A season of exhibitions

For several weeks, now, my mouth and my eyes have been filled with flavours, jewels, metals, colours.  Everywhere I look I am overwhelmed, as I try to find the words to capture what I see - I can't stop myself, it seems stupidly urgent.  Saffron and ginger and nutmeg; gold, copper, bronze; russet and rust, burnt orange and port, toast and butter and honey.  The splash of light in a shady corner, is it warm topaz, is it an amber glow?  That garden acer, that one there, it's a preposterous lollipop red! 

It's not even just the trees - bracken, bare hedgerow, moorland, they're all at it, with splashes of cornfield yellow and heady wine red, flamboyant pumpkin and speckled apricot.  I'm even caught up in what I reject - caramel and toffee, flapjack and syrup all too sticky; grilled grapefruit, for all it captures a colour perfectly, and the toasty edges, doesn't feel right.  Cinnamon works, foxy not; plum yes, aubergine no.  But the irritating truth is that words are failing me.  That there are so many blended, perfect shades out there for which I find it impossible to pin down any kind of helpful description.  As a word person I find it hard to accept, although as a colour lover I'm happy to gaze at, say, the peachy, brackeny, auburny tones of the japanese maple in my garden and enjoy their nameless colours while they last.  

It's mid-November - they'll all be gone soon enough.  Already there are as many pools of leaves on the ground as leaves on branches (though when they're below as well as above it can double the colour spike) and soon all will be subtle browns and forgetfulness.  That's fine - I love the starker land of winter too, and meanwhile, what a show there's been this year.  What.  A.  Show.

I'm sorry, I really didn't mean to go on about autumn.  Again.  The point of this was going to be to enthuse about a fine crop of art exhibitions - most finished, inevitably, but that's no reason not to celebrate them.  All six (six!) in one go would be overkill, but I could manage a couple today and the rest later.

First of the batch is/was Walking the Hills at Bath Contemporary - a collaboration between painter Malcolm Ashman and Norwegian digital artist Inger Karthum.  I'd been looking forward to it for a good while, and I wasn't disappointed.  Collaboration is something that has never quite appealed to me because of the lack of total control over one's own work that it implies.  You would surely need to accept in advance that you might hate the joint result, and do you therefore put up work that isn't (in your eyes) so good, so that you won't mind if it's ruined?  Equally, might you ruin someone else's?  Or do you work out each and every collaborative piece of work together, in fine detail?  It's very quickly obvious that I have no idea what I'm talking about, but I imagine every collaborative process is pretty much unique. Irritatingly, I've managed to leave this report long enough to have lost access to some of the supporting text from the show, but as I remember it the artists share an interest in memory and displacement.  Sometimes the work done by each artist is easy to pick out - 'Paths', above left, for example, where the landscape is by Ashman and the paving slabs below by Karthum.  Others required more attention, although obviously close observation makes the digital half of the collaborative images easy to identify.  I still have vague, unformed doubts about digital art, but that doesn't stop me enjoying the end results, and these had a subtlety and complexity that fascinated me.  The artists each had their own works in the show. too, and the playfulness of a number of 3D works created together added something extra.  

Pinning down now why I enjoyed the show so much is proving difficult.Some of it was to do with colour combinations, some to do with the way each style of  work really did complement the other.  Most of it was that the collaboration was energizing, buzzy.  For the first time ever I found myself wondering whether collaborating with an artist you trust might be surprisingly liberating. 

Also finished now In Bath (but moved on to Oxford) is the Society of Wood Engravers' latest annual exhibition, which was at 44AD - the rooms there were just right for it.  With every passing year I find wood engraving appeals more (still not had a go), and since I still don't go a bundle on the little amazingly skilled, fussy-but-dull pieces I assume that wood engraving is growing.  Whether it is or no, here's a little selection - glass and light don't make taking photos easy, but I gave up on the most difficult ones and did my best with the rest.  That's enough for one day - I'll finish off the exhibitions cluster next time.