London – Page 3 – Frames of Reference

Fui, Sarò, Non Sono

Quite by chance I found myself in Golden Square. I’d arrived early for lunch and rather than sit in the restaurant alone I walked around the block to pass the time. I should have known about the Marian Goodman Gallery, but it was a great surprise. It’s usually closed on a Sunday but they had opened specially because of Frieze London with a fantastic exhibition by Giuseppe Penone. The large piece on the wall was made of acacia thorns, like iron filings magnetised into the shape of a fossil leaf, or now that I look again perhaps it’s a pair of giant lips. Continue reading “Fui, Sarò, Non Sono”

Between Object And Architecture

Tate Modern has a new offspring, grown out of the former power station’s oil tanks. It’s called the Switch House, with a similar tweedy brick texture to its parent building – a new London vernacular. It has a utilitarian look with no decorative frills, polished concrete inside, minimal, neo-brutalist, multi-storey car park aesthetic but beautifully tailored. In retrospect it feels a bit like we just visited an enormous new sculpture and discovered inside the seeds of its own germination. Continue reading “Between Object And Architecture”

Radical Times

Radical Times is the title of an exhibition of paintings by Stanley Whitney at the Lisson Gallery. I walked here via Church Street Market, past the antique shops and the exuberant fruit & veg stalls. Continue reading “Radical Times”

Trees On Leaves

I’m fascinated by the structural qualities of leaves. The veins convey the lifeblood to the leaf and often echo the physical structure of the tree – trunk, branches, twigs – in miniature. These fractal-like qualities inspired me to paint trees on dried leaves, which were collected last autumn. Some were pressed, while others were left to dry in their natural shape. Continue reading “Trees On Leaves”

Connect

Once a term Holland Park School ask us to frame the cover of their school magazine. Most recently it featured a photo of Antony Gormley to mark the arrival of a specially commissioned sculpture on the school roof. This was a great surprise, and a nice coincidence, just as I was drafting the previous post about his exhibition last year in Florence. Continue reading “Connect”

Performing Sculpture

This was another camera-shy exhibition. We had to switch off our cameras at the entrance, even though it was full of exhibitionist ‘performing sculptures’, all of them posing and pouting and teasing. Mostly they’re mobiles though none of them moved, their motion implied through poise and balance. Yet despite these contradictions, it’s a fantastic show, elegant and vibrant and fun. Continue reading “Performing Sculpture”

Subterranean Homesick Blues

Bob Dylan inventing the music video in 1965 round the back of the Savoy Hotel in London.
Fifty years on and he’s back in London tonight, this time at the Royal Albert Hall.

A Short Diversion

Driving to work the other day I was diverted from my normal course and led to discover the Isokon building. I’d never seen it before but instantly it seemed familiar and true, as if it were an archetype, elegant and beautiful, the epitome of 1930s utopian modernism. Continue reading “A Short Diversion”

The Tower Of Babel

The Tower of Babel presently stands alongside the Medieval & Renaissance sculptures in Room 50a at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. It’s an exhibition of 3000 miniature ceramic London shops stacked precariously 20 feet high, ranging from bargain basement shops down at the bottom to exclusive and aspirational shops up at the top. Continue reading “The Tower Of Babel”

100 Cups

Long ago I made cups, real ones out of porcelain to be exact. And now I don’t do that anymore. Instead, I often paint pictures of cups. It began innocently enough, as a path for transposing the ceramic cups that had always inspired my pottery into paintings. This simple idea launched an obsession and soon my desire to paint cups got a little bit out of hand. Because I had so many different ideas, I began numbering them in an effort to hold it all together. Continue reading “100 Cups”