Open Air Art in Rouen: the Boieldieu bridge

Last week I went with a school friend on a package tour to Normandy with the aim of seeing as much art from the Impressionist Festival www.normandie-impressioniste.com as possible.  The festival continues until the end of September.  Unfortunately we could not find a tour that focussed on art history or the festival in July and I was not prepared to drive as I have done very little driving on the continent so we ended up on a more general tour.  Overall we did quite well though as we had quite a bit of free time.  In addition to very interesting exhibitions in museums (to follow) there were a number of open air pieces of art in Rouen.  The most spectacular of these is an installation by Arne Quinze on the Boieldieu Bridge right in the centre of the city.

It is built of wood and looks very light.  It takes up most of the space on the bridge and buses have had to be diverted.

Walking across the bridge underneath it is interesting.  The artist says that the installation aims to reproduce the energy of the original impressionists and to make the energy absorb the spectator in an active way.  I am not sure if I quite understand this!

The bridge has several permanent sculptures as well as a row of busts of famous explorers.  They are an interesting juxtaposition to this temporary work.  I do not know who the sculptor of the main pieces was but they remind me of Eric Gill's work.

As you can see, they represent Viking warriors who invaded this part of France.

And here is the second one end on:

There are lovely views of the old part of the city and the cathedral from this bridge, not to mention a city plage  on the river bank.  That is what the people leaning over the bridge are looking at.

Near the bridge on the embankment are some very small art objects.  We managed to find them but could not understand what they were saying!  I also found an interesting exhibition in the basement of Galleries Lafeyette.  These were photographs of Mount Fuji taken at different times of the day and at different seasons.  I have never given much thought to Mount Fuji and some of these made it look almost like something out of the mid-West of the USA.  Next day we went to Giverney and I began to learn about the connections between the Impressionists and Japan.  I knew there was a connection with pottery and Bernard Leach but I knew nothing of the Japanese influence on the painters.

Port Eliot Literary Festival

Since my last posting I have had two holidays: or rather, a week in Normandy followed by two days at home to do the washing etc. and then a weekend at the Port Eliot Literary Festival in St Germans. porteliotfestival.com  My sister has lived in St Germans for several years but is moving away next week so she very kindly invited me to join her at the festival.  The festival combines literature and music and also has lots of traditional fair type attractions.  And the food is very good!

There was a flower show with classes where you had to use weeds and wildflowers.  Here are a couple of examples:

As you can see from the label in the background this was an arrangement in a Wellie boot while the photo below is of the class for a garden on a plate.  It reminded me of the local flower show we used to have when I was a child when we spent all morning constructing gardens with mirrors for ponds and moss for grass and then returned in the afternoon to see if we had won a prize of a shilling, sixpence or threepence - plus a posh card of course.

The Port Eliot grounds are wonderful as they stretch right down to the river.  Fishing was an alternative activity and on Sunday afternoon when the weather was really good a lot of children went swimming in the mud.  I couldn't get a close up photo but this should give you the idea.  The tide was right out and started to come in rapidly just after this.

The talks were held in the usual assortment of marquees in different parts of the garden.  The two I enjoyed most were Margaret Drabble and Grayson Perry.  Margaret Drabble was interivewed by Rosie Boycott.  She read from her 1965 novel 'The Millstone'  which the woman sitting next to me and I could remember reading the first time round.  It has just been republished.  She then went on to discuss aspects of feminism with Rosie Boycott who, amongst other things, was the founder of Spare Rib magazine.  It is sometimes good to be reminded of what we all fought for in our youth!  They also talked about the different pressures on women today, the daughters who in theory have been able to have it all.  Margaret Drabble's new book The Pattern in the Carpet: a Personal History of Jigsaws sounds really interesting but unfortunately the festival bookstore did not have any copies.

I then went to the Persephone books persephonebooks.co.uk stand.  I discovered Persephone books a long time ago and have a couple but I had rather forgotten about them and it was good to be reminded of their interesting list.  I realised that I had heard quite a lot of them in various forms on Radio 4.  The books are beautifully presented.  Some of them were illustrated by very famous artists/illustrators and they all have endpapers taken from textile and wallpaper designs of the decade when the original book was published.  I was very pleased to see that they are planning to publish a book of these in the autumn.  It will be called Diary: The Persephone Ninety and will feature ninety endpapers with details of each fabric and the first line of each book. What a treat for textile lovers!

The highlight of the festival for me was the next talk I went to.  This was Grayson Perry.  He was ostensibly being interviewed but the interviewer did not need to prompt him much as he is obviously a skilled and experienced performer as well as artist.  He talked about consumerism as a kind of religion and of its influence  on art and showed slides of the scarf he made for the Tate Gallery and the Westfield Vase.  Go to studio-international.co.uk to see the vase and his Walthamstow tapestry.  I also liked the medal he had made for the British Museum exhibition 'Medals of Dishonour' in 2009.  This depicted Our Lady of Bond Street complete with designer carrier bags.  Grayson Perry described himself as a collagist who cannot bear to leave any space blank.  He says he will fill any spaces in a work with marbling or patterning of some kind.  That is an interesting concept for quilters as perhaps we use quilting for the same purpose.

When I look back at the programme I realised that I missed quite a few interesting things at this festival but maybe that is because I had not been before and the various venues were not well signposted so I kept getting lost.  And did I wear wellies?  No.  Crocs were OK.  It rained on Saturday evening but it wasn't a mudbath (apart from the banks of the river.)

In my next posting I will write about Normandy and the Impressionist Festival exhibitions.

Pole-wrapped painting

Following on from my rust dyeing this week I have tried colouring fabric by pole wrapping it shibori style.  My aim is to dye fabric but somehow it seemed easier to start by painting it, having been directed to Gloria Hansen's tutorial:. www.gloriahansen.com

This began as a piece of space-dyed cotton that had not work worked very well.  It was a combination of grey and orangey brown.  Having struggled to get it onto the drainpipe I bought six years ago when I originally learnt this technique I wet it thoroughly and then painted it with Setacolor Ultramarine.

I was really pleased with the effect.  The grey became blueish and the dark blue really looks like marks in the sand at low tide.  I have been trying to get this effect for years!

I then decided that I could use up some of my silk paints.  I have had them for years and some of them are beginning to look as though they might die if not used.  I found a piece of poor quality silk which was good enough to experiment on and covered it with strips of yellow,, blue and red allowing them to run into each other.

This was one long thin piece but I cut it in two.  The effect is similar to the cotton.

I realised that our garden pond looks very like this at the moment.  There are striped grasses on the edge and rather a lot of pond weed because the filter has broken and my husband supports the newts and is very loathe to scrape it off!

I'm afraid the colours on this photo are not brilliant as I took the photo at midday and the light was very bright.  I rather liked the abstract effect of this shot though.

Overall I think the technique works well and I will make some more.  The pieces are quite narrow but it is a good way of using up some of my stash of bridal off-cuts, many of which are rather odd shapes.  I am also thinking about what I can make with the resultant pieces.  I am off to Normandy for a few days on Wednesday so if I can get it together I may turn the silk into a journal quilt that I can hand stitch while travelling.  I have a six hour train journey to London (and another back of course) and the holiday is a Great Rail Journeys package  www.greatrail.com so in theory there is plenty of 'dead' time when we will be sitting on trains.

Rust Dyeing

Well at last I have sorted out my rust dyeing..  The cans that I put to soak back in the winter have rusted nicely and I also have one or two other items, notably an old striker plate.  I was also lent a very long twisted piece of marine detritus but my attempts to wrap cloth round it were not very successful.  However, I think that thanks to all the good weather I have now learnt what I have to do.  I find the cans a bit frustrating because they are quite small and consequently so are my samples.

Here is one where I used a piece of previously dyed cloth that was waiting to have something more done to it.  I have some other dyed fabric that I think might benefit from this treatment so that is my next plan.  I stocked up on malt vinegar at Tesco this afternoon!

Here is one made from keys.  Changing the front door lock proved a useful source of objects.
I think this has potential because they look a bit like trees.  As the fabric is linen I might try to embroider it at some point.

The can does make a good impression.  I have several like this and it has given me a journal quilt.

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I was reminded of some photos I took at Hayle harbour a couple of years ago so this one seemed to fit my theme of water.

And one of the prints from the striker plate worked quite well so that has formed the basis of another journal quilt.

The entrance to Hayle harbour is shallow and has to be marked, a bit like the Venice pilone so that was my inspiration for the patterns of the hand quilting.

This one is mounted on a piece of hand-dyed and quilted 'sea' fabric.  That is absolutely the last scrap of a piece that I dyed shibori style by wrapping around a pole when I was studying with Committed to Cloth six years ago.  So now it is panic stations to produce some more especially as a group of us who are members of the St Ives Arts Club are planning a craft fair the first weekend in October and I need some work for that.  Down here that means things related to the sea and lots of blue.  I have bought some Navy-Indigo procion dye because I don't want to go the whole hog with an indigo vat, and I have started to work on ways of making more sea fabric.  More in the next posting.

Mazey Day

Saturday was Mazey Day in Penzance.  This is our annual community extravaganza, now celebrating its twentieth year as a 'modern' festival.  It is timed for the feast of St John (23 June) who is the patron saint of Penzance.   Midsummer was celebrated all over Cornwall and there seems to have been a lot of emphasis on fires as these continued  the celebration of the pagan festival of midsummer. It was very big in Penzance but   it all got rather out of control  with the usual 'louts' setting fire to things they shouldn't have, so in 1877 it was banned.  The idea of a chain of hill-top fires was apparently revived in 1929 but I have only ever heard of these happening on very special occasions such as Millennium.Eve.  However, more recently Penzance has revived the customs with a week long festival called Golowan (from the Cornish word for midsummer which drives from Gol Jowan meaning John's feast.  The fireworks are confined to a display by the harbour at 11.15 pm on the Friday.  Fond though I am of fireworks I am of an age where I just listen to them!

However, I do join most of the population in spending Saturday in Penzance.

This year we were blessed with wonderful weather but someone told me on Saturday that in 1991 the inaugural parades were ruined by rain.  No-one knew that you needed to protect the constructions and their clothes by sealing them with acrylic so everything was ruined by paint pouring down.  Mazey Day is a great occasion for photographers which includes me but I had a slight disaster this year.  After only a few shots my camera had something of a nervous breakdown and proceeded to photograph everything in black and white. I didn't discover this until I got home and reviewed the photos and I still cannot work out how it happened since that command is buried deep in the menu. As the main attraction of the day is all the colour I am afraid the photos to illustrate this posting are not what I had planned and I have cheated by including a couple from last year.  You will have to Google to see other people's efforts.  (There are hundreds of sites so too many to put a link)

The main focus of the day is a series of parades involving all the schools and community organisations.  Each year there is a theme (this year it was the Wild West) and each school/organisation makes the most incredible 'floats' that are held aloft by fathers and others.  I was glad that I got a coloured photo of the one I think was this year's best.

These blue horses were made by Mounts Bay Secondary School.  The children carry hand held versions of butterflies, fish (always lots of these) insects etc. to illustrate the topic they have chosen.

Here is one of this year's floats which was bright green and covered in various insects.

 And here is the Mousehole Cat in 2009.

 In between the school entries there are bands, groups from voluntary organisations

 and a number of 'characters' such as this clown

The Mazey Day band leads the parades

and there are a several dance groups that perform around the town during the day and also join in the processions.

In between the parades there is a traditional street market to enjoy.  The streets are decorated with banners and there are live performances at various points.  This is Chapel Street, the oldest street.

A traditional funfair spends the weekend down by the Jubilee Pool so that it is also there for Quay Day on Sunday.  Quay Day used to be a fair in olden days and was apparently more for the rural people than the townspeople but now it is a second day of fun with many of the same performers and activities such as toy boat races.

There is a 'tradition' of banner making with banner making workshops in the weeks leading up to Golowan.  In addition to banners across the streets, others, usually made by children, are pinned to the railings.  I liked this image of a mother leaning into the area where the parade was assembling, trying to see her child.

This was the scene as the third and final procession assembled outside St Johns Hall.  I left after that and I am afraid that this year I did not make it to Quay Day so there are no photos of that.

Traditional quilts

I almost never make anything that would qualify as a traditional quilt but while the builders were here I needed to be around the house a lot of the time.  It seemed a good opportunity to complete the top of Zelah's quilt and I am glad to say I have done it.   It is a Katherine Guerrier design from Patchwork and Quilting magazine in 2009.  The house and tree blocks were relatively easy but she then said to use old leftover blocks as fillers.  Some of us don't have any of those!  So I had to set to and make some.  It seemed to take forever.  The arrangement is what makes the quilt individual but I found it very time-consuming.

Zelah is going to have a cabin bed which I know has a full size mattress but people tell me you can't tuck things in.  So the quilt is a bit narrower than a full size single.  I originally had four rows to be joined horizontally but as the bottom row had slipped when I stitched it on, I unpicked it and then realised that the whole thing was too long!  So I took it apart and put the small blocks at the top (you can just see them at the top of the photo below).  I think it needs an inner border and then something that will pull the millions of colours together, possible a Fossil Fern.  Fortunately I don't have a particular deadline so I think I may wait until the Festival of Quilts to buy the fabric for the borders and the backing.  Commercial fabric seems to have rocketed in price since I last bought any but I realised this is partly to do with the state of the pound. So here is the pieced top.

Then I turned my mind to the wedding present quilt.  Ashley very sensibly sent me three photos to show the colours she would like: one is a sunflower and she has said warm greens and yellows and I think there will be some blues.  I tried out a Churn Dash block from Cut Loose Quilts by Jan Mullen  http://www.stargazey.com/ which is an ideal book for those of us who don't like making accurate blocks.  I have used the book before, for a lap quilt for myself

and for the quilt I made as a wedding present for Jeremy's brother Alastair.  This one was butterflies which I made in batiks and it worked really well.

  I have decided the Churn Dash block is too wasteful of fabric.

You end up cutting off largish pieces at each step and although these could all go for use in other projects I think I will try out a couple of the star patterns in the book and see if they are a bit more economical.  In the meantime I am back to journal quilts and have had another go at rust dyeing.

What I got from Cornwall's Open Studios

I don't think when I did my last posting that I realised how time consuming having builders would be.
Our routine was somewhat changed while the new conservatory was built and then again this week when we had the outside of the house and the sitting room painted.  Having to move the two cars out into the street as soon as I got up, provide a certain amount of tea and coffee (although I left the conservatory people to do their own thing  using the studio) and generally keep things ticking over all took time.  But we now have a lovely conservatory which doesn't leak!  It is also much brighter as the roof of the old one was corrugated plastic.  We had to wait until last weekend to get the doorstep and decking installed but now the only thing still to come is the arrival of a small sofa to replace the old garden chairs that we have used since we moved here.

And the house and garden walls look much better for new white paint although you can't see them on this side of the house.

While all this was going on it was Cornwall's Open Studios which run for ten days over half-term week.  I have never been tempted to take part as I don't consider myself a professional and we do not have a suitable space here, but this means I am free to go to other people's.  Interestingly the whole event is concentrated in West Cornwall, underlining the fact that this is a very creative corner of the country.  St Ives artists do not usually take part because they have their own Open Studios in September as part of the St Ives Festival.  I usually start by getting the official guide, making a special note of people with the word 'textiles' in their entry and then sorting out a couple of half day trips where I can visit two or three studios.  Finding them is often the main problem since artists tend to live in the middle of nowhere down lanes that are small even by Cornish standards.  But once you get there you often find wonderful gardens (and houses/cottages) and make lots of useful contacts.

This year I found someone living in this village.  Chema Cruz www.chemacruz.co.uk is a Mexican who paints on a range of fabics which he does not prime so we had an interesting conversation about the properties of different surfaces.  I then struck lucky when I went to Trewidden Studios which is a complex of artists' studios that opened last September, only five minutes drive from here.  There are about fifteen artists based there, several of whom are now beginning to offer courses and workshops.  This is great as most teaching has been in St Ives and the problems with parking really put people from this side of the peninsula off.  I signed up for two courses, one of which I did last weekend.

This was a drawing course taught by Mark Spray. www.markspray.com  There were only three of us on it and we all knew each other already.  The first day was spent sketching in Nanquidno Valley near Lands End. I know this valley well but the other participants had not been there.  Mark once lived near it and had done a whole project on it which meant that he knew all the places to stop and draw the many rock formations.  I failed to take any photos until lunchtime but these will give you an idea of what it is like.

This was taken looking up the valley.  There are old mine workings in the middle distance on the right which were interesting to draw as they contrast with the granite boulders all around.

And this in Nanjulian Cliff at the bottom of the valley.  You can just see Sennen Cove in the background and the path is the South West Coast Path.  We spent the afternoon here, having made sketches as we walked down the path in the morning.

Here is my attempt at drawing the beach which is all rocks but has interesting colour changes.

And here, I hope, are the main elements of Nanjulian Cliff.  We experimented with different tools including using oil paint stick which is wonderful for portraying the mass of granite boulders.  As you can see from the photos we were extremely lucky with the weather.  It was a really perfect way of spending a day.

Sunday dawned rather cloudy and after lunch there was a torrential downpour but it did not matter as we were working in Mark's studio.  We worked on larger versions of our sketches and each of us interpreted them in different ways.  I realised that I tend to be a bit design based and I did not achieve as much as the other two but I had chosen to do the course in order to get myself back into practice after a rather unproductive year.  As I am not an artist I sometimes fail to recognise that producing a good drawing or painting takes a long time and means going back to it in the same way that I do with textile work.  I need to go back to the drawings I began (before house painters took up my week) but in true textile style I cut up one that had worked in parts and stuck the good bits in my sketchbook.  Now I need to make notes beside these bits so that I can remember what I did.  I also want to think about whether any of the techniques I learnt might work on fabric.

I have also signed up for a collograph printing course in September with another of the Trewidden based artists, Peter Wray www.peterwrayre.com  runs short courses in printing and also has a drop-in system for people who have done the courses and just want access to a press.  This is ideal for me as I have no intention of buying one!  I have done some printing and am really keen to do more.  I find it appeals to me more than painting and it is so quick compared with textiles!