I was lucky enough to spend four years at Glasgow School of Art. The Charles Rennie MackIntosh building was wonderful with white walls, dark wood everywhere, a lovely library complete with his furniture, tiny rooms off tiny staircases, and high up bays that overlooked the city. I loved to draw and therefore it followed that printmaking was a perfect medium for me. Printmaster Philip Reeves let us have complete freedom; it was as if we were in our own studios while he was in his working beside us. See Vimeo Philip Reeves—he is in his studio in his home many many years later. Sadly Glasgow School of Art has been destroyed by fire.
LOWER BELGRAVE STREET
When I moved my daughter to St Peter’s Eaton Square Church of England Primary School on Lower Belgrave Street, I did not know of Bruce Chatwin safely ensconced in Eaton Place just round the corner. My daughter’s closest friend at St Peter’s had an uncle who was a scholar and we visited his home with artifacts in glass cases—a private museum in a private home. I think that Chatwin would have liked these artifacts.
CAMPDEN HILL GARDENS
One evening I got off the tube and my daughter picked up an Evening Standard lying on the platform and then dropped half of it. That evening I looked through the remaining pages and saw a flat for sale in Campden Hill Gardens—in my favorite neighborhood in London. But it was too expensive so I put the paper aside.
In the days that followed I went for a job interview and I walked through Holland Park. I saw two policemen on horseback. The first rode off fast towards Campden Hill Gardens and the second one followed. Then I told my colleague at my work that I had seen this flat for sale but it was too expensive. She said take out a 100% mortgage. I did, the price was reduced in those three weeks, and I became the owner of the second floor flat at number 12 Campden Hill Gardens.
Like Bruce Chatwin’s attic, I had a lovely view from my kitchen window over the garden and beyond with a wonderful sky. It was like magic.
TASTE In eaton place
So to Bruce Chatwin and his impeccable taste. He bought a lease on a one room attic in Eaton Place. In An Anatomy of Restlessness Chatwin wrote about how he found and renovated this room.
“It was Sunday. My friend glanced down the property columns of the Sunday Times; her fingers came to rest beside an entry, and she said, ironically, ‘That is your flat.’
The price was right; the address was right; the advertisement said ‘quiet’ and ‘sunny’; but when, on Monday we went to see it, we were shown a room of irredeemable seediness.
There was beige fitted carpet pocked with coffee stains. There was a bathroom of black and bilious-green tiles; and there was a contraption in a cupboard, which was the double bed. The house, we were told, was one of two in the street that did not belong to the Duke of Westminster.
… It did, however, face south. The ceiling was high. It had a view of white chimneys.
… Very rarely—perhaps never in England—I’ve gone into a modern room and thought, ‘This is what I would have.’ I then went into a room designed by a young architect, John Pawson, and knew at once, ‘This is what I definitely want.’
Pawson has lived and worked in Japan. He is an enemy of Post-Modernism and other asinine architecture. He knows how wasteful Europeans are of space, and knows how to make simple, harmonious rooms that are a real refuge from the hideousness of contemporary London. I told him I wanted a cross between a cell and a ship’s cabin. I wanted my books to be hidden in a corridor, and plenty of cupboards. We calculated we could just make a tiny bedroom in place of the green bath. The room, I said, should be painted off-white with wooden Venetian blinds the same color. Otherwise, I left it to him.
I came back from Africa a few months later to find an airy, well-proportioned room, rather like certain rooms in early Renaissance paintings, small in themselves but with vistas that give an illusion of limitless space.”
Chatwin bought a folding card table, a tubular chair, and a Chateau de Versailles sofa from Christie’s. He already had “an old French chair, of the Regence, in its original but bashed-up condition,” and an Alvar Aalto birchwood table and stool.
Bruce Chatwin had taste.
BALENCIAGA by cunningham
I have just finished reading Fashion Climbing: A Memoir with Photographs by Bill Cunningham; to him true genius was Balenciaga. He wrote, “His designs were purely his own ideas, with no outside influence. He broke every rule in the fashion book, with new shapes and construction, then thumbed his nose at the phonies by throwing ropes of rubies over tweed suit jackets, adding two diamond necklaces at a time to an evening dress.” Cunningham had “found the rainbow pot of gold.”
This reminded me of Bruce Chatwin’s book, What Am I Doing Here. At the end of his interview with ninety-six year old Madeleine Vionnet in her home in the Seizieme Arrondissement in Paris, “she cherishes the memory of Balenciaga, ‘Un ami … un vrai!’”
the silk purse
I recently updated my Children’s Art Class binder for the classes I taught from 1993 to 1996 at The Silk Purse in West Vancouver. The gallery and the studio are right on the beach.
Eric Setticasi Seascape 1993
Eric was 14 when he drew Seascape—The Silk Purse is on the left. The students drew and painted in the studio and plein air on the beach.
Here are three very young students’ work from these classes.
Costa Dimakis Sail Boat 1995
Costa was six when he painted Sail Boat and this is what he chose to paint. He also painted a gun boat.
Annick Foukal Pansies with Maui 1994
Annick was seven when she painted Pansies with Maui. She painted the still life of pansies that I set up and drew my cat who came along that day to the studio. I love the way she has combined the still life with Maui under the table.
Edward Wong Primula on Pink Table 1996
Edward was seven when he painted Primula on Pink Table. He was a fearless painter with a lovely artistic sense.
Wayne Thibaud
One of the students in Deborah Cohen’s UCLA Osher class was taught by Wayne Thibaud at UC Davis way back when. She does lovely drawings. In a video with Wayne Thibaud he is invited to exhibit at the Morandi Museum in Bologna, Italy. Thibaud describes how Morandi spent a long time placing his objects and how they were tightly grouped together (while Edmund de Waal spaces his ceramics like musical notes on his shelves).
Morandi
edmund de waal
I have just finished reading The White Road: Journey into an Obsession by Edmund de Waal. He is exemplary. He works as a potter while writing. His education as a potter was hands on with a pupil of Bernard Leach and one year in Japan, and his education as a writer began at Cambridge where he studied English Literature. His Hare with Amber Eyes is a wonderful book—his books are about journeys that he has made. The reader makes them too.
Yesterday evening my friend Catherine showed me two lovely original pieces of pottery not at all like Edmund de Waal’s pottery but still lovely.
Pot decorated with fish scales
Japanese pot
OTIS
Professor Annetta Kapon gave Deborah Cohen’s UCLA Osher class a wonderful lecture on her daily collages and her Proxy Gallery. Beforehand I watched her videos on a Hungarian citing famous Hungarians, on the German Language, and on the Line between Beverly Hills and Los Angeles—one side of the road was new asphalt, the Beverly Hills side, and the other side of the road was full of pot holes, the Los Angeles side. She is very quirky and serious too. A book of her collages is available from blurb.com.
Annetta Kapon
Her Proxy Gallery is an Ikea small wooden box, famous artists put on a show, she has an opening and she sells the work! This reminded me of Edmund de Waal’s rows of pottery. A student mentioned Joseph Cornell and Annetta Kapon really admires his work.
Edmund de Waal
I wish that I had seen the exhibit White: a project by Edmund de Waal at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, 26 September 2015 to 3 January 2016.
MAF
The Marciano Art Foundation renovated the old Masonic Lodge on Wilshire Boulevard at Lucerne and it is beautifully run. Millard Sheets has a beautiful mosaic on the third floor covering a whole wall.
Millard Sheets MAF
The main exhibit during Deborah Cohen’s UCLA Osher class visit was Ai Weiwei’s work including his Sunflower Seeds, 2010—the grey bed are the sunflower seeds and the cream bed are the spouts of teapots.
Ai Weiwei
And then I read in Edmund de Waal’s The White Road: Journey into an Obsession, 2015, “Last year, says my guide, you could buy the rejects of Ai Weiwei’s sunflower seeds in this market for 200 yuan a kilo, little conical heaps of grey seeds that he had commissioned from the small workshops of Jingdezhen for his vast installation at the Tate Modern in London. They were press-moulded by the million, and you could go and collect a bag of them from a depot and paint a stripe of iron along each side and get paid by weight. There were 100 million made, 150 tons of seeds, and they kept workshops busy for a couple of years.
This year you can’t find Ai Weiwei seeds.”