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Making portraits with Gustav Klimt

I finished this piece this morning.  I braved the outside world and went and bought a staple gun to fix the applique to the canvas box mount and she was finished.

You might have picked up, if you follow me on Instagram, that I went to Vienna a couple of weeks ago.  I really loved it, although it is a slightly weird place, and am plotting about how to go back, assuming we ever get to travel again.  One reason for going was to see the Klimts.  Now every embroiderer worth their salt seems to go through a Klimt phase.  I went through mine about ten years ago, and I thought I was over it.  But, I was working on my sketchbook stuff for the workshop in May which I still hope is going ahead, and I started to get into all the lovely gold and patterning again.

I did quite a lot of reading round Vienna and Klimt, and there will be a lot to blog about, and I have used this in some new pieces of work.  This time round I was fascinated by Klimt’s portraits and not just the magnificent golden ones of Adele Bloch Bauer.  I really like this one of Joanna Staude:

She doesn’t attract a lot of interest because she was not one of Klimt’s clients; she was a professional model.  No-one seems to know much about what happened to her after the Anschluss.  I love the painting because it belongs to a series of paintings Klimt made which are really interested in fashion and fabric.  I think it may have been this portrait where the model turned up in a not particularly interesting dress and Klimt asked her to put her coat on backwards with the lining side out.  It would make sense.  It would account for the wonderful blocky outline.  I also love her hair.

So, I started out with an outline which I traced:

and made some pattern pieces, and then I built her up.  I like the blue against orange scheme of the portrait, but what I had to hand was some scraps of fabric with Voysey prints on them.  Voysey was immersed in the Art Nouveau movement like Klimt and so it seemed appropriate to use them:

You can just about see them through the beads.  The beads are, of course. a reference to all those great golden works and Klimt’s love of pattern.  I expect I was channelling the woman in Klimt’s Stoclet Palace cartoon:

I really enjoyed doing the embroidery on this.  I worked it in a frame.  I haven’t used a frame for a long time, but I knew the thing would distort if I did it in my hand and I wanted to be able to mount it as a flat picture.  Even better, when I went up to Hobbycraft to buy the frame, the bits had been in the sale so long that they were no longer on the system and so I got them for free.

I really enjoyed getting the fur collar on the coat:

It’s made from a tricksy synthetic furnishing fabric layered, frayed and stitched and I was delighted with how it turned out.

The hair was also interesting.  I was going to do more to it, but in the end I thought a simple approach was good:

I thought the pattern had an imperial look to it, which was appropriate for the city which had been the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

I loved doing the face.  Mine is more melancholy than the original, which perhaps reflects the spirit of the age.  I like the fact that she looks like she has seen life:

I used some bold colours on her face because that is what Klimt did in the portrait, and I liked the effect.

I didn’t use any bondaweb or similar on this as I find it difficult to stitch through.  I used a dab of pritt stick and the odd pin.  It seemed to work well enough.  Each component apart from the hair was mounted on something before I stitched it.  The coat was a piece of thin wadding and the face was mounted on felt.  This allowed dense stitching which would not have been possible on the thin background as it would have pulled and distorted badly.  The whole thing was then mounted onto some cotton interlining before being stretched over the commercial canvas.  I could have made the background as lush and glowing as Klimt and wondered about reversing the colour scheme so I had a red coat against a blue background, whereas Klimt had the opposite, but in the end I liked the simplicity of the background against the florid patterning.  The background fabric is some I found in the sale at John Lewis.  I bought it because it has a subtle shimmer which is great for the blingy Klimt.  The fabric is a linen blend and I can see why it didn’t sell as it doesn’t suggest any particular garment, but the linen makes it just firm enough to take the applique on top.

As I said, I loved working on the face.  I borrowed techniques from Sue Stone and Elizabeth Loveday, both of whom did wonderful workshops for Selvedge magazine last year.  I drew the face freehand and then ‘coloured it in’ with embroidery thread and a mix of stem stitch. back stitch, split stitch and seeding.  I like this way of working – not trying to make something pretty but something striking.

I am in the middle of another piece at the moment which is a bit larger.  I am thinking of working up a talk on Klimt for next year.  He is endlessly inspirational.  I am not sure if I would have liked him in person, but he was apparently catnip for the ladies, so who knows.  For the moment I am just enjoying using his work as a starting point for my own.

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Snowdrop collar

This is my new dog model, Chomsky, name chosen by the Medieval Historian, so we should be grateful that it’s not Egburt or Wizzo, who really did exist.  I took Chomsky out on a frankly less than tremendous photo shoot this week.  I thought we might get a nice shot in the cafe in the sunshine but in the event the sunshine was too bright, which is at the very least surprising, and shots of him looking moodily out through the cafe window came to nought.

All that aside, he really is a dog model, not a stuffed toy, because he has a rigid steel frame making him good at holding a pose.  The point of all this is that I am trying to widen my already slightly floppy and turned up at the corners portfolio career.  I am trying to make inroads in the whole celebration business so that I can integrate my creative work with my celebrant work, which is also creative, but in a different way.  I have made collars for a long time as I like striking jewellery, and, not being a small woman, I look better in statement pieces.  I like delicate jewellery but, on me, it can look a bit like a pimple on a mountainside as my mother used to say.  I was making a marigold collar – of which more in a subsequent post – when I suddenly thought that they would look good on dogs on special occasions.  For example this is my mutt in hers:

It struck me that people spend thousands on their wedding dresses and suits and general outfitting but then put a nasty polyester bandana or worse, tuxedo front on their dog who is supposed to be a cherished member of the family or s/he wouldn’t be at the wedding in the first place.  Dogsat weddings are a big thing, by the way, as ring bearers or just as attendants.  I saw two of these ‘Chomskies’ working it with the Dogs Trust people on a stall in a shopping mall in Bristol in exactly these rather down market artificial fibre items.

My collars were originally designed for humans rather than dogs , and people can wear them as statement pieces, or the collars can be box-framed.  It did strike me, however, that people might not want to wear something that had been round my dog’s neck, glamorous and alluring as Affie indeed is.  Thus the arrival of Chomsky.  Should I ever get my Etsy shop back into working order they will be on sale there.  I am calling them Occasion Wear for Dogs.

Readers of this blog, however, I am sure will be less interested in the commercial side of this and more in the collar itself.

I began it as part of a series of flowers of the month pieces for my celebrant blog.  I also have collars for October and November.  December got missed out because of Christmas, I suspect, and my push to make lovely but completely unwanted handmade gifts.  The flower of the month from the almanack that I am using is the snowdrop:

I am sure you know what a snowdrop looks like, but there is always room for a photo of a pretty flower.  I was a bit stuck on how to ‘do’ a snowdrop, but I suddenly remembered a Liberty print cotton I bought from a remnant bin.  I made the pattern, which is less impressive than it might sound as it is basically a crescent moon shape, and I cut the base layer from a cotton and linen table runner from IKEA.  Then I stitched on the printed panel with a bright green thread to echo the lovely colour of the snow drop stem and foliage:

After stitching on the panel I made a sandwich of the top, a layer of white felt for strength and support and then a backing of the same linen.  Then I started to fill in round panel with big porcelain beads and colonial knots in perle cotton.  I stitched some much smaller beads on the print, following the dots in the printed design, to look like snow.  The idea is that the beads and embroidery look like snow angels:

I had two goes at stitching on a strap because the first one didn’t hang right and the last thing you want to be doing on any sort of big day is fiddling with straps on accessories:

I allowed plenty of length so that it would fit most dogs.

The panel falls perfectly under Chomsky’s chin.  The condiments are to give you an idea of scale, but I am not sure that they are quite what we want for high class sales.

This is a close-up of the embellishment:

 

These are a couple of pages from my notebook/sketchbook although this collar was largely improvised rather than planned:

I will post about the remaining two collars shortly, and meanwhile will start thinking about February and violets.  I think I might have something in a drawer somewhere…

 

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New Year’s Day Dolls

Every year I make a doll on New Year’s Day.  The only rule is that they have to be achievable on one day and they have to say something about the past year or the one to come.

It’s interesting to look back over the many years I have been doing this.  It really shows my state of mind at the turning of the year.  Last year, when I was big into making bears, I made this one:

She is still one of my all time favourites, based on the walking work of art that is the artist, Bethan Laura Wood:

This year, I wanted to make something to help me in marketing my wedding celebrant business.  I saw the peg dolls in Margaret Bloom’s lovely little book, Making Peg Dolls.

I think her ideas are sweet without being too cloying.  I saw her Valentine’s dolls and thought that they would be perfect for my weddings business.

I bought a set of blank peg dolls and went to work on New Year’s day.  Margaret Bloom uses watercolour to paint her dolls, but I prefer acrylic because once it’s dry you no longer have to worry about it.  I used a set of acrylic paints that I bought in Sostrene Grene in Nottingham.  I bought them because they are such lovely muted colours, right outside  my usual colour palette but easy to use when someone else has mixed them for you.  I already had black, red and brown at home, and I used a Golden Fluid Acrylic for the bronzey-coppery hearts.  You probably know the wisdom of the phrase, ‘you get what you pay for’ and this is absolutely true with paint.  Golden paints burst with pigment and this metallic was really thick and juicy.  The Sostrene Grene paints are beautiful colours but thin.  This was perfect for this job, though, as I wanted to use them as a stain rather than a paint.  I thought about antiquing them, with some sandpaper and some brown gunge, but decided that they looked pretty as they were, and that was what I was after.  Pretty strikes me as more appealing that grungy when it comes to weddings.  So I gave them a quick coat of acrylic wax to protect them.  I finished with some circlets of flower-shaped sequins.

So, if you are thinking of getting married with nine assorted bridesmaids, this might well be your thing.

I really enjoyed making them.  The only skill you need is the development of a steady hand. I think I will make a lot more.  There are some adorable ideas using felt to make the blanks into various creatures such as bears, which I can’t resist.

Incidentally, I like the one second from the right with her big blobby eyes.  There is always one bridesmaid reluctant to give up her goth eyeliner.

As a sidenote, these dolls have a lot in common with traditional Japanese dolls.  I have a little collection of contemporary versions of these: Coco Chanel, David Bowie and Frida Kahlo:

These are much larger than my tiny dolls, but they are the same idea.  They are called Kokeshi dolls and the format hasn’t varied that much over the years:

 

All that said, Happy New Year and Happy New Decade.

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Ring pillows for the wrinklies

This post is about more work for my other role in life, that of humanist celebrant doing weddings and namings.

I was thinking about older brides in particular after leafing through another wedding magazine.  There really are only fresh-faced, porcelain-skinned young women in them.  You would be excused for thinking that no older women ever get married – or remarried.   I think it’s the equivalent of thinking women over 55 only ever want to dress in navy blue or beige artificial fibre tents.

I was wondering what sort of thing would suit older women.  I wanted to make some hearts that could be easily converted into ring pillows for weddings, and could be keepsakes thereafter.  Thinking about myself and my own tastes, these are hand-embroidered hearts worked on recycled fabrics.  Some are on the reverse of a very nice linen furnishing fabric:

You can see the front on the back, ironically, of this small heart:

The print is of these gorgeous, overblown tulips, but it would have fought against any lettering.  The fabric is leftover from some upmarket curtains.

The other is a printed commercial king-sized quilt which I bought in a charity shop and have been cutting up and using for a couple of years now:

The embroidery is largely stem stitch.  I learned how to do it a couple of years ago when a wonderful teacher explained to me that it is basically back stitch done on the back rather than the front of the fabric.  The scales fell from my eyes and I have been using it ever since after years of frustration not having any success and having to unpick it every time.  You can teach old dogs new tricks.

The little heart with LOVE on it is worked in two rows of chain stitch.  They are all done in variegated embroidery floss which is my current favourite thread.  They are all partly stuffed with the leftover fabric from when I cut them out.  All part of my drive for more sustainability.

You may have noticed that these all have quotations from Beatles songs on them.  These take me right back to being a little girl and being given Beatles singles for Christmas.  I would love to do a Beatles-themed wedding.  A couple coming into the ceremony to ‘Here comes the sun’ would be lovely.  I’m not sure what they would go out to.  The chorus of ‘All you need is love’ maybe.  Might be nice for a sing-song half-way through as well.

Just in case you are thinking of getting married and would like to use one of these as a ring pillow, they will be going in my Etsy shop which you can find by putting PomegranateByAnn in the search box on Etsy.com.  I can convert them to proper ring pillows by embroidering a little loop to thread ribbons through.  I am also happy to stitch any other song lyrics that have special meanings.

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Persie the Klimtian Cat

I am sure that some of you know that I am a humanist celebrant.  I do non-religious namings and weddings.  I like to give the baby a present when I do a naming, and this particular baby was adorable and had an unusual name.  For this reason I decided to make her something with her name on it, and because she loves cats so much, it had to be a cat.  The decoration is inspired by the patterns that Klimt used in so many of his paintings:

The famous Adele Bloch paintings are a treasure trove of decorative ideas.  I used some gold fabric and stitched them on:

I left the back fairly plain:

The face is a combination of the gold and some felt:

 

I embroidered the name in backstitch with perle cotton.

It’s quite easy to make, and I give a sort of cartoon set of instructions below.  It isn’t my idea, but I can’t remember where I got it from.  If I do find the original, I will post it separately.  Essentially, it’s the sleeve of a felted sweater, so you could make two from a jumper.  The head comes from spare fabric.

You need to chop the sleeve off at the length you want the height of the cat to be – so a child’s sweater will probably be the whole sleeve but a man’s is probably 50-75%.  The head could come out of the spare sleeve fabric, I expect.

The woman at the top of the page is my PhD supervisor, by the way.  This is a sort of memorial to her, because her birthday was in November.

 

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Baby shoes

Now that I have retired from the university, like lots of the retired, I find myself in straitened circumstances.  One of the things that I do to support myself is to work as a Humanist celebrant.  I create Wedding and Naming ceremonies.

Humanists do not believe in supernatural forces, including God, fate, destiny, and so on.  This means that we all have to think about living a good life for its own sake and not because we can expect some ultimate judgement in an afterlife.  We are highly discouraged from describing Humanism in these negative terms, according to what we don’t believe in, but I think it is by far and away the most interesting thing about it.  When I write what we are for you can see that it is not that different from the Christianity that I was brought up with: kindness, tolerance, openness, inclusivity and a desire for human flourishing.  If you want to know more about this, you can have a look at www.humanism.org.uk where luminaries such as Stephen Fry, Alice Roberts and Sandi Toksvig explain the principles extremely well.

All that out of the way, I can turn to the  point of this post, which is that in order to do anything at all these days, it seems that you have to have a web presence.  So, I put up quite a bit on instragram (@AnnRippin if you want to have a look).  Finding things to photograph and put up about Naming ceremonies is quite difficult, especially if you don’t want to put the child’s photo on the web.  So, I have been thinking about what I can include instead.

I have decided to make a series of baby shoes and put a poem that people planning a naming might like to consider.  The shoes are designed as decorative items, although theoretically they could be worn.  Maybe only for photographs, though, as they are very likely to fall off.

This pair is my prototype.  I made up a piece of patched together cotton fabric and quilted it roughly onto some purple felt.  Then I cut out the shapes from the ‘yardage’.  I stitched them together very roughly with variegated thread.

I really enjoy making them.  The pattern is by Simplicity and I got it in a pattern sale for a fiver.  I will blog more about that later.  Suffice to say they went together really easily and with only the tiniest bit of easing around the heel.

This pair also has pieced soles which I like.

The fabric for this pair comes from Aldi and/or Lidl.  They sell packs of fat quarters really cheaply and it looks a bit poor quality until you wash it, when, once the fierce dressing is out of it, it becomes delightfully soft.  Their cotton is from Pakistan, which is a change from the gorgeous US cottons we often use.   A lot of the designs, as you will see in later posts look a bit like vintage Laura Ashley which I also like.

Lots more to post on this project later.

 

 

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Improvised doll à la Ann Wood

Some of you may know the work of the mighty Ann Wood who makes lovely fabric dolls and other creatures as well as a range of galleons and little boats and so on.  She has a variety of free patterns on her website and an Etsy shop which is worth a look.   She has a whole range of tiny dolls with clothes and accessories.

One of her blog posts which caught my eye was about improvised dolls.  She describes her process of just starting off making a doll and not knowing where you will end up.  So you use what you have around you and just make a doll, trusting that the process will come up with something worthwhile.  I thought that this would be a really good holiday project while we were in a cottage in Pembrokeshire, particularly as it has been known to rain in this part of the world and you do need something to do when it pours.

I started to make my doll and I only had fabric and no stuffing with me, so I knew that it was going to have to be a rolled rather than sewn and stuffed doll.  So I made some fabric rolls from a beautiful soft cotton from the Cloth House in Soho.

These dolls are rough and ready and folky so they are not supposed to look highly polished, hence the wonky seams.  I stitched the legs onto the back of the torso so that the doll could sit on a shelf.  It was all going well until it came to the head:

Trying to fix a little roll to a large roll was tricky.  I could have stitched and then rolled more cloth round for a neck, but in the end, I decided to wrap it in a circle of linen and stitch the circle down:

This took a surprising number of attempts and was really ugly, but linen is linen even if it was a cheap end of roll bargain and I wasn’t going to throw it away.  The only thing then was disguising the very unlovely graft, which I don’t seem to have a photo of.  I was intending to make a nice girl doll, but the neck fiasco meant that a beard was called for:

I suppose I could have made a circus bearded lady, but I rather liked his shaggy look.  I had stitched a long nose, and had used black beads for his eyes from a variety pack from Tiger, and I used the coloured pencils in the photo above for his eyebrows and mouth and cheeks.

I found him really appealing, like a gentle hippy character.  I made him some Dad jeans and then really enjoyed knitting him a little sweater with gorgeous hand-dyed Welsh wool yarn I had bought in a woollen mill in Solva in Pembrokeshire.   The roll neck also helped to camouflage the weird neck situation:

I left the hands and feet free to fray.  I could have tidied them up, but I liked the messiness of them in an improvised piece:

So here he is complete:

The happy end to his story is that he has gone off to a new home in the USA.  He caught someone’s eye and we did a barter, although I would have been happy just for him to go off to someone who wanted him.  He would just have gathered dust here because the important part of the project was the process, which absolutely worked.

 

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Revisiting an old friend – The Laughing Cavalier by Frans Hals

I was in the Wallace Collection a couple of weeks ago having a look at the delightful Manolo Blahnik exhibition.  The shoes are dotted throughout the exhibition which means there is a kind of treasure hunt to find them.  One of them was placed in front of this famous portrait.  Now, The Laughing Cavalier was ubiquitous when I was growing up.  It turned up on biscuit tins and calendars all the time.  Because it was so familiar, I was a bit sniffy when I saw it up on the wall, but I thought I might as well have a look as it was there in front of me.  I am glad I did, because it really does reward close attention.  Frans Hals could really paint fabric.

A bit of information about the painting first.  Of course, the sitter isn’t laughing and he isn’t a cavalier.  Apparently, the motifs on his sleeve suggest that this might have been a betrothal portrait, and he was probably a merchant of some description.  The Wallace Collection website states:

In this exuberant half-length portrait, a young man poses, arm rakishly akimbo, against a plain grey background. The painting is inscribed with the date (1624) and the sitter’s age (26). The work is unique in Hals’s male portraiture for the rich colour that is largely imparted by the sitter’s flamboyant costume: a doublet embroidered with fanciful motifs in white, gold and red thread, with a gilded rapier pommel visible at the crook of his elbow…

By the early nineteenth century, Hals’s reputation had fallen into relative obscurity. Despite this, the portrait became the object of a furious bidding battle between the 4th Marquess of Hertford and Baron James de Rothschild at a Paris auction in 1865. It was acquired by Lord Hertford for the princely sum of 51.000 francs (about £2,040), an event which proved to be a turning point in the artist’s critical reputation. At the Royal Academy exhibition of 1888, the painting was exhibited with the title ‘The Laughing Cavalier.’

What caught my eye was the fantastic painting of the sleeve, particularly the embroidery, and also the lace.

 

I love those buttons and the lace on his cuffs.  Also, look at the way the ruff is painted:

Look at the gorgeous way he has painted the black silk:

And finally, the lovely frill of lace in the lower left-hand corner of the frame:

I think this is just too gorgeous to walk past.  Here’s the Manolo Blahnik that went with it:

Now, I can see why they paired the picture with Blahnik’s interpretation of the riding boot, but I think it misses the point.  Although materials and craft employed here are exquisite, this portrait is not about restraint.  It is flamboyant and rejoicing in excess.  I think it’s been matched with the title.

Just glorious.  Next time I go to the Wallace, I will go and have another look.

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Dieter Rams and Ten Principles of Good Design applied to Quilting

 

There was a very good documentary on BBC 4 last night about Dieter Rams who was, for many years, the head of design at Braun.  I had an orange Braun hairdryer throughout my adolescence which I really loved, and was slap-bang in the middle of his tenure so he may well have had a hand in it (now going for well over £100 on ebay).

 

He is an industrial designer, still working, who has a very stripped back aesthetic.  His own home is pretty minimalist and, frankly would drive me bonkers:

 

but it does show that he is consistent in his values and lives with them.

He is well-known for having developed his ten principles of design, which I thought were worth thinking about in terms of designing quilts and other textile pieces.  This is not because I think we should slavishly follow Herr Rams, but because I think it is good practice to think about what we do with a set of prompts which might just jog our thinking.

There is a very good account of the ten principles on Vitsoe’swebsite: https://www.vitsoe.com/gb/about/good-design.  He is currently designing for them and they have a show room just around the corner from the Wallace Collection, which is currently probably my favourite museum.

The ten principles then:

  1. Good design is innovative.  This one is straightforward.  Even if we are working in a really traditional way there is scope for innovation.  EPP is a good example.  Naomi Clarke demonstrates fantastic innovation in what is a particularly traditional form.  If you slavishly copy a quilt you are a copier not a designer, obviously.
  2. Good design makes a produce useful.  Of course.  There is little point in designing a circular bed quilt unless you have hot feet, in which case it is brilliant design.
  3. Good design is aesthetic.  For Rams, this is a pared back, stripped back aesthetic.  Design is about purity and he avoids fussiness or decoration.  I expect he would admire Amish quilting which exemplifies this approach.  It is plain.  But he is a bit more accepting of design that isn’t product design having a few more frills.
  4. Good design makes a product understandable.  All those things you look at and think, ‘what’s that for?’ are not well-designed.  When you look at a quilt, it ought to be recognisable as something you could put on a bed or on a wall.
  5. Good design is unobtrusive.  The idea here is that nothing should shout out at you.  When you go into your kitchen your eyes should not immediately be drawn to the kettle or the toaster.  We are after visual calm.  This might be worth a note to self as I reach for the fuschia pink highlight.
  6. Good design is honest.  It does not try to be anything other than it is.  It does not try to fool you with features you don’t want.  This is hard for quilters, I think.  I don’t think we try to suggest that our quilts are anything other than quilts.  But, I think that it applies to cheap printed quilts you can buy ready made.  They exist, but they arennot as lovely as the real thing.
  7. Good design is long-lasting.  This is an easy one for quilters.  The standard form of three layers is timeless.  And, we still collect antique quilts which will fit into most interiors – even Herr Rams cool white house.
  8. Good design is thorough down to the last detail.  Yes, thinking about how we are going to finish a piece comes under this heading.  Choosing the quilting thread.  Designing the label.  All these things need to be designed in at some point.
  9. Good design is environmentally friendly.  Rams was talking about our impact on the environment as early as the 70s.  He is a bit of a champion and hero of environmentalists.  This one is tricky for quilters.  On the one hand, many of us recycle and repair.  On the other, the textile industry is a massive polluter and dehydrator.
  10. Good design is as little design as possible.  This is back to simplicity.  I have seen quilts where I have thought to myself, ‘Blimey, they’ve thrown everything at that’.  But this one doesn’t have that much to say to me.

Rams is also famous for his nostrum: buy less, buy better, which Vivienne Westwood also recommends.  I think this is probably true for quilters.  We should think about the impact of what we buy on the world.  Will we use that fat quarter?  Can we buy organic?  All those concerns.

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Henry Moore Helmet Head Exhibition at the Wallace Collection

Yesterday I treated myself to a trip to the Wallace Collection to see the Henry Moore Helmet Head exhibition.  Moore apparently went to the Wallace Collection to study and draw the helmets in the Collection’s armour exhibitions.  He worked on these ideas throughout his life.

I only like three elements of Moore’s work; his drawings of sheep, his king and queen sculptures and his helmet work.  So, I really did want to get to see this show.  It’s been on for a good three months and I finally got to see it yesterday, the day before it closes.  That is typical of me.

The exhibition was wonderful, and the catalogue is great.  The Wallace is a lovely place to visit, and have lunch.  And there is a tiny branch of my current favourite shoe shop just around the corner.  That’s all I need, really.

I don’t have photos of the heads themselves, and they are easy enough to find on-line, like this one:

 

I went to draw the heads.  I think you understand what you are looking at a lot more if you draw it as well as just look at it,  So what follows is some pages from my sketchbook.

But, you can’t really go to a good show without learning something.  So, what I learned was that for Moore:

  • the helmet was a protector and  an object of war and brutality.  It has elements of the victim and the perpetrator.
  • the helmet is akin to the skull – it protects the brain – although within that it seems that the brain, for Moore, was the protector of the mind.  The mind is the thing that most needs protection.  It is the most important thing – the human consciousness.
  • the helmet is vital to the aggressive warrior but also protects the terrified soldier.  There is the warlike and the anxious.
  • there is tremendous human tenderness, somehow, in his portrayal of the human ear.  I wondered how much you heard in those helmets, and whether they amplified the sounds of war.  It turns out, that they had an arming helmet underneath which deadened the sound, which was good, but also meant that you couldn’t hear orders.  Infantrymen had much more open helmets which meant that they could hear order.  The heavy cavalry wore these enclosed helmets and couldn’t so once they charged, that was it – they were out of control.
  • I didn’t know about his lithographs which were stunning and a real extra special gift at the end of the exhibition.  He talked about them as soldiers looking out over the battlements getting ready for battle.  Anxiety leeches out of them as you look at them.  They reminded me as well as Goya’s unbearable painting of the little dog in his horrors of war series.

 

I also learned that Moore can make a much more graceful line in bronze than I can make on paper.

I think this anxiety about a world in peril, and people needing protection is very relevant again.  Moore had been in the First World War and seen the horrors.  I have lived a life of it on television.  I felt this exhibition gave a real feel of what it is like to suffer from this inescapable anxiety and to live with the ghost of war throughout our lives.

On a lighter note.  I loved doing these drawings.  I was going to give them some watercolour washes on the train home, but it was packed so there wasn’t room.  I finished them off this morning instead with coloured pencils and some kids’ crayons.  I absolutely loved doing it.  I loved layering the colours.  The sketchbook is a small six inch square one which gives you some idea of the scale of the drawings.  The collage elements were good for finding the proportions of the heads, which were a lot squarer than I thought.  Anyway, here are the pages.

 

This was one of the first exhibits of a helmet which had inspired him.  This one is from antiquity, whereas most of them are medieval or renaissance.

 

One of the things I learned from drawing was that the insides were cast separately from the helmet form, which is probably obvious, but took me a while.

 

I don’t normally like the stringed elements in Moore and his contemporaries’ work,  but I felt it worked here with some sort of reference to arrows as well as helmets.  Also seen in this collage of mine:

 

I loved the ambiguity of the above which looked masculine until you saw it sideways on when it had a goddess’ hairdo.  Also, whoever invented the Cybermen onmust have seen these heads.

These terrified me more than the Daleks, which must tell me something.

 

I love the shadow helmet which has emerged as I worked on the previous page and transferred some of the pigment from the purple head.

The piece on the left was affecting because it had the war-like lobster plate armour on the right as we look at it but an embracing, enveloping arm on the other.  Again playing with the duality of war: aggression and protection.  The drawing on the right is my version of Moore’s drawing.  Really perfect for layered stitching.

Good example of how cutting a square or a rectangle of paper helps to get the proportions right in these collages.

My attempts to work out how he did it!

 

 

I may well do some more work on these lithographs as they are almost preparatory sketches for stitched panels.

 

In short, this was a great show, beautifully mounted, and thought-provoking.  It had a brooding quality, which I think is instructive and highly current.

 

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