Usually, I post my ‘News’ report a few days into the following months. However, this time, I am posting it a few days early into the preceding month. This because I know I shall be travelling here and there a bit, and not much time to sit and consider with the system open before me.
Also, in order to break the pattern a bit, I thought I would do a ‘special’ art posting, since I have done quite a few exhibitions in the past few weeks.
It began with David Haughton at the Penlee Gallery in Penzance. Not a name I had really come across before. It seems he ‘discovered’ St Just in Penwith after he moved to St Ives, Cornwall in 1947. Anyway, he appears to have had an epiphany there and he spent several years painting and drawing not much else. The work had every lane and road of this small village/ town perched up inland from Cape Cornwall. He joined the Penwith Society of artists and exhibited with the best of them, but it was an epiphany that had its drawback as this work completely overshadowed anything else he did after he left to teach in London. Still, interesting stuff.
Another Cornwall-based exhibition was the new one at Tate St Ives with the theme: ‘Virginia Woolf: An Exhibition inspired by her work’. The paradox was that it included some great pieces of art from female artists. However, it was not clear to me at all to what extent Woolf came into the show, or indeed should have. Just sloppy curating in my view. Also, some rather over-exaggerated remarks about Ithell Colquhoun and her network of associates. I have no evidence IC ever read Woolf let alone was influenced by her.
Incidentally, my article on Ithell Colquhoun is now published.
http://www.michaelgrenfell.co.uk/art/ithel-colquhoun-painter-and-magician/
More London shows…
First one of epic proportions by the German photographer Andreas Gursky. It is difficult to suggest the scale of these pictures on a small screen. They tower above you with clarity and colour. Of course, we are talking about photography in a ‘post truth’ world, so they have all been ‘doctored’ to exaggerate certain aspects of the pieces – various figures repeats, re-positioned, and other elements removed. They suggest that what we see is not what exists, amongst other messages. Sometimes they are fun; at others there is a gaping silence when confronted with the essence of a situation, now distilled out into sharp relief.
Two cracking shows at the Tate Modern:
Joan Jonas and her incredible installations: again, we are talking ‘post human’, ‘post feminist’, ‘post truth’, indeed post post…..’
Each one brings you face to face with an angular aspect of life.
The Picasso exhibition displays work from a single year 1932. I went thinking I had seen it all before and was again completely balled over by his level of creativity – and in some many different forms and media. Kind of humbling as well when one thinks about what British artists were doing at the time – he was moving so fast!!
Then, Tacita Dean and things ‘about to disappear’. She really brings a kind of spiritual regard on both the mundane and epic. One almost ends up looking at one’s own ‘looking at’. Very moving.
Book reading is Karmic Traces, which does the same sort of thing in writings.:
