Half Term Adventures

Okay, so the daily (lessonly) updates fell by the wayside because I got so frantically busy!  The taster courses demand a preposterous amount of work from the students, but then you get to choose one of the topics as a pathway, and the workload after that is (I'm told) less intense.  I decided to pick Fine Art because I want to be an illustrator, and Fine Art is all about conceptual thinking, as well as drawing, painting and printmaking -- and I can still work in Textiles or 3D form if I want.

I do still have photos of my work to upload, though, so I might back-post them in due course.

This week has been half term, a week off to give everyone a breather.  Here's what I've been up to.


-- I went to the pet shop and cooed over wriggling heaps of fluffy bunnies and guinea pigs.

-- I saw David Haig in The Madness of George III at the local theatre.  I missed it in Bath so I was glad to get the chance to see it here.  I didn't know the film and thought it would be a witty Alan Bennett comedy but mostly it was very sad.  Haig is such a ball of rage-fuelled energy, he's brilliant in comedy roles but it's genuinely upsetting to see him strapped into a chair, suppressed and kept prisoner.  After the tour, the production is transferring to the Apollo in London in January.  

-- I visited the Imperial War Museum.  I wanted to research austerity, rationing and 'Dig for Victory' because I thought I might do a project about it -- the Food and Drink theme continues up until Christmas and I'd like to do something with a bit of history to it.  But I don't yet know what the brief's going to be for the Fine Art students, so maybe that will turn out to be not much use.
Unexpectedly, I caught an exhibition about Women War Artists, which was fascinating because they tend to focus on different topics to male artists, especially women's efforts in munitions factories and as doctors and nurses.  Closes 27th November and the book looks great. 
I also saw an exhibition called The Children's War, which includes a full recreation of a 1940s house, eight rooms over two floors, and loads of touching stories about evacuation and Kindertransport.  The museum was very crowded, lots of screeching schoolkids, too young to understand really what they were seeing.  There I was, moved to tears by some of the exhibits about the brave, noble little children in wartime and simultaneously wanting to strangle the kiddies dashing about around me.  The exhibition has been on since 2005 but closes January 2012.  Some photos:

Spanish Civil War propaganda. I didn't know this was the souce of that Manics song title.

'All women love children and like to help them.  Offer your services.'

Turning a gas mask case into a teddy makes a very scary idea palatable.

'Dead Civilians' by Edward Ardizzone. A very bleak watercolour by the great illustrator.

*sob*

-- I made flapjacks.  YUM.

-- My friend Lorna and I had a day out in London.  It was a bright, crisp autumn day, so we went to Holland Park for a walk.  There was a poster in the Tube lift for a place called Leighton House, and Lorna said, 'every time I'm in this lift, I see that poster and think, oh, I'd like to go there.'  So of course we thought that would be a nice thing to do.  It turned out to be the home of Victorian artist Frederick Lord Leighton, and the centrepiece is an Islamic hallway full of peacock-coloured majolica and gold tiles.

It was fascinating but I felt like I needed to go away and read up on the man and his art circle and his Oriental travels before I could come back and really get the most out of it.  Luckily a £5 entry fee gives you a ticket you can keep using for a whole year.

I bought this beautiful mug there, the striated blue glaze reminded me of the pencil drawings of Raymond Briggs.  I think it's handmade, I must find out who the potter was.

We also went to Ladbroke Grove to pick up a typewriter I'd bought on eBay, but I'll post about that separately.


-- Today my family went to the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, to see the exhibition Vermeer's Women.  As well as the Vermeers, there were little paintings by a whole selection of Dutch genre artists like him.  Notably, there were rare paintings lent by several international galleries in Holland, Vienna, New York -- plus private collections like the Queen's and the Louvre's Lacemaker which almost never leaves Paris.
The exhibition is free and was very busy, mostly elderly people politely elbowing their ways to the front of huddles of people.  My mum joined a huddle and a man turned and snarled at her, 'There is a QUEUE, you know.'  Which there absolutely wasn't!  It was a grey, bespectacled free-for-all.  The number of artworks was quite high, but because they're little, the whole exhibition fitted into one room.  Because it was so popular, and the pictures so small, I think it might've been nice to stretch it over two rooms and have an A2 reproduction of each picture nearby, so everyone didn't have to peer and cram in so much.

On the way to the exhibition, I walked past some slipware pottery by Thomas Toft that featured in the recent BBC4 documentary Ceramics: A Fragile History.  It was much more interesting because I'd seen the documentary and knew more about its history and how it was made.  I'd have just walked on by otherwise.

Walking to the Fitzwilliam, I went past a gallery called Cambridge Contemporary Arts and they were selling prints by Rob Ryan and Angie Lewin.  Their prints were going for £400 each, and smaller prints by less well-known names were on sale for £60-£100.  It's very helpful for me to see what contemporary artwork sells for in a gallery because I really haven't the faintest idea.  So it was both, 'oh, that's beautiful, and oh, that's interesting.'  I bought some Christmas cards with a cat-filled print by Edward Bawden.