Celia Hart's blog about what's going on in and around her studio.
Art, printmaking, inspirations, gardening, vegetables, hens, landscapes, wild flowers, East Anglia, adventure, travel.

Showing posts with label inspirations. Show all posts
Showing posts with label inspirations. Show all posts

Monday, 6 March 2017

Madonnas & Miracles at the Fitzwilliam

The major exhibition this Spring at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, is Madonnas & Miracles, The Holy Home in Renaissance Italy.

Last week I went along to a preview event, below are my thoughts along with some hints and tips which may add to your appreciation of the exhibition. But first here is the official trailer ...


You can also see more photos of some of the exhibits in a local news report, here. And the Fitzwilliam Museum as lots of useful information here. I'll add more links to press reviews, as and when I stumble across them.

This exhibition is the culmination of over 4 years cross-disciplinary research by Cambridge University's departments of Italian, History, Architecture and History or Art. It was funded by a grant from the EU, which has covered the cost of the research, the exhibition and the transportation as well as the cleaning and conservation of many of the exhibits. I've often wondered how long it takes to put on a large scale exhibition, and hearing the curators/organisers talk about the research in hundreds of libraries, archives and museums mainly in Italy but worldwide, certainly underlined the massive task that was undertaken.


So, what did I think of the exhibition? 
The title 'Madonnas & Miracles' led me to expect lots of gold painted altar pieces, but it's really about how families and women in particular, made prayer and their faith in God and the Saints, part of their day to day life and coping strategy in times of adversity. Of course there are lots of Madonnas among the exhibits, including a beautiful painting by Botticelli which is featured on the poster, but the focus is on objects which would be treasured by ordinary working folk - ceramics, beads, bowls and cutlery which would be handled while a prayer was murmered or painted plaques offering to a church as thanks for a miracle. Afterwards I thought that 'Domestic Devotions' would be a more accurate title . . . and to my surprise I've now found the research team's web site and blog is called just that! I wonder how and why they decided on the different title for the exhibition?

To transport you to Renaissance Italy, the exhibition space has been divided into rooms with dark green or blue walls, there's even a fire place and a bed. Stone effect archways frame the openings between - rugged semi-circular arches symbolise the masculine world around the piazzas and square topped doorways frame the domestic feminine world inside the home. A fact I would not have noticed if I hadn't read the Fitz's Instagram feed!

The theme of the exhibition is, I think, a bit obscure and academic - although the curators stressed how relevant the themes are to today. If you visit I'd be interested to know what you think. But many of the exhibits are intriguing, charming and have a link to ordinary people rather than the rich an famous. So it's well worth a visit (its' free to go in) and there is some wonderful imagery which you can enjoy without even reading the labels (though the labels are very clear and informative).

Here are my highlights:

- the pottery nativity table centre-piece, this is just fabulous and it's worth popping into the exhibition just to see this alone. I can imagine how this would illustrate the Christmas story told to children. And there is another ceramic nativity which incorporates inkwells ... which would be useful for Christmas cards and thank you letters!
  
- the Camerino wooden doll of baby Jesus, this life-like painted wooden baby is nearly 600 years old. It is from the nunnery in Camerino which was devastated by an earthquake last October, amazingly the doll survived unscathed. Apparently life-like baby dolls were popular with the nuns, who would cuddle and kiss them as part of there devotional rituals. Maybe they needed something to cuddle.

- the 'singing knives', which are engraved with music for the Benediction at the beginning of a meal and the Grace afterwards. Recordings of the prayers being sung (very beautifully) by members of St John's College choir, can be heard on the headphones next to the exhibit.

- look out for the rabbits munching their lunch in one of the large photo panels showing a scene from a painted interior. Just one of many sensitively observed scenes in the backgrounds of the pictures in the exhibition.

- I loved the jaunty horses on a ceramic plaque of St Sebastian and St Roch, who were both poplar saints for protecting a household from the plague. Notice how St Roch seems to be pointing to a rip in his tights ... actually he's drawing attention to a scar from a nasty plague boil, to give YOU hope that HE DID so YOU CAN survive. The ceramics and the illustrated woodcut pamphlets are probably my favourite things in the exhibition and the reason I'll go back for another look.

- And don't miss the wooden model of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, like beautiful Renaissance lego! Imagine a family telling stories as they put the building together, perhaps tales of the pilgrimage grandfather went on years ago.


To sum up ...

Well worth a visit if you're in Cambridge. I learnt a lot. Take time to look and find the unexpected and think about how the objects on display were once part of someone's daily life.


Tuesday, 28 February 2017

An interlude in Edinburgh

We've just got back from a long weekend in Edinburgh. We travelled by train, luckily missing Storm Doris and cancelled trains by a day. The mountains were still dusted with the previous day's snowfall.



Below you can see the roof of Waverley station with the grand monuments on the top of Calton Hill beyond. Our hotel was just around the far side of the hill.


A short bracing walk takes you to the top of the hill for a panoramic view of the city.


One of the first places we searched out (knowing it also had a nice café) was Dovecot Studios, here in a former Victorian bath house is a tapestry weaving studio. Our visit didn't coincide with being able to watch the weavers at work, but we were able to look at work in progress from the gallery.


The largest piece in progress was a massive tufted rug, the wool yarn is fired using a tufting gun, through a canvas fabric. This makes a dense pile on the other side. This rug designed by Victoria Morton is destined for a new performing arts centre at the Perse School in Cambridge.


Late on Friday afternoon there was just time to pop into the Scottish National Gallery before it closed, it deserved a longer visit as there are so many spectacular paintings. But the bell rang so we had to leave.

On Saturday morning we walked down to the Old Town for a tour of Gladstone's Land, a 17th century tenement house now owned by the National Trust for Scotland who have furnished it with original household furniture and accessories ... you have to imagine the grime, smells and noise.

Our lunch was at the excellent café at the grand Victorian Gothic Scottish National Portrait Gallery, before seeing the BP Portrait Award 2016 exhibition. I recommend a visit if you're in Edinburgh, although you can see some the paintings online they really don't show the variety of scale and media. 


As it wasn't raining, we decided to walk through the New Town to the Botanic Garden. I spotted a very smart mini-library with roof garden and then noticed we were in Scotland Street ... so maybe not surprising at all! (I don't think that No. 44 actually exits.)


Sunday morning and the sun was shining ... we set off on a bracing walk past Holyrood Palace and up the path towards Arthur's Seat, the rugged volcanic crag that stands over the city. But the weather soon deteriorated to rain and 40mph gusts (and I was wearing my leather knee boots rather than walking boots) so we took the 'easy' low level route. But it gave us a flavour of the 'mountain in the city' landscape.


The rain had definitely set in so we headed to the National Museum of Scotland which is in a fabulous building. We  joined lots of people who were appreciating a great indoor space that's free to visit. The huge galleried Victorian hall provides a wonderful area to promenade around. And the modern extension is a maze of intriguing spaces. There is also a roof garden, but we were content with viewing the rooftops of the city through the windows.


While at the Dovecot Studios we'd seen a reproduction of a painting of trees, and here it is again in the Museum, but this time it is a large tapestry that was woven at Dovecot. The design is based on a painting 'Large Tree Group' by Victoria Crowe, which features shepherd Jenny Armstrong. The colours of the yarn are all natural undyed wools from different breeds of sheep and were sourced from 70 different flocks across the UK as well as St Kilda and the Falklands. I've found an interesting programme which includes Victoria Crowe discussing her relationship to the landscape she depicts with Andrew Marr, well worth a listen. 


We were enjoying exploring the Museum and had found the Lewis chess pieces, but we didn't want to miss visiting Edinburgh Castle. So we braved the wind and rain. At times it was difficult to remain standing! Inside the castle the howling wind added to the atmosphere. 

And then the sun came out!


We found a quiet and cosy café at the top of Jenners department store, where tea and toasted tea cakes soon revived us. Then I treated myself to a pair of black suede ankle boots in the sale.

Our train home wasn't until 2pm, so we had time for a guided tour inside the new Scottish Parliament building. It was interesting to see behind the scenes and how the intriguingly shaped building contains practical work spaces ... it's well worth booking a tour.



Time to get the train, we'd paid a modest amount to upgrade our tickets to First Class so enjoyed being served lunch, tea and drinks as we sped through the countryside under dramatic storm clouds and 6 hours later we were back home.


Tomorrow is 1st March, in a couple of weeks this blog will be 10 years old! A whole decade of blogging. I've toyed with the idea of closing my blog, changing its name, or starting a different blog. But I think I'll leave things as they are and still blog whenever I feel like it. In recent weeks I've enjoyed posting on Instagram more than blogging, it's like a mini-blog post. Starting tomorrow, I'm planning a series of painterly Instagram posts through Lent, you can find me @celiahartartist


Celia
xx

Sunday, 1 January 2017

Greenery and other colours




Each year Pantone selects a colour for the year and for 2017 the colour is 'Greenery' or to be more precise 'Pantone 15-0343 TCX', so be prepared for lots of green in the style magazines this year. The reason I've mentioned this is because it nicely links the first day of 2017 ... Happy New Year! ... to something I've been planning to blog about but haven't got round to, mainly because the first blog post evolved into something quite unexpected...

I'll begin at the beginning ... I was looking at a list of UK Butterflies' larval food plants, the reason to see if we could grow more plants in our garden that butterflies need - not just flowers. I saw that Brimstone caterpillars need Buckthorn. The Alder Buckthorn, Frangula alnus likes acidic woodlands - you don't find that in SW Suffolk - but Purging Buckthorn, Rhamnus cathartic, is very similar and that is the shrub our local Brimstones would be searching for on which to lay their eggs. And so began my search for  Purging Buckthorn in the local hedgerows. I eventually found some on the Devil's Dyke and more planted by the gamekeeper for Pheasant coverts along our favourite hare-watching walk.

I didn't expect to find more Purging Buckthorn when I visited the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge to see the fabulous exhibition 'Colour - the art and science of illuminated manuscripts', but that's exactly what happened! 
(By the way the last day of the exhibition is Monday 2nd January so you could visit if you get your skates on, otherwise do look at the online resources which are brilliant.)
The first part of the exhibition looks at the pigments used by medieval scribes and illuminators, ground up earth pigments and semi-precious stones and plants like madder and woad and BUCKTHORN BERRIES! The caption in the exhibition explained that the purple juice of Purging Buckthorn berries made green ink!

I picked some Buckthorn berries and found some basic instructions for making ink from berries ... which recommended freezing the berries as when defrosted the juice will extract easier without needing to add water.
I then mashed the berries into a paste, adding a tiny amount of water.
I then pressed this through a tea-strainer, the consistency of a fruit coulis (DO NOT EAT! it's called Purging for a reason)  
Then I added about a teaspoon of vinegar and a pinch of salt, this acts as a preservative, so the ink doesn't go mouldy.
And to make the ink slightly viscous so it holds onto the pen-nib/quill/brush, you need a teaspoon of gum arabic. 
Result - INK!
And the magic bit is that it's purple but turns green as it dries!

After further research I discovered that by using alum (as a mordant) the ink can be made a green colour and it was by a complex distilling process that the colour 'Sap Green' was made from Buckthorn berries.


I was keen to make some more colours ... 
I found a jar of dried Cochineal beetles, a holiday souvenir from a street market in Lanzarote, soaked in hot water they produced an intense red-pink colour.
But without alum to fix the colour, the ink dried a dirty grey-brown. In the next batch I added a pinch of alum and hey presto! PINK INK!


What colour next?

I remembered the Saffron harvested from our Saffron crocuses, this year the yield had been good so I have a small jar of dried stigmas in the kitchen cupboard. I put a small pinch of Saffron in a mortar and ground them to a fine powder.
Mixed with a little water and WOOOOO! Liquid gold!
The Saffron ink needed no alum and the colour is intense. No wonder it was prized as a colour in medieval times
Painting Saffron yellow over Cochineal pink creates a lovely bright red.
I used my home-made inks to make some Christmas cards, writing with a quill. The Buckthorn ink gradually changing from purple through indigo to green. I added red berries (and forgot to photograph them!)

One of my Christmas presents was the book 'Colour, travels through the Paintbox' by Victoria Finlay, it's a fascinating journey through the stories of colour pigments. It's certainly got me thinking about how much we take for granted the coloured paints, pens, crayons and inks we can buy so easily today. And it's sure to inspire more ink-making experiments.


Wishing you a creative 2017
Celia
x

Saturday, 19 November 2016

Of whales and other creatures

I can't believe it's 3 months since our adventure in Newfoundland, so it's been interesting to look back through my photos and select a few for this blog post - the one I promised about the wildlife we saw on our road trip.

We were warned about Moose. Apparently many folk are injured and tragically some die in road accidents caused by Moose straying onto roads in Newfoundland. We saw huge road signs recording the year's fatal collisions. But we saw no sign of the giant gangly beasts. However while staying at Trinity we were looking forward to walking the Skerwink Trail and were warned that a family of Moose were on the headland. After the first bend in the path we spotted the youngster ... reading a house sign!

We slowly and calmly walked past as he munched on the vegetation. There was no sign of his parents ... although we knew they couldn't be far away - this made our return at dusk slightly un-nerving!

Beavers are one of my favourite animals, I find it amazing how a relatively small animal can fell trees and made such massive constructions. This lodge is on a lake near Rocky Harbour.
One evening just outside St Anthony we stopped by a lake where we thought we had spotted a beaver swimming back and forth carrying small branches. Then a much larger beast appeared - compared to the 'beaver' it was massive! The penny dropped, we had been watching a Muskrat. I didn't take shots as the light was failing, mosquitoes were eating me alive and it started raining.

This little squirrel was easy to photograph, he just sat nibbling a berry by the Skerwink Trail path.

And this Jack Rabbit - or Arctic Hare (wearing his summer coat) was even more laid back, he was just hopping around outside our cabin at Gambo.

Of course it's the giant beasts of the sea that Newfoundland is famed for. At St Anthony we went on the obligatory Whale Watching trip, this also included a close encounter with a massive ice-berg! We did see whales, and some were quite close to the boat. I think that these are Humpbacks.

And this is a Fin Whale, which was my favourite - they are HUGE, the 2nd largest mammal - over 20 metres long (70+ feet).

On a Whale Watching boat you expect to see Whales and Dolphins, but what surprised me was the fact that pretty much anywhere along the coast of Newfoundland you can just sit on a high headland and see Whales - it's just fantastic! This rocky cliff top at Bonavista was one of the best locations ...

... and because you are high above the water you get a great view of the whales - you hear them too, as they breathe out - a deep swooshing sigh and the white spray of water - apparently you can learn to tell the Whale species by the 'blow'.

Humpback Whales have long pectoral fins, like wings or arms, these are white on the underside so as the Whale swims the fins shine a pale turquoise colour under the water. Looking out to sea and watching for the 'blow' and then waiting to see if you'd see a fin or a tail or even a breach when a Humpback leaps right out of the water, is sheer magic. 

Of course there were lots of sea birds ... here are two Yellow Legs on a rock at Rocky Harbour.

Black Guillemots on a precarious ledge at Bonavista

and hundreds of Kittiwakes on a rocky islet off the coast near Trinity.

The bird I most wanted to see was the Puffin. I've never been lucky to see one in the UK and in Newfoundland there are a few spots that are easily accessible and near huge Puffin colonies - they like grassy cliff tops where they can live in burrows.

There were thousands of Puffins! Swarms of them filling the sky around the rocky islands off-shore, hundreds bobbing along in the waves below.

And Puffins are surprisingly small, a bit bigger than a Blackbird but not much, look how that Gull is massive in comparison. That Gull is after the Puffin eggs and young chicks! Luckily the young Puffins were mostly full grown and able to fly.



On the day we were there, a professional wildlife photographer had set up a toy Puffin decoy on the rocks to tempt a brave Puffin to land close to her cameras. When the tourist and bird-watchers aren't about, apparently the little Puffins land on the main cliff top as well as the off-shore rocky islands ... one brave little chap was curious and landed not far from where we were sitting, so we got close up view.


On a cold winter evening it's lovely to remember how beautiful Newfoundland was in summer. Where do the Puffins go in winter?


Celia
xx


Friday, 26 August 2016

Who led us to Newfoundland?



You went where? Why?


As you can see in the photos in the previous blogpost, Newfoundland is a beautiful, wild and remote island; but not at the top of most folk's holiday destination list. So what prompted us to go?


About 6 years ago Cliff's aunt became very ill and we had the task of helping her move into a nursing home. Her house was sold and among the things we brought home were keepsakes that had been in Cliff's family for generations – including a writing box with a secret drawer and a print hinting of a naval connection; a Georgian snuff box and a portrait of Joseph (Cliff's GtGtGtGrandfather) painted in 1804.

Then, 2 Christmases ago, a cousin sent us a copy of the front page of a family bible, the names were familiar from what we knew of Cliff's family tree but what caught our eye was where Joseph got married . . . St John's Newfoundland!

St John's harbour

We we intrigued and did some research on the web, the Anglican Cathedral in St John's has records online, we found Joseph's marriage to Ann in August 1803 and he is described as 'Purser on HMS Iris'. So now we knew that Joseph was in the navy and his bride, Ann, was from St John's. 

By now we wanted to see Newfoundland for ourselves, it was a good a reason as any to go there for our holiday. 

Inside The Rooms

In the photo of St John's harbour at the top of this post, you'll see a huge building with pointed gables and red roofs, that is The Rooms. Inside are a theatre, galleries, a museum and exhibitions, as well as The Archives. We had two opportunities to visit while in St John's, on the first and last days of the holiday; so we headed straight to the Archives on our first day in Newfoundland.

We were able to look at facsimile copies of the handwritten marriage records from 1803, and we saw that there was more information than in the transcribed online records. The archivist told us that we could only make notes with a pencil and photographing the documents was not allowed, we copied the words carefully. 

St John's, 1800

As we travelled around we began to put together a picture of what Newfoundland had been like in the early 1800s. While staying in Trinity, which was a major harbour and like St John's, a crucial part of the salt cod industry; we went on an excellent walking tour of the town and also saw The Pageant - a historical play by Rising Tide theatre company which is acted out around the town.

The Trinity Pageant

This gave us some idea of the industrial scale of the salt cod industry and the tough existence of those who worked there. 

Salting Cod on the Flakes - Trinity Pageant

The hillsides around the harbours were covered with fish flakes, wooden shelves on which the salted cod fish was laid out to dry in the sun and wind, before being packed into wooden barrels and transported to Europe or to the Caribbean where the poor quality fish was bought to feed the slave labour in sugar plantations. Newfoundland was part of a triangular trade route crucial to the economy of Britain and Portugal. The French were vying for control of the key harbours, these were tumultuous times.


Fish Flakes at Bonavista Bay

Imagine miles of these wooden structures covered with salted fish and hundreds of people working to keep the fish from spoiling when it rained and packing the fish into barrels. Imagine the stench!



One thing puzzled us, although there was a naval record of HMS Iris, we couldn't find any mention of her sailing to Newfoundland. However, the flagship of the British admiral who was the governor of Newfoundland, was HMS Isis; the more we read the more the facts fitted with Joseph's story - what if the marriage record had said 'Isis' and not 'Iris'?


The Newfoundland Archives

There was one chance to find out, at the end of our holiday we arrived back in St John's an hour before The Archives closed for the weekend. We ran up the steps and up to the archivist's desk, she remembered us and retrieved the marriage records box.

So, was it 'HMS Isis'? It could be, but equally it could say 'HMS Iris', we could see how the transcriber had gone for a name that seemed more plausible. Then I noticed the minister who wrote the records was called 'Harries' and in every record he wrote his own name and the word 'married', both those word have 'ri' in them. He was used to writing 'ri' so if the ship was 'Iris' the letters would look the same ... they didn't! Surely it must be HMS Isis! And proves that you should always go back to the original source of the information.

The Trinity Pageant

Knowing Joseph was on HMS Isis made things fall into place. He had probably been on board the previous year when Admiral Gambier arrived in St John's, having survived a hurricane in the North Atlantic, his flagship Isis with broken masts and tattered sails. As the purser, Joseph would have been responsible for sourcing and paying for the repairs.

St John's in the early 1800s

There were more names of witnesses on the handwritten record than the transcriber had put in the digital records. One was probably Ann's father, we found that he may have owned a butchery and tavern, was this where Joseph got supplies for the ship? Other witnesses were Thomas Skinner and Jane Hester Skinner, most likely this was the surveyor and architect in charge of building the British fort on top of Signal Hill, and his daughter who was the same age as Ann.

The fort that Thomas Skinner designed and built

I wondered if Ann had stood on The Lady's Lookout on Signal Hill, waiting for the Isis to return in Spring 1803, after spending the winter months in England. Had Joseph already proposed to her? Or was she hoping he might?

Waiting for her sailor
- a scene in the Trinity Pageant

In November 1803 Ann sailed with Joseph to her new life as a navel officer's wife, on board HMS Isis leading a convoy of ships including captured French warships.

The view from Signal Hill
looking over the narrow entrance into
St John's harbour

In January 1804 the war against Napolean's France was getting more serious, Joseph had already joined another ship, HMS Scourge, which sailed to the Dutch coast to rescue a captured British merchant ship. Joseph rowed a boat under gunfire to help in the rescue and was commended for his bravery. Was this that prompted him getting his likeness painted in June 1804, was this a gift for Ann in case he didn't survive the next voyage?


Joseph had a long career in the navy as a purser/paymaster, a position that was gaining more respect and importance. He retired in his 60's with a naval pension.

So, raise a glass and toast Joseph and Ann, without whom we would never have thought of going to Newfoundland and having a wonderful adventure.

Celia
xx