Open Spaces

Last month I showed some workings for a piece about the New Forest.  It was for this year's open exhibition at Mottisfont (the National Trust house near Romsey), on the theme "open spaces".  I produced a three-colour screenprint together and it was accepted by the selection panel.

"New Forest Heathland"

The forest was my natural response to "open spaces".  The area of heathland south-east of Lyndhurst, down Beaulieu Road and across Yew Tree Heath is my favourite destination for an escape from town.  I wanted to depict not only the tiny details of gorse, fern and heather, but also the signs that the forest is a human landscape:  trig points, telegraph poles, pylons, sign posts, the obvious management of coppices, cattle and ponies and the constant flame of the oil refinery in the distance.

If I were starting the piece now I would be tempted to make reference to John Betjeman's passage about Lyndhurst in "First and Last Loves", in 1952.

People say you cannot properly see the New Forest from the main roads and they are quite right.  But on a warm evening you can smell it between the wafts of petrol scent which linger on the tarmac - the resin scent among the conifers, the coconut smell of gorse on an open heath, the tropic scent like the Palm House at Kew under oaks and beeches, where holly shines and bracken is a young green. 

Outside Lyndhurst the forest begins to look less wild.  Victorian brick cottages peep about among the trees.  Lodge gates stand guard to winding drives of laurel and azalea, at the end of which - how deep, how far, who knows? - are the country houses of the formerly rich.

Hanging my print!

Now one of my seven prints is nicely framed and up on the wall.  Even better...  I hung it myself.

The exhibition is in the upstairs gallery at Mottisfont

28th September to 17th November

11 - 5 daily

Sketches from Copenhagen

I've been on holiday and I need to tell you about it.  I'm turning the lights off, so settle down for my slideshow, with a flexidisc of local music in the background and a plate of well-travelled foreign sweets.

Copenhagen from (nearly) the water and (nearly) the air

The view from the waterside steps of Amaliehaven,
including the opera house and the royal theatre.

The first thing that Adam and I did, after leaving bags at the hotel and finding coffee and cake, was to go up the Rundetårn for a view.  The first impression is that Copenhagen is bristling with spires and steeples and spirals and spikes.  I filled a page with towers of all kinds and in all directions, not knowing yet which were the main sights.

The view from the Rundetårn, on the first day, and the Glyptoteket, on the last.

I fixated upon the "pile-of-onions" construction, which I suppose has a proper name.  There will be a half-dome on top of a balcony, on top of an onion dome, balanced on a ring of balls, on top of an another onion dome, on top of a colonnade, on top of another dome, on top of a belfry.  The most important buildings are topped off with a series of crowns before the weathervane and cross.

The little roof café of Illum department store became one of our favourite places to drink coffee and play with panoramic functions.  On the last day we found another terrace, on top of the Glyptoteket (helpful translation:  Glyptotek), a large museum of antiquities, palms and impressionism.  It's right by Tivoli gardens and the fairground rides that are the source of screams that punctuate the day.

The opera house and royal theatre again,
with the new bridge.

The waterfront gives a different kind of view.  Studded along it are grand modern edifices:  the Royal Library (the "Black Diamond"), the Royal Theatre, the Opera House, modern apartment blocks and now a new sliding bridge from Nyhavn to Christianshavn.

I spent a lot of time sitting and sketching, changing cartridges over, letting watercolours dry - or giving up and taking photos to work from later.

Nyhavn is the main tourist strip, being a picturesque row of coloured harbourside houses.  If you've seen a guidebook to Copenhagen or Denmark, it's probably on the cover.  For those arriving on tours, it's the first destination.  Coming from any other direction, as I did, it is currently obscured a little by the ongoing work on a new underground line.  I'm a sucker for a lightship, so here is the Gedser Rev.

The colourful waterside buildings of Nyhavn.

Building and Buildings

Building work is a peppercorn in the sugarbowl of urban holidaymaking.  It's hard not to be disappointed when the picturesque fountains are dry, the boulevard is being torn up and the station is surrounded by fences.  I've already mentioned the underground work in Copenhagen, and I'm sure it's a wonderful thing in the long term.  Rosenborg Castle was semi-shrouded.  A local paper showed one of the statues being lifted from the roof for safety during renovation.

Rosenborg Castle, undergoing renovation.

The modern buildings are dotted about too.  We marvelled every day at the international style SAS hotel.  The national bank headquarters are like the SAS building lying flat, and clad like a fortress.  Nykredit has a whole plaza of buildings with glass, sharp angles and gaps underneath.

Modernist blocks.

More towers and courtyards.

The sculpture garden at Louisiana.

Two departures, outside Copenhagen

We took a train up the Öresund coast to Humlebæk to visit Louisiana.  The gallery holds 20th century modern art, ancient pottery and a temporary exhibition of Yoko Ono, but the main attraction was the garden full of Danish and international sculpture.  I sat on the manicured lawn, first in very gentle rain and later in hot sun, drawing the stones and looking across to Sweden.

A few miles further north is Helsingør.  Being not only the setting of Hamlet, but the shortest journey for booze-cruising Swedes, everything is as cartoonishly Danish as possible, in its run-down way.  The streets are hung with flags; the ferries chug in and out, and the shops declare the price comparisons for various spirits.  Adam calls it a cross between Dover and Stratford-upon-Avon.  I started drawing on the train back, thinking that I must look like the most patriotic little Danish boy, filling a page with red and white flags.

Danetastic Helsingør.

People are worth drawing too

To finish off, here is a jumble of people.  I've arranged them for a two-page spread in a newspaper, which I hope will all go ahead in the next few weeks [EDIT:  it did!].  I didn't get to include the English morris men, some of whom were on our flight home, after performing on the waterfront.  Airports are not easy when you're covered in bells.

A spread of people drawn on holiday.

Moss

Here is one of my rare nature moments, from a few years ago, at university.

I was experimenting with texture in screenprinting.  I wanted to build dense prints from layers of simple strokes and flecks.

This piece was intended to be a subtle evocation of damp, velvety mosses on a wall.  The staff were not at all sure what I was trying to achieve with this variety of blobs and smudges.  I put it down as another instance of me having some atavistic feeling in my head that doesn't translate into reality.

My five-layered screenprint of moss.

Moss, lichen, heather and grasses have two associations for me.  The first is homely and human:  a part of nature that sits, semi-cultivated, in a human environment, the subject of diligent but leisurely botanical study; knowledgeable but twee.  I see shafts of dusty sunlight in the country gardener's shed in an Edwardian children's book.

The second is primal and timeless:  windy, prehistoric or post-apocalyptic heath and fenland, silent but for a few marsh birds or the sound of a Jute being scalped in a bog; ancient buildings fallen to ruin and repopulated by unassuming but patient plantlife.

Most of the time I need to make pictures relatively quickly.  In my case, that leads to a lot of little people, buildings and boats.  But I could enjoy spending weeks in a print room, making backgrounds, surrounded by pots of honesty and heads of pampas grass, studying the leaf-structure of heathers and hebes...  and drawing them with a more refined series of blobs and streaks.

Winchester Cathedral

Winchester has a thing called the 10 Days Festival.

Badger Press, in Bishop's Waltham, set a brief for artists to make prints to go on display in Winchester, including the number 10, all ten inches square and in editions of ten.

Count the Tens - my print for Badger Press.

I had fun putting together a hotch-potch of Winchester Cathedral - the tiles, the Norman and gothic arches, the carved heads, the ancient graffiti and so on.  I had a demo sketch, but on Tuesday I made a research trip for a few more ideas.  This lead on to lunch (for my birthday) at Loch Fyne

Today I drew the final image, in two layers, and screenprinted it - with technical backup from the wonderful Omid and Clari.

Demo for the Winchester 10 Days print.

The deadline is this Sunday and the festival is from 25th October to 3rd November.

New Forest - Work In Progress

My favourite bit of non-town to head to is the part of the New Forest between Lyndhurst and Beaulieu.  The fastest I've ever managed the cycle ride to Lyndhurst was 39 minutes - although that may have been the time when I set out around 4am on a Saturday and went over the Millbrook and Redbridge flyovers.  Sometimes I come back on the Hythe ferry.

Drawing near Lyndhurst.

I love simply riding steadily on the roads.  Beaulieu Road undulates consistently (though generally downhill) as it runs south from Lyndhurst.  I love the open skies of the heathland, the fine sand between rows of heather and the medieval feel of the low pine groves.  It's Medieval and yet somehow Californian.

For me, it's a surprise to be in such a quiet place, even with groups of cyclists and classic car drivers, and pylons and the Fawley oil refinery usually visible.  I love the occasional trig points and burial mounds, opposite ends of the timeline of human activity.

Demo for a piece based on the New Forest.

I'm trying to put a piece together about it all.  My work is usually about busy details, not vast space, so it's a challenge to evoke the enigmatic silence, the wide sky and the warm colours of gorse and heather.

Too Many Tall Buildings

My Boris Johnson
Weathervane plan
for the Shard.

I've given some attention to tall buildings in the past few weeks and months, from serene campaniles to Sixties campuses.

Today Simon Jenkins, chairman of the National Trust, wrote in the Guardian about the colossal towers soon to spring up in developments all over London; what they will be for; who says yes or no; and why anyone wants them.  As you might guess, he is largely in the "against" position.

Here is the piece:  Who let this Gulf on Thames scar London?  Mayor Boris.

In the last decade, mayor Ken Livingstone was all about tall buildings and the futuristic lens-flare of prosperity that would bounce off their gleaming façades and all over London.  Now Jenkins is pointing the finger at Boris Johnson for opposing in principle and allowing in practice.

Otto's illustration for the Guardian. 

Jenkins writes:  "Towers imply civic leadership weak in the face of commercial pressure. They are not "vital" to the urban economy, least of all in a low-density city such as London. The last rash of speculative towers such as Centre Point in the 1970s mostly lay empty until rented for government offices. Today's are not built for people to use but as sleeping bank accounts for funk money. The Shard may well stay largely empty, like One Hyde Park and the palaces of Palm Island, Dubai. The rich may own them, but not inhabit them."

London in 2259, in Star Trek Into Darkness.

To me, the Shard, Heron Tower, the Walkie Talkie, the Cheesegrater and all the coming statements of bigness were referenced - almost satirised - in the new Star Trek, as the early phase of a monolithic sprouting all over the city (which, I admit, is hardly new).  What do you think?  Are your eyes set twinkling, or do you see a future of grand embarrassment over empty projects, or grim dystopia?

Optical Lattice Clock

The news this morning told me about a new type of clock, better than an atomic clock!  The whole thing seemed exciting and optimistic in an old-fashioned way.  I imagined children gossiping about the new technological wonder; explanations in layman's terms; textbooks of the future; and so on.

So here are those things.

Fanfare for a new clock!

Read about it at the BBC.
I like living in the future!