Kuniyoshi at the RAA

This was a stunning exhibition that had been set up in the Sackler Gallery on the top floor of the Royal Academy of Arts in Piccadilly. The exhibition was just jam packed, usually, this gallery has the smaller show, but each room was crammed with Japanese prints. It was so big, that I wanted to stop half way and come back again.

I great admire Japanese prints from my earliest days as 16 years old at Art College. There were a really good series on Japanese print artists and I still have my copies of Hiroshige and Hokusai bookcase downstairs. Hokusai has been mentioned as the precursor of the comic form of Manga, again you could rarely find examples here in the west until the American reprints of Lone Wolf and Cub came out. Usually, you had to wait and set Kurosawa's Samurai films to get a similar feelings. Then we had the the Manga explosion here in the UK and it seems quite settled. However, I have rarely found Manga as good as Lone Wolf, the only one that comes close, IMO, is Doll with stories just as good.

Kuniyoshi lived and worked during this period of Ukiyo-e across the 18th/19th century. His main oeuvre was warrior prints, these are usually dynamic portraits of heroes or in some cased diptychs or triptychs. This was because the cherry trees wooden printing blocks would be 36 x 25cm in size, due to the tree trunks size. These blocks would be printed in usually five colours and using a black keyline block to pull the colour elements together with any wording that was required.

These warriors are laid out with strong, structure, but then have the most gorgeous clothes with elaborate designs, that seem so far beyond any of the colour or black & white prints of the western world. Kuniyoshi was able to extend this single prints and combine them to achieve a larger image that can be seen overall or on their own.

What struck me in going round this exhibition was the colour. It is the structure and the composition that draws my eye first. Yet in this exhibition it was the delicate colours that were printed. The way they used vignette or graduated tone as a background, as I spent a lot of time trying to replicate on my own printmaking course. Some of the colours are very subtle and not primary colours or using strong bold colours to create statements. This is particularly shown with the image Yorimasa Killing the Nue with the lightning in a strong, bold colour and the black background emphasise this.

The other great thing was so see a couple of preliminary drawing sketches that I can not recall in seeing any of these sketches before. They were fascinating in how they were used on the wooden blocks and how Kuniyoshi was working his ideas, the rough use of a brush rather than a pencil or charcoal. I will be going again to see this wonderful exhibition again.

Early Days

It has been some time since I shown some images of the Book of Days, that has been laying out in my garden over the last few months. The book has changed dramatically over the period of the last fes weeks, from the frosty part of February and the snow (once in 20 years in this part of the world).


Buried in a white winding sheet across the ground.



Now buried with fallen leaves as there had been a lot of rain, the book has been bent by the water.


Now, it looks as if some animal has attached the book after all this time in the garden. Now more pages are exposed and can the book survive the year? Should I get another one ready to replace it? I do like the way the pages have opened or is it another flower rather than a carcase?

Watching the Watchmen

I saw the film on Tuesday and still trying to make a decision. The best so far was that visually is that it is superb, but...There is something wrong. Yes, the tweak at the end is OK. The Martian scenes were great and yet.

Two things stood out today as one of my friends said, 'Why do a film, when the graphic novel is so good - Does it add anything to the story'. Answer is no. I remembered that there was a re-make of Hitchcock's Psycho frame by frame and this is what I think happened to the film. It was shot almost like for like, but why? It is a different medium and therefore, it must add some that it unique to the story that either text in a novel or in this case, comic art could not do.

One of the innovations that the graphic novel showed to great effect was the use of colour in the storytelling. Yet I can not remember anything in this film that suggested that. Peter Greenaway's film, The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, the colour did show the difference from the various places in the film.

I thought the cinema cost was not worth the wait and the DVD might have more on it from the various articles I have read. So you might be worth waiting for the DVD.

Tertal - Bare Bones Part 3

This is the last stage of the first piece. In a way, it looks like a typical piece of my work and this is perhaps what disappoints me the most. The leaf of the book has been lost in the overall tangle of the trees' branches. Yet, you can not see the textural qualities of the as I drew and drew on the picture, the paper broke down. I had to glue a second piece of paper to the back of the first to give it some support.

This allowed me to continue working on the picture. Again the medium ground of the red soil has been taken back by working on the areas. Firstly in pencil, then with water to merge the soluble pencils into a 'solid' background. Again using an eraser to cut into this area, using the water to scourge back the colour and give it the harsh feeling of soil cut open.

As I look on it, I feel it should go on, but then not. I think, I would prefer to put it away and start again. Sky looks OK, but not brilliant, could do with some further work here, but what of the lost leaf, that I was trying to emphasise in this series.

Little Gems

I love going to the art galleries in the towns as you never know what you will find. Normally, there are a lot of Victorian paintings, sub PRB, but then tucked away. Some thing sparks your interest. When I visited Brighton recently, the gallery there had an exhibition called Paintings Unwrapped, which was a compare and contrast of paintings from the collection. It used paintings that could be described as minor pieces and used then to co-ordinate the audience's eye to uncover new ideas. Points that might be lost.

This was a wonderful way to use these paintings that are likely to be hidden in the vaults somewhere waiting to come out for display. Some times the pictures were war time realsim compared to classical Victorian melodrama. Yet just going into their is some thing waiting to be discovered, it might not necessarily spark interest in you, but it might be some one else who is inspireed.

Fever

Yesterday, when I was in the library. I took out a copy of a book about the North Downs Way, that runs from Farnham to Canterbury, so see what I might find in the way of research. Richard Long has using walking as part of his sculptural performance (?) and I have my father's interest in the green roads that criss-cross the UK. So it occurred to me to go and walk following this route.

Then reading the introduction, there is a mention of Graham Sutherland, who I usually associate with west Wales. Again, half bits of memory stream out and I know he produced some Palmeresque images in the early 30's before he moved towards semi-abstraction. Some one else who I am reading about is Iain Sinclair and his walk around the M25 in his book called London Orbital. This kind of walk with the layers of history and mythology, obviously, appeals to me. So a walk along the North Downs Way again, is gaining ground. Realising that I can not do the whole thing in one go, so I can use the book to take little steps on this journey.

Thinking of it as a walk from left to right, I could see that a landscape book would be a good way to record the images and ideas that I saw. Taking small steps, I could split the book up in sections of the various walks that I could follow. The landscape format follows the route, but should I start at Farnham or Canterbury. Should I start inland to work my way towards the sea or go from the inside out, beginning in Canterbury to Farnham?

Each walk becomes an episode, do I need to structure it literally? One of the book I read using a splinter layered/fractured technique was Fugue for a Darkening Isle, which has a lot of flashbacks and is disjointed in the narrative. Maddeningly confusing, until you reach the end as you as the reader start to weave all the pieces together. Again, it does not really matter for my record. The journey can start anywhere, even the mid point and it might only need me to start where I start collecting my walks from.

The title of this blog is amalgam of Surrey, England and the Dreamtime from Australia, too opposite points. I have wondered if I could use classical Greek and Roman mythology similarly, yet we have the 18th century gardens that where created as an idea classical landscape. As a student, it was suggested to me that I should look at Claude's landscapes whom I was told, Turner greatly admired. Again, the BBC2 series' Chronicle, a TV history first popularised Rennes-Le-Chateau and its mysterious as well as introducing me to the painter Poussin. Secret codes hidden in pictures and sacred geometry, fascinating to a child.

In a lot of children's saying and games, we have the survival of some of the pagan past. When a cousin mentioned Jenny Greenteeth, an old cannibal that lived in some water lodges near home, I felt it was a surviving spirit transformed from a lost goddess to a weak demon on the fringes of the world kept alive by the thoughts and fear you have as child. So when I got the North Down Way book, I found another about children's games. As I have written about the link to Cricket, often minefield of rules and laws that have to be follow. It was another piece in the research that was firing me up.

So I bought a A3 (approx. 11 x 16" for those in imperial) landscape cased sketchbook, as this can give me a long thin piece of paper. It represents the journey across the country and giving me the room to add images in two across one page. Now I am itching to begin.....

Sowing the Seeds

Where do ideas come from. This note is about some ideas that have swirled around, but never come out in a coherent way, but with some planning might.

One of my favourite Peter Greenaway's films is Drowning by Numbers. The idea of a count through the pictures reminds me of turning the pages in the book as you read through the story, yet you don't see them until you look at where you are in the book to stop or want to say where you are in the story without spoiling it for someone else. It must have been the first film of Greenaway's I saw, having missed the earlier ones of A Draughtsman's Contract and Zed and Two Noughts.

In a sequence of panels, you see numbers linking the frames one to another, but in a film. You should watch a film as a straight story, but when I saw this if taught me some thing. That you could add elements to the image and suggest more, by developing layers. You look at the story, which is simple, but yet gets more complex has you review it or watch it again, but why watch it again. Greenaway's talks about how the photography on the film was devised to match 18th century painters such as Constable and Gainsborough.

Both of whom, I could say, at the time was not impressed with and the flatness of East Anglia counties of Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex. Constable's Haywain was from the area of Flatford mill, where I can remember a rowing bow trip down the river and an argumentative trip later to Aldeburgh on the coast. The film opened my eyes to their work and understanding of the paintings. When I read the book, Fear of Drowning that linked a lot of the story as a set of 100 pieces, this idea of overlaying a series of images strongly influenced. My series, the Dreams of Deucalion was based on the idea of walking through an alphabet.

I rather like the idea of including games and Drowning by Numbers have a series of games, which can be used to described the action that is happening in the film. Hangman's Cricket played on the beach with a multitude of players has always fascinated me. Cricket is the archetypal English game and has a long history throughout the ages. It laws had to be written early to allow everyone to agree on how to play and give results to the amount of betting that took place. George the third's father is supposed to have died, when a cricket ball hit his face and caused an abscess in his jaw.

So I was rather intrigued when I saw this article about how Cricket was imported by weavers from Flanders. What also stuck me was the comment about cricket near Guildford. How it links into the north downs and the Pilgrim's Way. This one runs from Winchester to Canterbury, and yet, there is another path that runs to Stonehenge and called the Harrow way. Again we have Chaucer's pilgrims leaving from London, so there are layers waiting to be explored.

Having been recently to St Martha's church near Albury. A small church that has probably existed since Saxon times on a hill dominating the countryside. Being a Saxon church, it might have been possibly a pagan place of worship and it is unusal for a church to be sighted on a hill. St Michael's on Glstonbury Tor is another chapel, only a tower reamins. This Church at Albury is on one of the stages of the North Downs way, a route that seeks to follow the old pilgrims way. If games can be called a metaphor for life, either you are a player, a winner or a loser or just some one to leave the table. There is a game which surrounds or affects you in some ways.

Again the article mention is made of the idea of using shepherd's crooks as bats to defend the wicket. The idea of the sheepfold reminds me of the Andy Goldsworthy, Sheepfold project, which if I will endeavour to visit on a journey up north. So I will start to look at walking the route to see what I can find and what might develop further.

All these ideas are swirling around inside of me, waiting to make the links and join in creating work. I wonder where I will go.........