkers though if you miss your 'art' because the forestry commission now have their own separate Arts Council funded Grizedale sculpture programme (which doesn't in any way step on Grizedale Arts toes) so 'nice stuff not too far from the path' still does happen.

Every year there was an event around which artists were commissioned having been groomed (I think I mean curated) beforehand by a drunken viewing of the 'Filth and the Fury' or some similar. From these evenings came a country show with the pathetically sad 'Lofty' (Don Estelle) from 'It ain't half hot mum', a wedding for two couples (one middle class and one working class) and 'Roadshow' which was 2003's effort. Adam usually reported on the build up to and commission of these events to the board at sufficient length to ensure that no restaurant within twenty miles would still be open. 

Roadshow toured to a selection of nowheres, coming to a bloody conclusion in the form of a pitched battle in which the youth of Blaenau Ffestiniogg burned its tent to the ground. The community were thus said to be 'engaged'. 

This mug was offered as a souvenir of this event and in that spirit was bought by myself from a stall on the occasion of Grizedale's hosting of the 'Roadshow'. 

It is deliberately ugly and very uncomfortable to hold. A mockery of the kind of crass 'handmade' souvenir sold in Lake District craft shops complete with Titchner's 'Roadshow Graphic' crudely stamped on a cartouche. The clay is even 'too groggy' in an ugly way and the glaze has all the appeal of Hammerite on the lips. Which is why it currently contains a purple felt tip, a posidrive bit, two paper clips and a rubber and not coffee, which can be found in the altogether nicer 'Majolica Works' mug behind it in the picture above. If it is 'useful' at all - its clearly not for drinking.  

It is of course all about craft, indeed one might almost say a critique of craft and what what has become of it as Adam revives a 'forgotten' skill from a former life as a sloppy potter suborning Titchner to collaborate no doubt. 

Grizedale's new HQ now rejoices in a formal collection including one of mugs 'A mug's history of design'. The collections policy is most illuminating just in case you thought I was reading too much into it. 

Links: 

Lawson Park Collections Policy

Grizedale Arts Road Show

* I'm assuming that the minutes of any such conversation were 'redacted' long ago

Paul Scott, 'Urn....', 2003.

'Urn....'
Paul Scott
Glazed Ceramic with transfer print
Edition (2 of 5)
270 x 190 x 50
2003
Purchased for £250 (I think, it might have been less)
2013.002

I like this. I like Paul, I like his work and I have two pieces - both bought at the same time, actually I prefer the other one. I'll do that one another day.

I bought this because, and this sometimes happens, I don't want to put myself through the mileage and time and everything that gets invested in making a purchase without a decent haul. This is an approach more easily afforded in better times and when I had fewer children. So I regarded this as a sort of 'stocking filler', an ornament albeit an ironic one. I also can't shake the sense in which it was perhaps a bit of a 'homage' to Piero Fornasetti. Homage is a kinder word than 'rip off'. That it is 'derivative' and 'ornamental' somehow comes across in a pejorative way in my eyes although why I should think it of this, and not of other pieces in the 'Cumbrian Blue(s)' branded body of work which completely depends on the reworking of 'standard' designs I don't know. However I didn't think then, and don't think now, that it has the conceptual strength and resonance of other pieces. Particularly those connected to the Sellafield Nuclear site, The fabulous 'Present from Whitehaven' teapot which Paul once handed me on a business card and the brilliant work he created on standard meat plates in response to the foot and mouth outbreak in 2000. It feels minor.

I haven't seen Paul for probably a decade. He is one of those people that I think I know because on the rare occasions we are in the same room he nods hello and I feel I know his goings on - mainly because he is a particularly energetic tweeter and facebooker. I occasionally 'like' something he says or does, actually I like it all. His feeds bring news of a frantic pace of life teaching, publishing, art politicking and showing, oh, and waiting in airports. After all when better to update your status?

I bought this and the other piece from a show at Tullie House in Carlisle or maybe from his house, I'm not sure and actually I can't remember the price either.

The context was that I had recently commissioned a piece from him for the new flood defences at Maryport Harbour in 2002/3 which he was great about doing. The project was engineer led which gave rise to some small areas of 'misunderstanding'. None of them a big deal but the build process which was very contract led could have yielded a better quality of support to him. 12 years on the commission still looks great.

I curated the commissions at the invitation of Allerdale Borough Council and I had approached him because his recent residency at the Beacon Museum in Whitehaven had been game changing for his work, helping to confirm as a central concern in his practice the use of print in ceramics. Of course the fact that a vitreous enamel surface seemed so suited to sea defences was not lost on me. Paul lived locally and I felt that he was not being offered local commissions. Locally based artists are almost always ignored in favour of incoming ones, it being so much easier to be a prophet from afar. But Paul's work was being actively collected by Museums including the V&A and other craft type collectors. He had been energetic in seeking this kind of subscription for his work and around this time pursued his collaboration as a fabricator for Conrad Atkinson's landmines again, I suspect, mindful of its value to his career.

Anyway here is the thing that bothers me, the thing I need to sort out. I can think of many working in 'craft' who have used the apparatus used by artists to promote their work. This appropriation has always made me uncomfortable. The resume detailing subscription and critical appraisal, commissions, collections and so on. The catalogue in which a curator who knows the subject personally self-consciously refers to them by their second name throughout, or when the exhibitor writes of themselves in the third person. The white cube presentation of work 'as if it were art' and yet for 'craft' there is not the same rigorous critical environment. It looks like art.... but is it? Is it just pretending... anyway I will have more to say about craftiness in other posts. Paul is an artist who has made this transition. When I first came across his work as curator at Abbot Hall Art Gallery in Kendal he showed with the 'Cumbria Craft Guild'. He was definitely more crafts council than arts council at the time. Paul is a craftsman who has become an artist and his work will always carry that provenance. There is a tension in that and it also worries me that as 'Cumbrian Blues' he is prolific. Producing at 'cottage industry' if not factory volumes. There are a lot of 'Cumbrian Blues' but then I suppose there's a lot to be blue about in Cumbria.

One more thing...

On the back of the 'Urn....' which being very flat and handmade doesn't balance very well are a collection of stamps and signatures. Partly they exist because I suspect Paul is absolutely seduced by the world of collectable blue ceramics but there is also a signature and a last stamp warranting that this is 'Real Art'.

Does that settle it?

Links
Cumbrian Blue(s)

Audrey Melville Barker, 'Brighton Beach', 1953.

'Brighton Beach'
Audrey Melville Barker (1932 - 2002)
Oil on Hardboard
620 x 1270
1953
Low Commercial Value
Exhibited at New English Art Club 1953
2013.001

This painting has a huge sentimental attachment for me because it was made by one of my most loved and dearest friends during what she would have referred to as her career as a brush painter. She would have been 21 at the time. Most of her work from this period was dispersed by sales and she failed to keep tabs on it. After her death I took possession of her archive at the request of her executor Alex Frazer. I still store a proportion of it in the barn but made an arrangement for the important material in it to be selected by and transferred to the ownership of the National Disability Arts Collection and Archive (NDACA) at Holton Lee. Alex speculated that she might actually have been cross about this because of the god bothering that they do - but having turned down establishment honours for her 'service to the arts' - we were agreed that she is an artist whose contribution needs preserving somewhere. This painting was among that archival material and was left to Alex. He offered to sell it to me at the time but I didn't have enough money. So it was kept in my cellar at Aynam Road in Kendal. On a later visit, after we had moved, Alex generously gave it to me so I had the frame restored and glazed. It is in poor condition with a lot of surface damage and crazing. Despite being dark and discoloured it is a joyful painting, very much of its time, and it depicts a toy dog of the type that Audrey loved. While I knew her she had a selection of such dogs (all highly strung ankle biters) the last of which 'Harry', a pomeranian, was put down and cremated at the same time as her - his ashes being dropped into the river Irthing near Lanercost together with hers.

Links
Obituary
Ndaca