Emily Carr, Dulwich Picture Gallery
Canadian North-West painter, died in 1945, did forests, abandoned Canadian tribal villages, totem poles, sea canoes… She had several different styles – two of these paintings could be Duncan Grant, a few others are close to Fauves, there’s a room of swirly treescapes that could be anthroposophical (except the colours were different), a few more that used the Van Gogh short line marks… Many of the paintings are oil on paper, which is not the best medium; they look somewhat brown and dowdy. Canvases are better. Oddly, she had connections with Mark Tobey, who I had always thought was a sort of abstract expressionist – his paintings are often in books on AbExes, anyway. Turns out he was a “spiritual” painter (Baha’i faith) so they’re not really abex at all – more like visions of heaven or wherever. The other painter mentioned in the exhibition blurb in connection with her is the execrable Lawren Harris, member of the Seven, and painter of the white blancmange mountains (see previous Blackpaint).
Tree trunks and totem poles – bit phallic, really. I could see her in therapy with Rebecca Front on “Psychobitches” (Sky Arts)…
London Countryway
For the last five years, a couple of friends and I have been walking in the countryside around Orpington in Kent (we only have one map) and following the various “Green” urban footpaths around London. Judging by the following, Jonathan Meades had already done all our routes. I came across this in his essay “Hamas and Kibbutz” – it’s pretty close to poetry:
…roads to nowhere whose gravel aggregate is that of ad hoc Second World War fighter runways, decrepit Victorian oriental pumping stations, rats, asbestos sheets piled up in what for obvious reasons cannot be called pyres, supermarket trolleys in toxic canals, rotting foxes, used condoms, pitta bread with green mould, ancient chevaux de frise, newish chevaux de frise, polythene bags caught on branches and billowing like windsocks, greasy carpet tiles, countless gauges of wire – sturdy strands it takes industrial kit to cut through, wire gates in metal frames, rolls of barbed wire like magnified hair curlers in an old time northern sitcom, chicken wire, rusting grids of reinforcing wire – flaking private/keep out signs that have been ignored since the day they were erected, goose grass, artificial hillocks of smelt, collapsing Nissen huts, huts full stop, shacks built out of doors and car panels, skeins of torn tights in milky puddles, metal stakes with pointed tops, burnt-out cars, burnt-out houses, abandoned cars, abandoned chemical drums, abandoned cooking oil drums, abandoned washing machine drums, squashed feathers, tidal mud, an embanked former railway line, fences made of horizontal planks, fences made of vertical planks, a shoe, vestigial lanes lined with May bushes, a hawser, soggy burlap sacks, ground elder, a wheelless buggy, perished underlay, buddleia, a pavement blocked by a container, cracked plastic pipes, a ceramic rheostat, a car battery warehouse constellated with CCTV cameras, a couple of scraggy horses on a patch of mud, the Germolene – pink premises of a salmon smoker, sluice gates, swarf Alps, a crumpled Portakabin, a concrete block the size of a van, bricked-up windows, travellers’ caravans and washing lines, a ravine filled with worn car tyres, jackdaws, herons, jays, a petrol pump pitted and crisp as an overcooked biscuit, traffic cones, oxygen cylinders, a bridge made of railway sleepers across duckweed, an oasis of scrupulously tended allotments. (2008)
From “Museum Without Walls”, Jonathan Meades, Unbound pbk, £12.99
Voyage to Cythera, Theo Angelopoulos (1984)
Stern, tall, uncompromising old rebel, dancing in the mist at the top of a mountain, back home in Greece after 30 years’ exile in the Soviet Union. Later, towed out by the police, alone on a floating platform, in sheeting rain, to international waters. Finally, joined by his wife, having cut the rope, drifting off together into the mist. Fantastic – and timely, with the Greek elections. Go Tsipras! Re-negotiate those terms…. You have time, as there are another four Angelopoulos DVDs in my Xmas box set….
Nigel Henderson at Tate Britain
Free exhibition in the room to right at top of coloured stairs; it’s about the work of Paolozzi, the Smithsons, Henderson and two other photographers whose names escape me. There’s a continually changing triptych of slides projected on the wall,showing the very square Paolozzi – looks like a wrestler – seated amongst collections of Modernist art – think I saw an Adrian Heath – with Henderson’s fabulous photos of the old East End popping up right and left. Old shops, markets, bombed-out waste land, coronation celebrations, cranes, under floor central heating… I’ll stop now, before this becomes another Meades – style list.
Water Engine 2
Blackpaint
29.01.15
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