Adam Bridgland // Happy, All Smiles

If you're in Aberdeen over the next few weeks, try and catch this show at Peacock Visual Arts.

Yes, it's a show by fellow Bridgland, Adam, in his first Scottish solo exhibition.  Hurrah for Bridglands!!

Adam's a print-maker and is showing three new editions of screenprints, but he also does sculptures and vinyl installations.  

His prints combine deceptively simple phrases and images that have exactly anticipated all the graphically retro images that are all part of the present mood of the moment.  Here's Adam's  work...

Adam Bridgland, Happy All Smiles (Limited Edition Screenprint, 2012)

 Adam Bridgland, Darling, This Holiday will Solve All Our Problems (Limited Edition Screenprint, 2012)

 Adam Bridgland, Safely, I Built This House For You and For Me (Limited Edition Enamel Plaque, 2009)

Superficially, they come out of the same sort of kitschy mould as this, which we've all seen on a million teatowels and mugs...

However, what Adam's work does is to exploit the gap between the expectations of the superficially nostalgic image with its up-beat text, and the reality of the day-to-day which lies beneath, where nothing is actually quite as rosy or as clear-cut.  

Thus Happy, All Smiles shows a beautiful bouquet, suggesting a loving gift and a secure relationship.  But by the combination of text and image, one undermines the other.  The flowers therefore instead become like a tribute to something that has died.  

Similarly, Darling, This Holiday Will Solve All Our Problems suggests a light-hearted cruise with a heroic-looking ship sailing along majestically.  However, closer inspection shows that it is sailing through rather choppy waters, and the awkward angle begins to suggest that it is in fact a fragile craft that, like the Titanic, might not be as invincible as it first looks.

So instead of merely representing the nostalgic image, as with the ubiquitous 'Keep Calm and Carry On', Adam is going beneath it, exploring the poignancy of it, using the words to take away the safety ties and the reassurance normally contained within the image.  There's humour of course, and it's very playful, but there's also a certain sharpness in the sadness of it, like watching Brief Encounter.

Also look out for Adam's show in Aldeburgh (I love Aldbeurgh, and I've got work in Thompson's Gallery there in the High Street).  It's at the Aldeburgh South Beach Lookout from August 10th-12th, so blink and you'll miss it!

Happy, All Smiles is at Peacock Visual Arts, 21 Castle Street, Aberdeen AB11 5BQ until September 8th.  For more information, go here.

For more information on the artist, go to Adam Bridgland's website.

It's Official - It's the Olympics!

I'm just back from the London 2012 Olympics.  Not that it starts until tomorrow (officially), and not that I was in London.  Because today I was two miles down the road at Hampden to watch the footie.

Surprisingly, given that at one point I thought that I was going to be the only person in Scotland who'd actually paid for an Olympic football ticket, there was a crowd of nearly 38,000, consisting largely of families.  The large numbers obviously took the organisers by surprise as well, as they ran out of Official Pies.

Security to enter the venue was bizarre.  The list of items that you're not allowed to take in is long and complicated - no bags, no drinks, no food, no items that are unofficially sponsored (so don't go in a Pepsi T-shirt), and no sharp items or liquids over 100ml.  So tough luck to the group of Japanese supporters who arrived pulling their luggage, obviously straight off the plane. 

So outside the ground you are given a very, very large clear plastic bag (obviously they're expecting you to try to smuggle in your pet elephant), and asked to deposit metal items (but not cameras), wallets, keys, and a variety of other random stuff like plastic pens from the depths of your handbag.  You then carry the plastic bag literally three yards, go through the gate and then promptly take all the stuff out of the bag and put it back in your handbag.  There's no actual metal detectors or screening, or people looking at the bags.  Baffling.

The Olympic football teams have an age limit on them, so the teams playing today were Honduras Under-18s v Morocco Pre-Teens, and Spain Toddlers v Japan Tweenies.

 

Japan's fans react during the group D,

 London 2012 Olympic Games men's football match (AFP, Graham Stuart)

Honduras and Morocco drew 2-2, while Spain were the definite favourites to win their game.  

However the Japan Tweenies (who bowed politely to the crowd before the start), showed plucky determination, and by the end were breaking away and firing at the goal with spirited determination, if not accuracy.  Warming to the underdogs, and the fact that lack-lustre Spain had obviously thought that the game was in the bag, the crowd began to roar on Japan.  

 Spain's Jordi Alba (R) is challenged by Japan's Gotoku Sakai (L) (AFP, Graham Stuart)

The Spaniards, down to 10 men and suddenly realising that it was all slipping away, began to act in a ridiculously petulant manner, punching opponents and tugging shirts, earning boos from the good-natured crowd.

Japan's Yuki Otsu celebrates after scoring. Photograph: David Moir/Reuters

And so the Japan Tweenies won a historic 1-0 victory, and went home to a well-deserved rusk and a hot bath.

imagine...Dancing with Titian

I caught a really interesting programme on television last night, 'imagine...Dancing with Titian'.  I'm not a great fan of dance, and thought I wouldn't like it, but it was really enthralling.

The programme, with Alan Yentob, documented new artworks and dances inspired by three Titian paintings gathered together at the National Gallery in London for the first time since the 1700s.  The paintings show scenes from Ovid's Metamorphoses based on the myth of Diana.  They are...

 

Titian, Diana and Acteon (Oil on canvas, 1556-9)

Titian, The Death of Acteon (Oil on canvas, 1559)

Titian, Diana and Callisto (Oil on canvas, 1559) (from the National Galleries of Scotland)

These pictures were painted by Titian when he was in his 80s, at a time when, as one of the curators pointed out, he may not have been at the height of his physical powers, but he was at the height of his imaginative powers.  

These are mysterious, sensual paintings, full of texture and layers of glazes and flickering licks of glowing paint.  The paint is applied in various ways, sometimes smudges, or brushed, or dabbed, or looking as if fingers have been used.  It must have seemed radically experimental at the time.

This is echoed by the present day artists in the rest of the National's exhibition.  ‘Metamorphosis: Titian 2012’ features new work by contemporary artists Chris Ofili, Conrad Shawcross and Mark Wallinger in a unique collaboration with The Royal Ballet.

It was the Royal Ballet work that was perhaps the most interesting.  There were three ballets; one inolved a huge industrial robot which represented Diana, and moved on stage in a presence that was both beautiful and menacing, creating a real tension between the human and the mechanical.  And because of the problems that they had with the technology, you literally didn't know what was going to happen, so there was a continual frisson of danger. 

The second ballet had giant mirrors, which reflected not only the dancers but the audience as well, playing with the ideas of voyeurism contained in the Diana story.  

But the last was perhaps visually the most striking, even though it was the simplest, telling the story of the death of Acteon, set upon and killed by the hounds of Diana.  The sets and costumes were designed by Chris Ofili, who is not, I have to say, my favourite artist.  However, here he played an absolute blinder.  

The sets were stunning, with a mysterious forest, like the other-wordliness of the magical forests in Shakespeare, and lit by a huge scarlet red moon.  The fluid costumes and details of the individually designed dogs heads reminded me of the costumes for Parade designed by Picasso in 1917 for the Ballet Russes (which I saw performed some years ago in Edinburgh as part of the Festival).  It was amazing watching the whole creative process, and all the parts coming together.

 

Fusing dance and painting: Federico Bonelli performs 

Diana & Actaeon against the background of Chris Ofili’s psychedelic set design (Picture: © Alastair Muir)

You can watch extracts of the ballets here.

Marianela Nunez and The Royal Ballet in Diana and Actaeon. Metamorphosis: Titian 2012. © ROH/Johan Persson, 2012.

Not all of the connections with the Titian paintings were immediately apparent, but the it was more about the sense of the paintings, the contrasts of sensuality and cruelty, the transformative process.  Chris Ofili's set designs and costumes certainly were the most successful in combining dance with the painterly sense of the Titians.

When Titian painted these Diana pictures in his 80s, at a time in history when life could be cut brutally short at any moment, he must always have felt 'Time's winged chariot hurrying near'.  The fact that Titian's own death and transformation from the mortal was on his mind has greatly informed the work.  This is especially apparent when you look at the paint surface closely, with its wispy, flickery, urgent insubstantial layers of substance conjuring up form, and is possibly most demonstrable in one of his last paintings, the grim Flaying of Marsyas.

Titian, The Flaying of Marsyas (Oil on canvas, 1570-76)

Again from Ovid (read more about it here), it is a truly shocking image, telling the story of the chirpy satyr Marsyas, whose only crime was to play the pipes better than Apollo.  For this, he is flayed alive.  

Again, the paint is flickery and urgent, but spares none of the detail of the horrific scene.  Upside-down, the grimace of the martyred Marsyas looks like a smile.  It looks like Titian is also expressing all the pain and humiliation and injustice of old age itself, with youth and innocence and happiness being pointlessly stripped away until nothing is left.  It's about the pain of being mortal and having a body, and of losing it.  A metamorphosis indeed.

Do have a look at the programme if you can - it's a treat - and the free exhibition is on until 23 September at The National Gallery in London.

See the programme on i-Player here.

Arise, Sir Bradley of Wiggins

Yes, the Modfather of British Cycling has done it*.

Watch out for Chris Froome next year!

*born in Ghent, Australian father

Salvator Rosa's 'Landscape with Jacobs Dream'

I was at Chatsworth House in Derbyshire at the weekend, and in amongst all the grandeur, I came across this great painting by Salvator Rosa.   It's called Landscape with Jacob's Dream.

Salvator Rosa, Landscape with Jacob's Dream (Oil on canvas, 1665)

It's funny when you walk round the corner in somewhere like an old stately home, and you unexpectedly come across a Rosa - it's like meeting the black sheep at a family get-together.

It's a big painting, with Rosa's rugged romantic landscape of rocks and trees taking up the right two thirds and the rather colourful psychadelic dream of Jacob taking up the left hand third.  What hits you is the unusual (for Rosa) punch of three pops of primary colour - red yellow and blue - of the bottom three figures.  That bright, advancing red garment of Jacob, the subject of the painting, is right down there jumping out of the bottom left, and keeps drawing your eye.

There's a discarded wine flagon at the side of the rather abandoned-looking Jacob, which might suggest the origin of the colourful dream - Rosa's good on the nice little quirky details. (His Humana Fragilitas in the Fitzwilliam in Cambridge has a little pile of owl pellets in front of the rather queasy looking owl in the bottom right if you look closely.)  

The landscape echoes the turmoil of the dream, as the trees strain towards the angels as they ascend and descend the ladder to heaven, in a great swirling, agitated circular composition.

It's a big, mature painting, made when the artist was 50.  Here it is in situ at Chatsworth...

Salvator Rosa, Landscape with Jacob's Dream - Chatsworth House

..and here's Jacob in all his loosely painted glory.  Apologies for the camera work (the lighting was really bad with lots of reflection), but take a look at the way those rocks are painted.  There's lots of lovely, loose impressionistic brushwork.  I've blogged before about Rosa here, and how he was out in the great outdoors painting en plein air over 200 years before the Impressionists.  You can really see that in a passage of paint such as this.

Salvator Rosa, Landscape with Jacob's Dream (detail) (Oil on canvas, 1665)

Here's another detail, of the trees on the right hand side.  Again, apologies for the reflections, but they do allow you to see that the leaves  of the tree are painted with raised impasto.  See that area of white where the light is reflecting off the varnish in the bottom right?  You can see dark shapes in the middle of it.  This is the raised paint of the leaves on the branch of the tree coming down from the top right.  The paint is rough and stippled to give the texture of the foliage.

Salvator Rosa, Landscape with Jacob's Dream (detail) (Oil on canvas, 1665)

So instead of the paint surface being smooth and flat so that you can't see the brushmarks, you can very much see the way that the painting is put together - that's a very modern idea.  It's saying that the hand of the maker is allowed to be seen, and the personality of the painter is incorporated as part of the illusion of the painting, rather than being subsumed by it. 

You may not have heard of Rosa today, but he used to be wildly popular, both in his own time and later for the Romantics, for whom he embodied thrillingly wild landscapes peopled with excitingly rugged bad boys.  

Rosa was a bit of a rugged bad boy himself.  Here he is...

Salvator Rosa,  Portrait of the artist, half-length, in a brown doublet 

(c1645, oil on canvas, unlined
29¾ x 23 5/8 in.)

Phew!

Yes, Rosa may not be a name on everyone's lips these days, but there was a show of his work at Dulwich Picture Gallery in London in September 2010, the first major UK show since 1973 (the tercentenary of his death).   This self-portrait was sold at Christie's in London in 2010, just before the Dulwich show opened.

Christie's described it as having 'unfettered strokes and free handling typical of Rosa's graphic work, with brown pigments over a ground layer left partly visible (with) the immediacy of the alla napoletana style', with 'rapid execution, constructed of economical, broad brushstrokes'. 

It had an estimate of £100,000-£150,000.  It sold for - wait for it - £769,250, well over $1.1 million at the time!  

No wonder - take a look at that face.  It's a very intense and compelling image, full of a brooding personality.  It's over 350 years old, but it feels very modern.  It's a manifesto of the self, pertinent today for an age that's all about the self, self-image and self-promotion - something Rosa excelled at.

Maybe this tells us that we're entering a new era of popularity for Salvator Rosa...?

Visit the Chatsworth House website here.  Beautiful house, lovely gardens (very difficult maze to even get into...).  They've also got a small but stunning exhibition of drawings on at the moment, which includes a Rembrandt, a Leonardo and a Titian.

Le Gentleman

Although it's a rest day on the Tour de France today, it looks like (whisper it) Bradley Wiggins is going to win.  That's right.  A British cyclist.  Winning.

The Sun

Dubbed 'Le Gentleman' by the French press after his handling of Sunday's sabotage, where carpet tacks were strewn on the course (rumoured to be put there by a group of militant bald Frenchmen, enraged at the sight of Wiggins' overly-luxurient Noddy Holder side-burns), defending champion Cadel Evans was marooned at the side of the road for what seemed like an age, 29 others got punctures and Robert Kiserlovski crashed and broke his collarbone.  Wiggins, taking his yellow jersey responsibilities seriously, slowed the pelaton to allow the mayhem to get sorted out so that there were no unfair advantages.

 

Lets hope that Team Sky work together to let Manx missile Mark Cavenish have his moment of glory on the Champs Elysees.  Cav has been reduced to tea-boy so far in protecting Wiggins.

 

But barring the unexpected - and the Tour is full of the unexpected - it looks like Bradley Wiggins will be the winner at the weekend.

.

Golden age of British cycling?  That's now!

Cornish Holidays

Did you spend childhood holidays in Cornwall?  If you did, I'd like to hear from you!

I'm preparing for an exhibition of paintings which will be held in spring next year, which has the landscape of Cornwall as its theme.  Three different landscape painters, including myself, will be showcasing their different approaches to painting the same place.

My work is all about an emotional response to a landscape, about what it's actually like to be there, using lots of textures and expressive colour.  Obviously, I'm going to be going to be visiting Cornwall myself, but I'd be very interested to hear from anyone who spent their summers there (or who lives there) and what it means to you. 

What's special about Cornwall?  What sums it up for you?  A particular place? An evocative sound? A colour or smell?  What did you look forward to doing or seeing most on holiday there?  How did going to Cornwall make you feel?

Whatever it is, I'd love to hear from you.  Just leave a comment below - you don't have to be a follower to do so, and you don't have to leave your name.  Or you can drop me a line via my website.

Thank you!