E-cards are AWFUL

...it's an insult to send them: it shows that you can't be bothered to select a card appropriate to the recipient, write in it, put it in an envelope, address it, put a stamp on it, and post it by Royal Mail (or mail it through the US Postal Service). And the kind you find on the web are GHASTLY: repellent cartoon figures, twee pictures, revolting sentiments, pathetic doggerel, unfunny quips and often, worst of all, a bit of unutterably vile music. Yuck!  Poo!  Delete it before it befouls your inbox.

Yes, but there are exceptions...

There is a British company which produces charming and witty e-cards. It was founded by artist Jacquie Lawson in 2000, and she now leads a team of talented helpers—mostly her friends and family—including animators, a watercolourist, a musician and a web designer, based in Devon, London and the US.  They have a range of 196 cards for various purposes: you can see them at their excellent website, www.jacquilawson.com.

There is still time to send out some of these for Christmas, or better still their magnificent 2011 Advent Calendar, a bit more expensive but very good value. If you don't want to buy this or anything else from them, you can pass a pleasant hour previewing their stock.

Other Men's Flowers is, of course, widely known for its venality; it will happily publish a plug for any product, however tatty, overpriced or downright fraudulent, provided the fee is right. But I can make an honest declaration of disinterest in Jacquie Lawson: I have no acquaintance with her or any of her associates and no financial interest in their company. I rather regret this, for they are clearly an agreeable bunch of people and have a deservedly successful business.

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Return of Pooh

...to the Hundred Acre Wood. Well, he never went away, really: the last line of The House at Pooh Corner is : "... in that enchanted place on the top of the Forest a little boy and his Bear will always be playing".

Anyway, the title of a book being published tomorrow suggests that there has been at least a temporary (well, eighty-one years, actually) absence. The Milne estate has authorised a lifelong fan, David Benedictus, to write a new series of short stories. The cover adds to his name to those of A.A. Milne, E.H. Shepard, and Mark Burgess; happily, from the cover illustration it looks as if the latter's drawings, pastiche though they may be, pay proper homage to Shepard's originals, and we may hope that the text is no less admiring of Milne. Certainly, neither will owe any debt to Disney's charmless fat yellow blob in a red T-shirt.

E.H. Shepard's Pooh Bear at ease in the Hundred Acre Wood.

[Note: Since I wrote the above, the book has been published and reviewed to general acclaim. The US initial print alone is 300,000]

Not suitable for children

One of the Psycho Buildings in the exhibition at the Hayward Gallery (until 25th August) is a cinema, or rather what the creator, Slovenian artist Thomas Putrih, calls an eclectic baroque theatre, though neither of these adjectives seem to me to be in any way appropriate.

It is showing short films by other artists and these weren't particularly baroque or eclectic either. We did not sit through them all and probably didn't miss very much, but one of them we did quite like. It was called Little Frank and His Carp and was filmed at the Guggengeim Bilbao; this has a fish-shaped tower at its heart which I suppose could be a carp, but Little Frank does not appear.

The film follows performance artist Andrea Fraser in the role of a museum visitor listening to the official audio guide and its climax (I use the word advisedly) comes when the guide encourages her to caress the 'powerfully sensual' curves of the fish. This she does, with a will.

When her thong came into view, we heard some commands being hissed at the school party behind us and a dozen (not very young) children scampered down the gangway and were ushered out. This was a sensible precaution on the part of the teachers, for the accounts of the visit given later to the parents might very likely give rise to some concerned enquiries of the school authorities, or even complaints.

What surprised me was the children's reaction: the commands were obeyed instantly, with no giggling. This showed commendable discipline and sense of decorum, but none of them even attempted to dawdle, which suggests that they had been inculcated with prudery. Or maybe they just lacked curiosity.

Psycho Buildings

Having enjoyed the free exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, we still had some time to kill so we forked out for the one you had to pay for. The art works in Psycho Buildings are said to be "by turns visceral, pungent, meditative, absurd, threatening and atmospheric... and probe the ways in which built structures shape our imaginative and physical lives". They might have added "and some are bit of a giggle too", but anyway the exhibits are mostly fascinating and in some cases it is actually possible, with some help from the catalogue, to grasp what the artist is getting at.









One of the exhibits we liked very much, Fallen Star 1/5 is the first chapter of a project in progress by the Korean artist Do Ho Suh which documents the cultural displacement that he experienced in moving from Korea to the USA. He sees his sudden transplantation as analogous to the Kansas cyclone that transports Dorothy to the land of Oz, and presents a 1/5 scale replica of his childhood home crashing into the apartment building he lived in when he first arrived in the United States. Here are photos of the front and the back.

Psycho Buildings is nowhere near as baffling as an exhibition I saw years ago at the Pompidou Centre. It was called, I think, Les Immatériaux (abstract things, intangibles) and seeing it was an unforgettable experience of which I remember nothing at all: this is as it should be, for most of the exhibits were exactly that, empty spaces configured in significant ways or in some cases not configured at all. The whole thing had a sort of profound superficiality, and was the very epitome of all that modern French intellectualism has given to the world.

Hyperbolic Crochet Jam

I have never been a keen crocheter (pron. crotchetter? crowshayer?); this and other crafts such as needlepoint, quilting and macramé have never really impinged on my life to any great extent.

Nevertheless I was intrigued by an event with the above title which took place in the Clore Ballroom at the Royal Festival Hall on 21st June, as follows: "...Join a mass of fellow crochetters for live music, crochet and chat. Limited materials are provided, but bring your favourite yarn, hooks and used plastic bags". This sounds a real gas (sixties slang seems appropriate here), and I am sorry that I missed it; had I heard in time, I might well have gone along to it with a rollicking yarn and some plastic bags, though I would have had to borrow some hooks.

This may all sound rather unlikely: why did crochet come to the Royal Festival Hall? Clearly, I must explain further. The Los Angeles-based Institute for Figuring has organised a project called The Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef, "...a large-scale constantly mutating series of hand-made crochets that replicate the forms of natural coral ...Fusing science and mathematics with fine art and handicraft, the reef is constantly updated by an ever-expanding group of participants from around the world". There is currently an exhibition of the project at the Hayward Gallery on the South Bank.

This is one of the exhibits, and here there are photos of some of the others, which should be viewed by anyone who finds it difficult to imagine being fascinated by a display of crochet. We saw it by chance, having wandered into the Hayward Gallery to fill in a couple of hours; this exhibition was free, otherwise we might not have bothered.

Speak roughly to your little boy...

...And beat him when he sneezes
He only does it to annoy
Because he knows it teases

James Thurber was once asked by a publisher to provide the illustrations for a new edition of Alice in Wonderland, but he knew where his talent lay. 'No,' he said, 'keep the Tenniel drawings and I'll re-write the text'.

Capturing the President

George W Bush has been such a gift to cartoonists that many of them must be concerned about his successor, wondering whether he/she will be as easy to draw. The Guardian asked some top caricaturists for their views on the possibilities offered by the current candidates.

Their own Steve Bell writes as well as he draws: "George W Bush is a figure of such towering political idiocy that he will be an extremely easy act to follow politically. Could anyone possibly do a worse job? But in cartoon terms, it's a different prospect. Not one of the three potential presidents will be able to fill that vacant monkey suit.
It's not that they aren't good subjects for caricature. Each has a distinctive set of features that make them recognisable even from this side of the Atlantic. Clinton has two mad eyes that explode into life whenever she is surprised, delighted or feigning orgasm. McCain looks like an eager hamster that happens to wear a truss. Obama resembles that rubber man out of the Fantastic Four.
This is all grist to the mill of any self-respecting cartoonist, but there is even more promising material in store. Obama is black, Clinton is a woman and McCain is old.
Yet there are problems. Not one of them is as stupid as Bush, and they all speak perfect English. Worse still, they all have at least one redeeming feature. Obama is a stunning orator and has opposed the war in Iraq from the start. Clinton has a gratingly whiny voice and has flip-flopped on the Iraq war, but at least she has had the good grace, not to say common sense, to finally come around to calling for troop withdrawal. And McCain may be dementedly pursuing victory in Iraq, but he has bravely given the finger to the religious right in his own party."

Barry Blitt: "Obama’s ears and heavy eyebrows are his obvious features. "If you get those right, it’s hard to mess up. He’s actually pretty easy to draw, even for me. His body language is relaxed. You want to capture that — it’s not the norm among politicians".

Steve Brodner: "Clinton has a long, sloping nose that draws her face down and almost crowds out her mouth, which is small and feisty. It is as if her face twists to accommodate her various constituent groups. I see a kind of conflict in there. There is also something in her intensity: there may be traces of latent Nixon chromosomes in her sullen, victimised, enemy-listing, openness-averse, highly ambitious mien".

And finally Rick Meyerowitz: "John McCain has got 'the hunch', a stiff—shouldered, slightly forward-tilting pose. And then there is that under-bite, where the Arizona senator shows his bottom teeth like a wily old badger ready to take a piece out of anyone".

Julius de Basil and his icons

After all that depressing stuff I wrote about websites, let's have a nice picture of an icon. Nowadays we use the word most often in one of its two modern meanings. The OED says:

1a. An image, figure, or representation; a portrait; a picture or illustration in a book
1b. An image in the solid; a monumental figure; a statue.
1c. Computing A small symbolic picture of a physical object on a VDU screen.
2. Eastern Church A representation of some sacred personage, in painting, bas-relief, or mosaic, itself regarded as sacred, and honoured with a relative worship or adoration.
3a. Rhetoric A simile. (Obsolete)
3b. Philosophy A sign which represents its object by virtue of having some character in common with the object.
4. A realistic representation or description in writing. (Now rare or obsolete.)

Oddly, the other modern meaning apart from 1c appears in the OED as a draft addition from 2001, though it was recorded in print fifty years earlier:
A person or thing regarded as a representative symbol, esp. of a culture or movement; a person, institution, etc., considered worthy of admiration or respect. (e.g. "Hollywood's female gay icons Jodie Foster, Susan Sarandon and Jamie Lee Curtis").

But never mind about those, or about the bits of art that clutter up our screens. Meaning 2 has the best images, and here's one from the 6th century: the oldest icon of Christ Pantocrator (encaustic on panel, ca 6th century:Saint Catherine's Monastery, Mount Sinai). My friend Julius de Basil, a bit of an icon himself, is dotty about the things, and has some nice ones among the family anecdotes in his blog.

Two Spaniards

Salvador Dali in his studio at Port Lligat in 1951 with his painting Christ of St John of the Cross and Pablo Picasso with a vast carving of a goat outside his villa in Cannes in 1955.

While Franco ruled Spain, Picasso remained in exile; Dali didn’t care, and carried on doing his thing. Or rather, various colourful things. James Thurber, quoting The Secret Life of Salvador Dali (written by Dali, with paintings by Dali and photographs of Dali) noted some vignettes which give the flavour of the book:

…the youthful dreamer of dreams biting a sick bat or kissing a dead horse, the slender stripling going into man’s estate with the high hope of one day eating a live but roasted turkey, the sighing lover covering himself with goat dung and aspic that he might give off the true and noble odour of the ram… Salvador kicking a tiny playmate off a bridge, Salvador breaking the old family doctor’s glasses with a leather-thonged mattress-beater…
There was, in Dali’s home town of Figueras, a family of artists named Pitchot, all of whom adored the ground the enfant terrible walked on. If one of them came upon him throwing himself from a high rock—a favourite relaxation of our hero—or hanging by his feet with his head immersed in a pail of water, the wild news was spread about the town that greatness and genius had come to Figueras. There was a woman who put on a look of maternal interest when Salvador threw rocks at her. A mayor of the town fell dead one day at Salvador’s feet. A doctor in the community (not the one he had horsewhipped) was seized of a fit and attempted to beat him up.

Thurber added “The contention that the doctor was out of his senses at the time of the assault is Dali’s, not mine.”

How about a Beefeater newt?

It is easy, but pointless, to say rude things about the London (or rather london) 2012 logo: everybody knows that if you give world-famous brand consultants Wolff Olins a year and £400,000 to design it then you are likely to get a piece of laughable rubbish. So no surprise there, though the animation of it which causes epileptic seizures, the unrecognisable 2012 and the fact that it suggests a swastika were unpredictable bonuses. It was apparently designed to "attract the internet generation", an objective both deeply sad and clearly not achieved: an online petition to get the whole thing ditched attracted nearly 50,000 signatures within a couple of days, while a "Support the 2012 Logo" list was struggling to make it into double figures.

There will also be a London 2012 mascot and we can be fairly sure that its unveiling after the Beijing Olympics will evoke similar contempt and ribaldry. In recent years many Olympic venues have settled for awful sub-Disney cuteness as in Moscow’s Misha and Seoul’s Hodori.

An honourable exception was Barcelona’s Cobi, but then they had taken the extraordinary step of giving the task of creating it to a real artist-designer (Javier Mariscal), who was responsible for the corporate identity for the Games; their logo was one of the best ever.

Few will be much impressed by the charm and originality of Huanhuan, the mascot for Beijing 2008 now being promoted to the world.

[Note that it is a microphone that the gentleman on the right is holding.]

Giovanni Antonio Canal and his gang

In a column on the left of this page there is a list of the categories into which fall the 570 (as of today) posts in Other Men's Flowers. I suppose it does reflect more or less what is important to me: there are 88 posts about words, for example, and only 4 on fashion; 24 on food and drink but only 7 on art. Actually this last figure is not really representative, for while I am without artistic taste, talent or understanding, I do quite like looking at pictures, provided no-one expects me to say anything intelligent about them.

Anyway, I went to an exhibition last week, so here’s post number 8 on art.

This year there have been two London exhibitions of pictures including many of the city itself: by Hogarth, showing its squalor and the depravity of its people, and by Canaletto, showing its beauty and the elegance of those who stroll there. I get quite enough squalor and depravity at home, so it was the Canaletto exhibition, in Dulwich, that I went to and enormously enjoyed.

Looking at Canaletto’s pictures of London and Venice, it struck me how tedious architectural painting must be for the artist: one of the buildings had a dozen identical windows, another a row of ten identical pillars. Of course I knew that artists of that period used various devices to help, and had apprentices to work from their sketches, but I had never realised just what an industry they created until I read this:

Recent studies have brought to light the extensive efforts Canaletto employed in creating such works. The paintings were drawn, if not painted, from inside a portable, room-sized, camera obscura by highly trained (and no doubt very patient) draughtsmen (we could hardly call them artists), and then turned over to studio assistants and apprentices for the actual painting. Canaletto, of course, oversaw the whole enterprise and no doubt lent his hand to the all-important finishing work, but in large part, these incredible painted images were the output of a surprisingly sophisticated art factory.

So one can see how it was possible that he had nine hundred paintings attributed to him.

Merrily On High

I have been told that my choice of topics in the pre-Christmas period so far has been shamefully inappropriate, and I suppose this is true: there are very few aspects of Tory policy, marine diatoms or prostitution which are likely to waken anyone’s festive spirit.

So here we go on a series of Christmas-themed posts; it’s a bit early to start this because I doubt if I can keep it going for a whole week, but we shall see.

Many years ago when commercial silkscreen printing was in its infancy a friend and I started a little business making and selling, among other things, Christmas cards, in both secular and religious designs. Our artists were equally proficient at both but found the former enabled them to adopt a more uninhibited approach. Here are two of our designs; angels are timeless (obviously), but the style of the other drawing has dated a bit.

Sadly, the unsold stock is long since exhausted and nowadays we have to buy cards. Everybody knows that charity cards sold in shops give only a derisory share to the charities which produce them and most of them are awful anyway, so we get ours from a local voluntary organisation which pops up every year to offer a selection of cards from all the charities, and presumably passes on a fair slice of the proceeds.

Most of these designs are pretty awful too, and one also has to choose from those supplied by a charity of which one approves. Well, I suppose all charities are deserving in one sense (except maybe Eton and Harrow and all that lot, whose charitable status gets them £100 million a year in tax relief) but most people would rather give money to some than to others.
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And now for something…

A couple of years ago I imposed upon myself the obligation of making a new post to Other Men's Flowers every second day. I have not found this difficult to fulfil, my writing being untrammelled by considerations of accuracy, originality or taste. That’s the advantage of maintaining an obscure personal blog with no reputation for quality to keep up, or fastidious readers to satisfy: when inspiration flags, I can shovel in any old codswallop and no-one will complain or even notice.

In recent days absolutely no new subjects for calumny or mockery have come to light: there have been no idiotic new initiatives from the government, no new pronouncementations from Dubya, no new evidence of our moral degeneracy or the squalor of our politics.

Anyway, I am in no mood for my usual poking around in the midden of our public life, or the media, or the celebrity world, for little bits of discreditable information on which to make snide comments, for today the sun is shining, the hounds of spring are on winter’s traces, and, unless I have been misinformed, a livelier iris changes on the burnish'd dove.

So here is a nice unseasonal picture:

Pieter Bruegel I (c1525-1569): Hunters in the Snow 1565 (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum)

I don’t even know what I like

Having publicly confessed to my deficiencies in the field of sport, I might as well own up to my total lack of artistic talent or appreciation. This seems to me to be a far more serious failing; any whippet can run faster than a man, any fairly fit wildebeest can jump higher, and it would not be difficult to teach a bright chimpanzee to play most ball games, but the ability to create a work of art (except by accident) is something that distinguishes us from animals.

So while my admiration of sportsmen is less than whole-hearted, I have enormous respect, and some envy, for people who can draw, or paint, or sculpt, or even make a nice picture by sticking grass and bits of cloth on a piece of cardboard. Recently I have been enjoying making up web pages which exhibit the work of a few artists; I charge a small fee for this but it’s not a money-making venture, just a source of satisfaction in that it makes me feel that I am associated in some small way with the world of art.

And I imagine that on the whole artists are rather more agreeable and interesting people than footballers or cricketers, though I don't actually know any of those.

Sacred Worker

"…and what is the use of a blog", thought Alice, "without pictures or conversations?"

I haven’t put many of either in recent posts. Here for no particular reason is a nice digital image (i.e. messed-about photo), taken in Delhi in 1990 by the great photographer and writer Goswell Frand and reproduced here with his permission. It is called "Sacred Worker"

Trilingual sign

A while ago I saw on a French train something which I coveted. Fortunately I had with me a penknife which, though useless to a Swiss soldier, did have a little screwdriver blade, so it was the work of only a few moments to unscrew the thing and put it in my rucksack. I had then, and have now, no feelings of guilt about this: firstly, no-one would really come to any harm because of my theft, and secondly the train was clearly nearing the end of its life and would soon be scrapped, so that I would be preserving something beautiful for the enjoyment of future generations.

I am not joking about this; my photo doesn’t do it justice. I really do think it is a lovely object: consider the subtle curves of its outline, the background colour, the way in which the edge colour is carried round the screw holes, and the clarity and elegance of the lettering and layout. Here is a utilitarian artefact created by someone who knew that function is not all, and put a great deal of care into designing the form this lump of enamelled metal would take.

Anyway, fifty-five years later it is still a cherished possession and I have it displayed in an appropriate place, not as a jokey sign but as something which is pleasant to look at.

...But I know it when I see it

At the spring exhibition of a local art group the other day I heard that some artists had cancelled their memberships because they felt that some of the paintings being hung were of such a low standard - "not art", in fact. Artists are an intolerant lot.

But certainly - as at any art exhibition - among the many pictures on the walls which demonstrated substantial talent there were a few ugly and unskilled daubs.

I spoke to the painter of several of the former kind and we tried to work out how one could define art, or at least recognise it. We agreed that it was unlikely that we could find an answer since greater experts have spent a lifetime trying to do so, and failed.

Afterwards it occurred to me that the answer is really much the same as the one given by A.E.Housman when asked for a definition of poetry. He replied that he could no more define poetry than a terrier could define a rat, but that he thought that both he and the terrier recognised the object by the symptoms it provoked in them.

The Horsecroft controversy

Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst are only the latest in a long line of artists whose work has not been appreciated - or even understood - by the public.
There was a notable argument in the sixties about the work of the late Godfrey Horsecroft. By the time of his death in 2001, of course, he had become a respected conventional artist, but in those days he had attracted much opprobrium by his contempt for the art world and his refusal to conform in any way to its conventions. Some of the discussion was carried on in the correspondence pages of the now defunct magazine Art-Horizons, from which these letters are reprinted by permission of the publishers:

Sir, I feel you should give me, as one of the modern artists pilloried in your columns recently, an opportunity to reply.
Of course there is a lunatic fringe to our profession. The lay public’s contempt for the man who produces pictures by riding a bicycle over dollops of paint, and sells them at a hundred guineas a time, is understandable. Personally, I must confess to a sneaking admiration for his acumen, if not for his artistic integrity, but I would not attempt to justify his methods. Cycling and painting are quite separate means of self-expression and their combination is both incongruous and indecorous.
It is unfortunate that this sort of thing leads many people to believe that any means of producing pictures which is not basically the same as that practised by, say, Rubens, is a fraud and a matter for contumely or mirth. It is doubly unfortunate for artists such as myself who, daring to use a medium both new and exciting, have been tarred with the same brush as the charlatans who seek only notoriety.
My own method of creating pictures – the attaching of large, irregularly shaped pieces of newspaper by means of special resins to sheets of anodised aluminium - is, I believe, a very real advance in the techniques of pictorial representation. My experiments with it have shown that it permits, in a way that no other medium does, the expression of psychiatric tones as opposed to mere visual ones.
My Paranoia Recumbent for example, a study in the chiaroscuro of the subconscious, would be completely meaningless in oils or watercolours, but in pieces of newspaper on aluminium it captures the very essence of the subject.
Alas, I am not one of those who profit by their originality. To maintain myself I have been forced to devote a large proportion of my time to menial and ill-paid work, the influence of which may in the long run destroy my very will to create.
But I do not despair. The vituperation and neglect I and the bulk of my fellow modern artists suffer was also the lot of Van Gogh. Now, every suburban villa has its view of Arles. In fifty years’ time, perhaps – who knows? - my own Nature Morte Schizoide will be as popular. In the meantime, we can only bow to the scorn of the multitude, and await the judgment of posterity.
Yours, etc
Godfrey Horsecroft
****
Dear Sir, Mr Horsecroft must be mad if he imagines that the public in fifty years time are going to take him to their hearts as they have Van Gogh.
His letter does not really tell us enough about his method to enable us to judge it properly. These pieces of newspaper that he sticks on to the aluminium, for example. Are they all from different papers or does he, as I suspect, use only the sports pages of the Daily Mirror? And is the aluminium completely covered or does some of it show through? Above all, is not the use of special resins merely an affectation when ordinary glue would serve just as well?
It would be unfair to call Mr Horsecroft a charlatan without a better acquaintance with his work, but I cannot help feeling that his motives in trying to foist it on the public are, to say the least, questionable.
Yours faithfully
Arthur N Ruttmold
****
Dear Sir, Godfrey Horsecroft has generously permitted me to reply on his behalf to the unkind letter from a Mr Ruttmold which you published last week.
Anyone who has sat at the feet of Mr Horsecroft for twelve years, as I have, knows he is not a man to use special resins where ordinary glue would do the job. Has Mr Ruttmold ever tried sticking pieces of newspaper on to aluminium? I can assure him that it is not so easy as it sounds.
As for the gibe about using only the sports pages of the Daily Mirror, Mr Ruttmold might be interested to know that in his latest work, Libido with Mandoline, Horsecroft has used pieces of no less than forty-one provincial weeklies as well as short extracts from all the national dailies. Besides disposing of Mr Ruttmold’s insinuations, this, I think, is a complete answer to the charge of superficiality so often levelled at Horsecroft’s work.
Yours faithfully
Fuchsia Burlap
****
Dear Sir, I see that a lot of people are writing about these pictures made of newspaper stuck on aluminium.
My husband brought one home that Mr Horsecroft had given him for decorating his house, and ever since then our friends have been saying how nice it is and asking where they could get one like it. It is called Autumn Neuroses and my husband says it is the best picture he has ever seen, though you can’t read what it says on some of the pieces of newspaper because the stuff they are stuck on with has come through and stained them a sort of brown colour.
Yours faithfully
A. E. Crimstance (Mrs)
****
The Editor writes:
No further space, unfortunately, can be allotted to the Horsecroft controversy, which has caused as much furore among art-lovers as the violent disagreements a few years back about Wilbert Longbottom’s ceramics.
Note: Mr Horsecroft has asked us to thank all our readers who sent him bundles of old newspapers and pieces of aluminium, and to say that he now has sufficient to last for several years.

Art for the inartistic

Anyone seeking fulfilment as an artist but handicapped by a total lack of talent should study the works of Goswell Frand.