On a lovely, sunny, crisp winter day I paid another visit to Kettle's Yard, the former home and art collection of Jim and Helen Ede in Cambridge. This place has an almost mystical air, where every nook and cranny is filled with treasure of the artistic or natural variety. Jim was a curator with the Tate Gallery and befriended many of the artists, and was therefore able to create this enviable collection of art and sculpture. Artists collected by the Ede's include Ben Nicholson, Alfred Wallis, Joan Miro, Constantin Brancusi, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and some beautiful drawings by David Jones.
It must have been a wonderful refuge and home for the Ede's when they lived there. It is so tranquil and inspiring being surrounded by a wonderful art collection, some lovely pieces of furniture and glassware, plants and stones, as well as a substantial library.
I like the way the artwork and objects are curated and displayed in the house in a comfortable, seemingly haphazard manner. Viewers are able to interact with them with ease in a manner that is not too precious like some other galleries and museums.
This is a great place to be inspired if you are an artist/sculptor, architect or interior designer.
Kettle's Yard
Castle Street,
Cambridge,
www.kettlesyard.co.uk
How good are these? Fantastic sculptural textiles based on butterflies and moths by Yumi Okita. Can't find much information on the maker but love these fabric interpretations of winged things. Really good attention to detail and mixture of textile techniques.
Managed to catch this absolutely wonderful display of a selection of Schiele's masterful figurative drawings before it closes at the end of this week.
The show comprises his drawings from 1910 to 1918 - the last year of his life. They are beautiful, almost other worldly, in that the figures are intentionally elongated, emaciated and a statement of intent of Schiele's radical ideas in moving away from the work of the other artists of the Vienna Succession and forging his own style.
I thought the textures and the mark-making in the drawings were beautiful and served to highlight the other-worldly appearance of the figures. I also liked the restricted palette of green and red gouache paint to highlight the features of the figures such as the elbows, buttocks, facial features etc. which also served to emphasise the thinness and alien-like qualities of his models.
Some of the drawings are uncompromisingly explicit and depict his perverse take on the figure, and attempts to advance figurative art of the time. Unfortunately Austrian society of the time were not prepared to go along with Schiele's vision and he was jailed for a time as his work was deemed pornographic. In this respect I certainly found the drawing below of his wife pretty explicit and uncompromising. It brought to mind the similarly explicit Jeff Koons' pictures with his then wife La Cicciolina. Though it is a shocking image I find it to be beautiful at the same time because of the way in which it executed, and certainly no more explicit than what can be found on the internet in this day and age.
Schiele's drawings also reminded me of much of recent fashion illustration and the recent controversies about the use of both pre-pubescent and bulimic models in the fashion industry. I was really inspired by this show, Schiele's draughtsmanship is fantastic, and I feel the need to look at and reassess my own drawings through fresh eyes. Be quick if you want to catch this show as it closes next Sunday.
Egon Schiele The Radical Nude
until 18th January
The Courtauld Gallery
Somerset House
Strand
London
Also on show at Somerset House are some great photographs of the ever gorgeous Debbie Harry aka Blondie, taken by her long term partner and band-mate Chris Stein. These are a great evocation of the late 1970s early '80s period in music and fashion and remind me of seeing Blondie on Top of the Pops for the first time back in the day as a group fronted by the drop-dead gorgeous Ms Harry. This show has it all, the hair, the dresses and those cheekbones.
Chris Stein/Negative:
Me, Blondie, And The Advent Of Punk
until 25th January
East Wing Galleries
Somerset House
An occasional series in which I look at the work of other artists who have used butterflies for their creative inspiration. First up is Christine Caldwell who like Walead Beshty in my previous post creates art using cyanotypes, and also manipulates photographic negatives
to good effect to produce these stunning images that take their inspiration from the natural world. See more of her work here.
Hadn't been to the Barbican for a while, so I made the trip to see this intriguing installation by artist Walead Beshty, or to give it its proper title - A Partial Disassembling of an Invention Without a Future: Helter-Skelter and Random Notes in Which the Pulleys and Cogwheels Are Lying Around at Random All over the Workbench. Phew! A bit of a mouthful, but a really engaging show of no less than 12,000 cyanotype prints taken of objects and artistic detritus lying around his studios in LA and London from 2013 to 2014.
They are created on porous surfaces - anything from newspapers to cigarette packaging, to paper plates and blocks of wood, all displayed chronologically along the curved wall space of The Curve gallery.
There is so much to catch the eye it is almost overwhelming, but I enjoyed scrutinising the individual prints and loved the ethereal, ghostly outlines and shapes of the objects created by the cyanotype print process.
Seen as a whole the work is pretty impressive and overwhelming in its impact.
I loved the various tones and hues of blue. It was like a large indigo denim patchwork, and very reminiscent of the Japanese indigo/denim Boro patchworks I wrote about earlier last year.
