Project 5 - Assignment 10 - themes and ideas for the final project

So, it has been a while since I did any concrete design, although I have spent quite a bit of time thinking about this project. I have for example recently been thinking about what inspires me - whether visual art, film, literature, or music, and I will list some of those things later. I also thought about what words I aspire my work to describe or contain (rather than words describing the work, which with maturity may coincide, but certainly don't at the moment) - words such strength, subtlety, reflection, energy (whereas right now I think my work can be described s developing, experimental).

The things that inspire, or evoke imagery I think might some time become a work or series of works include key books I have read such as Haldor Laxness' Independent People, Herman Hesse's Bäume: Betrachtungen und Gedichte, Sjon's The Blue Fox (this book I have read every year since I first got it, it is short, poetic and very beautiful, like a small gem you can pull out and adore from time to time). There are many works of art I find inspiring, so rather than list these, I will list some key artists (and this is a short and very incomplete list in no particular order): Anselm Kiefer, early Gustav Klimt, Josef Hoffman's jewellery, Finnish landscape painters such as Akseli Gallen-Kallela, landscapes by artists in the Group of 7, some Matisse, landscapes by Schiele, the German Expressionists, Breughel's landscapes describing the seasons (especially the autumn picture which has such strong blues and browns), and the list could continue....

.....in fact, these lists sound a bit like the lists Sei Shonagon wrote out in her Pillow Book. Totally subjective and impressionistic lists of things that stimulated her. I think long lists of picture like the ones you often find on personal blogs are inheritors of this way of listing things out.

Music: I am partial to national romantic music such as that by Sibelius, Grieg and Smetana, and I recently started listening to Beethoven's music properly and can't believe how amazingly beautiful it is. Mozart's Magic Flute I listen to from time to time and any choral music by Bach is so incredibly transcendental somehow - it carries so much with it I wouldn't know where to start explaining what it evokes, in fact Bach's music is probably what I would take with me to a desert island.

Film - there are many films I have found inspiring, but here are a few - Etre et avoir, The Story of the weeping Camel , Sleeping Beauty (Disney's animation), Hitchock movies such as North by Northwest, To catch a Thief and Rear Window (costume, humour, suspense, sets - all such great assemblies and story telling), some films by the Cohen brothers such as Fargo and Oh Brother where art Thou? and Ingmar Bergman's Fanny and Alexander, which I also try to watch once a year as it is so resonant with feeling, childhood, magic and Christmas, it is just a great film.

And where is this leading..... how does it lead into a textile project? Well, I guess everything you enjoy, digest and are touched by as you wander through life will somehow infuse thoughts about any project you do. I have already mentioned that Hesse's Bäume is a key source for project 5 in a different post, and so when I look at landscapes, trees, foggy meadows or certain architecture, my reflections may involve thoughts and memories of particular themes from this stock of culture. I guess an example will help describe this: it is a common thought that gothic architecture may have been inspired by strong slender trees, but mix in ideas about dark forests from fairy tales such as Hansel and Gretel, or Little Red Riding Hood and something else is added, and when thoughts about Kiefer's use of forests and wooden huts creating dark places in his art are then added as well, suddenly forest trees gain a certain feeling and maybe something useful can grow from this.

So, to the themes

The plan is that I will weave four smallish tapestries and develop them into a joined outcome at the end if I have time and am given permission to do what I have in mind. The four tapestries will be on the theme of trees, based on the seasons.

Spring

I haven't fully decided how the spring piece will look. I worked up some photographs of blossom from a large tree in our garden by my childhood home:

 

Or perhaps the spring theme can be based on buds and the idea of becoming, a notion Hesse evokes as tree coming into 'becoming' in spring - for Hesse trees are lifegiving, nurturing, giving things that you can study to find meaning in life - his celebration of trees sits with his idea of nature as innocent, and as spiritually enriching. Spring buds are a reminder of this life-giving essence of trees:

Summer


This is more clear - there is a particular tenchique I want to try out in tapestry weaving, a way of rendering the structure of the weave open and wavy. I haven't tried this before but Fiona Hutchison uses it to great effect in her tapestry work and taught it in a summer school I attended once.


The summer piece will therefore be an abstract reflection of leaves and light, and maybe a bit of earth and sky, which the tree is so dependent on.

Autumn


Here I want to work with a representation of roots and winding, snaky vines through the  wrapping technique. It will be in browns with hints of green and blue. I am planning vertical lines with some flowing lines.

An autumnal tree, the colours enhanced in Paintshop Pro. Although these are good autumnal colours I will not include all of them across the piece but will be be selective about how they will be present on each individually wrapped line.

I will be working with these pictures - colour them by hand and draw a few examples to work out how the lines and waves might work.


Winter

Skeletal trees look great against winter skies. They seem mournful and sad, alone and yet still proud and waiting. They are still and fragile without their leaves.

 Some wintry trees in a baroque park in Bayreuth, Germany

Bark detail coloured with blue and greens, in colder tones. I am tempted to weave something along these lines but will work up some drawings to see how his will work.

Austrian holiday - city visit 2 - Vienna

Vienna is absolutely great - it is a beautiful big, and big in all manner of ways, with large scale architecture and town planning, wonderful architectural detail and great museums. Again, where to start? I will just discuss a couple of things, how you can find art nouveau detailing in the street, baroque churches and just drink in some amazing art in the large art galleries there.

We visited the Leopold Museum where the Tracey Emin exhibition was just finishing (in a recent programme of What do Artists do all Day, she had been shown preparing for this show), and where they keep beautiful judgend stil furniture by the Wiener Werkstätte and paintings by a number of Viennese turn-of-the-century artists, Gustaf Klimt, Otto Kokoschka and great Egon Schiele works. I was really taken by the Schiele works in particular, his work with shapes across bodies and backgrounds, the body in paint, and his later work where he was modelling the body more, they seemed less thin and distorted and more fleshy and real. I thought this work very impactful, even his landscapes and houses, described in flat shapes were fresh and demanding.

This was a very fine museum in the city's museum quarter, but from there you just crossed the Ringstrasse and entered the other museum area where the Kunsthistorisches Museum stood, which we also visited. This is a great museum, not just in size, but also in its collection. They had a temporary exhibition on while we were there, on tapestry (entitled in translation, The Strands of Power), which had tremendous tapestries on show, including a royal throne balcony. This show also showed medieval prints of tapestries in situ: at a French emperor's coronation, hanging two tapestry-deep on all spare walls of the church, there was a picture of a renaissance banquet where people's faces and the large wall hangings were illuminated by candlelight.

A gold automaton in the Kunstkammer of the Kunsthistorishes Museum - also in the background an amazing automaton in the shape of a ship that could roll down the table with small mechanical people playing drums, waving their arms, and as a finale a canon would explode to complete the effect. I loved this display and wished we had more time to look at more in detail. this gallery had benches along the periphery of the room where you could sit down and study films of the automata in action, showing the wind-up mechanism and clock-work wheels and gears of the machinery.

The Vienna Sezession building, a gem of a place, so complete and a statement of the new feeling for art that the Viennese artists of the turn of the century was working to create:

 

And so, when you walk through the city you can find all manner of art nouveau detailing:

These balonies sit on Majorlica Haus a residential building designed by Otto Wagner, 1898-99, it is a large building and the neighbouring block is equally grand with its gilt surface designs. Unfortunately the buildings sit on a busy road with a lot of traffic and so any picture taken of them is crowded at the bottom by cars ziping past.

You can walk into churches you pass by and find the most serene or voluminous interiors without it breaking the bank:

 

We also visited the Upper Belvedere palace which houses collections of Austrian art, again key works by Kokscka, Schiele and Klimt as well as other, earlier art works. Here was my favorite Klimt painting, a portrait of Sonja Knipps (1898), before he started painting the longer, thinner more distorted bodies of The Kiss and the paintings of the Beethoven Frieze from after 1900. 

In the Lower Belvedere they had an exhibition on called Klimt and the Ringstrasse, a title that was in fact a bit of a mis-nomer, as it was about many different artists and architects and their patrons at work at the time of the design of the Ringstrasse and those grand buildings I mentioned earlier. However Klimt had painted some small works in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, which I tried to capture; so, spot the Klimt(!):

 

 

 

And lastly, part of the central European tradition of puppetry is being performed (perhaps slightly touristically) at the Schonbrunn Palace. We did not visit the Palace, but went there to see The Magic Flute in a performance of puppetry, that was quite sweet, but very well crafted. The theatre had a small display of puppets in glass cabinets so here is an impression of soe of them:

I love puppets, since childhood I have enjoyed puppets and stop-motion animation, and in the 1970s in Denmark where I grew up, there was this Saturday TV programme for children with a small puppet on a string that would play piano and talk with a human presenter. And so I seek out puppet theatres and performances when I can, and naturally if there is one in Prague (which was definitely for tourists) or Vienna (which was less so and had local people in the audience) or even somewhere near where I live in the UK, I will seek it out. I am not sure why I love puppets, maybe it is the way this dead matter, wood or a synthetic material, is dressed up and animated, breathing life into an inert thing can evoke dream-like states, like a suspended reality, or parallel life.

 

Austrian holiday - city visit 1 - Salzburg

Cities can be wonderful places to go on holiday - art, architecture, music, history, it is all there to explore and find. We recently went to Austria to visit Salzburg and Vienna, with a quick visit to a small place called Werfen.

Salzburg was the seat of princes and bishops during the 16th and 17th century, and continued to be a regional capital for centuries. It was also the city Mozart spent much time in, it provided the backdrop to the Sound of Music, and is generally a photogenic place, which people visit. So there are a fair few tourists there, but they didn't seem to be in the city museum, they were at the castle and toured various sights which we also visited.

The old city centre here seen from Museum der Moderne, looking across to the castle. I think you can see the narrow streets, and the small squares between the buildings. Below is a close-up of the towers of the cathedral and other churches.

Where to start? This needs perforce to be a summary of the visit, so I shall just mention some of the key areas of art that interested me, and will show a few impressions.

We visited the Museum der Moderne (Museum of modern art split into two separate places in the city), the cathedral, the Hohen Salzburg Castle, the City Museum, other churches and generally walked around the city. There was just too much to see and experience to share here, but I will show some pictures of beautiful, unexpected details that can be found as you walk around the old part of the city. The below will be impressionistic shots of architecture:

Museum der Moderne: when we visited the exhibitions at this site were of 1960s and 1970s performance art. This was quite interesting, in particular the work by E.A.T. (Experiments in Art and Technology), an American group of artists who used technology in their expression, for example in the Pepsi avillion in Japan in 1970, an impressive experiment using sight and sound and immersive environments to stimulate visitors. Interestingly they used personal audio devices for visitors, the types of audio devices we now take for granted as optional in museums.

the other site of Museum der Moderne had a show on of Charlotte Salmonon's work. This was interesting from the perspective of how autobiograhical her gouache/water colour works were. She painted a lot of these paintings during the 1930s and early 1940s, and looked back at a relatively happy childhood that then seemed to grow into an adulthood of tense relationships, and then the disturbances of war, her diaspora into France from Germany and then the narrative ended and the disaply explained she had died in Auschwitz. There were many many pictures here, mostly dark and brooding. I thought one was interesting in the way she had drawn up her boyfriend's reclining body and then repeated it down the page and in the process creating a pattern. There was a lot of text drawn up around the images. It was striking how this use of the study of the self was used in this work. Not unlike a strand of contemporary art that uses the self in representation, these drawings/paintings drew on Salomon's life to describe a modern woman's thoughts in Berlin in the interwar period.


Walking around the old city 

There were so many different details left on buildings to study and enjoy:

 

An old door handly on an old door.

One of several passges you could walk through from one road to the next, often ended by old doors and some with shop windows.

On the way to the cemetery of St Peters, here a modern wood-carved sculpture, ancient rock and the medieval castle, Hohen Salzburg in the background.

 

A very beaurtiful baroque church had wonderful stucco in white marengue-like clouds, with putti floating generously through it all.

 

Salzburg has along history of being ruled by Catholic Princely Archbishops and even in more recent times the Christian faith could be seen in modern renditions such as this relief panel on a wall and in the same corridor a saint in colourful tile-work.

 

It really was a joy to find all this history and ways of making connection with life in the city. Here are some bell-pulls, I am not sure whether they are still used: 

 

A ram's head on a large iron gate flanking a concert house in the city centre:

And the famous fountain next to the cathedral which stands alone in an open area, on one side the Salzburg Museum stood, which housed great collections that we enjoyed in almost solitude. This museum had a number of displays of which three were really enjoyable - first a display of landscape paintings, watercolours and prints mainly from the late 18th and early 19th romantic period. There were conventional landscapes of the Alpine landscape around Salzburg, but there were large drawers which could be pulled out to reveal prints advertising the landscape, sketch books by artists, and watercolours. There were vertical stands of prints which you could pull to the side to reveal each print in turn, and in this way there was a lot on display without over-hanging the walls and prevent over-exposure of light on the works on paper.

There was also the gallery of musical instruments, really the best one of this type I have seen - here there were instruments, some recognisably violins and violas, horns and zithers, but some also slightly strange such as violins with horns, a contra-base type of instrument to be thumbed, that would make a trumpet-like sound, a steel piano that was used for the Glockenspiel tune in the opera The Magic Flute. Alongside each instrument was a monitor and headphones showing the instrument being played, using music of the time of the instrument, as well as introductions to opera and choral work. It was such a treat to go around exploring this, here the instruments were alive with sounds, played by talented musicians, a great aspect of this central European culture that otherwise would be confined to concert houses and the radio.

And lastly I got very excited when I learned that there was an early 19th century Panorama at the museum. We had panned this visit in advance and I looked forward to this treat, as I had read about panoramas during my studies, and here was one, complete, showing a 360 degree landscape of Salzburg at the time. It had been taken around Europe on a tour that lasted 10 years and would have introduced many people to a city they may not even really have heard of. It was very detailed, with trees, mountains, streets and streams all shown in a daily-life sort of way, with washing drying on the grass and people walking about attending to their daily deeds.

There was of course a huge amount of other things to say about Salzburg, about the castle, about puppets, about the Mirabell Gardens, but that would just be too much for this place.

Lastly I will show some pictures from a haberdashers shop which lay in the heart of the fold town in as complete a 1950s state as it could be, all the way down to the small white card boxes they used to store their buttons in:

 

 

  

We the spent a night in Werfen, where a certain castle is better known as Schloss Adler from Where Eagles dare, a film in which Clint Eastwood manages to kill a lot of nazis, and seems to be a cult movie. The sleepy town was pretty and the castle looked great and imposing amongst the mountains:

An interlude - a dyeing (experiment) project

It is that time of year again - the blackberries are out and I decided to go picking on a quiet Sunday. I have this absolutely beautiful yarn of a singles DK Wensleydale wool - I believe I have praised the qualities of Wensleydale wool before, but here it is - it is smooth, is lustrous and there is enough for a jumper (900g):

The plan was to dye two lots of 300g in solutions of berry dye, to get two different shades of a purple colour, and then dye the last 300g in the colour derived from leaves of the bramble plant. I picked a large volume of berries, and focused on snipping the fresh shoots from the plant. The yarn was prepared in an Alum (8%) and cream of tartar (7%) mordant - here it is soaking before it went into the dye bath:

Here the berries are being cooked to draw out the juice for the dye:

Here the leaves and shoots are soaking prior to being cooked up to get the most of the dye:

And what results did I get out of it? Well, I had a bit of a disaster with one of the dye baths. The colour was a bit insipid and I found a blog where someone suggested she had tried to change the PH of the dye-bath to change the colour by using washing soda, so I poured some in, and the colour changed so dramatically that I had to pour it out almost immediately to prevent the yarn from getting too dark a grey colour, and then poured some left-over fruit juice into that bath to re-gain the purple tones. I then also read on Jenny Dean's blog, Wild Colour, that one should not add washing soda to wools in warm water as it breaks down the fibre, so I had to rinse the wool in huge volumes of water to try to get it all out. I do hope it will be OK.

Anyway, in the end I have two tones of grey-purple, and the silk fabric I added has also taken the colour fairly well:

On other blogs I had seen that the leaves of brambles would dye wool a pale green. This would be a perfect complement to the purple, so I had high hopes for the leafy dye-bath. However the colour that came out of it was a bright yellow - at least on the wool fabric I dyed. The wool and mohair yarns also took the yellow, but is slightly paler. Unfortunately the photograph does not show how yellow it has all become.

I am now contemplating doing an indigo over-dye on the fabric, as the yellow is not good for making garments of, if I was to wear it myself:

Wool fabric, fine tightly spun mohair and wool yarn.