The Write Stuff

Well, what with The Bard's birthday and World Book Night #2, it's been one belletristic week. Also on the subject of writing, it's been National Stationery Day... no, honestly. Keen to stress the tactile, visual or creative aspects of old-time communication in the age of email, National Stationery Day arrives alongside a 30% hike in postal prices that should ensure the letter's luxury status, and maybe seal its fate.

448th

If only the English Renaissance diet had been a little better Shakespeare would've celebrated his 448th birthday this week. Here's an illustration of Anne Hathaway's cottage from an old biscuit tin lid. The artwork is uncredited but the style (especially on the sides) puts me in mind of Edward Pond, whose illustration was an integral feature of Thameslink's old rolling stock.

,',','

Rats! I think I've got a dose of the national pastime, obsessing over the weather. It could have its own clickable category here on the right but it just wouldn't be fair to the rest.

• Façades & Faces, Osbert Lancaster, John Murray 1950

The short answer to Milly's recent question is yes... there's fewer walls to bounce off. I'd love to post some more pics of our home online, but the tiny stone yurt still needs so much attention. Here's an exterior view from 1935; a well-cropped shot of the interior; another rundhaus in Aalen, Germany; and The Round Building in Derbyshire (ostensibly a factory), designed by Michael Hopkins for David Mellor in 1990.

The latter's circularity isn't entirely void of symbolic content; it's interesting to note that, eschewing the prevalent C20 trend for Fordism, Mellor encouraged his metal workers to "rotate from task to task, increasing job satisfaction through a sense of involvement in the project as a whole".[1]

Happy Easter

Coming up short on seasonal post inspiration, I thought I'd snap some charity shop pots around a tenuous Easter theme. The eggs and birds are obvious but, just in case you're wondering, the fish is for Good Friday and that there's an Easter Bonnet... well, I did mention it was tenuous.

• Studio pottery bird jug, 1953, mark unclear, found here
• Studio pottery bird vase, unmarked, found here
• Guldkroken white bust vase, found here
• Studio pottery egg vase, mark unclear, found here
• Amateur (but characterful) fish dish, unmarked, also found here

Ship-Shape Shed

When we got here this shed was a huge rotting rhombus of wood the colour of gravy. After so much attention (a few new panels, some cross-braces and a lick of paint), I'm hoping it'll last a couple more years. Now it really needs a length of gutter and a water-butt to counter the coming drought.

Listen, I realise my life's completely dull but what should I do, make stuff up? Next week: pure lies.

Nice to see the BBC use Faber & Faber's preferred font, Albertus, throughout the otherwise unremarkable Arena documentary The Dreams of William Golding. "Unprecedented access to the unpublished diaries" did little to dull the image of Golding teaching while writing bombastic boys books destined only to be taught. Yet between those well-known works, sodden with allegory, there's a peculiar, less noisy novelist. I'm unsure what led me to some of the in-between works, Free Fall (1959) for instance, the truly odd Darkness Visible (1979), or the late literary romp The Paper Men (1984), but they're all still there on the shelf; a watermark of sorts. Sometimes I half expect to find Golding's imagined town, Stillborn, out there on Google Maps.

I love this photo by my friend, Virginie Vaulot, especially as I know these are her daughter's* favourite trousers. After holding out until spring to re-post, I figure we're nearly there now; this week saw the vernal equinox... the official end of winter! Sometimes Virginie lets rip with a piece of writing to accompany Hips Like Boys, her online photo-journal, and it's almost as excellent as hearing her speak.

* I say daughter, more like long-term collaborator.

Culpable Earth

We didn't make it to the opening night of an old friend's exhibition, for a pregnant woman it seemed far too far for a couple of hours of standing and shmoozing. Hopefully we made up for it by taking the round trip to Colchester a couple of weeks later. Standing over the final plinth of Steven Claydon's Culpable Earth (lathed wooden cylinders resembling tins, a modular Euclidean cube in red on a recessed back-lit resin bed) another visitor struck-up conversation.

Like most awkward people, I tend to deflect suspected small-talk with a series of stock responses (you know the drill, every statement a light conclusion, never a leading question. Polite and trite in equal measure), and yet this energetic septuagenarian engendered something else entirely. Emboldened and enlivened by the work, we all spoke for a time about the stranglehold of Catholic symbolism; object/artefact/relic; transubstantiation and the appearance of matter; the pure becoming of life; the imperceptible end of a bell's open note; and his expansive hunch that some moments can never be truly lost in time but continue to unfold everywhere and always at once.

On the train back to Liverpool Street we laughed at the way the stranger had become and integral part of the show... or at least our experience of it. It's a pity he won't be waiting there for everyone, an uplifting and interpretive tool for an artist who's often awkward and always engaging. Sure, Essex isn't the most glamourous destination but with an ancillary gallery pairing Constable's cloud studies with Carl Andre's infamous Equivalent VIII, there's certainly a stack of reasons for visiting Firstsite this season.

Steven Claydon: Culpable Earth, 4 February - 7 May 2012

Firstsite, Lewis Gardens, High Street, Colchester CO1 1JH

• from Steven Claydon's Culpable Earth, 2012 [Andy Keate]
• Firstsite, Colchester, Rafael Viñoly Architects, 2012 [Richard Bryant]
• John Constable, Rainstorm over the Sea, c.1824-1828
• Carl Andre, Equivalent VIII, 1978, Firebricks

Yee-Haw!

Congratulations to our dear friend, Liz, on 5 cancer-free years. Our thoughts go to those with less happy news.

• Leonard Rosoman (1913-2012), Figure in Garden with Sunflowers, 1956

Black Book

When I heard it was the centenary of Durrell's birth, I didn't think of the dense soaps and dreary travelogues of his later writing but of this dark little kernel, The Black Book. To re-read it in adulthood may make its livid prose fall limp, though as a teenager I'm not sure what thrilled me more; to recogise familiar places (in south London) or to have them peopled by such unfamiliar characters. Once championed by Henry Miller and T.S. Eliot, you can pick it up these days for a penny.

• Faber's 1987 paperback. Jacket: Pentagram. Illustration: David Gentleman.

I hadn't realised The Comedy Theatre had changed its name, last time I was there was probably 10 years back, watching an old friend Jonathan McGuinness in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Brilliant.

Now it's called The Harold Pinter Theatre and, post production, they flog their props on eBay. This big rug was an even bigger bargain and recently appeared beneath Thandie Newton, you know.

Death & the Maiden received favourable reviews but no special mention for the carpet. Judging by the cat's expression, she's not too sure... suddenly everyone's a critic.

Brrr!

A glutton for punishment, I've been reading seasonally themed books of late. First up was Veleda Vida's Let the Northern Lights Remember Your Name (there must be some glyph I could insert here to imply indifference, a typographic shrug of the shoulders), followed by To Siberia by Per Petterson.


As I read both my mind wandered to a third chilly tome, 12 Days on the Norwegian Coastal Steamer, an old travelogue I picked up from Charing Cross Road. Reidar Johan Berle's illustrations are just-the-ticket!

• 12 Days on the Norwegian Coastal Steamer, Erling Welle-Strand, 1961

Making Eyes

There's quite a large series of these studies from Francis Picabia's mid-career and they're all equally astonishing. If you care to, you can see more here, here, here, here, or even here... though my personal favourite can be found here.

Hope you have your own ecstatic embrace this Valentine's Day.

• Francis Picabia, The Kiss, 1923

Quite White

The UK will be looking quite white to orbiting satellites this morning but you'll find no photos here, I'm staying indoors with the cat. You can have this very pretty picture by Vera Spencer instead. In fact, if you've got a spare £2,850 you could buy the original.

• Vera Spencer, View Through a Window, watercolour on paper, c1940

• Ben Gazzara, 1930-2012

Don't Book Now

There are certain forums where joining the throng is a positive exhilaration and, though experiencing art doesn't number among them, I'll occasionally be tempted by a blockbuster exhibition (Hockney at the RA, say, or Freud's portraits at The National). Ultimately the 'Book now' tag on the poster sounds the final death knell and I'll see a handful of smaller shows instead. A pity then that a recent trip into town didn't quite allow for a quick flit east to take in Renee So's show. Maybe next time.

• Captain, 2010, wool, acrylic, oak
• Bellarmine IX, 2012, ceramic

Renee So, 18 Jan-25 Feb, 2012
Kate Macgarry, 27 Old Nichol Street
London E2 7HR

• Mike Kelley, 1954-2012

Backstamps

 

When I was young the mug making game was pretty much nailed down by KilnKraft, they'd brand the base of the piece in relief and the artwork would incorporate a separate credit elsewhere (usually near the handle on the far side of a right-handed drinker). Maybe that's why we weren't so bothered about having a backstamp of our own, despite everyone's protestations.
 

 

Now we're changing suppliers it seems a good time to capitulate, we've spent all week sketching different designs until forced to surrender, letting the mind go blank and willing the right idea to announce itself sometime soon. It's uncanny how many times you want to use the Dover Street Market or Ordning & Reda logos without thinking. In the meantime, we'll probably go for some pedestrian button motif.

 

I still couldn't help doing a little research though, up-ending everything I laid hands on. My favourite things were these scrappy little drawings in a pocket-sized antiques guide. Sketched like occultish glyphs by Stanley Fisher, they have the all the scratchy symbolism of silvery tattoos from the bodies of sailors and convicts in early photography.

• English Pottery & Porcelain Marks, W. Foulsham & Co. Ltd, 1970