Royal West of England Academy

Having been sent the call for entries for the Royal West of England Academy’s summer open, Through the Lens, by our head of department, it was no surprise to receive the thanks-but-no-thanks answer. The delightful surprise was receiveiving an email amending the reply and asking for two photographs to be delivered ready to hang to the Academy in Bristol. The opening was 7 June.

The full exhibition can be seen online at http://www.rwa.org.uk/open08/gallery1.htm (Im at the end of the first page)

Peering through a window under the archway leading into J.H. Weatherby and Sons. The factory closed in 2000. It was recently destined to become apartments; but the company went bust.

Stoke-on-Trent has many redundant pottery factories, some acquire other uses; or parts of them do. In these fine Victorian potbanks the stillness and emptiness is palpable. Sun streams in but there is no memory of the cacophony and activity of their previous lives. They just wait.

A flaming Tuesday.

I wander unheeded, there are voices –

somewhere in the building.

Draped forms wait patiently,

Like Arthur’s knights,

For the miracle that may occur.

This photo was taken at the old Price and Kensington factory.

A New Experience

An exhibition of work by the Barracks life drawing group, at the Borough Museum and Art Gallery, Newcastle-under-Lyme. This fine show includes three of my life studies, two in ink and one graphite, looking very formal now framed.

The show is based on working with a model who has never posed nude before, as well as all the art it includesa poem she wrote about her feelings and how they changed and developed over a couple of months. As members of the group are arranged around the model to draw, so the work is arranged around the walls so that the viewer finds themselves in the place of the model, being gazed at by photographs of each artist.

I have been doing life drawing for many years, sometimes they get better and sometimes worse. The figure is in many ways the most exacting thing to draw, it is imediately apparent when one does not get it right. Regular drawing does keep the eye and mind alert, drawing does also have a meditative quality about it.

Berlin 5th biennale,2008, 3.

The top floor of the KW Institiute was devoted to an installation by Tris Vonna-Michell about Detroit. We may think Stoke-on-Trent is blighted by industrial decay but the decay to be found in North Amerca is several orders of magnitude greater and grander – we’re talking log scales here!

A couple of years ago I had some free time in Detroit so set off for the Detroit Institute of the Arts. Within were the fantastic, huge murals by Diego Rivera, a paean to the working man. Looking more closely at some of the scenes howerver, they are far from idylic; almost dystopian and were hugely controversial at the time (1932 – 3).

The link to view very good photos of the four walls of mural:

http://www.dia.org/asp/search/ExecuteSearch.asp?artist=rivera%20diego%20m

What a sad irony is the devastation that surrounds this building; completely flat city blocks with occasional large, solidly built hulks left standing but all empty and in ruins as far as one can tell.

Then on into downtown, so bleak to european eyes. The Renaissance Centre (Ren Cen) just offices, no retail to be seen, only the occasional little lunch emporium. All new and clean and totally deserted. Such a place will be populated during office hours and then becomes echoing emptiness. There was talk of a new casino venture which it was hoped would bring flocking tourists and people to populate that little part of the city after business hours.