It sounded as though the open weekend went off OK. Saturday's miserable weather hit attendance a bit, but the new tea room was a success with visitors. It does suddenly look quite good. When I left work a week ago it had no tables or chairs, none of the catering equipment was plumbed in, and the two new windows were still boarded up. By the weekend all was finished, and the walls decorated with some reasonably attractive prints. It was unfortunate that the man who was supposed to come and fit the new coffee machine failed to show up at the appointed time, and staff training ended up being done late on Thursday afternoon, when everybody was exhausted, but the catering student the owner met at a village fund raising supper and recruited to help out turned out to know how the coffee machine worked, which was a stroke of luck.
I think they are looking for staff for the tea room, at least for the summer, as I took a phone call from somebody enquiring about the job. The owner ran it for today, but I don't think that's going to be a runner in more than the short term. She went out first thing, and as customers started to arrive we began to realise that we didn't know how much we were supposed to charge for any of the hot drinks or the cakes. Later on I had to summon her from her lunch to make two cups of coffee. I cleared a few tables in quiet moments on the till, but slunk into the very edge of the kitchen area, put the crockery down and slid out again. The owner pointed out where the sink for washing hands was, but I still don't think I should be in the kitchen. I'm quite sure the dog shouldn't have been there, but of course an open plan tea room and kitchen with the possibility of cake crumbs are going to act like a magnet to the dog.
At lunchtime I went for a walk round the garden, something I don't do very often. It still wasn't really warm enough to sit outside, but pleasant strolling about. I found the gardener dividing clumps of snowdrops, and we discussed whether it hurt them doing it at this time of year. There is a theory among some snowdrop experts that it weakens the plants, as normally they would be making leafy growth and storing up reserves for next year after flowering. The gardener's view was that it never seemed to do them any harm, and we agreed that if you didn't do it around now you couldn't see where they were, or where the gaps were in existing bulb plantings.
I sat briefly on a bench, admiring the blue sky and white fluffy clouds, and the buzzards gliding high overhead. There was a very beautiful magnolia in full flower, with great chalice shaped flowers flushed pink. I went and checked its name on the label, and realised when I got back into the plant centre that I had already forgotten it. It's a sign of age. Later on I had a very confusing conversation with a customer who was after a peony called 'Beauty of Livermere', since I thought that was a variety of oriental poppy. I was very relieved when in the end I appealed to the manager for clarification, and he said that there was both a peony and a poppy with that name, and that we only did the latter.
We are showing some sculptures in the garden, I discovered when I walked down there, which explains why we have leaflets about the sculptor displayed in the shop. They were all of skinny figures with exaggeratedly long limbs, and postures suggesting anguish, not bad as eye-catchers if you wanted a sculpture in your garden, but derivative. I heard the other day on the radio that Tatty Devine were suing Claire's Accessories for ripping off some of their jewellery designs, and Elizabeth Frink and Giacometti would have a pretty good case against this chap.
Showing posts with label sculpture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sculpture. Show all posts
Monday, 19 March 2012
Thursday, 2 June 2011
another art work
We recently installed another art work in the back garden. This was the culmination of an incredibly protracted process, that started three years ago, if not four, when I saw a sculpture I wanted in the Museum Selection catalogue. It was the head of a Muse, Thalia as it happens, the muse of comedy, and I liked it very much. However, I didn't want to pay the full price for it. The catalogue has periodic sales, so I tracked it until the head was reduced. Obviously the risk you take is that the coveted item never makes it to a sale, but I thought that if I failed to get this one, something else would turn up, and held my nerve. Until the first reduction, that is. I decided not to press my luck and wait for a further drop in price.
The head arrived in spring 2010, and spent the summer living on one of the chairs in the study. I liked it there, but it used to give visitors rather a turn, and even the Systems Administrator forgot it was there sometimes, and would get a shock going into the room. Come the chilly autumn nights we moved back into the study, and the head was banished to the spare bedroom. The reason for the delay is that I was trying to work out what to use as a plinth. I imagined the head tucked into a shady corner between two trees, hovering above me on a tall classical column. I don't like fake pillars made out of drainpipes. A proper classical column swells in the middle and tapers towards the top. I think this idea owed a lot to the wonderful pillars salvaged from the old Coutts Bank in The Strand by Sir Frederick Gibberd at his garden at Harlow. However, classical columns around 2m tall don't seem very easy to come by. The artificial stone companies sell them, for unbelievable amounts of money, and I found a company that made them out of weatherproof plastic, but they cost a small fortune as well. Also I couldn't work out how I would get the pillar to stay up, mounting it as a freestanding object on soft ground.
After we used a piece of telegraph pole for the holey stone, I considered using a longer section of that, but my partner said that a classical head would look silly on an old telegraph pole, and how did I propose to get the pole to stand up. When we started stocking Haddonstone at work I eyed up their plinths, since by then I had begun to realise that a 2m column in my chosen corner would put the head up inside the crown of the trees. However, the reconstituted stone plinths, besides being expensive, weighed 65kg, and I didn't see how we were going to get one to the bottom of the garden without rupturing ourselves. The answer seemed to be that the plinth needed to be hollow, to reduce the weight.
I ended up buying a black terrazzo finish concrete cylindrical flowerpot. It is not remotely classical in inspiration, but looks not unlike the plinths used in exhibitions at The British Museum or The Royal Academy. (I'd found a supplier online who made rather nice MDF plinths, but I didn't think they'd last outdoors). The only drawback with the flowerpot , turned upside down, is that the base is not graphite coloured fake marble, but plain concrete. This problem was solved by buying the smallest and cheapest pot of black acrylic paint that our local art shop stocked. (They are very good that way. I once went in to get some cobalt blue paint to renovate a table, and the chap ahead of me in the queue wanted paint for his outdoor model railway). My partner had advised getting a sample pot of black Sandtex or similar, but I couldn't find small ones, or indeed black, in B&Q. Maybe I was looking in the wrong aisle. The painted base, seen sideways on, from a distance, in shadow, blends in perfectly well. If it fades I can always retouch it, since I have most of the pot of paint left over.
The nervewracking bit was attaching the head to the plinth. We thought she should be bolted down in some way, to stop her blowing off. As she was going to fall onto soft earth she would probably have taken no harm, unless she chipped herself on the edge of the flowerpot, but I want to walk down the garden and see her in place, not find her lying on the ground with earth on her face. My partner is the technical expert in such cases, and said that it would be possible to drill a hole in the base of the head, which was clearly hollow, and that it would not fragment into a thousand bits. The plinth, being a flowerpot, came with a handy hole already in the centre, so we could bolt the head through the top of the plinth (formerly the bottom of the flowerpot). I was rather glad not to know when the drilling operation took place, but the head duly emerged from the workshop with a neat 15mm hole in the base of the neck. A threaded rod was fixed to the head using a spring butterfly clip, a washer fitted, the rod fed through the hole in the plinth, and a bolt fastened inside the pot. It took a bit of packing to stop her from wobbling, as the washer held her slightly proud of the top of the plinth, but she was finally in place, about fifteen months after I bought her.
She is a 21st century copy of a Roman copy of a Greek original. I don't mind her being a copy. After all, I look at reproductions every day on the internet and in books, so why not in a garden? Classical statues have formed part of the English garden tradition since the Grand Tour took off. I can share the culture, I just can't afford the original. It would be nice, though, to find more modern art intended for garden use. We look at the statues every year at Chelsea, and most of them are unbelievable kitsch. (I can't decide which are worse, the fantasy goblins or the badly-drawn-from-life small children and labradors). And most of them are made out of bronze, and cost a lot of money. There seems very little on the market between those and the concrete statues on offer at the less upmarket garden centres. Why some enterprising person can't come up with some attractive original designs that could be affordably manufactured in modern materials beats me. My partner says that the head of the muse is made out of polyester, which is the P bit of GRP as used for yacht hulls, without the glass reinforcing bit. A project for some of our young design graduates, instead of them all wanting to fill the RA with tables covered in bags of maltesers.
The head has two functions in the garden. One is as an eye-catcher. She is hidden by vegetation from some directions, then you find her as you go around the corner, and see her across the lawn. When I did my year two Design module at Writtle a tutor wrote on one assignment that I needed to think about the placing of focal points. I have been thinking about it ever since, though he might have expanded on his feedback a bit. The head's second funtion is to symbolise the mind, then as you go on around the garden you get to a terracotta nude torso by Dominique Keeling of the Whichford Pottery (body) and the seated Buddha (spirit). The holey stone doesn't symbolise anything, it is just a stone, though the white of the stone and brown of the telegraph pole plinth have been placed to echo the colour of bark of the neighbouring birch tree. I forgot to mention that before.
I tried to take some photos for you. I am one of the world's most inept and reluctant photographers, and my camera didn't appreciate standing in bright sun and being asked to photograph statues in deep shade, but here they are.
Head of a Muse the Maiden the seated Buddha
and in case you've forgetten what it looks like the holey stone.
I have planted a couple of yews behind the head of the muse, to try and get it so she is seen against a dark green, inpenetrable foliage background, instead of the rabbit fence as as present. These sculptural installations take time.
The head arrived in spring 2010, and spent the summer living on one of the chairs in the study. I liked it there, but it used to give visitors rather a turn, and even the Systems Administrator forgot it was there sometimes, and would get a shock going into the room. Come the chilly autumn nights we moved back into the study, and the head was banished to the spare bedroom. The reason for the delay is that I was trying to work out what to use as a plinth. I imagined the head tucked into a shady corner between two trees, hovering above me on a tall classical column. I don't like fake pillars made out of drainpipes. A proper classical column swells in the middle and tapers towards the top. I think this idea owed a lot to the wonderful pillars salvaged from the old Coutts Bank in The Strand by Sir Frederick Gibberd at his garden at Harlow. However, classical columns around 2m tall don't seem very easy to come by. The artificial stone companies sell them, for unbelievable amounts of money, and I found a company that made them out of weatherproof plastic, but they cost a small fortune as well. Also I couldn't work out how I would get the pillar to stay up, mounting it as a freestanding object on soft ground.
After we used a piece of telegraph pole for the holey stone, I considered using a longer section of that, but my partner said that a classical head would look silly on an old telegraph pole, and how did I propose to get the pole to stand up. When we started stocking Haddonstone at work I eyed up their plinths, since by then I had begun to realise that a 2m column in my chosen corner would put the head up inside the crown of the trees. However, the reconstituted stone plinths, besides being expensive, weighed 65kg, and I didn't see how we were going to get one to the bottom of the garden without rupturing ourselves. The answer seemed to be that the plinth needed to be hollow, to reduce the weight.
I ended up buying a black terrazzo finish concrete cylindrical flowerpot. It is not remotely classical in inspiration, but looks not unlike the plinths used in exhibitions at The British Museum or The Royal Academy. (I'd found a supplier online who made rather nice MDF plinths, but I didn't think they'd last outdoors). The only drawback with the flowerpot , turned upside down, is that the base is not graphite coloured fake marble, but plain concrete. This problem was solved by buying the smallest and cheapest pot of black acrylic paint that our local art shop stocked. (They are very good that way. I once went in to get some cobalt blue paint to renovate a table, and the chap ahead of me in the queue wanted paint for his outdoor model railway). My partner had advised getting a sample pot of black Sandtex or similar, but I couldn't find small ones, or indeed black, in B&Q. Maybe I was looking in the wrong aisle. The painted base, seen sideways on, from a distance, in shadow, blends in perfectly well. If it fades I can always retouch it, since I have most of the pot of paint left over.
The nervewracking bit was attaching the head to the plinth. We thought she should be bolted down in some way, to stop her blowing off. As she was going to fall onto soft earth she would probably have taken no harm, unless she chipped herself on the edge of the flowerpot, but I want to walk down the garden and see her in place, not find her lying on the ground with earth on her face. My partner is the technical expert in such cases, and said that it would be possible to drill a hole in the base of the head, which was clearly hollow, and that it would not fragment into a thousand bits. The plinth, being a flowerpot, came with a handy hole already in the centre, so we could bolt the head through the top of the plinth (formerly the bottom of the flowerpot). I was rather glad not to know when the drilling operation took place, but the head duly emerged from the workshop with a neat 15mm hole in the base of the neck. A threaded rod was fixed to the head using a spring butterfly clip, a washer fitted, the rod fed through the hole in the plinth, and a bolt fastened inside the pot. It took a bit of packing to stop her from wobbling, as the washer held her slightly proud of the top of the plinth, but she was finally in place, about fifteen months after I bought her.
She is a 21st century copy of a Roman copy of a Greek original. I don't mind her being a copy. After all, I look at reproductions every day on the internet and in books, so why not in a garden? Classical statues have formed part of the English garden tradition since the Grand Tour took off. I can share the culture, I just can't afford the original. It would be nice, though, to find more modern art intended for garden use. We look at the statues every year at Chelsea, and most of them are unbelievable kitsch. (I can't decide which are worse, the fantasy goblins or the badly-drawn-from-life small children and labradors). And most of them are made out of bronze, and cost a lot of money. There seems very little on the market between those and the concrete statues on offer at the less upmarket garden centres. Why some enterprising person can't come up with some attractive original designs that could be affordably manufactured in modern materials beats me. My partner says that the head of the muse is made out of polyester, which is the P bit of GRP as used for yacht hulls, without the glass reinforcing bit. A project for some of our young design graduates, instead of them all wanting to fill the RA with tables covered in bags of maltesers.
The head has two functions in the garden. One is as an eye-catcher. She is hidden by vegetation from some directions, then you find her as you go around the corner, and see her across the lawn. When I did my year two Design module at Writtle a tutor wrote on one assignment that I needed to think about the placing of focal points. I have been thinking about it ever since, though he might have expanded on his feedback a bit. The head's second funtion is to symbolise the mind, then as you go on around the garden you get to a terracotta nude torso by Dominique Keeling of the Whichford Pottery (body) and the seated Buddha (spirit). The holey stone doesn't symbolise anything, it is just a stone, though the white of the stone and brown of the telegraph pole plinth have been placed to echo the colour of bark of the neighbouring birch tree. I forgot to mention that before.
I tried to take some photos for you. I am one of the world's most inept and reluctant photographers, and my camera didn't appreciate standing in bright sun and being asked to photograph statues in deep shade, but here they are.
Head of a Muse the Maiden the seated Buddha
and in case you've forgetten what it looks like the holey stone.
I have planted a couple of yews behind the head of the muse, to try and get it so she is seen against a dark green, inpenetrable foliage background, instead of the rabbit fence as as present. These sculptural installations take time.
Thursday, 12 May 2011
found object as art (or at least decoration)
Last autumn we went on holiday to North Yorkshire (it is an interesting part of the world, and I recommend it highly). One of the places we visited was Flamborough Head, a great chalk outcrop that juts into the sea below Scarborough. Growing up in the West Country and living in the flatlands of East Anglia, I enjoy an occasional trip to a good cliff, to remind me what verticality looks like. I was not disappointed by Flamborough Head, except that I thought it was a pity the council had put signs all around the edge reading 'Please be careful in this cliff-top environment'. For goodness sake, if you're going to patronise people's intelligence then at least make it snappy, something along the lines of 'Danger. Do not fall over the cliff' or 'Falling 120m can be fatal'.
After admiring the Head we went down to the South beach, and being a keen beachcomber I kept my eyes largely on the ground. I was rewarded by a large pebble with a hole in it, which immediately disappeared into my coat pocket. I'm sure there is a by-law against taking stones from the beach, and so there should be, but that must be meant to stop you taking stones by the sackful, not one special pebble. We made it back to the car without being apprehended by a council warden, and the stone came home with me to Essex.
I wanted to display it in the garden as a sculpture. Having tastes that run to Barbara Hepworth and Eric Gill, and a budget that runs to B&Q, this was the nearest I was going to get to my own Henry Moore. I could provide a found plinth, in the form of a section of old telegraph pole, but was utterly stumped by the practical problem of how to mount the stone on the plinth, except by having something specially made. This defeated the aim of the installation being entirely a found object, but the stone was heavy and my metal working skills non-existent.
(We had the remains of four telegraph poles, because the phone line to us and about twenty other properties, including the lettuce farm, used to run alongside the edge of the wood. After years of trees falling on the line, BT finally realised it would be sensible to move it, and the lettuce farmer said they could put it along the side of his field. It was in his interests, since it is difficult to run a salad enterprise with no telephone. I never felt particularly guilty about our trees falling on the phone wire, since it was clearly a very silly place to have put it in the first place. BT were happy to leave us with the sawn off poles instead of carting them away, and we were happy to keep them).
I initially visualised a bronze holder like an acorn cup, but bronze was out of the question. I toyed with the idea of an iron cup, but began to worry that when water collected and froze in the holder, the stone might shatter, and settled on an iron spiral. The first time I made an appointment with a local blacksmith, I went hurrying round there straight after work as agreed, and the forge was shut up and nobody there. Cursing him as a time-waster (and it was a very nasty right turn back on to the main road) I tried Tatam's of Wakes Colne, which was a further drive from home but looked a professional set-up. The current smith is the third generation on this site, his son is being trained in the business, and before coming to Essex they were blacksmiths in Cornwall, so smithying is fairly in their blood.
I explained what I wanted, we agreed the diameter of rod to use, and I had to leave the stone with them. It is brittle, being chalk, and I had awful visions of it being accidentally dropped and smashed on the smithy floor. I felt quite ashamed when I went to collect the finished support, and the smith showing me how the stone fitted in the holder unwrapped it from its bag with the delicacy of someone unfolding a rare piece of antique lace. I realised that when you spend your days working with lumps of red hot iron you don't randomly drop things, but learn to move with as much control and precision as an instrument maker. The fit was incredible. The pebble is flatter on one face than the other, and will only fit only one way round into the stand, which then holds it snugly. That was beaten out by hand, from a material that shrinks as it cools. The smith had been unwilling to quote me a firm price before starting, explaining that he didn't know how long it would take, but reassured me that I was looking at somewhere in the thirty to fifty quid range, not hundreds. In the event the bill for my tailor-made, bespoke piece of ironwork, finished in exterior grade black paint, was thirty-five pounds. I thought this was very good value, and urge anybody in the area who needs a piece of ironwork to go and support Roger Tatam, Original Ironwork.
Last week we installed the piece. My partner succeeded in mounting the stand vertically in the telegraph pole, which is something I could not have done. The proportions of the stone and stand together relative to the height of the plinth is based on the golden ratio. Here is the complete installation and here is the stone in close-up. It is aligned so that if you look through the hole, it frames a statue of the buddha who sits in front of the wood (and next to the septic tank), but I couldn't work out how to photograph that. I think you need to have got beyond autofocus. A friend suggested placing it to frame the rising sun at the solstice, which was a good idea but I'm not sure where I'd have put it to achieve that, and the effect would only work once a year, whereas the buddha is there all the time. It acts as a good eye-catcher to lead your eye across the bottom part of the garden, and the plinth will be useful for running the hose around when I need to water down there.
I don't have the faintest idea if it's Art, but I like it.
After admiring the Head we went down to the South beach, and being a keen beachcomber I kept my eyes largely on the ground. I was rewarded by a large pebble with a hole in it, which immediately disappeared into my coat pocket. I'm sure there is a by-law against taking stones from the beach, and so there should be, but that must be meant to stop you taking stones by the sackful, not one special pebble. We made it back to the car without being apprehended by a council warden, and the stone came home with me to Essex.
I wanted to display it in the garden as a sculpture. Having tastes that run to Barbara Hepworth and Eric Gill, and a budget that runs to B&Q, this was the nearest I was going to get to my own Henry Moore. I could provide a found plinth, in the form of a section of old telegraph pole, but was utterly stumped by the practical problem of how to mount the stone on the plinth, except by having something specially made. This defeated the aim of the installation being entirely a found object, but the stone was heavy and my metal working skills non-existent.
(We had the remains of four telegraph poles, because the phone line to us and about twenty other properties, including the lettuce farm, used to run alongside the edge of the wood. After years of trees falling on the line, BT finally realised it would be sensible to move it, and the lettuce farmer said they could put it along the side of his field. It was in his interests, since it is difficult to run a salad enterprise with no telephone. I never felt particularly guilty about our trees falling on the phone wire, since it was clearly a very silly place to have put it in the first place. BT were happy to leave us with the sawn off poles instead of carting them away, and we were happy to keep them).
I initially visualised a bronze holder like an acorn cup, but bronze was out of the question. I toyed with the idea of an iron cup, but began to worry that when water collected and froze in the holder, the stone might shatter, and settled on an iron spiral. The first time I made an appointment with a local blacksmith, I went hurrying round there straight after work as agreed, and the forge was shut up and nobody there. Cursing him as a time-waster (and it was a very nasty right turn back on to the main road) I tried Tatam's of Wakes Colne, which was a further drive from home but looked a professional set-up. The current smith is the third generation on this site, his son is being trained in the business, and before coming to Essex they were blacksmiths in Cornwall, so smithying is fairly in their blood.
I explained what I wanted, we agreed the diameter of rod to use, and I had to leave the stone with them. It is brittle, being chalk, and I had awful visions of it being accidentally dropped and smashed on the smithy floor. I felt quite ashamed when I went to collect the finished support, and the smith showing me how the stone fitted in the holder unwrapped it from its bag with the delicacy of someone unfolding a rare piece of antique lace. I realised that when you spend your days working with lumps of red hot iron you don't randomly drop things, but learn to move with as much control and precision as an instrument maker. The fit was incredible. The pebble is flatter on one face than the other, and will only fit only one way round into the stand, which then holds it snugly. That was beaten out by hand, from a material that shrinks as it cools. The smith had been unwilling to quote me a firm price before starting, explaining that he didn't know how long it would take, but reassured me that I was looking at somewhere in the thirty to fifty quid range, not hundreds. In the event the bill for my tailor-made, bespoke piece of ironwork, finished in exterior grade black paint, was thirty-five pounds. I thought this was very good value, and urge anybody in the area who needs a piece of ironwork to go and support Roger Tatam, Original Ironwork.
Last week we installed the piece. My partner succeeded in mounting the stand vertically in the telegraph pole, which is something I could not have done. The proportions of the stone and stand together relative to the height of the plinth is based on the golden ratio. Here is the complete installation and here is the stone in close-up. It is aligned so that if you look through the hole, it frames a statue of the buddha who sits in front of the wood (and next to the septic tank), but I couldn't work out how to photograph that. I think you need to have got beyond autofocus. A friend suggested placing it to frame the rising sun at the solstice, which was a good idea but I'm not sure where I'd have put it to achieve that, and the effect would only work once a year, whereas the buddha is there all the time. It acts as a good eye-catcher to lead your eye across the bottom part of the garden, and the plinth will be useful for running the hose around when I need to water down there.
I don't have the faintest idea if it's Art, but I like it.
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