Category Archives: Art

Architecture, Art, British history

Looking Back

Sometimes an image will transport you to another time.

The carved bench ends of St Winnow’s Church in Cornwall take you straight back to 1520!

The same place, the Fowey estuary, but 500 years ago. A Tudor boat, like the ones they saw from the church yard, but in a heavy sea, blown by the wind god.

Local craftsmen will have been carving what they knew. Images and icons of the time, emblems, armorial bearings, monograms or, maybe an allusion to a sponsor, perhaps a guild. They were artists so there is more to the work than Christian symbolism — they capture the essence of the time.

According to Todd Gray, A Gazetteer of Ancient Bench Ends in Cornwall’s Parish Churches, these carvings of tools are images of the Passion (above is a hammer and pincers, pillar with cord and 2 whips). With my artisan’s hat on I wonder if they represent carpenters and the ceremonial truncheons — the marks of authority of maybe the constable and the two keepers of the poor-house.

You will note that some of these bench ends are better preserved than others — the church was renovated in 1874 and care was taken to preserve the ancient bench ends at that time.

This is supposed to be the symbol of the martyr Saint Catherine but her wheel should have impaling spikes to inflict her horrible death and be broken by the power of her holy spirit. Could it actually be a nod to the wheelwright who financed this particular bench end? Did he sit here?

As I get older I realise how short is a lifespan. How near we are to 1520 — how nothing changes. Here is the bench end that confirms this. Have you noticed how the archaeologists on TV are obsessed with ritual — I always look for practical explanations — is this chap a sinner or just marking the brewer’s bench?

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Art, Birds

Exotica

Flamingo (seen in Paradise Park — Hayle, Cornwall) by Emily Carr (age 4)

Picasso said that every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we have grown up.

Here are some of the other exotic birds we have been lucky enough to see in the last twelve months — if only I could paint them like Emily.

White Ibises — Texas
Juvenile (not quite white) Ibis
Brown and White Pelicans — Texas
White Pelicans swimming in formation, scudding across the lake, to fish with spectacular synchronized trawling!
Whooping Crane
Spoonbill, Snettisham, Norfolk
Roseate Spoonbills, Texas

We saw White Storks in flight in Cornwall this summer, but in his excitement, Bill’s photographs got accidentally deleted — here are some he took earlier in Hungary.

  • White Stork: Hungary
  • White Stork: Hungary

Happy Thanksgiving to our friends in the States.

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Art, Books, Entertaining, Literature, Wales, Welsh culture, Wendy Wigley

Champagne and Canapes

IMG_2027artichokes2

Well…  Prosecco and nibbles — wonderful artichoke dip, goat’s cheese and black olives, smoked salmon sandwiches and little cheese scones topped with prosciutto followed by bite sized strawberry meringues.

That, according to my daughters, is how you do a book launch — but that seems to be what they would recommend in any number of situations (where did I go wrong!)

Anyway — it seemed to work. We launched Iolo’s Revenge locally on Saturday.

It was carnival day and the streets were decked with flags and the numerous pubs overflowed with revellers in fancy dress.  Having an artistic director of our own helped — Wendy, the artist who illustrated the book, and who goes to lots of private viewings of exhibitions, colluded with bunting, flowers and colourful napkins.  She also exhibited some of her original artworks that head every chapter.

original art work2

The previous night I had fallen from the kitchen work surface while retrieving a jug from a top shelf — the jug was smashed but I survived, stiffly, despite the numerous tellings-off.  Alan’s son, Daniel, saved the day, by putting out the chairs and remembering all the things I forgot in my percussed and anxious state — including the TV for the silent film show that had taken me weeks to prepare.

Takking to guests

There was a good turn out on the night — about 100! There I am, above, talking to some of them.  The readers: Libby, Alan and Gay did us proud.    The guests all laughed in the right places!

Guests

Books at launch

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Wendy posing with Su and Richard Wheeler,  of Logaston Press, taking a break from selling books, while I catch up with the signing!

IMG_2042 me

Copies of Iolo’s Revenge are obtainable from Logaston Press

 

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Art

The Soul of the Soulless City

It stopped me in my tracks, that image, with a gasp
(I turned to see if anyone had noticed).
It had reached out from the wall and grabbed me.
Like a snake in the grass – really, not a metaphor,
but a primitive reaction.
As I passed, the picture had crept un-noticed through the corner of my eye, into my brain, and hit a trigger – KAZAM and spinning round, amazed,
I recognised the view —
the exact view from my earliest childhood, or so it seemed —
though I’ve never been to New York.

Soul of the Soulless City by CRW Nevinson ()

Soul of the Soulless City-CRW Nevinson

Creative Commons Licence

Wide-eyed and gripped by New York in 1920 and never so moved before by art, I was perplexed.

Even more so when I found this!

Roofs of New York CRW Nevinson in my grandparent's flat circa 1955

My Mum and Dad with the Roofs of New York by
CRW Nevinson, in my grandparent’s flat circa 1955

You see — it’s not the same image at all — just an essence, the blowing steam, the style, and I was a child when I last saw that picture. But still I spun round when I saw through the same eyes, sixty years later — the eyes of CRW Nevinson.  What does this tell us about art?

Here I am looking the other way!

Essentially unchanged

Essentially unchanged

P.S  The artist renamed the picture which is now on show at the Tate Britain when he fell out with American critics years later, it had been New York — an abstraction, it became The Soul of a Soulless City.   This explains the disparity between the positivity of the image and the negativity of the title, I don’t believe he thought the city soulless when he painted it!

My grand-parents picture was sold many years ago — perhaps to a conciliatory American.

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Architecture, Art, Humour

Excited about Architecture

‘It’s the building with the huge golden knob on the top,’ said the handsome soldier recruiting in Victoria Square.  He had real leadership potential — I found it immediately — the Library of Birmingham.

He could have said, ‘the three tier cake with squiggly icing, or ‘the Spirograph Building,’ that would have found it too.

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You can’t judge a book by looking at the cover and neither can you judge a library from the outside.  Judge the inside for yourself–

Tiered circular balconies
illuminated escalarors
Central suspended escalators
Looking out at traditional cityscape
From a circular mezzanine

And at the very top, the golden knob illuminates the whole — the hole in the bibliographic doughnut.

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Next to this enormous roof-light is the Shakespeare Memorial Library, remember we are near to the birthplace of the bard.  This has travelled through time and space and been given new life on the roof of this iconic building, designed by Francine Houben of Mecanoo Architecten and opened in 2013.

Shakespeare Memorial Library
Original stained glass roof of Shakespeare Memorial Library
Farsighted sons survey cityscape
There’s the bard
Birmingham’s civic pride

Nothing is perfect though: the glass lift was out of order, to the great relief of my lift-phobic friend, and the route to the top was through a warren of corridors, the ceiling of which I could easily touch — two meters perhaps.

‘Why so low?’ asked friend (her son is 6’8” tall).

‘Mistake!’ said I (having run out of head-room in our barn conversion), ‘Still, at least there are no beams!’

 

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