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It was almost four years ago that I held my first art exhibition here ‘Spirit of Place’ by a group of students in their final year at the Sir John Cass School at London Metropolitan University. It was a wide range of work spanning photography, large pieces of abstract art through to exquisite jewel like watercolours. The last were by Beryl Touchard and talking to her one day she showed me her sketchbooks including some colour fields, which I absolutely loved for their spontaneous intensity of colour. I was struck too by her surprise at my liking them: to her they were just preparatory colour fields, of no interest outside their usefulness in her work. I just wanted to buy one, frame it and put it on the wall (which I did eventually).

About a month later I visited an auction to view a painting I had seen in the catalogue and which I thought might be of interest. Sadly it was not, but rather than have a wasted journey I looked round the rest of the sale including some sketches and watercolours in folios. To my surprise one included a design by Duncan Grant for a plate for the Festival of Britain and I was happy to be able to buy the folio in the sale.

Looking through that folio of watercolours and sketches made me realise that in general, works on paper reveal the mind of the artist in their immediacy with which they are committed to paper much more than say an oil painting, a much more forgiving medium that can be worked and re-worked over a longer period of time. So the germ of the idea for the next exhibition: ‘The Mind of the Artist’ was born, which will run in the gallery from 14^th – 30^thNovember at Town House. It will include works by Hercules Brabizon Brabizon, Laura Knight, Feliks Topolski, Madge Gill, Austin Osman Spare, Scottie Wilson, E Q Nicholson and of course the Duncan Grant design for the plate.

 

I had an unexpected treat when I visited Anthony Eyton to collect the paintings and drawings which are going to be included in Now and Then, an exhibition of current figurative artists living and working in the East End opening here on the 28^th November. Anthony is no longer living in Spitalfields, but he had a studio in Hanbury Street at the end of the 60’s, when he was drawn to Spitalfields and Whitechapel by the noise, colour and vibrancy of the area.

He had managed to get most of the paintings together, but was still unable to find a couple, so that meant a lot of rummaging through stacked up paintings, looking for the elusive ones. Nothing nicer I think, because of course we discussed the paintings we came across as we searched, in a much more companionable way than you’d expect given that I hadn’t met him before.  We were drawn together for the time being by the magic of seeing old friends for him, and the magic of seeing the many facets of his work for the first time for me.

This painting, from his studio in Hanbury Street in 1981, encapsulates for me his view of the East End at the time. No sky, just an overwhelming sense of buildings one after the other, run-down, but not depressing.  A sense of lives lived on top of each other, but where someone has made a tiny patch of green amongst the endless brick.  His is a gaze of great fondness for the city and although his paintings in the exhibition are mainly about the buildings, you sense a great love of life at the heart of them all.

 

My email box is unusually exciting at the moment as I’m being sent lots of images by the artists taking part in the new East London Group exhibition ‘Now and Then’ at Town House from 28^th November – 8^th December. The exhibition sets a group of six artists living and working in the East End now alongside some works of the original East London Group from the 1930’s and some works by Anthony Eyton working in the area from the 1960’s.

I love this etching of a mudlark and his dog, which arrived from Joanna Moore recently. At first it was the visual appeal of the sketching and the rapid strokes that convey the repetitive movement of man and dog as they search for ‘treasure’, almost resolving into a pattern. Yet it soon reminded me of an article I read recently about the artist Simon Ling, shortly to appear in an exhibition at the Tate, who also likes to work outside and whose intense focus is such that a detail becomes everything. I realised that Joanna is doing something similar in this etching, but focusing on the event rather than the object.

The etching comprises a series of sketches made as Joanna watched the mudlark and his dog, but by combining it into one image the event is analysed over a period of time so that we can view it from every angle. Not only does it convey the closely focused, minutely choreographed movement of the mudlark as he works, but we also understand the close relationship between man and dog much better than we would from a single sketch.

 

Until about 1830 Fournier Street in Spitalfields was called Church Street and in a spare moment last year I googled my address as it was then: 30 Church Street. To my surprise a result from a trade directory was first on the list, referring to Richard Ball, weaver, living here in 1794, and a resident of the building previously unknown to me. Unable to find any further information on him, I filed it away as another piece in the jigsaw of who has lived here for the past three centuries.

In an extraordinary coincidence a few months later I picked up a second-hand copy of ‘Life and Death in Spitalfields 1700 to 1850’ written about the excavation of the crypt in Christ Church and published in 1996. One of the vaults examined was the Ball family, specifically Mary and Martha who died in 1819 and 1821, aged 47 and 70 respectively – but no Richard. I assume, however, that these were his wife and daughter. I have since discovered that Richard Ball seems to have been in partnership with Stephen Sorel, forming the firm Sorel and Ball, weavers and silk merchants of Church Street, which was active c1770 – 1790.

So I am very much looking forward to the talk taking place on the 16^th April in Christ Church on these excavations, part of the Huguenots of Spitalfields festival (8^th – 21^st April). Not that I think the Ball family will feature, but I’ll know a bit more about their lives in Spitalfields as I imagine them weaving in the attic here. The photo is one of the plates from Hogarth’s Industry and Idleness, 1746 and shows weavers with their tall looms, the cut-out for which was found during the work that took place here ten years ago and which survives to this day in the attic ceiling.

This is a cabinet of curiosities that isn’t. It is a bookcase into which I placed some smaller items of stock when I was moving things around for the arrival of the coffee machine earlier this year. Small objects, more self-consciously curiosities, had been in it previously and sold, but this time I was in a hurry and in need of somewhere to put things. So instead of selecting and arranging carefully I just put the things in: all have been moved around several times for various reasons, each time in a hurry. Yet the odd thing is that it doesn’t seem to make a difference to how people view the cabinet, mostly finding it fascinating, which has made me wonder why.

Placing the objects in a cabinet seems to take them out of context and makes us look at them in a new way, as though in a museum. There are some animal or mineral curiosities in there, but most are man-made and when I look at the photograph many are, to our modern eyes, slightly curious: a tea brick made for transport by sea, a pocket globe for carrying around, an unusual money box or a snuff box. Rather than being curiosities of a strange new world these are curious because they belong to a past world that is completely unfamiliar, rather like looking at an old faded photograph that initially looks recognisable and then being surprised at how much has changed.

In the past these cabinets were created to display to their audience wondrous man-made or natural objects of a world that was still being discovered. Now, perhaps, the wonder in looking at this lies in how much we have changed.

 

Saturday was cupcake day in the shop. We gathered at 10.30 to be taught how to decorate them by Lisa who has a passion for making them and baking in general. She supports the Spitalfields Crypt Trust and we offered a donation to the charity in return for a day’s tuition in cake decorating.  I have a collection of 18^th and 19^th century hand written recipe books, which we are going to use to make the cakes to serve with the coffee arriving downstairs in the kitchen area of the shop in about a month. Cup cakes seem like a good idea too: there is something irresistible about these brightly coloured jewels. In the space of three and a half hours we made and decorated nearly two hundred of them and if you had told me at the beginning that we would be able to decorate the cakes that are in the photo I would have laughed and told you that it would be completely impossible. Nevertheless there they are and they created quite a stir as they appeared in the window of the shop so that by 2pm we had a queue forming and by 5pm we had sold out and raised nearly £200 for the charity. Thank you if you bought one and thanks to Lisa, we had a lot of fun.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(Seems a long while ago now and we never did do cupcakes in the coffee shop, which finally opened in May 2012 after a delay getting the coffee machine).

As I sit here in the shop in the cold waiting for the snow to arrive Robert Sayer’s engraving of skaters in January seemed appropriate.

The figures in this are very appealing: the bulk of the figures are around the fire, so bundled up that they can hardly move in contrast to the lightly clad figures on the ice, keeping warm through exercise. But perhaps he is also illustrating the folly of youth in its refusal to dress up warmly. I am not a print dealer, but from the research I have done into Robert Sayer, these figures seem to be typical. Slightly elongated limbs, with quite distinctive faces and a sparse approach to the landscape setting which has a very linear/graphic feel to it. The lines underneath read:

‘The old ones, round the fire give sage advice,

And cry ‘tis dang’rous skaiting on the Ice’,

But Fribble heeds not what old people say

Because he thinks he’s got more wit than they.’

‘Fribble’ means a coxcomb or dandy and I assume that’s the figure being pushed in the chair on the ice as he looks rather elegantly dressed. Apparently David Garrick played a character of the same name in a play, which fits with a date of mid eighteenth century for this set of prints.

I set off early on Wednesday morning: up at 5am in France (4am as far as I was concerned), to go with friends to the ‘brocante’ at Le Mans. I hadn’t been to it for a long while– it’s not much fun going on your own, struggling up at that time of the morning, driving for an hour and a half and then fighting for a parking space in the middle of a muddy field, so I was looking forward to going with the others. Of course once we arrived and had a quick cup of espresso to warm up, it was down to work and then you’re on your own: unspoken etiquette demands that you separate and go your own way to avoid the difficulties of everyone wanting the same thing. So it’s first come first served until the initial rush is over and then everyone meets up for another coffee and to compare notes.

I’m told that I’m very fussy about what I buy…. and there were lots of attractive things which, on the whole, weren’t as outrageously priced as I had expected. But it always has to be something I love for one reason or another and this dish from Provence was one of them. Partly it is the shape: I have two plates in the shop at the moment with the same glaze, so I was pleased to find a serving dish. Then there is the colour: such a suggestion of summer warmth against which any food would look good. But one food sprang to mind as soon as I saw it – asparagus. It’s not only that English asparagus is delicious, but the fact that it is only around for such a short time heightens my anticipation. And it is soon followed by broad beans, peas and all the other harbingers of summer. More than anything else though, it is the fact that asparagus would look perfect against the warm yellow of this glaze.