Good at Looking
  • Good at Looking blog
  • About Good at Looking
  • Contact Good at Looking

Pure feeling

23/11/2014

0 Comments

 
Picture
Etel Adnan, 'Le départ', tapestry, 2013.
Having been caught up in work-related business the past few months, I’ve neglected Good at Looking somewhat. I’ve been looking, but not writing. So it is with regrets and apologies that I am posting only now about an exhibition that ended last weekend. It’s too late to inspire readers to go and see it, but I hope it will inspire some of you to look out for future shows of her work.

I hadn’t known that I would love the work of Etel Adnan; in fact, I hadn’t even heard of this Lebanese-born artist until I happened upon her show at the White Cube in Bermondsey, which was also showing a more well-known artist, Tracey Emin. Emin’s show, ‘The Last Great Adventure is You’, features gouache nudes and large-scale embroidered versions of these beautifully rendered, thoughtful paintings. Emin is an artist who weaves her personal life into her work and lays bare the painful and traumatic as well the joyful and the tender.
Picture
Tracey Emin, from 'The Last Great Adventure is You', 2014
Picture
Tracey Emin, from 'The Last Great Adventure is You', 2014
In the room opposite we glimpsed bursts of colour that were a complete contrast to the black and white of Emin’s works. Adnan is primarily a poet and journalist – more than that, she is a leading voice in contemporary Arab American literature. Born in Beirut in 1925, and having studied in Paris and the US and lived in both the US and Lebanon, she settled in northern California in the late 1970s. The 26 paintings in this exhibit are primarily abstract landscapes – bright, expressive blocks of colour suggesting mountain, horizon, coast, sun. All are deeply resonant places for her.

Picture
Etel Adnan, 'Untitled', oil on canvas, 2014
Picture
Etel Adnan, 'Untitled', oil on canvas, 2014
The exhibition notes explains that Adnan works on a table rather than an easel, and she often applies paint directly from the tube in bold swipes across the canvas, resulting in compositions exuding intense energy. She is quoted as saying that ‘Images are not still. They are moving things. They come, they go, they disappear, they approach, they recede, and they are not even visual – ultimately they are pure feeling.’

For more on Etal Adnan, see here.

White Cube, Bermondsey: Tracey Emin, 'The Last Great Adventure is You', and Etel Adnan, 'Inside the White Cube' 8 October - 16 November 2014
0 Comments

Got the blues?

23/3/2014

0 Comments

 
Most of us experience some version of Sunday night or Monday morning blues at some point in our lives. But the blues aren’t always a sign of feeling down. Blues in music can be exuberant. Blue skies are rejuvenating. Blues can be life affirming and a welcome shock to the system.

Take this ultramarine cockerel by contemporary artist Katharina Fritsch. Standing on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, it’s an unmissable wake-up call, a cock-a-doodle-doo of a "Good morning London!"
Picture
Hahn/Cock by Katharina Fritsch (2013)
And if it could speak, it might say “Come and see the Veronese exhibit at the National Gallery just behind me.” Veronese: Magnificence in Renaissance Venice displays around 50 of the sumptuous paintings by Paolo Veronese, one of the most renowned artists in 16th-century Venice.

The colours in his works are stunning, even after more than 450 years, and the fabrics and settings are lush and detailed.
Picture
The Conversion of Mary Magdalene by Paolo Veronese (1548)
So next time you’re feeling down, head to Trafalgar Square for a bit of colour therapy and embrace the blues.
0 Comments

Colour shock

21/4/2013

0 Comments

 
Picture
Kaffe Fassett: A Life in Colour - 50 Years of Textile Art, Fashion and Textile Museum, 2013
“We told each other which colors we liked best together, and I remember the feeling of profound originality I experienced when I insisted, although it had just occurred to me, that I had always liked black and brown together best. I saw them floating in little patches of velvet, like the crazy quilt, or smooth little rectangles of enamel, like the paint-sample cards I was always begging for at the general store.”

Elizabeth Bishop, Exchanging Hats (Carcanet 1997)

Where do you stand on this issue of colour? I wondered about this as I went through the small but vibrant exhibit of work by knitting guru and textile designer Kaffe Fassett at the Fashion and Textile Museum in Bermondsey. I’m someone who believes black is the loveliest colour there is, and like Elizabeth Bishop I like black with brown – earthy colours. This show was way out of my league colourwise. 
Picture
Kaffe Fassett: A Life in Colour - 50 Years of Textile Art, Fashion and Textile Museum, 2013
Fassett considers colour to be 'a vital ingredient in life', and he was greatly influenced by a trip to India twenty years ago. Travel seems to be a key source of creative use of colour for him; a video showing in the museum's shop on my visit showed him ecstatic to discover a stall of hardware at a market in Vietnam, with screws and nails set out in small wooden boxes, making an impromptu patchwork quilt of bronzes, golds, silvers and greys.

Colour is vital and has great significance – historically, culturally, politically. Just think of the fuss made this week about what colour tie various newsreaders would wear when reporting on Margaret Thatcher’s funeral. We know that in different cultures colours mean different things. In Britain, for example, white only became associated with wedding dresses in the mid-nineteenth century, during Queen Victoria’s reign, after she was married in a white dress. Marrying in white meant you had money; otherwise you got married in whatever your best clothes were. In the US, red means Republican; in Britain it means Labour; in India it’s the colour of weddings. For anyone interested to learn about colours, have a look at Pantone: A Color History of the 20th Century; Brain Pickings has a lively review of this ‘fascinating and uncommon lens on familiar cultural history’ on its site at www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2011/11/23/pantone-book/.

‘Extravagant’ is one term used by the Fashion and Textile Museum to describe the range of colour and texture Kaffe Fassett uses in shawls, sweaters, cushions and quilts. That’s an ambiguous term, suggesting lushness but without purpose. For some, Fassett’s work lies on the decorative crafts end of the art spectrum, with all the twee connotations of knitting and interior design. For others, his pushing at the boundaries of traditional arts, including knitting but also quilting and embroidery, is inspirational - and all the more so for being a man in a traditionally woman's world. 

Whether you like his work or not, there’s something unnerving about so much bright colour in one place. It’s a sort of assault on the senses, but in my view that’s not a bad thing. Sometimes we need to be assaulted – shaken and stirred.

Kaffe Fassett: A Life in Colour is on at the Fashion and Textile Museum until 29 June 2013.
0 Comments

    About me

    I'm Margaret Doyle, a mediator and researcher in administrative justice. I'm also a Welcoming Ambassador at the Victoria & Albert Museum, the world's leading museum of art and design.

    Categories

    All
    Alessi
    Althea McNish
    Anna Maria Garthwaite
    Architecture
    Barbara Jones
    Bermondsey
    Blue
    Breakfast
    British Library
    Cemeteries
    Charles Sargeant Jagger
    Christopher Dresser
    Colour
    Cornelia Parker
    Craft
    Democracy
    Edmund De Waal
    Embroidery
    Enid Marx
    Etal Adnan
    Folk Art
    How To Look
    Kaffe Fassett
    Kurt Schwitters
    Mae Architects
    Magna Carta
    Marie Gudme Leth
    #metoo
    Mona Caron
    Pat Taylor
    Phyllis Barron And Dorothy Larcher
    Plants
    Popular Art
    Public Art
    Rachel Whiteread
    Rule Of Thirds
    San Francisco
    Shared Spaces
    Tapestry
    Tate Britain
    Textile Design
    Tracey Emin
    UK Parliament
    Utility Covers
    V&A Museum
    Walking
    White Cube

    RSS Feed

    Archives

    May 2019
    January 2019
    August 2018
    February 2018
    December 2017
    September 2015
    May 2015
    March 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    September 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    January 2014
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.