shewhomust | Entries tagged with art

1. Coughing: I thought I was over this wretched cold, but since we went swimming yesterday, I have been coughing again. It seems unfair that organising ourselves to take some healthy exercise - first time swimming in a couple of weeks, what with one thing and another - should result in my feeling less well. (I exaggerate, of course. The cough is only intermittent, and it isn't painful - but it is irritating).
2. Thawing: We parked, as is our habit, just across the river from the pool. The water is high and fast moving: still within its banks, though we wondered how long that would last. The geese who live on a grassy hummock at the water's edge had taken refuge at the top of the bank, just below the patio of the Passport Office. Returning after our swim we thought that if anything the water level had fallen slightly, and were surprised - but the heaps of snow are smaller today than they were yesterday, and the real test is what happens when it thaws up the dale...
3. Cooking: I bought two bergamots from Waitrose, last time I ordered online - I've never been offered bergamots before, so how could I resist? Two citrus fruits, about the size of a medium orange, greenish yellow, what do do with them? In the end I made a version of Josceline Dimbleby's 'Canary cake' (a flourless almond sponge soaked in an orange syrup): adding the zest to the cake mixture and making the syrup from the juice and a little honey. The two fruits in their packaging were completely inert, but as soon as the zester bit into the skin there was the unmistakable spritz of Earl Grey tea. The juice was sharper than orange, but again, that distinctive flavour. I'd buy more of those...

Meanwhile, I have some pink onions: not the genuine Roscoff variety, these were grown in Essex, but a chance to try out the recipe leaflet I picked up at the 'Maison des Johnnies'.
4. Remembering: The Guardian's 'How we Made' feature talks to the artist and designer behind the poppy installation at the Tower of London. I wish I had seen that: I love the idea of it, and the details in the article are very moving, but you can't really talk about art without actually seeing it (well, I can't, and I don't think you should). So I was pleased to see, at the foot of the article, that there will be a national tour of the Weeping Window section of the work (I'd have loved to see that in Kirkwall during the Battle of Jutland commemorations, but we were committed elsewhere). The nearest it will come is Carlisle, which is not impossible, despite the less than ideal dates.
5. A message in a bottle: The world's oldest message in a bottle has been found on a beach in Western Australia by a couple who thought it might "look good on a bookshelf".

Alternative title: "quibbling". This is not the story of a bottle employed to carry a message, it's the story of a message added to make it possible to track a bottle - not communication, but mapping. The bottle was thrown overboard in 1886 as part of a German experiment to track ocean currents; hundreds of bottles from this experiment have already been found, but none since 1934. I think this means that this latest find is the oldest message in a bottle by a margin of a quarter of a century, not because its older but because it took longer to find it. It's still a very cool thing to find.

Crossposts: https://shewhomust.livejournal.com/622605.html

On the first day of Lumiere - Thursday ten days ago, but who's counting? - we reckoned that things were just going to get busier as the weekend progressed, and that today was therefore our best option for visiting what were likely to be the most popular items, in the centre of town. This was the area which was entrance by ticket only in the early evening, so we ate first and then headed in to town just after the gates opened. The first thing we saw - and we stepped into St Margaret's churchyard for a distant preview - was the moon:

This is the closer view, as it looked down over entrance point and railings of Framwelgate Bridge. Hannah Fox's 'Our Moon' is a digitally generated face projected onto the Castle wall: four faces in all, a different one for each night of the festival, and each one composed from the scanned faces of a number of local people, whose moving expressions drove the movements of the moon face. All of which seems over elaborate - and why create an incentive to revisit that part of the festival which you know will be oversubscribed, instead of encourage visitors to explore more widely? But I liked the way I caught sight of the face from different points in the city, and came to respond to it as a friendly presence.

( There's more... )

But as we walked home past the allotments, there was one last glimpse of Our Moon.

Crossposts: https://shewhomust.livejournal.com/607339.html

Since I was in Newcastle yesterday for the Reading Group, I visited the Paul Nash exhibition at the Laing Art Gallery (Guardian preview of the show at the Tate, not all of which, I think, transferred to Newcastle).

I arrived late, and didn't have as much time as I had intended, but as it turned out I had as much as I wanted. There were one or two amazing paintings, but overall my reaction (and yes, this is about my limitations, not Nash's) was: too much surrealism, not enough Black Dog.

I liked this passage, though:

Last summer I walked in a field near Avebury where two rough monoliths stand up, sixteen feet high ... A mile away, a green pyramid casts a gigantic shadow. In the hedge at hand, the white trumpet of a convolvulus turns from its spiral stem, following the sun. In my art I would solve such an equation.

I didn't have a notebook with me, so I am indebted to Outlandish Knight for the transcription (and for some of Nash's paintings of Avebury).

Crossposts: https://shewhomust.livejournal.com/606772.html

We have just had the weekend of Lumiere, Durham's biennial festival of lights. As usual we made some expeditions to see what was on show, and, as usual, my reactions were pretty mixed. For the first two evenings they ranged from "Oh, that's quite nice..." to "Let me out of here, NOW!" And I hope to expand on that later. But on Saturday we went to the Botanic Gardens to see For the Birds, with no idea what to expect beyond what the Lumiere website told us: "a meditative and immersive journey through the wilderness to discover over 20 light and sound installations inspired by birds and created by a collective of artists:" Useful practical information might have added: "You enter by the gate adjacent to the Park & Ride, walk the length of the Gardens, and back, leaving through the same gate you came in."

What they really couldn't say, I suppose, is that this was by some margin the best thing in the Festival. Also the hardest to photograph, because it makes the best use of darkness.

But wrap up warm and come for a walk in the dark woods. Just follow the little white lights:

( We were warned: 'There will be surprises' )

For the birds was devised in 2014 for the RSPB's Ynys-hir reserve. There are photographs on the website of one of the artists ihvolved.

Overheard of the evening: "But why would they have an installation of a crying child?"

Crossposts: https://shewhomust.livejournal.com/606687.html

This post has been gradually accumulating over nearly two weeks, now. It began in reaction to a television programme, Who's Afraid of Conceptual Art?, which we stumbled into while looking more or less at random for an hour of diverting television. But it seems to have turned into a hybrid, partly the sort of response - I won't flatter it by calling it a review - that says well, if I'd been in charge, it would go like this... and partly just a place to stash some of the links I gathered together while thinking about that.

( Cut for length and ramblings. But it might be worth it for the links. )

In the last week, among other things, we have been to the cinema twice (for some reason, both films included a piece of the Flower Song from Lakmé), been to two book launches (by coincidence, both books brought together images with poetry by a number of poets; that being the case, it's no coincidence that some of the same poets were at both launches) and entertained a house guest (D., who is still with us, except that he has gone out to do his own thing this evening). In brief, then:

First film: Anomalisa: Peter Bradshaw's glowing review in the Guardian; Mark Kermode's more ambivalent review in the Observer.
Does that excuse me from producing an opinion of my own? The midlife crisis of a motivational speaker, staying in a corporate-type hotel before giving a corporate-type speech. Here he meets a young woman who seems different from everyone else. This is familiar territory. But the actors are stop-motion puppets, which is not only an interesting gimmick but opens up possibilities: Lisa genuinely is different from everyone else, she has her own face and voice, while all the other characters (except Michael himself) have the same face and are voiced by the same actor. There's something called the "Fregoli delusion" apparently, which is that everyone is really the same person, and this is referenced in the name of the hotel - the Fregoli Hotel. So that was a clever reference that I didn't pick up on, and had to have pointed out to me. On the other hand, I did spot that the film on the tv in Michael's room was My Man Godfrey, and wonder why (because, says the internet, unlike Casablanca, it is in the public domain).
Extremely clever, and the character of Lisa is actually very touching. These two things ought to enhance each other; yet I react as if they were in conflict.
First book launch: Two Rivers and the Sea: Inspired by the work of Rachel Carson, poet Lisa Matthews ans visual artist Melanie Ashby spent a series of four residencies on the Northumberland coast, the circuit of A Year in Beadnell. They blogged, they took photographs, they filmed life in the rock pools, they wrote poems, they invited other poets to visit and observe with them, and they have published this record of the year.
Second film: Marguerite: Strange enough that there should be one film about Florence Foster Jenkins, but stranger still, two have come along at the same time. This is not the one with Meryl Streep, this is the other one, the French one, "based on a true story" but fictionalised. This has the drawback that you can no longer point to the story it tells and say "Incredible though this seems, it happened." It has the advantage that you are free to tell whatever story you wish, and to relocate it to the 1920s, with all the fun that offers: the frocks! the Dadaists! The tone wanders uncertainly between comedy and pathos, and there are aspects of the story whose truth I questioned which have nothing to do with Florence Foster Jenkins. But I didn't feel I'd wasted my time.
Second book launch: NORTHbound: Vane Women celebrate their silver anniversary with an anthology built around Pat Maycroft's photographs. The women themselves and invited guests contributed poems inspired by one of Pat's photos, and many of the contributors were present at today's launch, so we had an unusual reading at which each poet read a single poem. Highlights included Pru Kitching's Franz Kafka in Durham City (a moody black and white view up a vennel that could well be in Prague's Old Town), Diane Cockburn's Heloise takes the Veil (a cat at a lace curtained window) and Bob Beagrie's Amanita Muscaria (what it says in the title, with Andy Willoughby taking second voice, reading the 'shadow poem', so that I half thought the magic was in the performance until I saw how ingeniously the poem was built on the page).
Bonus art exhibition: Cercle d'Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise: The NORTHbound launch was at mima, and while we were there, we saw the current exhibition of sculptures by Congolese plantation workers. I wish I had taken my camera. Failing that, imagine a bright white room containing a number of brown sculpted figures and portrait heads, and interspersed with leafygreen potted plants. Each piece is moulded from clay, scanned and the data transmitted to somewhere (I've forgotten where) in Europe where it can be reproduced in Belgian chocolate through multiple technologies, including 3D scanning and printing. Evidently the purpose of the project is to generate income for the cocoa plantation workers, and who knows how suitable a material chocolate is outside this context. I'd have photgraphed, too, the sign on the wall saying that mima was supporting the project by purchasing one of the pieces for £3000 (through a gallery which would take its usual 50% cut): surely the starkness of the statement was intended to make me want to photograph it?

From Sunday morning, when we discovered there was no heat in the house, to Tuesday evening, when I came home to cautiously returning warmth, ten days, during which I have posted about nothing but plumbing. But that's not the only thing I've been doing.

( Sunday was jam-packed )

Monday was eaten up by getting quotes to replace the boiler. On Tuesday D. arrived bearing fan heaters and firewood, and we made an open fire. On Wednesday we took him to the pub quiz, and had a sociable evening (and our team won, which is not unusual, and dates back well before

durham_rambler and me joining the team). On Friday we cleared the dining room table, and had a proper dinner party, which was fun.

D. left us on Saturday morning, and in the evening

durham_rambler and I braved the winds and the water to drive to Barnard Castle to hear Martin Simpson, who was playing at the Witham. In fact our journey wasn't too bad, though anyone coming from the west would have had a hard time, and the audience was much diminished - pity, because it was a great show. I could (very easily) have done without the enthusiasts in the row in front of us repeatedly calling out requests for Buckets of Rain (funny the first time, but not that funny). Good to hear a couple of Dylan songs making their way back into the repertoire, especially North Country Blues, very topical. I still yearn for that album of Dylan songs Martin Simpson never made.

The main excitement of Sunday was watching the final two episodes of Doctor Who; from which you may infer that it wasn't a very exciting day. On Monday we were up early to welcome the builders, and on Tuesday we spent the day at the planning appeal over the County Hospital site, which I may or may not post about at greater length: I'd quite like to know how it turns out before I do. After which I went to the Graphic Novels Reading Group, and we all went out for a Christmas meal afterwards. Which brings us round to where I came in.

The Bears were with us for the weekend of Lumiere, so we made a serious effort to see things. This stopped short of getting the tickets which would give access to the central area in the early evening: tickets were free, but required us to decide which evening we wanted them.

( Friday night in the ticketed area )

( Saturday night in the rain )

We didn't go back for more on Sunday: we discussed it, and tried to work out whether we could get to the riverbanks without going all the way through the city, but I don't think we would have tried. Then

durham_rambler found the news reports that the pieces we were talking about had been removed because the river had flooded the footpath, so we had every excuse for a leisurely dinner en famille instead.

tl:dr version: I don't think there was anything I hated, though there was a lot I was unenthusiastic about. And I enjoyed being unenthusiastic about it in good company. Plus, there were maybe three things I liked very much. Whether the exercise is worth what the Council puts into it, I don't know. But I had a fun weekend.

Yes, of course I'm thinking about Paris. But I have nothing useful to say on the subject.

So have a picture from the Lumiere Festival. After the sound and fury of the son et lumière, and the interminable procession through the maze of barriers which brought us eventually into the cathedral, after the unimpressive lighting of the cathedral itself, eventually we came into the cloister and admitted that yes, the rose window was rather good -

- and then we emerged into this garden, and it was all light and fun and good humour:

We'll go back for more tonight, if the rain holds off.

I've been busy lately, with both pleasure (D. has, for reasons of his own, been staying with us twice in the space of ten days, with a trip home in between) and business (several clients simultaneously announcing sizable projects which needed to be added to their websites).

I did find time for a brief visit to the DLI for an exhibition of Paolozzi screenprints called General Dynamic F.U.N. "Here," says the programme, "Paolozzi makes brilliant use of the technologies of mass-reproduction – the household names and familiar faces of consumer advertising, high fashion and Hollywood." Fifty prints hung around a bright white room, not as large as I had imagined (I'd anticipated something poster-sized, I suppose, but presumably the dimensions are those of the printing screen), some of a single bold image, some a kaleidoscopic collage of detail, all reflecting the lighting and each other in a way that would normally have irritated me but here seemed appropriate:

F.U.M. seemed about right: I thought the artist must have had great fun assembling all these raw materials, the cars and the film stars and the confectionery wrappers, and sorting them into the final images must have been fun, too. I wished I could have joined in that process, or failing that, have walked round the exhibition with someone who had, and played the game of 'do you recognise this?' and 'oh, I know where that came from...'

lamentables went to a WWI commemoration and it seems to have been all right, to have expressed something worth expressing:

Minimum Monument is the work of Brazilian artist Néle Azevedo, and this iteration was commissioned by the Birmingham Hippodrome. So alongside my ambivalence about commemorating the outbreak of the war - and with the news each day as sanguine as it is, to claim that we are remembering the War that was going to end all wars - you can set an entirely different class of ambivalence about art which is apparently related to a particular place and time, but which is actually the thing that a particular artist does. Nonetheless, it feels appropriate, all those fragile little beings melting away...

Another fine photo, by someone else and one that catches the dissolution of the figures.

We had plans for Thursday evening, so we took it easy during the day, pottering around doing our various errands, taking the last chance to visit or explore or -

durham_rambler and I spent the morning disposing of recycling and doing a little light shopping. Our house had no recycling bins at all, but we had found the way to the tip earlier in the week: just past the corner where this lonely figure stood sentinel ("It's the Michelin man!" said

durham_rambler, but it isn't...).

Recycling discarded, we followed the signs to the Cheese Farm and Coffee Shop. Coffee first - and perhaps, I suggested, a little something off-diet to accompany it? "The all-day breakfast?" asked

durham_rambler. That wasn't on offer, so we had cake with our coffee, examined the menu and felt that another time this would be a place for an agreeable lunch. We bought some of their cheese: the local variety is called Anster (which is allegedly how you pronounce Anstruther, though we didn't hear anyone doing so - and something I read complicated matters still further by asserting that it's pronounced 'Enster') and is a tasty but not exciting hard cheese. I liked the younger, creamy-crumbly form better than the more mature, Cheddar-like version.

On our way into Anstruther. to do a little more utilitarian shopping at the Co-op, we passed this mystery object. It stands alone, apparently in a ploughed field, in the pouring rain, and no amount of internet search has given me any clue what it is.

Though I did find this splendid gallery of Scottish castles, so my time wasn't wasted.

I spent the afternoon wandering around Pittenweem, nosing around the shops and galleries, taking pictures of the harbour, generally enjoying myself. There were some wonderful contemporary crafts, beautifully displayed, at the The Coach House, though the item I most desired was a drawing by James Barclay, of a broken creel at Cellardyke - and that was in a curious shop, which appeared to be the downstairs of the proprietor's house, full of second-hand oddments (including a shelf of books) but dotted with reasonably serious - and seriously priced - contemporary art. Can this have been The Little Gallery? I can't tell...

In the evening we all went to the folk club in Crail - upstairs in the Town Hall, which is a very fine building. The guests were James Hickman and Dan Cassidy, and they were fine: they played very varied material, something for everyone but not really conveying any focus - I'm not complaining, as I suspect the focus of their interest is not the part of their repertoire that most interests me. I enjoyed the evening, and while I wouldn't go out of my way to see them again, I wouldn't go out of my way to avoid them, either. The club had the unusual practice of starting on time, putting the guests on for a set straight away, then after the break putting in some floor spots before the second set. Which seemed to work, and the Bears did a floor spot, so that was good.

And the next morning it was time to clear up and come home. Goodbye, Pittenweem.

One section of our coastal walk that particularly stuck in my mind was the stretch from Kirkaldy to Dysart: after the long slog up from Kirkaldy you enter a park, and descend, looking back towards the massive ruins of Ravenscraig Castle, to a pleasant path which follows each zig and zag of the coast (the local laird was apparently determined to thwart any miner who might think to walk to work along the shore) until it vanishes into a tunnel through a spur of rock and emerges into Dysart harbour. Today we revisited that walk, and both was and was not as I had remembered.

We took the opportunity to visit the castle: it didn't delay us long, but it was a very splendid ruin, and provided fine views of the path ahead. I don't know why we didn't take the time to visit last time, except that we had a long way to go and I had the impression it was more of a detour than it was. On the other hand, the path to Dysart was as agreeable as I had remembered (this time with the bonus of a piper playing what we eventually identified as the Freedom Come All Ye) but much shorter. Emerging onto the harbour was still good, though the blue skies and high tide had made for a prettier picture.

After lunch at the Harbourmaster's House we walked Dysart's town trail in reverse order. I remember reading the boards about the Dysart Artworks, four pieces of contemorary art recently installed: but how could I not have seen Donald Urquhart's 'Sea Beams', a set of upright timbers painted a selection of tasteful shades of blue? On this visit, they struck my eye as son as we entered the town, yet I had no memory of them at all.

It's less surprising that - as we pursued our journey along the coast - we didn't see some of Dysart's splendid buildings (like all these Fife towns, it has an impressive tollbooth), or realise that the park where we had started our walk continues, and becomes a beautiful - and beautifully maintained - arboretum. This is the setting for another of the artworks, Alec Finlay's 'Nest Boxes', a dozen nesting boxes each bearing a crossword clue. What I liked about this was that it gave us a focus to walk around the arboretum looking at the trees. By the time we had had enough, we had round half a dozen of the clues, and solved three of them (sample: 'Bird on board' = 'rook'; no wonder they didn't have the cheek to attach one to the monkey puzzle!).

And home via the Co-op, cups of tea, dinner, the internet - where does the evening go?

I would like to record that last night's strawberries, bought from the farm shop as 'Pittenweem Strawberries' were among the best I have ever tasted, despite also being among the biggest.

Last weekend was all about the ephemerality of art. And about the visitors, that was a theme, too - and thinking about it, visitors with dogs: the expected visit from cousins who called in on the way from football at Sunderland to holiday cottage in Alnwick, but couldn't stay long because the dog was in the car, the unexpected visit from M. who was walking the dog and rang the bell on the off-chance we'd be in. All of this was good, but there's not much I can say about it, whereas I have plenty of pictures... ( So this will be a picture-heavy post. )

What's the opposite of writer's block? Writer's flux? Each of the things that follow could have been a post of its own (not to mention the ones that I remember as soon as I have shut down my computer and gone to bed). Since that's not going to happen, here is the news in brief:

Tyne at the Theatre Royal; David Whetstone's review in the Journal refers to the original production at Live Theatre, and although the Theatre Royal was both packed and appreciative, I felt it would have been more at home in the smaller, more intimate setting. I found the framing narrative more than a bit predictable, but the material it framed was enjoyable. Best thing: a story by Julia Darling that was entirely new to me, The Women Who Painted Ships (perfectly performed by Zoe Lambert and Jane Holman)

I made hot cross buns, a mash-up of my basic sourdough, the recipe from Elizabeth David's English Bread and Yeast Cookery and what ingredients came to hand. I don't usually add sugar to my bread, the sourdough starter doesn't need it, but the remains of the jar of nutmeg jam were quietly cristalising in the fridge, so I scraped that in, and added more nutmeg as well as cloves, cinnamon and allspice. I liked the result, warm and aromatic with nutmeg. I followed Elizabeth David's instruction to make the cross by cutting the risen buns, then gave them five minutes more before putting them in the oven: this, too, worked surprisingly well (Mrs David says don't worry about getting the crosses perfectly even; the important thing is that you have made the effort. I paraphrase, but not by much - and yes, I know it's not like her to be so laid back).

valydiarosada and D. came for the weekend, and accompanied us to a curious concert at the Sage. Greater North was a Folkworks production involving a variety of performers, from recent Folk Degree graduates Horizontal Sunday to the Keelers and Maddy Prior, compered by Kate Fox. What the publicity material doesn't mention is that it was put together as the entertainment for a Rotary convention, which was a bit disconcerting, but didn't turn out to be a problem. I liked Melanie Barber's clog dancing.

Sunday lunch in Cotherstone was a bit of a detour on the way to the Bowes Museum, but a very scenic detour. The museum itself is just so full of stuff you can't see it all: you could spend a entire visit on the ceramics or the paintings, or focus on the history of the building, the Founders' collection, the Swan, or head straight for the temporary exhibitions (currently Gavin Turk neons. These really deserve a post of their own, too, but the essence of it would be: you can't dislike a giant neon banana, but the accompanying information does its best to persuade you...). Then you head downstairs to the cAafé and discovery a whole other gallery hidden away. I end up wandering around exclaiming incoherently: "Mechanical mouse! Meissen starlings! Roman pottery! Cup and ring markings (on the Gainford Stone)..."

durham_rambler and I went to Helen Savage's tasting of cool climate Californian wines. Some very enjoyable wines: a classy Roederer fizz, a Kendall Jackson pinot noir (my notes say both 'butterscotch' and 'cabbage' - but then my notes also say "Beware the glassy winged sharpshooter").

As a birthday treat, J. and I allowed durham_rambler to drive us to Alston for a day out: a pub lunch of Cumberland sausage, a stroll beside the Nent, a circuitous route home - Teesdale again - and suddenly, just on that one stretch of road, lapwings everywhere, tumbling in flight and standing sentry on the flanks of the hills, smart in their olive coats and slicked back crests.

And home for a quiet evening on the sofa, a bottle of Spanish red, a bowl of olives and the first episode of Shetland on television.

I have great admiration for those single-minded folks who set up a blog to document one thing and one thing only: photographs of London's shop fronts, or descriptions of cooking their way through Julia Child, say. There are recurring obsessions in this blog, but if there is an actual theme, I have yet to discover it. I'm less enthusiastic about the collection of concrete objects (other than books, obviously), but the same applies: I don't collect, I accumulate, and the objects accumulated are things which appeal to me individually, rather than representatives of some general class of things. Naturally I try to justify myself by the precedent of the Cabinet of Curiosities.

Now, according to this recent Guardian article, the Cabinet of Curiosities is back in fashion. Of course, this means that it is no longer sufficient to gather interesting and beautiful specimens, and arrange them to your own satisfaction, whether you are an affluent gentleman with a dedicated display room in your mansion or a lead-miner constructing spar boxes from minerals smuggled away from the mine. Now we have a project at the Prado in which an artist rearranges exhibits to reflect the museum's origins as, in effect, a cabinet of curiosities, bringing together works of art and speciments from natural history (I am charmed to discover there is a painting called 'His Majesty's Anteater'). What's more, my taste is not really macabre enough to meet the criteria laid down in the article.

I comfort myself that this may be so, but that the article uses the words "carved sperm whale teeth" to describe something which is illustrated (in the paper edition only) by a piece of scrimshaw: don't they know the word? Thinking about this set me wandering about the internet, whence I return with treasure: starting with a word that I didn't know, scrimshander, a maker of scrimshaw. It's a beautiful word, and reflects a view of scrimshaw I had not previously come across, in which it is not a folk art, made by sailors with a little time and a the simplest of tools and materials, but an art exercised by specialists. This mermaid is carved on a whale tooth, but she is not scrimshaw as I have hitherto known it. This whaling scene is more representative, scratched or incised rather than "carved", and here is the collection of the New Bedford Whaling Museum, awaiting transfer to their new scrimshaw gallery.

One last curiosity for my cabinet: thanks to

sovay for Jeff de Boer's armour for cats and mice.

I know better than to make resolutions about the coming year. Even so, things that fall around the turn of the year seem loaded with significance: the last this, the first that... With the help of

valydiarosada and D., who have as usual been helping us see in the New Year, we managed some suitably agreeable firsts and lasts.

( The last outing of 2013 was to the seaside... )

Back home, I pot-roasted a joint of venison for a special New Year's Eve dinner - not something I've done before, but a success, at least from the cook's point of view: simple, carved beautifully, tasted good. And we stayed up and saw the New Year in - not a first, but certainly the first in some years, more often I slope off to bed early.

( ... and so was the first outing of 2014 )

So that's one year ended pleasantly, and the next well begun.

Last weekend was the annual open studios event in the Ouseburn, Newcastle's "creative quarter" where derelict warehouses have gradually been converted into artists' and designers' studios (not to mention Seven Stories). There must be a limit to how far it can grow, how many paintings and pots, how much hand-made furniture and architectural glass the city can sustain: but new studios keep opening, so apparently we're not there yet. Many of the studios and workshops are extremely smart, yet the area retains an air of semi-dereliction: there's a lot of mural art, mostly rather well done.

We were meeting friends, and since Gail had arrived early and gone for coffee at the City Farm, we started our visit there, enjoying the sunshine, and the golden foliage, and the giraffes and other livestock (there was a very fluffy Shetland pony). The photo is taken from one of the Lime Street studios, though.

Our first stop was Northern Print, where there was much to like (although mostly I had already liked it last year), then Lime Street, where much the same applied. I liked Zoe Garner's glass work, especially the piece illustrated on the home page of her website, vertical rods of differing lengths, each somehow glowing at the tip - in fact it may be a theme of the day that I liked the glass, since another artist who stood out for me was Effie Burns, who has been casting romescu cauliflowers in glass (her website shows mainly much larger work, though the strawberry is rather fine).

Up in the attic I was interested to see Stevie Ronnie's photographs of his recent trip to the arctic, but unsatisfied by them. Perhaps when he's written something about it... The first time I met Stevie, he talked about Gontran De Poncins' book Kabloona about life in the arctic, and I reminded him of this - at which he fetched out the book and we both enthused over it. Much of the current work he was showing was book sculpture, which tends to make me uneasy. Here's an example of the sort of thing (though not one I've seen): "A poem, composed in a new form which utilises the structures of rope, has been twisted into a paper rope and mounted onto a salvaged Arctic weather balloon winch" - which makes a pretty object, but how do you read the poem? I liked some little pictures which had been made by tracing the outlines of geographical features from Google maps, then cutting them out of coloured paper: Kielder reservoir, Seaham harbour, the line of Newcastle's city wall... They made pleasing, almost abstract shapes.

We hadn't planned to eat at the Cluny - in fact, we had actively planned not to eat at the Cluny - but although the Open Studios didn't seem very busy, it was still standing room only at the Ship, and we tumbled back into the Cluny almost by default. We won't do it again: they have succumbed to the tyranny of the Sunday roast, and weren't doing it very well. I enjoyed the beer, but it's not a place to eat. Gentrification still has a little way to go, clearly.

That's all, folks.

Lumiere weekend has just passed - the third time Durham has hosted this festival of lights. We enjoyed the 2009 version, and had mixed feelings about the 2011 version (which is not the reason why my post about it was in two parts, part 1 and part 2).

( If a picture's worth a thousand words, this is a very long post indeed )

After the disappointments of the early evening, the giant snowdome in the Market Place was a welcome blast of pure fun: I liked the way Neptune was silhouetted against the royal blue of the dome, as if about to burst its bubble with his trident, and I liked the snow, so much more conveniently contained than the real thing. I was less sure about the neon message on the plinth, and not just from incipient neon fatigue: yes, I understand that the message 'I love Durham' was part of the conversion of the statue into a tacky souvenir, but given the passions aroused by that statue over the last couple of years, is it possible to take that message at face value? (The Guardian's reporter managed this, remarking that "Shoppers and workers walk by this statue every day without giving it a second glance. Now, though, they were agog, seeing it as if for the first time" and was corrected at some length in the comments).

Most of the complaints I have read about the event were about the crowds, and the failure of the organisers to anticipate and deal with them. So it's only fair to say that the Market Place was the only point at which we found ourselves in any sort of crowd, and it was, as someone remarked, nothing like the crush on Gala day. That said, we didn't go up to Palace Green: the son et lumière at the Cathedral was wonderful two years ago, but we wanted to see something new.

( And we did... )

The publicity makes much of the fact that Luniere 2011 is more than twice as big as Luniere 2009: but it wasn't twice as much fun - though it was drier, which may help explain why the number of visitors was so much greater. It's my constant lament that an event will be counted a failure unless it is more crowded than I find comfortable, but this time I'm not alone in finding the crowds (and the crowd management) a major bar to enjoyment. Our plans for the rest of the weekend meant we were doing as the organisers advised, and visited at a relatively quiet time at the very beginning of the festival, so perhaps we hit more than our share of teething troubles - I don't know, I can only report what I saw (and didn't see) - but I'd have settled for fewer items and more of them functioning properly. Some of the artworks would have had more impact, too, if there'd been less repetition. By pure luck we had saved the best till last, and came away happy, but we didn't feel the need to go out again the following night and try to see the things we had missed.

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