Autumn's Urban Wildlife

Autumn Song

Know'st thou not at the fall of the leaf

How the heart feels a languid grief

Laid on it for a covering,

And how sleep feels a goodly thing

In Autumn at the fall of the leaf ?

And how the swift beat of the brain

Falters because it is in vain,

In Autumn at the fall of the leaf

Know'st thou not? and how the chief

Of joys seems-not to suffer pain

Know'st thou not at the fall of the leaf

How the soul feels like a dried sheaf

Bound up at length for harvesting,

And how death feels a comely thing

In Autumn at the fall of the leaf?

Dante Gabriel Rosetti

And so Autumn comes calling. The days grow shorter, and a little colder, and as I spend time gazing out of the windows I find that we're being visited by a variety of creatures looking for either food or warmth. It was nice to observe this Jersey Tiger moth (above), at close quarters through my mottled bathroom window without disturbing it.

We've also been recieving visits from this foraging fox. It's so cautious and moves so quickly but is a beautiful specimen. I hope to catch him/her again on a future visit.

Perhaps not so beautiful was this monster (below), lurking in my bath and unable to scale the steep sides to escape. It was huge, and appeared to be missing a leg, but I managed to scoop him up and wrestle him out of the window so he could continue on his way.

I was really surprised, but happy to see this frog during a recent spot of rain. Initially, from a distance I thought it was just another fallen leaf, but then saw it hop, so dashed for the camera.

It appeared to love the wet conditions before darting out of sight under the garden shed.

Autumn

The leaves are falling, falling as if from far up, 

as if orchards were dying high in space. 
Each leaf falls as it were motioning "no".

And toight the heavy earth is falling
away from all other stars in the loneliness.

We're all falling. This hand here is falling.
And look at the other one. It's in them all.

And yet there is Someone whose hands
infinitely calm, holding up all this falling.

Rainer Marie Rilke

Ai Wei Wei - Cubes And Trees

I made the journey back up to Cambridge this week to pay a visit to Cambridge Contemporary Art, and also to visit Downing College's Heong Gallery to see their second exhibition - Ai Wei Wei: Cubes And Trees. 

The grounds of the college are so beautiful, the students are so lucky to have such an inspiring campus on which to pursue their studies.

I wasn't familiar with Ai Wei Wei's Cubes, and I must admit that although the premise of a group of cubes didn't seem particularly enticing - I had solely gone to this exhibition for the Trees sculptures - these 1 metre square cubes which are enriched by the materials they are made from, really enhanced my viewing experience. They were fantastic. The four cubes are made from crystal, ebony, Pu'er tea and Huali wood. The Crystal Cube was amazing, it gave some fantastic optical effects as it reflected and refracted the light.

This Huali wood Treasure Box had a wonderful marquetry surface and was, intriguingly, like a bee's hive with various hexagonal openings cut into its surfaces to reveal some complex inner constructions.

This  Cube in Ebony was a wonderful exercise in surface pattern. So seductively textural and mysterious with its richly, dark carved surface.

And lastly this Ton of Tea cube (above), did what it said on the tin, and was literally a ton of tea. It too was also full of alluring, fibrous surface textures and the faint aroma of the Pu'er tea plant. The Cubes viewed, it was then time to head outside into the grounds of the college to view the Trees.

I really do enjoy Wei Wei's trees, and had previously encountered them in London at the RA (here). This particular 'copse' at Downing consists of seven trees planted outside the Downing College chapel. They are so clumsy, lumpen and lifeless, but have an ungainly grace of their own, especially when compared to an abundance of the real things in this particular setting. 

I love the rusted rods, nuts and bolts which hold them together and also the beautiful gnarled textures of their constituent parts - some of which are hundreds of years old.

The artist says of the trees:-

'We assembled them together to have all the details of a normal tree. At the same time, you're not comfortable, there's a strangeness there, an unfamiliar-ness. It's just like trying to imagine what the tree was like'.

The following is a poem by Ai Wei Wei's father - Ai Qing who was a poet.

Trees

One tree, another tree,

Each standing alone and erect.

The wind and air

Tell their distance apart.

But beneath the cover of earth

Their roots reach out

And at depths that cannot be seen

The roots of the trees inertwine.

Ai Qing, 1940

As I made my way out of the city centre back to London I smiled as I saw this lovely, mid-century cubistic, stone-work tree installed on the side of a building.

Unfortunately the exhibition closes tomorrow, but to see a short time-lapse video of Ai Wei Wei's Trees being installed at Downing College click on the video below.

Georgia O'Keeffe

"I found I could say things with colour and shapes that I couldn't say any other way... things I had no words for" Georgia O'Keeffe

I really enjoyed my visit to Georgia O'Keeffe at Tate Modern. I love her aesthetic and found the paintings really inspiring. Below are a selection of her works from the retrospective that I particularly enjoyed. O'Keeffe (1887-1986), seems to have a grudging respect from some art critics. Many find her work problematic as they regard it to be too graphic in style, her technique to be insufficiently painterly, the imagery, (particularly the flower paintings), trite, and lacking in seriousness, and others appear to think that she owes her status in the art world solely to her relationship with husband, photographer Alfred Stieglitz.

The Specials series of charcoal drawings above, are early works in which she started to find her own artistic voice, and were the first of her works to be publicly exhibited in Stieglitz's 291 gallery. The following series of works were from Room 2 of the exhibition which I perhaps enjoyed most in the exhibition. They are in part inspired by the work and ideas of Kandinsky and explore the links between music and art. I like that she blurred the boundaries between figuration and abstraction in these pieces and created works which are both contemplative and quite spiritual in nature.

The painting below - New York Night 1928-1929, was my favourite in room 4 of the exhibition dealing with her New York cityscapes. O'Keeffe and Stieglitz lived on the thirtieth floor of the Shelton Hotel building which gave them access to some wonderful vistas of New York and the East River. The paintings in this room are complemented beautifully by photographic studies of the city taken from their apartment by Stieglitz.

The two paintings above are works from a series in which O'Keeffe spent time at Lake George, upstate New York, Maine and Canada, again using landscape as subject matter and abstracting it. I really admire the sense of movement and drama contained within the forms in these paintings, and the colours work so well together.

I also really admire O'Keeffe's large flower paintings in which she crops and enlarges sections of the flower and makes these the focus for the viewer. They have recieved a variety of interpretations from feminists, and psychologists and of course many comparisons to genitalia - a resemblance which was refuted by O'Keefe. This exhibition also seems at pains to refute the accusations of sexualisation levelled at the flower paintings. I like the delicate pastel coloured harmonies in White Iris (1930), above and feel her painting style complements the smooth, waxy surface textures of the blooms.

These works from her move south west to New Mexico again divide critics who cite them as kitsch and repetitive, (charges which could equally be leveled at the work of countless other artists). O'Keeffe regarded this area as her spiritual home, and thought that the dry desert landscapes encapsulated the essence of the 'real' America. Much of the work from this period does seem dreamlike, and prompted comparisons with Surrealism. O'Keeffe embraced the Native American and Spanish colonial cultures which were prevalent in this area and produced works which I feel are of a reflective nature depicting the Penitente  crosses which are found throughout the landscape, and doll-like kachina figures which represent Native American spirit beings.

Even though O'Keeffe's brushwork and painting style leaves many critics cold, I really like the way that she handles colour. Her palette ranges from the fiery, intense colours to lovely pastel hues, used to shape areas of light and dark to give form and create harmonious works. O'Keeffe found her style very early on in her career and obviously didn't really alter this from the start to the very last works, which again, is something most other artists are guilty of. O'Keeffe was though, an innovator in the way that she saw and depicted subjects in her paintings. She had an expert eye for cropping and composition, presenting subjects in ways that they had never been seen before in the history of art. This could possibly have been due to her close working association with husband/photographer Stieglitz, and friend Paul Strand. Whether one likes O'Keeffe's vast body of work or not, they are without doubt established icons of American painting, and images that are as strong as those of any of her contemporaries. This is a really enjoyable retrospective from a giant of 20th century American art and well worth a visit before it closes at the end of the month.

Georgia O'Keeffe
until 30th October 2016
Tate Modern
Bankside
London
www.tate.org.uk