Olga de Amaral at Lisson Gallery

 Golden textiles, woven and painted (not dyed) -

How does she do it? Gesso and gold leaf are involved - this is the front of one piece -

... and this is the back -

Some of the work is massive - most of it is large -

Sometimes threads (linen) are woven around sticks -

Sometimes strips that have been woven are woven yet again -

Fascinating, intriguing, clever, beautiful. And how lovely to be among these works, that golden glow...

Olga de Amaral (b.1932) is a Colombian textile artist who, the gallery says, "spins base matter into fields of color and weaves tectonic lines through space, unselfconsciously testing the borders between crafted object and the work of art". She traveled widely in the 1950s and 60s, studying textiles at Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1952 and teaching at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in the 1960s. She represented Colombia at the 1986 Venice Biennale. She is married to an artist whose works appear incidentally in the two films that are shown.

The show runs till 29 October.

Anni Albers, weaver and artist

What held my eye at the Anni Albers show at Tate Modern (till 27 January) were the drawings, many reflecting Precolumbian motifs encountered on trips to Mexico as early as 1935-6, after she and her husband had moved from Germany and were working at Black Mountain College.

 She started printmaking in 1963 -

Sometimes the embossing was on metal -

 "Taking a line for a walk"? (Klee was one of her teachers at the Bauhaus) -

This 1970 colour study looks like a random collection of half-triangles ...

 ... but when you look closely you there are larger areas, of grey when combined with orange, of red when combined with grey -

That realisation got me looking for how space emerged in her patterning.

This became a design for Knoll in the mid-70s -

What's the basic unit here - is there one?

 The drawings of knots, preparatory work for a wonderful rug, are gorgeous -

The room centred on her book On Weaving (1965) had several splendid Precolumbian textiles, dating to approximately 500-1100. Such lovely faded colours, the same as those in a Coptic textile, date 800 perhaps, also displayed -

In the final room were samples of different yarns, and some samples woven with them;  beautiful work by Louise Anderson -

 A chance to experience the "haptic and tactile" qualities of the cloth, and very popular -

The big poster outside the museum has a short and striking summary of the exhibition:

An artist who changed weaving
A weaver who changed art

If textile exhibitions in art museums are of interest, this 2015 article on the Tate website deserves your attention:

Why this fascination now? Is it, as Richard Tuttle once stated, because ‘weaving has a certain cast of the future’?

Woodblock Wednesday

Next week the Japanese woodblock printing course resumes. I have a few ideas for work that will complement the porcelain pots ... or might get sidetracked ...

Meanwhile I've been finding woodblock artists for inspiration, and marvelling at their skill.

Helen Hyde (1868-1919) came to my notice via this charming image -

Further investigation found further images and some biographical information -

Ah, the Mary Cassatt of woodblock printing ... "portrayals of mothers and children caught in everyday moments"; the domestic setting; "considerable technical skill". Both came from wealthy homes and  both never married - important factors for a woman of that time to have a career as an artist. (Hyde saw Cassatt's work in Paris in 1890 Cassatt was influenced by Japonism, but did not visit Japan.)

Living in Japan for 14 years, and learning the craft through the workshop system, makes Hyde rather unusual. It's interesting that as a publisher she hired artisans to prepare and print the blocks, so she would "merely" make the designs.

Further biographical information comes from this site - 

Born in Lima, New York, Helen Hyde moved to San Francisco with her family in 1870 where her wealthy father had built a business based on the Gold Rush. At age 12, she began studying art with Ferdinand Richart in Oakland. In 1882 her father died and her mother and sisters relocated to the home of her Aunt, Augusta Bixler. In 1886 she graduated from Wellesley School for Girls and entered the California School of Design.
Between 1888-1894 she studied in New York City, Berlin and Paris where she met Felix Regamey, a Japonist who greatly influenced her development. In 1894 Hyde returned in San Francisco and in 1895 she bought a printing press and experimented with etching.
In 1896, Chinatown became a source of subjects for her early etchings, which she continued to sell in America. In 1899, Hyde traveled to Japan and by 1900 began producing colored etchings and woodcuts in Tokyo. There she met Ernest Fenollosa and Emil Orlik. In 1901 she returned to San Francisco and in 1902 visited dealers in New York and Boston, returning to Tokyo at the end of the year. Between 1903·1913 she traveled widely from her base in Tokyo, visiting China, India and Mexico, before returning permanently to the United States in 1914. Hyde exhibited prints at the Panama-Pacific International Exhibition in 1915 where she won the Bronze Medal. Moving to Chicago, she had a solo show at the Chicago Art Institute in 1916. In 1919 Hyde visited her sister Mabel in Pasadena, California, where she died of cancer. A memorial exhibition of her works was held at the Art Institute of Chicago the following year.
As one of the first Western artists to study Japanese print making in Japan, Helen Hyde influenced many other artists to visit and study there. Her works continue to be popular with collectors of American color prints of the early twentieth century. 

And now for some more of her work -

A Day in June (via)

The Go-Cart (via)

Moonlight on the Viga Canal (via)

The Family Umbrella (via)

A Windy Ride (via)

2017 Turner Prize winner - Lubaina Himid

What with the Turner Prize exhibition taking place in Hull (city of culture!) this year, I haven't seen the exhibition or paid the entire thing much attention. The only familiar name on the shortlist was Andrea Buttner, whose exhibition in Milton Keynes I saw some years ago.

This year the age restriction was abandonned, that's a step forward!

The winner was announced yesterday: she is 63 and has been making and exhibiting all her life (work from the 1980s onward is on her website); she's just never been in the limelight in quite this way.

She said she was never overlooked by curators or other artists but she was never in the press, perhaps because her work “was too complicated to talk about”. ... “I guess the issues I was dealing with were complex, many-layered, and you’ve got to sell newspapers.”

Having read this interview, and checked out a few other sources, I think Lubaina Himid is a good choice. Her work has messages, but it's visually appealing and positive. The juxtapositions can be surprising. You need to know only a little about it in order to start thinking about "the issues".  

I especially enjoyed the vivacity of the Lancaster Dinner Service -

(via)

At the end of that article there's a slideshow of some of her drawings, which "simply" combine patterned background and one object.

This installation of jelly moulds continues the painted ceramics theme; it's a spinoff of, or contribution to, an architectural competition for a pavilion. "Can we devise strategies for an architecture of pleasure?" she asks at the end of the video.

Kangas fit my dining table perfectly, size-wise, and I have a couple of favourites from Tanzania, whose messages I cannot read, so Lubaina Himid's painted "lost kangas" are of immediate interest. She talks about how they came to be part of the 2012 "Cotton - Global Threads" exhibition at the Whitworth, Manchester, here.

One of the Kangas from the Lost Sample Book (via)

She loves to juxtapose text, spoken or written, with pattern (the pattern is speaking too).

Her work has many more aspects, and as with so many artists now there's a lot about identity and colonial history, as well as "institutional invisibility" in it. 

Mona Hatoum at Tate Modern

"A comprehensive exploration into 35 years of Hatoum's work in Britain, from her early performance and video works to her sculpture and large-scale installation" is at Tate Modern till 21 August.

"Born in Beirut to a Palestinian family, Mona Hatoum settled in England in 1975. Her work creates a challenging vision of our world, exposing its contradictions and complexities, often making the familiar uncanny. Through the juxtaposition of opposites such as beauty and horror, she engages us in conflicting emotions of desire and revulsion, fear and fascination." See a short video at www.tate.org.uk...mona-hatoum

Light Sentence 1992

 "I choose materials in a very intuitive way - if those materials are seductive to me, I want to use them. If they resonate with me, they're gonna have the same effect on people."

Barbed wire - Impenetrable 2009

 When she has a residency somewhere, she often spends her time going around markets and junk shops to find things to use, such as pieces of furniture that she transforms in some way - "assisted readymades, if you like", sometimes united into an environment, perhaps with added electricity.

Cellules 2012/13 - steel bars and red bown glass

 "Sometimes I feel that there's still room for development of each of the works that I somehow worked with and then abandoned to go into something else." She often makes work that responds to a space, and the culture and history of the space and its location. "I go into a totally different direction for that exhibition, and the next exhibition can take me somewhere else."

Undercurrent (Red) 2009

She doesn't used sketchbooks any more - "They're too heavy and too serious". She uses spiral-bound notebooks now, and always carries a small one in her purse. Some of her sketchbooks and notebooks, and smaller objects, are gathered in a vitrine. Beautifully kept.

Art I like - Geta Bratescu

Seen at Tate Liverpool - the exhibition runs till 18 October. Read about it briefly here and at greater length in the press release.

Recent collages and works using painted sticks

Large Medea embroidery

Medea prints

Two of the Medeic Calisthenic Moves (1980-1) - "drawings with a sewing machine" - see them all here

"Recently, Bratescu has been besieged by curators. Her installation at the Venice Biennale in 2013 and subsequently in the Moscow Biennale the same year introduced her to a new audience from outside Romania. The displayed abject fabric collage works were stitched together from old clothes that belonged to her mother ... “She wanted to find a purpose for them.” And then the great museums of the world and collections fought over them." (via)

Sketchbook pages regarding the Medea work

Info about Medea, and about the blind drawings of women, above

Costumes for Ephemeral Celebrations (1987) - collage;
a better view is here

A mysterious textile - hard to get near enough to see it without setting off the alarm!

 An excerpt from her film Hands is here.

Geta Bratescu (b.1926) in her current studio (via)

More work here, from which this overview photo comes -

Large sketchbook development

The little John Piper picture in my new large sketchbook has been joined by another image I simply couldn't throw away (for reasons not yet known to me), a vignette of a carving of an Indian(?) musician -

After cutting out its shape through several pages and glueing it on the last one, I started adding colour (the paint was used as glue too). On the last page of this set has been rolled with block printing ink ... which, being water soluble, easily mixes into any paint subsequently added to it.

The ovals are the cutouts, also inked up, for use elsewhere ... cut into filigree perhaps? Thinking about this as I write, the next step with the musician will be to draw him, or others like him*, behind the cut-outs and on other parts of the pages. Also, I'm seeing faces on the left-hand page - amazing how we tend to see faces whether we look for them consciously or not. John Updike said something about abstract art aspiring to remove anything that could be seen as a face...

And coincidentally to faces - from a review of James Hall's recent book on the self-portrait, this photo from the review in World of Interiors -

It's a self-portrait of Sofonisba Anguissola "holding a medallion". Hall says that the medallion is actually the back of a mirror bearing her father's initials and a marginal inscription: "Painted from a mirror with her own hand by the Cremonese virgin Sofonisba Anguissola". Perhaps this was fresh in my mind when the Indian musician, with his "medallion", came to hand?

Elsewhere in the large sketchbook, more scrapes and blobs of colour get added whenever the paints or pastels are handy -

*Similar musicians are surprisingly hard to find on the internet, but this one is certainly appealing -

Apsaras as a musician, 6th century Chinese, V&A (via)