2011 works: The Human Clay exhibition

University of Surrey has a vibrant Public arts programme with 30 sculptures and busts around the campus, including works by Bridget McCrum, John Mills, Diane Maclean and William Pye. Jon Edgar’s solo exhibition there in Nov/Dec 2011 was linked with his Surrey Sculpture Society Autumn lecture, to which about 75 attended. For those that did not see the Lewis Elton Gallery show, here are the new 2011 works and a summary of the catalogue text.

The Carved Sculptures
Edgar’s improvisational methods include not selecting blocks so much as them selecting him, so their material and proportions – which influences the final form – are incredibly variable. Carvings are initiated without prior thought; maquettes are seen by the artist as deadening to the creative process. He feels that mere translation of intent is akin to the experience of a chain-gang worker. When forms start to appear, the block is often turned to suppress these until richer, more ambiguous imagery emerges. The very process seems to open or divide the block further to enable a wider selection of forms for consideration.

A portrait to mark the exhibition – Patricia Grayburn
Pat Grayburn MBE DL has been involved with the arts in the county for nearly 30 years after moving to become Arts Administrator at University of Surrey in 1983. She is responsible for the breadth of public art across the campus and was awarded the MBE for services to the arts in 2004. As well as being a Deputy Lieutenant of Surrey, she is Executive Director of the Guildford International Music Festival, Chair of the Guildford Book Festival and Committee member of  the Yvonne Arnauld Theatre Trust, Royal Ballet Benevolent Fund and Guildford Arts as well as other local societies. The artist made a direct request, and she kindly agreed to sit for the portrait unveiled here. During the sitting Edgar learnt that whilst working for London County Council, Grayburn had commissioned the Blind Beggar and his Dog sculpture for Bethnal Green, one of Elisabeth Frink’s earliest commissions.

The Human Clay?
The portrait of the musician and poet Stephen Duffy is displayed as it was his song lyrics which inspired the title for the exhibition. The lines originate from W.H Auden’s poem
‘Letter to Lord Byron’:
To me Art’s subject
is the human clay
And landscape but
a background to a torso
All Cézanne’s apples
I would give away
For one small Goya
or a Daumier.

The Environment Series
Sculptor Jon Edgar’s Environment Series of clay heads marks some of those who have contributed to a potential better future, and include the writer Richard Mabey, scientist James Lovelock, Eden Project’s Tim Smit and Riverford Organic’s Guy Watson. Sitters are invited to participate in a barter of time. The breadth of this sculptor’s archive of heads has permitted a bespoke selection for the University of Surrey exhibition; the distinguished climate scientist Professor Chris Rapley was formerly Director of the Science Museum and British Antarctic Survey and lives locally. Shalford-based automotive and ex-Formula 1 designer Gordon Murray was chosen for his developing contribution to small car design. The heads exhibited gave insights into the characters of these creative and motivated personalities.

Winklestone from the Surrey borders
In the early 1800s, Winklestone rivalled many of the stones which were routinely imported from the continent. A kind of shell marble occurring in the Wealden clay just south of Blackdown, its quarrying was concentrated on the Egremont Estate. It was used in Westminster Abbey in Edward the Confessor’s Chapel and the tomb of Edward III and of Richard II and his Queen. The Archbishop’s Chair in Canterbury Cathedral is an entire piece of the stone. These facts are now little known, but were interesting to a sculptor exploring interesting stones to carve in an area which did not have a geology yielding an obvious carving freestone. Back in 2008, enquiries were made through for a source of the freshwater marble which developed in shallow lakes in relatively thin layers. Edgar was alerted to a seam of the rock that had been uncovered as part of new foundations at Sparrwood Farm at Plaistow; several works, including Block IV (right) were exhibited from this source just over the Surrey border.

The Compton Triptych
Edgar searched for local clay in the parish to work on a head of the former curator of the Watts Gallery, Richard Jefferies. Mary Watts initiated the Compton Pottery in 1890s utilising the seam of clay found at Limnerslease, the house next to her artist husband G.F.Watts’ studio. Whilst this had long since been exhausted, it seemed an appropriate plan to use local materials for the head, and the sculptor chanced upon the Brickfields Pottery after traipsing along stream banks searching for suitable material. Meeting the potter Mary Wondrausch, the plan became more complicated. She kindly mentioned a bag of clay quarried from work on the foundations of her house… but Edgar left Compton feeling that it would be sacrilegious not to use the material for a sitting with the remarkable person he had just met. This left an odd balance. Having used three elements in combination before, it seemed right to think of a third head for a Compton Triptych. After an appeal through the local press suggested a number of candidates both living and historic, Edgar thought it fairest to select solely on the strength of feeling in the parish, as all suggestions were equally heartfelt. This was an odd mechanism for a selection by a visual artist – the sculptor had thus not even seen the subject prior to starting the head – but this just made the project more interesting. The resulting work’s three elements balance artist, historian and Jane Turner as one of the community lynchpins which bind this diverse parish together. A final note: ‘Nothing ever goes quite to plan. Despite the higher firing temperature of the third head, the colour of the clay seemed oddly different. Uncovering some fired clay samples whilst preparing for the exhibition, I then slowly scrutinised the clay store and found a bag with “MW” scrawled on it – denoting Wondrausch’s initials. Which was odd – but I now realise that my presumed Compton “C” bag was actually the remainder from a head of sculptor Mat Chivers; clay dug from the ground in North Dartmoor. Perhaps a subconscious indication that communities are made more vibrant by a combination of the local and the foreign? I still have the final bag of Compton Clay… ‘

New Works in Relief 
The Slate carving Charmer (left) is one of several new works which show the role of improvisation for this artist; the block started out with a random letter-cut on the horizontal slab, which was intended to act as a prompt for exploring what words/language might come. This proved to be merely a start, with the block pulling itself from the horizontal to the vertical and with strongly figurative imagery by the time carving ceased. The sculptor is not exactly sure of the derivation of the new reliefs, which include the 2 metre long carving in lime, Blowing in the Wind (below) which started as a single vertical figure. Faunal (bottom right) displays in relief but is carved on both front and back and can sit happily on any of its edges, as can the granite Igneous (right). One possible influence or inspiration for the dominance of the relief form in recent works has been the presence of a sculptural frieze on a fragment of stone column, discovered by the artist and presently being written up for Britannia, the Journal of Roman Studies. The sculpture is now believed to be circa 1st century AD and an important new find for the nation. Whether its qualities have subconsciously influenced the decision to select blocks which have previously been passed by can only be surmised.

Carving blocks with provenance
Interesting histories seem to help Edgar’s carvings develop and some pieces link to particular locations or people. A newspaper article in Spring 2008 described how disease forced the felling of a Cedar tree next to HRH The Prince of Wales’ home at Highgrove. Edgar put pen to paper, wondering whether His Royal Highness had retained any of the tree after its sad loss. A reply was received with the gracious offer of one of the blocks. At Highgrove, several sections of the cedar were selected and in 2009, two blocks were worked which are now on loan to the Cotswold Care Hospice of which HRH is Patron. The third block, Tipping Point (left), was finished 5 days before this exhibition started – the scent of fresh cedarwood remained.

Click on any of the images for a larger view.

Link to archive of works

Roger Eliot Fry – why knowledge isn’t always a good thing

There is no feeling of inner life and all traces of sensibility in the handling have been polished away. 

Surely that must be Brian Sewell commenting on a contemporary conceptual work? Did not Roger Fry die in 1934? This quote is part of Fry’s consideration of this 4500 year old Dynasty IV portrait of King Chefren, which he acknowledged has great realism and is one of the finest works of the period. Later versions of the same subject deteriorate further as the vital plastic rhythms disappear:

It is pure and quite unintelligent craftsmanship. Description, decoration and mechanical finish have become the only preoccupations of the sculptor. (Fry, Last Lectures 1939, 56-57)

In sculpture, our pleasure comes from contemplating the main relations of the planes and we strive to find other systems of plastic relations within these, before considering texture and perhaps even the grain of the material. Richness comes from a prolonged succession of moments of pleasure coming from the answering of the causes of the image/object (appealing to our sense of harmony and fitness), whereas the intellect cannot benefit in such a way from facts and mathematical problems – a symmetrical design (or ‘getting’ the conceptual idea) is answered in a millisecond.

Roger Fry’s Last Lectures (as Slade Professor of Fine Art) were assembled from his lectures notes and images after his death and is introduced by Kenneth Clark. Reading it is a breath of fresh air, particularly considering his two themes of vitality and sensibility which we shall return to.

We want every scrap of knowledge we can glean from archaeology, from political and social history and from the study of documents. We want to know all we can about the origins and circumstances of a work of art. But besides this knowledge you have to practice an art, the art of looking at works of art with the most sensitive and vivid response possible. And perhaps the most important part of that art consists in the power to maintain your spirit in a condition of tense passivity, a state of passive receptiveness in which you are alert to its appeal, ready to vibrate in harmony with it. The aim I have in view has been to suggest to you possible methods of such a training of aesthetic apprehension. (Fry, Last Lectures 1939, 95-96)

So next time you are in a gallery, look at the work before you read the interpretation plaque – and see what happens.

Some Roger Fry (1866-1934) texts are available online:

Roger Fry on Art and the Market (selected writings) by Craufurd D. Goodwin http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Zb8hTlHZOb0C

A Roger Fry Reader (Selected writings) by Christopher Reed http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=IDsxXfnGNiYC

Poesis and immortality

What is behind the urge for making? I’ve always suspected it is something to do with our mortality and the desire to be around for longer than strictly possible, as well as just feeling like something that one needs to do. Plato’s Symposium, written around 360 B.C.,  considers a tea party dialogue on the meaning of love between Socrates and his mates, with the wise seer Diotima having issued advice on immortality to him. Her first point of this Benjamin Jowett-translated text  seems clear enough:

Mortal nature is seeking as far as is possible to be everlasting and immortal: and this is only to be attained by generation, because generation always leaves behind a new existence in the place of the old… Those who beget children – this is the character of their love; their offspring, as they hope, will preserve their memory and giving them the blessedness and immortality which they desire in the future.

She also saw a different sort of immortality as part our constant renewal as our knowledge constantly disappears:

Even in the life of the same individual there is succession: a man is called the same, and yet in the short interval which elapses between youth and age, he is undergoing a perpetual process of loss and reparation – hair, flesh, bones, blood, and the whole body are always changing. Which is true not only of the body, but also of the soul, whose habits, tempers, opinions, desires, pleasures, pains, fears, never remain the same in any one of us, but are always coming and going; and equally true of knowledge… The departure of knowledge, which is ever being forgotten, and is renewed and preserved by recollection. The mortal body, or mortal anything, partakes of immortality; but the immortal in another way.

The desire for fame is not a new thing, but it is worth considering just what sort of commitment is required here for a name to endure:

You will wonder at the senselessness of their ways, unless you consider how they are stirred by the love of an immortality of fame. They are ready to run all risks greater far than they would have for their children, and to spend money and undergo any sort of toil, and even to die, for the sake of leaving behind them a name which shall be eternal.

Diotima then considered those who produce “children” of a different sort; those who desire to create, seek wisdom, order and justice – who give to the world many noble works and are parents of virtue of every kind:

Souls which are pregnant – for there certainly are men who are more creative in their souls than in their bodies conceive that which is proper for the soul to conceive or contain. And what are these conceptions? – wisdom and virtue in general. And such creators are poets and all artists who are deserving of the name inventor. But the greatest and fairest sort of wisdom by far is that which is concerned with the ordering of states and families, and which is called temperance and justice. And he who in youth has the seed of these implanted in him and is himself inspired, when he comes to maturity desires to beget and generate… The children who are their common offspring are fairer and more immortal.

So there are plenty of options to work towards an immortality triple whammy.

But why is all this relevant? Perhaps for an artist, considering this might just take the pressure off the development of a body of work. We have a lifetime to ensure that creative outputs with the necessary qualities survive us – and to ensure those which do not have, do not.

THE HUMAN CLAY – JON EDGAR SCULPTURE
New relief work, portraits and carvings
University of Surrey – Lewis Elton Gallery  GU2 7XH
01483 686641

Private View – Monday 14th Nov: 6-8pm
Exhibition open Mon-Fri, 15 November-22 December
(or by appointment at weekends or over Christmas and New Year) 

Portrait sculpture – conscious, subconscious, unconscious?

Worthing Museum has an interesting sculpture exhibition on until January 2012, featuring the Latvian-born Dora Gordin (1895-1991) – she later changed this to Gordine – who settled in London after studying music and art in Paris. It is co-curated with Dorich House, where the artist lived and where the Gordine archive continues to reside in the care of Kingston University’s Brenda Martin. I’ve got a soft spot for Worthing’s permanent collection and visiting after a year’s gap since exhibiting there, it was lovely to see the work of one artist in the top gallery space. Gordine’s portrait heads sometimes seem to have plinths with more mass than they might require, but are formally strong; particularly the ones with solid, flat patination.
This clip of a new feature-length documentary on Gordine is rather interesting – uploaded in September 2011 by Director Annaleena Piel Linna, it give some idea of the sculptor’s vocal strength, which draws to mind the powerful, arresting handwriting in some of the letters on display at Worthing.
Her last husband, The Hon. Richard Hare, was instrumental in propelling her into the London society that allowed portrait commissions to arise with the great and good; similar to Jacob Epstein who was born 15 years earlier and entertained many formal sittings from the fashionable, bohemian and artistic crowd he lived amongst, as well as keeping his hand in with many heads of his wife and children, models and lovers.
Interviewed by the BBC in 1972, Gordine commented “when you do a portrait bust of somebody you only do their noses and mouth and all that – and it is nothing! You have to imagine what they are like inside and to bring out their inward life, inward feelings,and then put it in a form. And whether its true or not, what do I care!” When asked whether she felt that she was capturing the soul, she agreed, suggesting: “the feeling, the nostalgia, the dream – all that you have to put it in your sculpture.”

Jacob Epstein’s ethos for portraiture is also documented in the 1932 publication The Sculptor Speaks in which the sculptor was in conversation with Arnold L Haskell (here pages 61-66):
“I give a complete portrait – and a sculptural work as well by bringing out what is interesting and significant in a face”.  Haskell then suggested it is for us [the viewer] to tell the artist what is in a work, to which Epstein replied “… superstition. People see the artist as a medium, possessed by a certain force that he cannot control or reason about. I am fully conscious of what I am doing and can judge the result and character of my sitters.”  Epstein went on the discuss Rodin who, he purported,  had acted the role of the somnambulist artist, probably to flatter some journalists he was talking to, suggesting: “I don’t know exactly what I meant to do here. You tell me.”

Two pages later, Epstein added “the artist doesn’t cheat nature but he must translate it and render it as he sees fit… it is always necessary to accentuate some particular trait that gives the character to the face and distinguish it from other faces. A man is an artist because he has the necessary judgement and skill to know what accentuation is necessary.”

Talking about his bust of Joseph Conrad, “I went entirely by what I saw… in portraiture the artist must depict what he sees of his sitter and not be influenced by what he knows of him or think he knows about him. I always set out conscientiously to give as good a likeness as I can. Without that a portrait has no value as such”.
So, slightly contradictory stuff, it seems. How can he have been fully conscious of his accentuation whilst giving as good a likeness as he can? I personally feel the accentuated traits in some of his lesser heads appear to sit dangerously on the cusp of caricature.  Strong forms – but with the impression of over-conscious actions.

I follow the working method of Alan Thornhill (b.1921), whose portraiture relies on the building of a formal equivalent to the head of the sitter through overcoming our ‘notions of normality’. This relies on perception, avoiding pre-conceived thought and concentrating on observational rigour rather than knowledge. Our own perception – our personal way of seeing – thus provides something of the sculptor entering the work – but it is with the carefully cultivated involvement of the subconscious mind, perhaps, rather than an unconscious approach as per the Rodin story. Anything can creep into the work if one is prepared to let it.

As the use of measuring calipers grows at the expense of pure unadulterated observation, the translation of the relationships between plastic forms becomes more efficient and mechanised. The building of a formal equivalent is lost in favour of copying. Portrait work is taken out of the realm of art-object as the sculptor’s input of pure creative energy is lost. At their most efficient, these processes can be seen in Madame Tussauds waxworks, but the use of calipers is common with the “professional” portrait sculptor who makes a living from the physical likenesses which are behind much of the public statuary and sculpted busts today. They are technically sculpture but not art. Paradoxically as they become visually as realistic as they can be,  this only seems to reduce their vitality and inner intensity.

My own clay heads are fired as terracottas, rather than immediately used to take a cast from and then discarded. The shrinkage involved in the kiln process I find an advantage as it seems to increase the intensity of the forms, but portrait sculptors might see negatively as further deviation from a requirement to be life-size.

There are seven heads to be exhibited as part of 40 works at JON EDGAR – THE HUMAN CLAY,  UNIVERSITY OF SURREY (LEWIS ELTON GALLERY) 15 November-22 December 2011, weekdays 10-5.

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Stone: whose work is it anyway?

I receive letters like this once a fortnight. They effectively promise to do sculptors’ hard work for them at a very reasonable cost. I send a small model or maquette to China, and it will be factored to my dream size in granite or my chosen material; hardness no object. Permanence guaranteed. All from the comfort of my chair.

This process is behind much of large work  in stone today – the anodyne Borough works of  statuary as well as large works by non-stonecarving artists who (perhaps) are using stone as an addition to their oeuvre, to tap into the huge market for “public sculpture”. The sculpture of Alison Lapper which occupied Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth typifies todays working – Marc Quinn unashamedly having a life cast made before the enlarged final marble was crafted by Italian artisans.  Much sculpture has undergone a regime change and has become what was formerly known as design. ‘Professional’ sculptors have ideas and  ’project manage’ them with finesse.

Interesting to compare an earlier worker of granite who worked by hand with the expertise gained from the Dartmoor granite workers at Sticklepath.  John Skeaping RA, first husband of Barbara Hepworth and a former Professor of Sculpture at the Royal College (1953-59), lived in Chagford, Devon and worked on an over-lifesize figure which shows absolute mastery and craftsmanship of the hard yet extremely brittle material. This in a day before diamond disc cutters and tungsten carbide tooling; when axes and drills – or the percussive blast of the chisel – were used to shape the stone. Memorial (1955/6, pictured right) is seen by Skeaping’s son Nicholas as his sculptural tour de force… and it contains much of the sculptor’s feeling for Paul, his and Barbara Hepworth’s son who was killed in RAF service in 1953.

Contrast the work in Scottish granite by Ronald Rae who also works alone, by hand. His sheer persistence with a hammer and chisel does not overpower the stone. It appears to be a well-matched battle, with the sheer stoniness of the sculpture – and the overall form of the original block – being allowed to remain. The twenty tonne Lion of Scotland is a work of Rae, but it is also still a boulder of Corrennie granite.

Ironically, although their work is very different, the later work of Rae and some of that of Peter Randall Page (whose team of skilled sculptors use industrial tools where helpful)  is  similar in its formal arrangement. Randall Page’s intense concern with surface in works such as Give and Take (right) similarly respects the integrity of the ice-worn boulder, which has its own visual balance through years of geomorphological activity. We experience the same effect through picking up well-worn – yet still irregular – beach stones which have a completeness of surface about them.

Rae selects recently quarried boulders which speak to him; their developing new figurative identity maintains the perceived overall volume of the block whilst his chiseling introduces a completeness to each of the irregular sub-divisions created. Water and ice erosion have provided a similar but universal effect over millions of years in boulders selected by Randall-Page. In Give and Take (right) there is a completeness of form in each regular tesselated unit and – as the units are similar in form, depth and surface treatment – in the sculpture itself.

So is the actual path of sculpture coming into being completely irrelevant? I trust that somewhere deep inside the maker there is a marker about the intrinsic rightness of things. Hopefully this feeling with be in evidence to the viewer in influencing the decision of whether the physical time spent between sculptor and stone is important; whether it  makes the content richer or warmer.[Alan Thornhill's definition of content: 'that phenomenon of communication in which the observer's  awareness senses signals of presence and action issuing from another consciousness, that have been embedded, without self-regard, in a chosen material']

Working granite by hand is hard but the experience cathartic – one has to be incredibly persistent.  I certainly wouldn’t want to be working it all the time and I do not go looking for it – but it sometimes just arrives serendipitously. I picked up four irregular chips from the working of Ronald Rae’s latest block at Cramond, whilst visiting for his portrait sitting which will be part of my ‘Sculpture’ series of heads. They are tiny, slight and extremely difficult to work without snapping them asunder, but are a challenge nonetheless – and I’m unsure quite how exactly I’m going to work them because of their brittleness. Another block turned up after a phone call from someone who wanted a piece of ‘heavy marble’ moved from their Petworth garden. It was indeed heavy, and turned out to be the most stable and resistant black granite known, prized for these qualities for the ultimate flat, stable surface for truing precision instruments and the like. With uniformly fine textures and tight porosity,  black granites are extremely resistant to water absorption or warping from humidity, being twice as stiff as light-coloured granites based on Young’s Modulus of Elasticity as they contain no crystalline quartz.

The resulting work  (a high relief of two feet square) has taken three years, because my threshold of being physically able to work it by hand has been so low. Working it for twenty minutes at a time, I would rapidly think of something more intelligent to do. But without any love for it, and with no desire for a “result”, something interesting gradually emerged which had as much to do with the unyielding stone and its fiery origin (seemingly) as it did with the sculptor. But I do have a 5-year-old and I’m sure the books we read also creep into the work. Igneous (2011) will be at the Surrey University Lewis Elton Gallery solo exhibition in Guildford, weekdays from November 15th until 22nd December.

Come along to the Private View on the evening of Monday 14th November.

A contemporary search for Petworth Marble (or Winklestone)

In the early 1800s, Petworth Marble rivalled many of the stones which were routinely imported from the continent, in both beauty and quality. A kind of shell marble occurring in the Wealden clay at Petworth, its quarrying was concentrated on the Egremont estate at Kirdford and there are accounts of industry at Plaistow.

Also called Sussex marble, it was used in several chimney pieces at Petworth House and further afield at Westminster Abbey in Edward the Confessor’s Chapel, the tomb of Edward III and of Richard II and his Queen are both in “grey Petworth Marble” (The Saturday Magazine Supplement, May 1834 p.212); and Canterbury Cathedral, where the archbishops chair is an entire piece of the stone. (Useful Knowledge: Or A Familiar Account of the Various Productions of Nature: Animal, Vegetable and Mineral which are chiefly employed for the use of Man (1821) Volume I, William Bingley)

Winkles’s Architectural and Picturesque Illustrations of the Cathedral Churches of England and Wales Volume II (1851) documents embellishment of the Nave of Chichester Cathedral in both Purbeck and Petworth marbles, the latter making up pillars of the upper triforium which then showed some decomposition of the shelly particles.

These facts are now little known, but they are interesting to me as a sculptor having returned to my native West Sussex. I was intent on sourcing interesting local stones to carve; Fittleworth ironstone is harder than granite whilst Horsham stone looked promising but isn’t pleasant to work.

Back in 2008, I asked around as to anyone who might know of any source of the stone. New work produced after some 200 year gap would be a fine outcome! Courtesy of information from the Parish Council in Plaistow, I was alerted to a seam of the rock that had been uncovered as part of new foundations at Sparrwood Farm. Some test blocks were transported and a number of sculptures have since developed. Noticing the difficulty with which it is worked, I was intrigued by the amount of Petworth Marble in Chichester Cathedral – in many of the pillars. In further conversation, it appears that much restoration of the Petworth Marble is now performed with Purbeck Marble, which has visibly smaller Winkle shells and a stronger more stable structure – very important in times when budgets must be agreed and met.

So how does it carve? Well, it doesn’t really carve easily. The white shells are calcified remains within the brown/black matrix which derive from primeval muds. Where the stone has laid down well – appropriately trampled by igunadons and such - it is a fine stone – but more often than not there is a distinct strata of good flattened material, with other layers being very soft and brittle. Some are glutinous and almost like Christmas pudding – complete with the mincemeat feel. So you can imagine the horror of working with a large block only to be confronted with an area that is patently not stone in the midst of your carving. Fine for a sculptor who works with the material  - not so good for the stonemason who works up designs to order. But where it is good, it is remarkable – a depth of colour from white to browns and blacks with as much tonal range as a good photograph. It provides such a colourful surface that the forms need to be simple to ‘read’ well in sculpture.

Sadly, a large work is too impractical to start until a commission for a permanent indoor work presents itself. Like alabaster, its gleaming qualities are ruined by being outside, despite the stone being very hardy in the well calcified sections. Many vintage paving and tomb stones around the quarrying sites are found to be Petworth Marble on closer inspection – their shallow gleam lost over the centuries, but the winkles are still visible to the curious.  Take a look at some of the old paving around your houses if you live in the area.

A short Petworth House exhibition on 17-21 September 2011 will feature four works in Petworth Marble (including the 2008 work pictured above) and portraits in terracotta, supported by oil paintings by painter Martin Paterson. He studied under Joan Souter-Robertson who was a pupil of André Lhote, associated with the Cubist Movement in Paris. She has maintained a strong influence on his work, which aims to recreate the random shapes and colours of nature in compositions of formal beauty.

Please make contact if you would like to attend the Private View on the early evening of Friday 16th September. 

You can read more about Petworth Marble in Roger Birch’s book: Sussex Stones – The Story of Horsham Stone and Sussex Marble, Roger Birch (2005) ISBN 978-0955125904

Exhibition: 17-21st September 2011
JON EDGAR & MARTIN PATERSON
Petworth Marble, Portraits and Paintings
Petworth House, West Sussex

(admission charge to the National Trust grounds)

Dick Barton, the mapping of South Georgia… and a solitude experiment

In 1951 Duncan Carse, the voice of ‘Dick Barton – Special Agent’, a BBC serial thriller with a huge daily audience, abruptly gave up his radio acting career to lead a six-man private Antarctic expedition during 1951-52 that planned to make the first accurate map of South Georgia. It failed to achieve this, but Carse organised a second party in 1953-54, and then a third in 1955-56. Finally, his persistence was rewarded in 1958 by the publication of a map by the Directorate of Overseas Surveys which remained the definitive map of the island until 2004.

Alec Trendall was geologist on the South Georgia Surveys. Between 1954 and 2002 he lost contact with Carse, but met him again in Sussex in 2003. Recognising that the South Georgia Surveys merited a proper written record, after Duncan’s death in 2004 he began to write Putting South Georgia on the Map which was published in 2011. Carse’s abandonment of his professional career to become a freelance explorer is explained for the first time. As an apprentice on a square-rigged ship, then as a seaman on an Antarctic research vessel, and later on a British expedition to the Antarctic peninsula, he had developed a burning ambition to lead a trans-Antarctic expedition. He never fulfilled this desire, and died in 2004 a disappointed man. But his contribution to Antarctic exploration was rewarded by the award of a second clasp to his Polar Medal by Queen Elizabeth II in July 1982.

 

In the midst of this story, Carse embarked on a 18 month solitude experiment in 1961, becoming a hermit at Ducloz Head on the south coast of South Georgia. The 1976 documentary Survival in Limbo is an account of the remarkable story directed by David Cobham for the BBC, and relived by Carse.

The Edgar portrait head of Carse is now cast in bronze at South Georgia Museum, South Atlantic and in the Scott Polar Research Institute collection. (The SPRI web archive includes several images of Carse and Trendall from the 1950s expeditions.) The original terracotta remains at Carse’s former home in Sussex where the sculptor now lives.

This Guardian article on Carse by Jon McGregor (2007) is also worth reading.

Composition and flow

The Picasso etching Le Repas Frugal (1904) demonstrates in two dimensions how the subconscious or intentional actions of the artist can assist the viewer’s eye around the composition without too much effort. The joints of the fingers and arms lead one’s eye from one character to the other and back again.

Whether a contrivance or not, it helps focus on looking at one’s own work, especially where the composition is complex – i.e. more than a few elements – as that complexity can mask understanding of the formal characteristics of the work. Sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska noted ‘The connoisseur loves one spicy cake, but the glutton requires at least six to stimulate his pleasure’ in comments about the virtues of the single statue over a group arrangement.

A few things to consider might be the balance of the forms within the composition – think about their relative sizes and positions, and whether they are similar in feel, or provide contrasts.

Moving from two to three dimensions, it could be found that things become easier; the extra dimension allowing one to see more as a result of having more viewpoints. In two dimensions, there seems to be a visual deceit at play.

How does a three-dimensional sculpture react when glanced at in a similar manner to our consideration of the etching? Does it encourage you to move around it following the masses, occasionally pausing and restarting, or are you stuck still, having to consciously decide which way to move around the work?

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska’s letters to Sophie Brzeska frequently conveyed his sculptural musings. In May 1911, he wrote:

The great thing is:
that sculpture consists in placing planes according to a rhythm
that painting consists in placing colours according to a rhythm
that literature consists in placing stories according to a rhythm
that music consists in placing sounds according to a rhythm

Whilst now 100 years old, these observations could suggest you might consider art forms you are less familiar with in a similar vein to one you are most comfortable with… as an aid to ‘reading’ the work; understanding why it grabs you (or perhaps does not).

Sculptors are all too frequently working alone and with no regular sounding board to give thoughtful consideration to works which spring into being.  Sculptural devices have been used for many thousands of years to increase the visual power of the three-dimensional object. Whilst it may appear formulaic, having a background knowledge of an understanding of sculptural form and mass can only assist rigorous objectivity; to help us realise which could be the emperor’s new clothes before they are made too public. Sadly, the vast majority of works of sculpture today do not rely on a sculptor’s formal understanding; those qualities of mass and space which might subconsciously link to some sort of instinctive response by the viewer are often absent, replaced by slickness, design and cerebral puns – or the wholly representational.

A practical exercise  - on composition and flow – links to this piece.  If you haven’t previously done so, please sign up for email updates and then request the password for the ‘List of Practical Exercises’ through the contact page.

To read more of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska letters, read Savage Messiah by H.S. Ede, originally published in 1931. For a time he was an assistant curator at the Tate and got to know many of the avant-garde artists of the day.  Kettle’s Yard was Jim Ede’s former home and he bought many of Gaudier-Brzeska’s work from Sophie Brzeska’s estate after her death.

On the tradition of pre-conceiving sculpture

This short clip is part of a Documentary film by Anna Thornhill. It features archive footage of sculptor Alan Thornhill working on a sculpture in Putney in 1989 and the resulting work, Exodus,  some 20 years later at Kingscote Park in Gloucestershire.

Thornhill’s self-devised method of improvisation using clay allowed him to abandon the use of the sculpture armature and build freely creating a matrix with pre-prepared clay ‘elements’. His concern was to manipulate the material, to find ways of making it stand up or hold together, and through adding and taking away, to see what came. This allowed things to enter the work which were far from intentional, and were later seen to echo some of the sculptor’s preoccupations at the time of making the work. This way of working differs from sculpture commonly produced from the maquette, which is based on an idea and is essentially designed or pre-planned, often factored up to a chosen size in a chosen material, for public display. Thornhill sees pre-conceived ideas as essentially deadening to his creativity.

His teaching and trustee role at the Frink School of Sculpture and teaching at Morley College, London has been influential to several artists and several continue to introduce his methods to their own students. For me, translating the ethos behind Thornhill’s working method to the carved block (where one cannot add material) has been hard but eventful. The block is turned any number of times when imagery starts to occur, before something hopefully more enduring finally resolves itself… or the block ends up as wood chips or gravel! My sculpture Block (right) was initially worked in the horizontal with landscape-like references for several months before elements of one figure gradually emerged. This exerted a sufficiently strong force to re-orientate the stone vertically from that point. This work will be at the Leicester Botanic Garden International Centenary sculpture exhibition between 26th June and 30th October 2011.

The film Spirit in Mass is available from www.alanthornhill.co.uk where his archive of works is also accessible. The Putney Sculpture Trail is permanently accessible to the public, with 9 works by Thornhill on the south side of the river between the Exodus sculpture at Leaders Gardens, The Embankment and Prospect Quay adjoining Wandsworth Park. It is a considerable body of work on permanent public display in our capital city and deserves to be better known.

Leonora Carrington on intellectualising art

It is sad to hear Leonora Carrington has died aged 94. Her recent sculpture (in the link, seen here in the exhibition which she lived long enough to see open), is seemingly interpreted from the imagery of her earlier paintings. For me, it does not have the power of her two-dimensional work or earliest sculpture. Nevertheless, for the British artist who lived in Mexico City for sixty years and was adopted as one of their own, there appears to have been a growing demand for it.

The Guardian journalist Joanna Moorhead is a relative of Carrington. She produced a touching film which was shown at the travelling exhibition at Pallant House Gallery and Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in 2010. Here is an excerpt from Carrington’s discussions with Moorhead:

Her admonishment of her great-niece about the intellectualisation of art is refreshing, and when I first saw this it made me question the similarities between true improvisational working and surrealism.

Surrealists set out to liberate the workings of the subconscious and disrupt conscious thought processes, by the use of irrationality and mystery. Paradoxically, perhaps that last ‘by the use of’ bring things back into the conscious, intellectual mind?

In a dialogue between Andre Breton and Andre Masson, the former referred to one of the precursors to the Surrealists:

A good question for an advanced examination for art critics would be ‘Does the painting of (Henri) Rousseau prove he knew the Tropics, or that he did not?’

Did the exotic paintings spring from the imagination, or from memory? It’s a nice quote, but actually irrelevant here as the imagery is still cerebral. It seems to have narrative rather than just feeling.

Sculptor Alan Thornhill has remarked that true improvisational working comes from instinct rather than intellect; form emerges ambiguously from an interplay with clay or paint, rather than being imagined and created as an entity. For the artist, keeping free from pre-planned ideas is difficult. Responding to form, mass or colour for its own sake must have an input from somewhere – but perhaps from another part of the brain that is free of ego and somehow more ‘honest’. Conceptual work survives on its idea, and for me often dies through its inability to survive on its visual appeal alone.

Intellectualisation springs up on the other side of the fence too. For the viewer and the art historian, there is a continual need to ‘get’ visual art, with the former often spotted – pursed lips; hand on chin – analysing the imagery in front of them.

Carrington standing up for purely visual values might suggest that the only two outcomes for the viewer of “art” could be summed up as: being moved by it… or not being moved by it.

The Guardian’s obituary on Leonora Carrington.