Why I deleted most of my pictures on DeviantArt

I've just gone through my DeviantArt gallery...and deleted almost all of the images in it.

Because, frankly, they just weren't that good.

It's not that I dislike them all, or that I wasn't happy with them after I'd done them; I just don't think the rest of the planet needs, or wants, to see them.

This was sparked by watching the film Sound City, which is very good (available on iTunes) and well worth watching. During the film Trent Reznor says;

"Now that everyone is empowered with these tools to create stuff, has there been a lot more great shit coming out? Not really. You still have to have something to do with those tools. You should really try to have something to say."
(I found the quote typed out here)

It's hard to argue with this. For years we've been provided with more and better tools to use the computer to produce art, much of it either very reasonably priced if not actually free. Video, graphics or music: anyone can now put their hands on tools which offer opportunities not even imaginable not so long ago. Digital cameras are really cheap with no costs in film and processing, and loads of people are now carrying 'phones' which offer great photography and video capabilities. There has never been a better time to use digital technology to be creative. But access to tools doesn't equate with ability, just because anybody can make and share their art and music doesn't mean that it's worth sharing. Note that I said 'worth sharing', art and music are always worth making because the process of being creative is just good for a human being. Years ago I said to somebody I knew that I was a fairly dire 3 chord guitarist to which he replied "there's nothing wrong with that...so long as you know that".  On and off I've strummed for fun, but I've never thought my playing was something anybody else might want to hear.

Desktop publishing has allowed everybody to produce their own flyers and posters without the cost and time involved in getting a designer to put them together and a printer to produce them: but look at any notice board and while you'll see loads of adverts for clubs, societies, small businesses and events most of them are actually not that nice to look at. They do the job, but they don't do it elegantly. Think I'm being judgemental and snotty? Okay, take a magazine and find a print advert in it you like. Then go and look at the notice board in your university, or village hall or whatever and see how many of the flyers and posters look as good as that advert from the magazine. OK, so if you wanted to know when the flower arranging club meet or you're looking for a band to see this evening all those amateur flyers are going to tell you that, but they're not of the same standard as the professional ones. Because the professional ones have been put together by people who spent a lot of time learning what looks good and mastering the tools to achieve that. Youtube has hundreds of hours of video uploaded to it every minute: thousands of amateur filmmakers (though the term is now accepted to be 'Youtubers') producing content on a whole range of subjects which may be of interest. But once you get past the content how many of them have weird lighting, or poor framing, or piles of undone ironing in the background? When did you last see a professional video, or one done by a film school graduate with pairs of knickers drying on the radiator in the background without them needing to be there? You don't because serious filmmakers know how they want their film to look, have the skills to understand how to achieve that, and put in the time and effort to make it happen.

Which brings me, via my inabilities as a guitarist to why I deleted most of my DA content. See, the reason I'm still after all this time a dire 3 chord guitarist is simply because I don't apply myself to the guitar, I don't study the theory and above all I don't practice seriously. If I did those things then I'd improve. I listen to good players and don't want to be that good, though a bit of me wishes I was better. Music is something I don't really want to be better at enough. Graphics on the other hand I love, I look at the work of professionals and wish I could work to that standard. I wish I could live up to Trent Reznor's idea of having something to say. So I took a long hard look at my stuff on DA and realised that most of it was either dull, or derivative, or badly conceived so I took it down. It's still on my hard drive and many of them represent a lot of work and learning new techniques, but none of it really showed any skill, or vision, or had anything to say.

Maybe it's time for us all to remember that being able to produce stuff isn't the goal: having something to say is

Free Nuke for fun

Greetings to all my new friends at GCHQ and at Fort Meade who had their filters tripped by the post title - sorry for taking your time folks, it's just a way to create a title for this post. But hey, stay and enjoy anyway!

A few weeks ago I posted on the need for free quality visual creative software if we want to produce the next generation of people who'll enrich our visual world. Well this week comes the announcement from The Foundry of a free version of NUKE for people who just want to mess around at home and have fun, and who want to learn the software. This is exactly what we need to see from more companies, and all credit to The Foundry for doing it. It's going to give anybody who wants to the chance to muck around with it with no expense. Everybody wins with deals like this. Of course there are limitations to try and reduce the chance of it being misused by people who really ought to be paying for it, which again is good for everybody because companies need their commercial revenue stream.

If I have one tiny wee gripe about the conditions it's this one, though I can see why they've done it

"The commercial NUKE range cannot load files created with NUKE Non-commercial. The Non-commercial NUKE range can, however, load scripts and gizmos created with the commercial version"

Clearly this is to stop companies getting people to do work at home with the free version which they then import into the commercial one, and I can honesty see why they went with this, but it also means that if kids have access to NUKE at school under an educational licence they can't then download the free one to use at home and move files into and out of school...which rather goes against my view that we need to have kids doing as much stuff both at home and at school as possible: but again I can see why they did this. Perhaps a future upgrade might allow the product sold to schools under the educational licence to open files from free NUKE?

But, all round this is totally to be applauded, well done The Foundry and let's hope we see lots of other commercial creative software companies following their lead

Michael Borremans - thank you artstack

I've just signed up for Artstack, as though I didn't already have enough blogs and sites to read every day. But I really like it as it shows me lots of art that I didn't necessarily know about and much of which I really like.

Like Belgian artist Michael Borremans, who I discovered this week.

(Image linked in from Salomea's Room)

He's a contemporary artist, alive and working today, though his paintings are clearly in the Old Master style and very 'painterly' (according to Wikipedia he cites Valazquesz as an important influcence) ... though they're also very surreal, sometimes to the extreme.  You work your way down a figure to discover that they've got no legs and are floating just above a table top for example.  Or people are shown from the back but with their clothes on back to front.  I'm not sure I've got much to actually say about him, apart from the fact that a) I'd love to own one of his pictures and/or b) I'd love to be able to paint like that!

But I really do recommend that you go and spend some time looking at his work online - worth checking out this link on Salomea's Room for more samples of his painting, or just google for him

Modern house in traditional setting - why not here

Checking out Dezeen (one of my favourite sites) the other day I saw this item on a startling modern new house built in Norway - Villa Wot is a Brick Cuboid..

What impressed me, along with how much I was taken by the house itself, was the fact that it's not like the other ones in the street, in fact it says in the article "The plot in the Tåsen neighbourhood to the north of the city centre is surrounded by traditional timber-clad houses from the 1930s" which it clearly is in the photos. Villa Wot is just not like it's neigbours, and why the hell should it be? I know I've blogged about the aspic nature of the UK's attitude to building design before but I want to revisit it in the context of this because it's just not the sort of thing which happens here. Here it's all about homes fitting in, and even if the planners would let you build something very different somehow people opt for not doing so.

It's all so exemplified by the Prince of Wales famous comment about one of the proposed extensions to the National Gallery being a "monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend", which for some reason seems to have contributed to the proposed design being scrapped Now I'm not denying that HRH had, and continues to have, the same right to comment as any other citizen; unlike some people I don't think his role in our society should mean he can't express an opinion on whatever he likes. I don't agree with him, heck I don't agree with the idea of a Prince of Wales, but I reckon he shouldn't have been slated for having said it. What he said seems to have struck a chord deep in the society of the UK which believes that somehow modern is something which has it's place...and that place isn't where anybody seems to be! Buildings have to fit in with other buildings in a supposed harmonious whole.  Which brings me to, and I give myself the same rights as HRH here, to his own driven development of Poundbury outside Dorchester. Dear God what a place, it's one of the most soul devoid places I've ever seen. It's like being in 'The Prisoner' only somewhere less imaginative. There's nothing wrong with any of the individual buildings (though the huge building visible from the Dorchester bypass always seems to me like something Albert Speer might have designed if he'd lived in rural Britain) but it's all just so clearly a one-hit pastiche of the sort of towns which develop over years and which have far more variety of building types than HRH possibly thinks they do. Historically we didn't do this, houses were built in whatever style the builders were comfortable doing: now we worry about them fitting in rather than being visually interesting and a pleasure to live in. When they had the huge fire at Hampton Court Palace they spend lots of time and money lovingly recreating it the way it was before: Christopher Wren would have pulled it down and built something new. 

We're busy building houses in the UK, though not as many as we need, and they're very much out of the HRH school of thought. They're very much like every other house built for years. Is the house-buying public really so locked into this view, and they are pretty much like the pictures of houses kids learn to draw at nursery, that they wouldn't buy something different? The modernist estates which grew up after the war weren't bad in themselves, the flats were big and the buildings were striking in their own way. What let them down was that they were built to a price which sometimes wasn't high, and then run by councils who both penny-pinched and didn't really care about them. If they'd had the money spent on them, and on-site staff who cared, and they had mixed communities, then they might well have worked. I suspect none of this helped modernism in the UK, but I'm sure loads of young aspiring professionals would be more than happy to consider modernist housing if only people built it.

Which brings me back to Villa Wot, which sits among 1930s homes and looks nothing like them: and you know what? It doesn't matter. Just because every other house in a street looks the same there isn't the slightest reason that one can't put something very different in an empty space should one appear. It doesn't matter that it's a similar house, it just has to be a good house: a house which would make a good home. 

Hair and Makeup - sculpture and 3d painting

My son was chatting online to one of his friends the other day, who was getting ready for a party. He was bemused by the fact that she was going to allow an hour to do her hair and makeup..with the comment that "I can get ready in 10 minutes....5 if I'm out of bed when I start".  So I explained to him that what he was seeing was in fact art of the highest level, which is something that I suspect a lot of people don't think about.

Makeup; something women put on their faces, right? Well now that depends. On one level it can be a bit of lipstick or eye shadow or blusher...but at the other end it's multiple layers of toning shades all with varying levels of translucency, applied with a variety of brushes and pencils. If somebody does it with paint on paper then everybody acknowledges it as an art form, but somehow not if somebody is doing it on a 3d surface, in a mirror. How bizarre is that?  What's more, women have to pull this trick off with a colour palate limited by what they happen to be wearing.

Hair: guys if you think making this look good in anything beyond a ponytail is easy then find a long-suffering female acquaintance and try it on them. You just have to take several thousand very fine fibres, which may or may not be slippery, and turn them into something stylish and pretty to look at! Again if this wasn't something women did on themselves to make themselves look good then it would be acknowledged immediately as an art form.

So, every day millions of women and girls, some of them in their mid-teens, pull off amazing feats of artistic skill and dexterity....

Appreciate it for what it is!

The PRB - my long term and variable relationship

I've had a long-term, and very fluctuating relationship with the Pre-Raphaelites; we've been together on and off since the 70s. In my late teens I was very taken with them, I loved the colours and the scenes in a way which one might normally associate with a particular kind of artisticly over-wrought teenage girl, the sort with long hair, long dresses and with an excessive enthusiasm for black, crimson and purple. Then I went off them for a fair while because I found them a bit too over-done, too romantic, a bit too, well, teenage girl with long hair, long dresses and an over-enthusiasm for crimson, black and purple. In the last few years I've re-engaged with and found that I'm more positive again; though not uncritically. I'm with whoever it was who said that Millet's Ophelia managed to make dying beautiful, though I have trouble these days with things like A Converted British Family Sheltering a Christian Missionary from the Persecution of the Druids - a painting which frankly I want to spend less time looking at than I would have to saying the title.

How Millet could have produced Ophelia and then gone on to paint Bubbles is beyond me, she's mesmerically beautiful and tragic (with of course the whole story of Lizzie Siddel catching cold in the bath)...Bubbles is just an exercise in mawkish sentimentality. Blech. Let's be honest, if you had to be dead wouldn't you, just a bit, want to look like Ophelia? Would you, really, want your kids to look like Bubbles?  Eve of St Agnes, liking that one.

Holman Hunt is a bit too keen on shoving Christanity down the viewer's throats, though there is something of the gothic I think in The Scapegoat and you do get all the bit about having to go abroad to marry his wife's late sister which gives him a bit of romantic shine. Can't stand The Light of the World, never could. sorry.

Which of course leaves the most Byronic of the Boys in the Band..the rockstar of the PRB, Rosetti. A painter who, for good or ill, has linked every girl with long wavy hair with the word 'pre-raphaelite' (including at times when younger, my wife). At his best, he's amazing as in his drawings of Lizzie and his drawn self portrait, and I've always had a soft spot for Ecce Ancilla Domini! though I'm not sure I can put my finger on why. Then you get all those over-lush portraits of women which are verging on pinups...well okay they are pinups. Got to admit it some of them are cute though a lot of them are clearly the work of a man who knows there's a market for pictures of cute women especially if you dress them up in some kind of classical label.

Do I think they deserve their place on chocolate boxes, table mats and 'artistic' girls bedroom walls? Yep, definitely, and I think that both Millet and Rosetti who both in later life worked out that painting stuff people will buy is a good thing :-)

The Future of Design Requires Free thinking and 'Free' Software

Or at least, very cheap software.

The creators of the visual world of tomorrow are in schools now. If we want an amazing visual world tomorrow then we've got to nurture them today, we've got to build their confidence and let them practice. We've also got to show all the kids that this is for them; I don't mean that they should all do it, or even want to do it, but we've got to show them that if they want to then they can.

The problem is that the digital tools for this are expensive. In some cases very expensive. I'm not going to name names here but some software, while still sold much more cheaply into schools than it is into industry is still very expensive in the constrained budgets for education. If we want top flight and excited visual creatives in the future we've got to give them time to play with the tools now (the lack of time to play in the crowded modern curriculum with the multitude of targets and grading is another issue). I'll will name-names and praise Autodesk for biting the bullet and giving schools and their students free access to their stuff saying "The challenges of today will be solved by the designers of tomorrow. That's why Autodesk gives students, educators and educational institutions free* access to professional design software, creativity apps and real-world projects. Autodesk Education helps to inspire and prepare the next generation to imagine, design and create a better world." - okay so the folks at Autodesk have twigged it, you want designers tomorrow you've got to let them play with the toys today.

Sure, there are brilliant free tools out there like GIMP and Blender, but you come up against the issue that most people have only heard the name of one piece of graphics software and will use it generically, like we do 'hoover' for a vacuum cleaner, and believe that you have to use that. And frankly much as I love GIMP if you want to let kids play with the pro tools for graphics and web design now there is one game in town...but that's an expensive game to play for a school. Then there are all the programs used by VFX companies which lots of kids in schools would love to use - now under the Autodesk package they could have Maya or 3Ds  but there are others which would be great to let kids use, even just to play on in extra-curricular clubs, but which are expensive. The core business of these companies is selling into the graphics industry, wouldn't it be an investment in our visual future, and also their future businesses, to either let schools and their students have free use of it, or price it at a peppercorn level?

In ten years I want to be blogging on Visupulse about exciting stuff being produced - I reckon that will be so much more exciting if all the kids in all the schools could play with all the toys

Where I look at online art

There's a whole lot of art out there in t'internet. It's never been easier as an artist to get your work out to a larger audience; not only is it easy to get your work online but there is so much sharing and re-sharing who knows how it will end up. It's also very easy for the lover of visual things to see stuff to excite and inspire..so today's post is a roundup of some of my favourites

Personally, I'm a big fan of Pinterest for finding new art to look at; lots of art of different kinds appear in front of me and I can follow up on it or not depending on how it engages me...also it's a bit Darwinian in that it tends to be the art which is exciting, interesting or engaging which gets shared about which means that most of what I get to see is really rather good, and also because it either shows me stuff from people who have similar tastes in art who have boards I've followed, or suggestions based on what else I've picked.

The big player  in online art is Deviant Art, and there is lots and lots of good stuff there to see. But quite often I find that I'm not seeing it because there is almost too much art being added all the time! According to the entry on Wikipedia DA receives 140,000 new submissions every day; that's a hell of a lot of art! For me that's an almost unworkable amount of art! I can't look at a fraction of that number daily even if I had the time so to do; I'd get image overload. I do find lots of things on DA which I really like, and generally I make a point of following the artists so I can see more of their stuff...in fact it's essential for me to do that in order to manage my experience. Where DA really scores is the number of people who selflessly produce stock images, photoshop brushes, textures and other things for other creative people to use in exchange quite often for nothing more than an acknowledgement.

Another site where people publish their own work which I like is Behance, there is much less content than on DA and it's aimed more at graphic design than fine art- the fact that it's based on creative portfolios makes it a different sort of thing, and the standard is very high and very professional; in fact a lot of people who put their art there are professional designers. Lots of eye-catching things to see. I also like the website of the Depthcore collective and I'm a daily viewer of Creative Bloq, Dezeen and This is Colossal all of which have great art and design content added daily. Recently I've also started using Flipboard and Stumbleupon to see a range of art and design content from around the web.

That's my own list, there are loads more places out there to see art online - what are your favourites?

Klimt, forget the gold leaf, enjoy the scando-crime landscapes

I've always been unconvinced by Klimt.  For a start there's all that gold leaf..okay frankly it's mainly all that gold leaf which puts me off, along with the pyscadelic patterns. Every year I have an art calendar in the bathroom (I do a lot of my artistic thinking in the bath), where I can ponder it from the bath and I have to look at the same image for a month so I can take it in properly. I've gone for Klimt this year because that way I'll have a year to consider him properly...thus far after 22 days of looking at his portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I'm not coming round to liking it..I'm not sure it does her many favours either; paint her...but then slam so much gold leaf round her that it looks like she's staring out of it. But at least I'm giving him a go.

But a few months ago, before January so before I made my calendar choice, I found he did landscapes too and those really quite took my breath away (and not only because of the total absence of gold leaf).  I'm looking forward to whatever month this year gives me one of those.  Every year Klimt left Vienna and went off to the Attesee to paint for fun - locals called him the 'Forest Demon' apparently, which when you look at photos of him and remember that he seldom wore underwear gives one rather pause for thought I think. I'm busy waiting for a major UK gallery to have a Klimt landscape show, I'll be there in a heartbeat. He did a number of subjects, lakes, forests, flowers..okay the flowers are a bit psychadelic..maybe he'd been consuming mushrooms while painting...but nowhere near as over the top as the portrait commissions. But it was the forests which I really warmed to, and found myself thinking of ScandoCrime.

Yes in true Visupulse blog style I'm taking a huge leap from the Attersee of the 1880s to the televisual Scandavia of the 21st century here, but bear with me.  You'll see the point in a bit..or maybe you won't but it's my blog and I'll run with this.

I love scando-crime dramas, The Killing, The Bridge (not the knock off American ones), Wallander (Sorry Ken, the Swedish ones with Krister Henricksson not the UK produced ones), love them all. In fact there is going to be a blog post entirely on them soon. Assuming you've seen them you may be cottoning onto where I'm headed; think of those endless forests with nobody in them in which either somebody finds a body or is murdered..got that? Okay now take a look at this Klimt birch forest...  The colours are punchier than the gorgeous desaturated ones in scando-crime, but the sense of trees going on for ever with nobody there is the same, the feeling of being hemmed in, the glimpses of sky. It's only a matter of time before somebody trips over a corpse or gets hacked to bits. They're not 'our' forests, you don't get the feeling that they're anywhere in the UK, they're not Epping or the New Forest, they're not full of deer and birds...they're not full of anything else but trees and you, the observer (and possibly the killer and/or victim). They're not warm friendly forests in which one might take a stroll after Sunday lunch, they're the primal forests of Northern European folklore, they're the forests where red riding hood met the wolf, where you might find Rapunzel's tower, where Hansel and Gretal are kidnapped.

But they're lovely paintings, the colours on the tree trunks and the forest floor, especially where he's gone for a very pale light and muted tones. He understands trees, he's spent a lot of time looking at them and he's really engaged with them. I think he's a lot more engaged with them than he is with all the society beauties of Vienna: I think he likes the patterns more which is why the women seem stuck in the middle of them. When he's doing forests there is only the repetative patterns of the trees. Sure, he'll take your money to paint your wife but he'll spend the time (and a lot of your money) doing the patterns rather than them.

Of course there are the strange unearthly women from some the Beethoven Frieze or the works the SS detroyed, and who could have come straight out of the forests....

The 9 Most Annoying Things Every Graphic Designer Does

This was on Creative Bloq the other week...I'm not a professional graphic designer but as I like design, and I'm a very visual person, let's see how I did :-)


1. Buys anything that has a nice packaging

According to Sue, I'm guilty as charged on this one. To be fair I don't buy anything that has a nice package but I find I want to a lot of the time...and I did buy a packet of Kallo breadsticks the other week for no reason other than the fact that I loved the packet illustration - the font of the box is now on my pinboard. Back in the early 80s when we first got together Sue could never fahom how when I went shopping I bought Preto's 'basics' marmalde and corn flakes...but would then counter any financial saving by getting the tissues which came in the prettiest box: I'm still a sucker for a pretty tissue box by the way. So yeah, I'm putting my hands up for it, but then again why not have lots of things in pretty boxes to make your home a prettier place?


2. Critiques the menu design of a restaurant every single time they dine

Not guilty. We don't dine out very often so don't really see that many menus. The last place we ate out was Le Manoir and everything at Le Manoir is beyond criticism. That doesn't mean that I've not done the 'ooh, I love that font' thing (see number 3, below) when we do eat out though.


3. Downloads every beautiful font they see

Okay, I don't download them all...but I do download a fair few. I do have a tendency though that when one of the students at work wants a font downloaded and installed to find myself thinking that it looks either nice or fun..then taking a copy of it home to use in a future piece of work...which may or may not actually appear. Though I did once bring a student-picked font home and found exactly the right use for it.


4. Listens to music you've never heard of

What music have you heard of? Seriously in a lot of cases this is only because I like the music from my youth..and a lot of people I talk to are younger than that...a lot younger. I also do tend to like singer-songwriters who don't make mainstream. But I don't think I exclusively listen to music people have never heard of


5. They make your instagram photos look like trash

Nope, there are loads of people who aren't even designers who make my instagram photos look like trash! Innocent of all charges


6. Critques every advertisment they see

Innocent again. I'm very generous to the world of print advertisements...unless they've got really ropy photoshop in them, like this one, which I seriously hope is intended to not look realistic....please....


7.They will close your website if it's old school

I don't manage websites, and I'm not a web designer so not guilty...the fact that I redesigned the bat group website without bothering to ask or tell anybody on the committee because I thought it looked very old-fashioned as it was doesn't count because I was in charge of that one..


8. Gets mad if they ask you for a high-res photo and you paste it in word

Who doesn't hate it when people do that? Why does anybody do that anyway?  Really, why?  You must have the picture in the first place, why paste it into a word document and THEN send it It's not quicker, or easier!. People who do this should be lined up and shot....


9. Prefers beautifully designed front book covers

I wouldn't buy a book just for the beautifully designed cover....though the cover has made me open a fair few in Waterstones. Probably counts as innocent of the charge? 

Degas - Le Coiffure (and other women in a state of dishabille)

You know this one. 

It's big..it's a whole lot bigger than you expect it to be. It's red...yep, it's red alright. It's got a lot of hair, well okay the painting doesn't have any hair but the woman in it has. It's La Coiffure by Degas and it's in the National Gallery. Like a lot of paintings, it's more impressive in real life than it is in reproduction. The colour really pops out at you and the size is, for me, always a surprise; a sort of fine arts version of "I was expecting somebody taller", only in reverse. It's one of the ones I always make sure I see when I'm in the National Gallery, so I thought it would make a good Visupulse topic.



A woman is sitting in a chair while a woman combs her hair, given that outfit that the woman with the comb is wearing you jump to the conclusion that it's a maid but when you think it through it could easily not be, in fact the blouse with the little bow at the neck does look a bit impractical for a working outfit. So maybe it's a mother and daughter? But then again all those red curtains somehow suggest something a bit more opulent than a domestic scene - if you can afford all those velvet drapes then surely one could run to a maid to do the brushing? So are they just friends? What exactly is going on here. Obviously it's not a real scene, it's posed, Degas didn't dash into somebody's home at the right moment and shout "hold it there! just let me get my sketchbook out" and then work it up later. He's set up the composition, one assumes got a couple of women to model for it, then produced the painting. So the question is actually what do we want to interpret as going on here? And that's a whole lot more open than if he'd made the context explicit. If you compare it with the painting Haret flettes by Christian Krohg in Oslo, which shows a girl having her hair braided (it's a delightful painting by the way, worth seeing if you're in Oslo) you can see how it's a lot harder to unpick, or de-tangle one might say, the Degas. You've got to make your own story out of this one.


I ran the photo past some friends of mine with long hair and they all agreed that it was very reminiscent of what having their hair combed when they were younger was like..right down to the look of discomfort on the girl's face! Degas has got the reality right here. It's not a pleasent experience for her, that hand on her forehead seems to be either showing where it hurts or trying to take a bit of the tension off. The woman with the comb seems very relaxed an in the zone, she's clearly enjoying it or at least enjoying whatever she's day-dreaming of while she's doing the brushing. You've got to wonder who is in control here, it looks like the woman with the comb really. So it could be a mother/daughter, or it could be a madam/working girl, or it could be a relationship with BDSM overtones - there's a bit in Sarah Walter's book Affinity where the heroine is reduced to tears by her maid's brushing and the maid not only brushes harder but makes the heroine count all 100 strokes. This could easily be a caption for this painting.


There is a theory that Degas was a misogynist, he was definitely a conservative and an anti-semite, but the jury is out on his attitude to women. One of his friends said of him that "Degas enjoyed the company of women! He, who often depicted them with real cruelty, derived great pleasure from being with them, enjoyed their conversation and produced pleasing phrases for them." (quote in this rather good article); I'm not sure he disliked women per se, but I do find myself beginning to wonder if he rather fantasized about cruelty to them, or at least finding themselves in positions in which they're the victims.


Which brings me onto another recent Degas experience. I went to Cezanne and the Modern at the Asmolean a while back. In it was a Degas called 'After the Bath, Woman Drying Herself' which I just kept coming back to. It's first of all the pose, nobody dries themselves like that: I'm not an art historian and I don't know all the back story to Degas and his works, but that painting is about her bum. Get somebody to shoot that today as a photograph with a model and try to convince anybody it's about somebody drying themselves, go on, dare you. She's bending over the arm of a sofa for heaven's sake, who dries themselves over the arm of a sofa? The other thing was the skin tone, it wasn't healthy, when you stand next to this large photo and really see it there is a quite nasty tone to it, sort of green...sort of...meat gone bad...sort of...dead. Personally, I think it's creulty smut with a tasteful label to it. Then again so are a lot of the other Degas bathroom scenes; this one for example.

Though this one seems to have less of a sexual dynamic to it, she's combing her hair in a way I've seen real girls do without any sign of discomfort, and she's got a rather healthy skin tone too rather than that bruised green of the girl drying herself.


Okay, so I'm not trying to create a "50 Shades of Grey in Oil Pastels" out of Degas here, lots of his stuff is very straight art: think of all those ballerinas, or folks at the races for example, and lots of his pictures of women at their toilette (nobody says that any more, which I think is a shame) are sympathetically drawn and absolutely beautiful. But I do think that there are some of his pictures which go beyond that (and they are still great and visually lovely pictures) to a place where the woman is more victimised.


So, you make your own story out of La Coiffure, you get to decide who they are and what's going on. Is she about to get her hair put up stylishly, change the slightly frumpy frock for a ball gown and dance the night away...is she getting brushed out after such an evening...or what? I'm not sure quite what story I'm going with, every time I look at it I come up with a different one!

"The Bricks"

The first time I was aware in any sense about this thing called 'Modern Art' was in the late 70s when the media furore over Carl Andre's Equivalent VIII erupted...having done some research I can now date this to 1976 when a piece appeared in The Sunday Times newspaper called The Tate drops a costly Brick by Colin Simpson. Now we didn't take The Sunday Times, my parents were strictly Daily and Sunday Express people, but I remember clearly it being on the news and the subject of a piece on the now (thankfully) defunct current affairs program Nationwide alongside the skateboarding ducks. In this piece a variety of presenters produced various heaps of bricks and then spouted made up jargon about what they'd done..and how we were all invited to laugh along with them. Like most of Nationwide it was pretty much content light. Okay, I'm the first to admit we were, as a family, classic members of the Nationwide demographic. We didn't have 'the arts'; we didn't have classical music, we had Mantovani and James Last; we didn't have radical thoughts, we didn't have modernism. So we sat in our living room every evening watching situation comedies and programs like Horizon, getting our news from the Express, and watching Nationwide. I was a very non-alternative teenager, easy-listening rather than popular music, Top of the Pops rather than Whistle Test, Blue Peter rather than Magpie, reading not very challenging books. Actually, I did have an older sister who did the whole summer of love thing (TM, the maharishi, etc etc) who had a lot of very bohemian friends. I sometimes wonder how much pot I may have passively inhaled growing up with her and her friends around! But she died when I was 13 so she wasn't around during this part of my life. I often wonder if things might have been different if she'd been around for my teenage years, but hey. So I laughed along with the rest, didn't do art or music at school, had a shit time, failed my exams, and went out to work at 16.


Okay, so now we fast-forward a few years and my world did a shift, as it often does. I had money to buy books, and started reading a lot of (fun but not very good) science fiction, discovered Hawkwind and Rush, and met a very strange bloke a few years older called Pete who was hugely alternative. Thanks to him I read Richard Brautigan, and Jack Kerouac, and Tom Robbins, and found that The Guardian was so much better than The Express, and because he said it was worth visiting I went to the Tate Gallery for the first time. This was the old Tate Gallery, what is now Tate Britain, before all the modern art went off to Bankside. So there I am, intellectually totally unequipped for modern art, but curious. I wandered around looking at pictures I could identify now but couldn't then, and not sure what to make of it all. Then, all of a sudden, there I am looking at The Bricks. Equivalent VIII by Carl Andre - not that at the time I could have told you what it was called or who it was by - and thought 'hey, these are what all that fuss was about years ago, these are stupid'...only it wasn't. Actually it had something, I couldn't pin down what it was, but it was definitely something. Yes, it was 120 bricks, arranged in two layers, it was everything that Nationwide had said it was. Though it was more than it's substance, it had....something. If you were to ask me what it is now, I'd say it was things like balance, and a sense of physical presence, satisfying colour and texture, the way it fills the space, stuff like that. But at the time all I knew was that I liked it. It wasn't rubbish. It wasn't silly. It wasn't remotely like the piles of bricks the clowns on Nationwide had produced, it was more than that.


So I suppose, if you had to ask me to pin down my art gallery moment, that would be it. I still don't know very much about Andre, though I do like the work 144 Magnesium Square a lot (also in the Tate collection), and perhaps I ought to find out more about him.




Tate Gallery Page on Equivalent VIII

http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/andre-equivalent-viii-t01534/text-catalogue-entry

[VLOG] Mark Rothko and the Seagram Murals

Uploaded the first of what I hope will be a serious of VLogs, on one of my favourite artworks, the Seagram Murals by Mark Rothko in Tate Modern

Phil Noto

Back in the 60s my father used to have a subscription to Do It Yourself magazine; quite why is a mystery has he both loathed DIY and never used any of the ideas or information from the magazines. I clearly remember them in a pile in our dining room, and I used to leaf through them now and again they way kids will do. We also had a copy of Nicholas Monsarrat's The Tribe That Lost it's Head from the same vintage, a book which I never frankly felt remotely inclined to read but which had a somewhat intriguing title when I was young and as I got into my early teens I developed something which one might only call a crush on the woman illustrated on the cover: it was something about her very pretty nose..

This is back story, I will tie up some relevance in due course...honest.

Okay, cut to the present where, half a century later on I've got a renewed interest in comic books (which were also a passion in the Do It Yourself / Tribe That Lost it's Head years). When the new run of Black Widow started I decided to give them a go, because hey how can you NOT love Black Widow. Issue No. 1 arrived...and I was blown away by the drawing, they were like nothing that was in any of the other ones I was reading, and actually were nothing like anything else I was seeing. I could work out what was going on, flat colours, very little outlining, etc...but there was something about them which was..well... I just didn't know. So I googled for the artist Phil Noto and found an interview in which he said:

 "I was also very influenced by the guys who did all the book covers and advertising art in the 50's and 60's, like Robert McGinnis, Bob Peak, and Coby Whitmore."

Bang, there it was. I was looking at a modern take on my dad's old magazines and that copy of The Tribe That Lost it's Head.

The comic book was very now, but it was also very then too,

So that led me off to looking at the art of the three people he mentioned, Coby Whitmore, Bob Peak, and Robert McGinnis  - which made me realise the other thing I was looking at from my younger days in the Noto drawings...those classic Bond movie posters!

So Phil Noto is, for me, both totally modern and totally retro at the same time.

By the way, it's worth either nipping down to your local comic book store or logging on to your favourite online comic supplier...and even if you don't like comics it's worth doing this... as he's doing special cover variants for some titles at the moment

Also, check out his website and twitter to see more of his stuff!

"Love is Enough" - William Morris and Andy Warhol - MOMA Oxford

My first thought on seeing this exhibition listed was that there seems to be precious little in common between these two men - they're both great but how do you link them? Bit like chocolate cake and chesse..on their own great...together......how?

Takes about 5 minutes in the first room of this exhibition at MOMA Oxford to have a revaluation: repeating printworks! Flowers and birds = Elvis Presley and electric chairs. It's the repeating printworks stupid!!

Of course it isn't just that, nowhere near. In fact one of the things I got out of the show was the way it made me think about the ways they're the same. Warhol began his career as a commercial illustrator and Morris was focussed on work which would sell to a mass market (though one has to comment that one needed a certain level of affluence to be part of that mass market). Warhol called his art studio 'The Factory' while of course Morris and Co quite literally had one! Neither of them worked alone but in conjunction with other craftspeople in the production of their work.  Both were writers as well as visual artists. Both were interested in social change. Etc

Richard Dorment in The Telegraph fails to like it, calling it a "half-baked self-indulgent mess" ; it's a scathing and frankly brutal review which does make some very valid points, and clearly Dorment likes both Warhol and Morris so it's not just the material he dislikes. It's a great piece of writing though and you should read it as it WILL make you think

Mark Brown in The Guardian is more generous to the show

So, does having read the Dorment review make me think differently in retrospect? Would it have made me think differently had I read it before? I think that by it's very nature an exhibition which seeks to compare and contrast two artists separated by some of the most world-changing decades history has seen was always going to be somewhat artificial. Quoted in The Guardian review linked above Jeremy Deller (the curator) says of the show that he was asking people "to suspend their disbelief momentarily and make connections about art across two centuries".  Of course one can find limitless differences - volume produced wallpaper for 'the masses' (even if the working class couldn't afford it) is a lot different to limited runs of silk-screen portraits of pop-culture icons and food packaging. After all there were pop-culture icons and packaged food in Morris's day and he doesn't, so far as we know, even consider putting them on wallpaper! The whole cultural atmosphere is also totally different, which creates a totally different cultural context for the work, and Morris seeks to change society by exposing them to beautiful well crafted things rather than producing graphic images of the aftermath of things like the Chartist Riots and the Newgate Gallows: transformed by beauty rather than inspired to riot one might put it.

But, and I think there is a but, the exhibition does make you look at their work and by showing the similarities makes you realise there are some. The past is a different country and they do do things differently there..but Morris' old buddy Rosetti might not have been too out of place hanging out with the Velvet Underground (and Lizzie might have just dumped him for a rock drummer and lived).

Even if you agree with Dorment and find it all ridiculous, or like me find some things which do make you think,  I think it's a great show. If you can get to Oxford before it closes on the 8th of March then do so.  It's also free so if you find yourself finding that it's rubbish you've not lost any money and just go and have a coffee instead!

William Blake: Apprentice and Master - Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

(Image linked in from the website of The Independent review, below)

I think this is one of those exhibitions in which the more you know about the artist beforehand the more you get out of it. I knew almost nothing about Blake before I went, and hand on heart I don't think I knew a heck of a lot more about him after I'd been. I knew a lot more about printmaking, and I had more of an understanding of Blake the printmaker and how he was keen to both exploit new techniques and to innovate in his own workflow. But I didn't get any sense of the man at all from it, no feeling of engagement with the person behind the printing press.

Now, not for one bit am I doing down the exhibition. It's like everything at the Ashmolean well planned and executed, though due to the nature of the materials on show the light levels are very low so seeing some of the details is a challenge for those of us with less than hawk like vision. It moves chronologically from his early days as an apprentice engraver through to his late work, and then includes work by those influenced by him. There are original copper plates on show so one can appreciate the amazing detail in the engraving, as well as some of his woodblocks. Lots of his prints to enjoy of course, including different prints from the same plate to illustrate how they differ. I'm going to put my hands up for this one and admit that frankly, I don't find I engage with Blake very well, somehow I just don't get that 'wow moment' - sorry.

Here are links to a couple of good reviews of the exhibition, either of which I wish I'd read first :-)

Richard Dorment, Daily Telegraph
Maev Kennedy The Guardian
Nick Clarke The Independent

I think though, for those more knowledgeable about Blake, his life and work, there was much more to be taken away from this exhibition than I did. So if you're going to see it and you're not a Blake fan, then my suggestion is that some background reading might be an idea

It's on till the first of March, so you've got another month to catch it - more information here

Peder Balke - National Gallery

I had some time after a business trip to London last week so I stuck my head into the National to take a look at their Peder Balke exhibition.

Who?

And you'd be right, the chap is almost unknown outside his native Norway, and for all I know he may not be too well known their either. I was quite taken by the bit on the National Gallery website where he's referred to as a 'forerunner of Modernism' and I do like a bit of modernism. Truth be told, it didn't look too much like modernism to me, but that might be my lack of a firm grip on what this might mean in art crit terms. I found this review by Alastair Sooke, who does know what he's talking about, and he rather seems to agree with this..or perhaps it's fairer to say I agree with him!

That's not to say I didn't enjoy it, I did and I'm glad I dropped in on it. I'd have been less enamoured if I'd trekked up to London just to see it mind, as there isn't a whole lot of it and there is a limit to how many shipwrecks and lighthouses I can enjoy. The later ones where there is little or no colour are interesting, and the big one just to the left of the door as you go in is the one I kept going back to look at.

The exhibition is on loan from the Nordnorsk Kunstmuseum in Tromso - having taken a look at some of the exhibitions they've had on their website I rather wish it wasn't so far away...