Posts Tagged ‘Nottingham’
A Walk Along Long Row in Nottingham
I liked the way the geometric tile pattern seemed to race along with me and change as I walked at speed along Long Row East in Nottingham City Centre, early in the morning, on the first really warm day of this year.
Long Row Slideshow (Nottingham)
I wondered what Nottingham’s Long Row East paving tiles would look like in a slideshow.
A Gallery for the Down Hearted
I have blogged before about the paving tiles along Long Row (East) in Nottingham City Centre. There on the floor it is almost as if they form a gallery for the down-hearted. You have to be looking down to see them.
Well, I had an appointment early one morning in Nottingham, so I took my camera and some paper and crayons with me, got down on the floor and took rubbings as well as taking some new photos and making a list of which tile is where. I intend to appropriate them for a series of ten paintings.
Thomas Cook
Anne Summers
essensuals
Primark 1
Primark 2
Primark 3
The Works
Jem Leisure
Going Places
Thompson
Doing the rubbings I felt a strong connection with whoever designed them and even more so with whoever laid them (does anyone out there know anything about them? If so, please tell us what you know in “comments”)
City Gallery Nottingham, Painters’ Open
I noticed a month or two ago that a new gallery opened in Nottingham.
The City Gallery is off Long Row East (that’s where the paving tiles are that I am interested in and have blogged about before).
It’s a “community gallery” which, sorry to say, to me means that not everything in there will be good. Well, there’s one of mine in there at the moment!
I didn’t get to the opening of the Painters’ Open, and as the gallery opening hours are 11 till 4 I find it difficult to visit. I took this snap through the window when the Open was closed. I also tried to get one of my friend Geoff Jones‘s painting but I couldn’t reach it through the glare and the shutter door.
We both managed to get to a poetry reading one evening and we were impressed. Apparently it was the Crystal Clear Poetry Launch Party and the readings were from: Roy Marshall, Aly Stoneman, Charles G Lauder Jr, Andrew MulletProof Graves, Mark Goodwin, Deborah Tyler-Bennett, and Wayne Burrows.
Long Row East, Nottingham
In a previous post I said that these geometric tiles were to be found along Smithy Row in Nottingham, when in fact they are on Long Row (East)
Whilst I was photographing them one or two people looked down and said “I’ve never noticed them before”. And I overheard one person asking “what’s he doing?”
On Smithy Row in Nottingham
On Smithy Row in Nottingham, so long as you look down, you are likely to see street tiles with geometric designs like this one.
In “appropriating” it I realised that one of the things I like about this kind of design, like the others I have been exploring in my most recent paintings, is that no one can claim ownership, they are always already existing.
Art Postcards
I posted here about The International Postcard Show at Surface Gallery, Nottingham and in response a fellow artist/art blogger Terry Greene suggested we exchange postcards of our own, and I agreed. He sent his ages ago and it was really a postcard, it actually came through the post, whereas mine isn’t finished yet and when it is I will probably resort to an envelope, in case the colours run.
Though maybe one of the interesting things about the painting is the evidence of it having been through the post. This one has ‘painted’ additions that make it a (slightly) different card than the one that Terry mailed. The work already has this contrast going on within it between chance and plan, and it seems to me to be enhanced by the slight risk of sending it through the post. Does it also say something about the difference between a communication ‘sent’ and a communication ‘received’?
Another thing that happened in response to my post about the show was that I got a comment from one of the other artists (as if to prove that it really is international) from USA, Vicki J Eaton, whose postcards are showing in the row above my own.
The show is on until 11 February 2012.
The Variety of the International Postcard Show
I have three little pictures in The International Postcard Show at Surface Gallery, Nottingham, and having a look round the exhibition yesterday what impressed me first was the amazing variety of it. This annual show, in its tenth year, has 264 postcard-sized (6″ x 4″) works from 122 artists. And whilst the format is continually repeated, the kinds of work represented, the media chosen, the approach of the artists, the attitude of the work, all look very different.
There are drawings, paintings, collages, ceramic tiles, texts, photographs,etchings, lino-cuts, embroideries, etc in a great space.
I spotted work by an old friend of mine Ian Cutmore whose Moving Landscapes seem to emphasise that most of the ‘natural’ world I ever see is from the inside of a car. I am reminded of a childhood conversation with my father, him explaining to me that motorways had both marred and opened up the landscape at the same time. (Any trip on the M62 is a clear demonstration of this.) I snapped them here.
Below Ian Cutmore’s postcards are three by Christopher Moore: Untitled, Leaf Tip and Emergence.
Here are my own three (bottom right) and next to them is Will You Be Mine? by Emily Bacon. Above them are, on the left three cards by Vicki J Eaton: Missing You, Pure Heart and A Dream and on the right two charming photographs by Richard Fish: The Corner Girls and Vox Nihili.
A lot of the work is for sale at £15 each and the artists also partake in a gallery facilitated postcard exchange after the show ends on 11 February. If you are anywhere near Nottingham, go and have a look.
Nottingham streets
Walking along a Nottingham city centre street I dropped my glove, and looking down I noticed (surely not for the first time, though I cannot remember noticing it before) that there are wonderful geometric paving designs all over the place.
When I have an afternoon free I could travel the city street and document as many of them as I can find. I wonder who commissioned them and when, and who designed and laid them and in what conditions. Anyone out there know anything about them?
Klaus Weber at Nottingham Contemporary
Visiting the Klaus Weber show at Nottingham Contemporary the other day I realised that one of the things I like a lot about Nottingham Contemporary is that the gallery attendants talk to you about the art, if you want them to.
I noticed that in this piece one of the heads was missing…
…and I had fallen for the artist’s little joke when I asked the attendant of it had actually been stolen or damaged or if it was part of the piece. You guessed the answer! I asked if she had met the artist, which of course she had, and was able to tell me all about his visit to the gallery.
The exhibition, showing until 8 January 2012, is in two parts: If you leave me I’m not coming is Weber’s solo show, whereas Already there! is Weber’s selection of artifacts from the Science Museum, The Ashmolean Museum, Berlin’s Bode Museum, Archaeological and Zoological collections of University College London and art works mostly from the Tate collection.
Already there! represents our tentative understanding of ourselves – belief systems since discredited or abandoned. The exhibition is perhaps a memento mori of our own scientific and social systems – now the apogee of human achievement. In the future our own artefacts will be just as charged and curious Weber seems to suggest – part of another natural process of decay.
(from the notes on the exhibition web page)
As well as the heads already mentioned If you leave me I’m not coming includes Bee Paintings, looking like abstract paintings of dots and blobs they are actually the record of bee performance,
every year when the bees first leave the hive they perform a ‘cleansing flight’ when they excrete, preferably on clean white surfaces. In this casethey have obligingly decorated Weber’s canvases.
In the little video I have posted here the Bee Paintings can be seen behind the Large Dark Wind Chime (Arab Tritone). What would usually be a small garden ornament, cheerfully making audible the natural force of the wind, is here a gigantic object set in motion by electirc fans and tuned to the “devils music” or the “tritone”. Click on the video clip to hear it.
The video starts with Weber’s massive “windscreen wipers” constantly clearing away the artificial rain that pours down the inside of the gallery window.
