You know that you're a cussed old bag when...

Everyone is having a lovely time at the food fair, meandering slowly in groups of several plus at least one pushchair, through the absolutely chocabloc crowded town centre, pausing here for a while to see what this stall is selling, pausing there for a  while longer to savour the delicious aroma, pausing again to WILL YOU JUST MOVE, DAMMIT, BEFORE I BARGE MY WAY THROUGH THE LOT OF YOU, ALL I WANT TO DO IS MOVE.

Maybe the delights of crowds - and food festivals - are wasted on me.

As to further examples of rag dolls, the two I saw today, with their tutu style skirts and their cocky hats and their stocking tops, almost certainly were dressed up for something.  Weren't they?  They were definitely the most cheerful thing on the street (though given the street in question, that wasn't hard).  But even better, I thought, was the small boy singlemindedly licking the inside (natch) of a bus window.  Such things do give a day character.  Something distinctive.  It can be a perfect cloud or a stark, storm-lit landscape; nuthatches on the bird feeder or a little girl crouched down and  talking very seriously to Peppa Pig on a packet of cake mix, completely wrapped up in the moment.  When I was in London last summer for the day, I got back on the train and made a quick list of things that had caught my eye in the previous few hours.  Sort of coathooks for memories:

beach huts
heron in the park
roses
free bikes
grubby Thames
a NatWest boat going under a bridge and looking like a spaceship
free runners practising
immigrant poems
Trojans and Greeks
fiddlers on Millennium Bridge.

Though some of the coathooks don't have anything hanging on them - what roses?  I like the list just the same - it works for me in the same way as sketches.  If I hadn't been driving, maybe I could have sketched the rag dolls in stockings today. 



   

You know the years are passing you by when...

You look at roaming groups of girls in town and find yourself repeatedly thinking of rag week.  Mind you, one girl elsewhere looked sort of medieval but fantastic in a pair of black and white vertically striped leggings (and what sort of legs do you have to have to look fantastic in those?  Good legs, that's what sort) and the most gorgeously jewel-bright pair of (diesel) trainers I have ever seen.   Why medieval?  The shoes looked from behind as if, when you peered round the corner, they would have extravagantly curling toes.  Utterly brilliant though.

PS  Are late summer bobble hats trending?

Have wasted not a second in booking a table at next year's Bristol Artists' Book Event (20th and 21st April).  This gives me nigh on 8 months to produce some stuff - surely that must be long enough even for me to be productive?  Add to this that I'm about to start renting  a studio, and actually doing something vaguely arty starts to look possible.

I've been learning all over again that I never do anything over the summer.  My brain just seizes up the minute the house is full of (2, just 2) sons.  It's not that they are in the way, or demanding.  They don't clutter up the house (well, not much), they just seem to clutter up my head.  But if I can escape to a dedicated space, that excuse evaporates and I'll either have to find a new one that works or actually do some art.  I don't know how this goes - it could be that the studio will prove to be a 9 day wonder (for 9 day, read 1 month, obv) and I'll be back home realising that my inabilities are built in at foundation level.  But if that proves to be case, at least I'll have given it a shot and I'll know. 

Meanwhile I'm quite excitable about both prospects, the studio and the fair.  

Ok, so there I was trundling into Bath, experiencing weather (yey Britain) and discovering its effects on my approach to art exhibitions.  Here was my view of a visit on Wednesday:   

And it rained and rained and rained and rained...  I can't remember when last I got as soaked in recent times, but then, I     wouldn't normally choose to go out in weather like this morning's.  When you're only somewhere for a short while, though,         you can't afford to waste the time just because the rain wants to play mean. 

I took myself off to the Victoria Art Gallery, to see Graham Dean's 'Fitter, quicker, longer' and Robert Race's automata.  I             expected the former to be so-so and the latter to be a 5 minute visit with very little interest.

I was right about Graham Dean's exhibition, in that I didn't go away particularly enthused, but I don't hold him entirely                 responsible for that.  The subject was (not surprisingly, in this olympic year) sport.  The artist paints in intense layers of             watercolour and makes up complete pictures from a patchwork of sheets of paper.  The intense colours I thoroughly                 enjoyed and I found his choice of  sporting poses often very pleasing - they are mostly before or after the event, and many         of them rather thoughtful.  He does some nice things with lighting too. However, I cannot take to his frequent representation     of skin as some kind of diseased map, and in the end I feel that I've just looked at a load of sportsmen and women and I         can't make myself care particularly much.  There is another thing - I'd already seen an article on him with plenty of pics in         Artist & Illustrator magazine, and that's the umpteenth time recently that the Victoria Art Gallery's artists have been                     showcased there before or after an exhibition.  Is it that the mag has a close connection with someone at the Gallery?

I was wrong about Robert Race's automata - they were really good fun.  Simple pieces - by which I mean they were created     purely for fun, and that was what they delivered.

On to the Holburne - the exhibition was the much reviewed Portrait Sculpture, and though I wasn't convinced that this was         my sort of thing, the many excellent reviews made me think that maybe I'd be a fool to miss it.  But in fact I had been right.  It just didn't do it for me.  I mean yes, there were some fascinating busts there - one gentle and sensitive one turned out             to have overly hollow cheeks because it had been taken from the gentleman's death mask, and on the final stretch were         two busts of someone else, sculpted many years apart, which gave an unsettling sensation of seeing him from two points in     time at once.  But I liked the waxwork of Henry Moore as well as anything there, and apparently he wouldn't have                         approved (realistic representation, he felt, was not the way to go).  It wasn't that there weren't good pieces, as I said, but I             didn't feel they added up to something special as a whole.  Well, I was sodden by the time I got there, cagoule not                     withstanding - so wet that a number of people felt driven to made sympthetic comments on my condition (I guess I must             have looked a total sight) - and maybe I wasn't prepared to give the exhibition the time it deserved.  The thought of getting         back to my parents' house and changing into something dry was too attractive, so I went. 

However, by Thursday (mostly sun), I felt dry and a lot more positive - I'm not sure my final judgement was so very different, but I found much more to like than before.  I had wanted to take some snaps of the automata, and ended up revisiting all three exhibitions, plus one I would have missed otherwise.  Here's the reprise:

I took myself off to Bath again today, this time armed with a camera (for the automata only, alas) and a notebook (that would     be for notes).  I do feel that being dry makes an enormous difference to my state of mind when going round exhibitions.          The automata, I'm afraid, got much shorter shrift today - they hadn't changed, but I saw and played with them all yesterday.  I     just didn't need to do that again.

As I was there, I revisited Graham Dean too - I'd wanted to note some picture names, but yesterday I just really couldn't             hack it.  Today I suppose I was feeling much more sympathetic.  I really do like the intensity of the colour.  A handful of             favourites include Small Sprinter (the only one of my faves for which I could find an image), Wrestlers 2 and Basketball - I         was also very taken with a subtle sage grey union jack nestling in the sage grey background of Weight Lifter 2, and the             stillness (dejected or preparatory?) of Athlete 4.  Still, in the end they remained 'just' sportspeople.  Go make your own             judgement.

Then back to the Holburne for the Portrait Sculpture.  Again, the notebook came in handy, so I can now identify the model         for the sculpture taken from a death mask (the one with the sunken cheeks) as Anthony Adlington, doctor to George III             among his other duties, and the gent with two takes was Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield, at the ages of 43     and 55 - amazing sculptures, you'd take bets on his personality from them.  I also very much liked Giacometti's portrait of         his brother Diego, Chiavenna Bust I, where he felt that by far the most important thing was to capture the intensity of the             eyes, and the rest would follow, and Daphne Wright's moulds taken from her two young sons - brilliant.  Nevertheless, and         even allowing for a few other equally arresting pieces, I think some of the exhibition constituted filler. 

And finally, the bonus exhibition, as it were - What Are You Like?  It was in the room right next to the portrait sculpures, but         yesterday - well, nuff said about yesterday.  A number of celebrities (or illustrators, or possibly celebrity illustrators) were         asked a number of questions - favourite food, favourite transport, pet hate, that sort of thing - and the resultant illustrations         were the art works.  My sort of exhibition, and totally unexpected.

Two examples from  What Are You Like?

I boiled my datastick.  Well, no, that's not true, that's not fair.  What I actually did was put it through a mixed wash cycle - with a prewash for some reason - at 40°c, but the effect was doubtless much the same.  It died.  Completely and utterly - there isn't even a ghost.

It's so annoying.  I lost a lot of stuff, most of which I can't remember and can't even remember when I last looked at it, so it probably doesn't matter, and some more important stuff which I can more or less copy from other files and update from other sources, but still.  And it's such a silly thing to do.  And when I think how often I complain about all the detritus I find in the washing machine because other people don't check their pockets before trousers and the like go into the wash.

Gah!

And now the new one is throwing up some message about not necessarily being windows compatible WARNING! WARNING! which panics me mightily and probably isn't even true.  The only good thing to come out of the whole sorry episode is that I've paid enough attention to realise that I've unnecessarily been putting the not very dirty clothes through a prewash in the quite-new machine.  That doesn't seem like much of a silver lining to me, but I suppose it'll have to do.

So I made it to the second of the Cumbria potfests.  Normally, two over two weekends just seems too much like hard work, but this year, for the first time in quite a while, I got there.  It was good, and, unlike last week, I actually spent some money.  Even better (after a fashion), they were nearly all presents for other folks - a neat little trick which allows me to spend without adding (m)any more dust magnets to the clutter of home.  There were actually some delightful bits of clutter that I didn't allow myself to get, and that's good too.  Really, who needs some truly wicked cats (I should mention that nothing on the website is as good as the cats were on the stand), or indeed somehow delightful little dead ones?  Apparently the dead ones are remarkably popular - not just cats, but rabbits, dragons, dogs, and the dead sheep had long since run out (well I say run...) because they're so popular - and I can't show you this potter's enormous range of tiny animals (not all of them dead) because I wasn't clever enough to note his name and now I cannot track him down.  Sigh.

There were a number of potters making various uses of print methods.  Two in particular took my fancy in different ways - Kit Anderson uses gum bichromate printing on her pieces, and Andrew Adair makes deeply imprinted letterpress designs on his. 

Anyway, I'm glad I went.  The potfest was fun, and the cumbrian landscape was truly awesome - and that was just from the motorway.  Sunshine and showers led more than once to near-black distant hills, nearer hills and fields coloured in stunningly brilliant greens that you wouldn't dare paint  because obviously they can't have been like that  (so wet summers are good for green, if nothing else), studded with freshly washed, sparklingly white sheep, and in front of that, cars sending up clouds of spray seemingly lit from within.  Driving down the motorway with a camera in one hand (and actually, due to my old-fashioned ways, pressed to one eye) seemed a deeply foolish option, so I'll just live off the memories.