Enid Marx

Also at the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester was a small exhibition of engravings and linocuts by Enid Marx - who I connect with patterned papers on book covers.

I was interested to see how she used stylisation so effectively in her work - and managed to bring some humour, even happiness, to simple ideas. For example, the fishbone feathers in the tail of the cockerel. (Odd choice of paper for the printed engravings, by the way. They'd work much better on smooth paper, in my view.)

The use of colour in the seascape is particularly well done, although I suppose it is rather childish, in a way.

Edward Burra

On Saturday I went to the Edward Burra exhibition at the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester. I didn't really know what to expect. Burra struck me as a strange artist. I couldn't quite understand why he had chosen to paint so much in watercolours. To me, oils would have been better. (I guess that is his choice!)

A good example of his style is Striptease, above. There is an almost-cartoony style to certain elements – for example, the clown above the stage, his eyes rolling towards the performer. Then there is a huge sense of menace that's hard to explain. It is a combination of the ugliness of the audience and most of the characters, their lurid green faces, the leering grins and, most of all, the bright eyes gazing fiercely in different directions, like spotlights - fierce rays of light criss-crossing like Kitty Krause's lightboxes (below).

More Work in Progress

It's taking so long to get the shirt right and it still isn't right - but there is progress...

White Cube, Bermondsey

Until this morning I never realised there as a chain of galleries called White Cube.

The building itself inside is almost hospital-like, clinically white and echoey, which did make it a good space for art.

The artwork that really stuck out for me was Cerith Wynn Evans' flute piece. This was an installation of seven clear crystal flutes which were suspended in the air. They almost resembled a chandelier of frozen icicles. Each emitted a single note as air was pushed through the mouth-pieces from a wind-operated automaton.

The sounds they made emanated through the gallery and you could hear them in all the rooms. I know that some people in my group  thought that the sound ruined the other pieces of work, but I didn't think that.

For example Kitty Krause's installation of mirrored light boxes. I think the sound actually contributed to the experience. Her work was displayed in a room separately and it was almost as if I was walking into a construction site in the city. An entire city being built at night. On the wall at the bottom in text it said:

'The reflection angle is a right angle, thus the light does not reach the lamp.'

The gallery opened up from these two separate rooms where the work I have just talked about was displayed. The exhibition was called structure and absence and definitely with Kitty and Cerith's work I felt they played along well with the theme, but I couldn't see how some of the other works fitted in.

Damien Hirst's 'Neverland' was the piece I spent most time in front of, a giant housing estate/glass bathroom cabinet... with shelffuls of handmade pills made from resin. Some looked to be invented, but others (eg, a simple omega 3 tablet) were based on real pills.

Walking alongside Neverland (it's very long, 93 x 344 inches), I could see my own reflection broken up by the shelves. I'm not sure why the mirrors were there except maybe to create the illusion of more pills. I also liked how I had to get involved withe the piece closely to realise what was going on.

It reminds me of a piece in The British Museum - a tapestry called Cradle to Grave – that contains all the tablets an average person consumes in a lifetime. Lovely...

Matt's Gallery

Argh! Sound overload. I have been in the room for about 15 minutes and keep hearing the same sounds, over and over again. Like mechanical birds each with its own individual and annoying cheep-cheep. And then, hang on, I keep hearing new sounds.
The artist had stuck bright neon 'feathers' to cameras to make them look like birds.

The sound is important. These things work well individually, but in a room all together without sound, wouldn't make sense. The camera tripods remind me of trees. The cameras could almost be seen as little eyes. Emma Hart, the artist, has created an avian nightmare. The man in charge of the exhibition says to him they are like sculptures,  but I don't think of them that way. We become part of the performance as we look into the cameras. Not many people walk to the middle of the room to view the cameras. If you do, prepare for an interesting experience...it's a bit like standing in a clearing in a forest...

Work in Progress

Painting is a slow business...to get from the first to the last picture shown to the last took a couple of weeks... And it could have taken much longer... But I have some deadlines to hit...

Daumier

I have come across some pictures by a French artist called Honore Daumier. The pictures are of third class travel on a train. They're from the 1850s.

It strikes me that these pictures are of real people. And also, that it does not matter who these people are. It's probably accurate. It's certainly not intrusive. (I am still bothered about this privacy issue!)

What's important, surely, is the story behind the pictures. And the humour and insightful relationships between the people.