Mark Haddon's Blog, page 13
November 24, 2011
npg
i had a couple of hours spare in london yesterday so i visited the national portrait gallery, which i do every so often, though because i've been painting portraits recently everything was much more interesting this time and i was standing a lot closer...
really reassuring to see a bad lucian freud (albeit opposite a breath-takingly good self-portrait of his): lord jacob rothschild, the face grey and lifeless, the background sloppy. it looked likes a unwilling commission done at speed.
a portrait of camila batmanghelidjh by dean marsh in the style of ingres' harem paintings (a concept which in itself makes me a little uneasy). the face is really well done but not very captivating. the main subject of the painting, however, seems to be a glorious triangle of silver damask (?) spilling over the divan on which she's sitting. rare to see as much care taken over a background / foreground in a contemporary painting. and even rarer for the background / foreground to be the most interesting thing in the picture.
fascinating to see group portraits in which the sitters have been painted separately and the eyelines therefore don't quite match up. e.g. a rather pedestrian picture of the royal family during the second world war, conversation piece at the royal lodge, windsor, by james gunn - george vi, the queen, elizabeth and margaret - in which everyone seems to be avoiding one another's eye. which, i suppose, they may have been...
photorealism and it's near relatives seems to be the flavour of the decade (especially if you look at the annual npg national portrait awards catalogues). but they work best in reproduction. seeing big photorealistic works in the gallery, however, takes the wind out of their sails. look closely and you see the brushmarks which reminds you that they have been hidden, which gives the whole work an air of embarrassment and unself-confidence. it's like listening to the sound of violins or trumpets generated electronically on pro-tools. and it might be a rather hackneyed and naive response to ask why you should labour so long and hard to produce a painting that looks exactly like a photograph when you could just take a photograph, seeing paintings-that-look-exactly-like-photographs hung alongside very good photographs does make it a very hard question to answer.
long corridors of victorian gentlemen locked in some kind of repetitive burnt umber hell. all of them head-and-torso poses, everyone wearing a dark suit and standing ram-rod straight, like they've come out of a machine with only the slightest variation. then you look at the labels and realises that these were fascinating men. burns, stevenson, livingstone, tennyson...
that dark background which began life in the early renaissnce when painters like durer and van eyck started using lenses / mirros and had to isolate and illuminate figures in a darkened room, and which then became detached from it's function and became instead a marker of tradition and seriousness. strange, then, to see how long it has lasted as a trope, when it can kill a painting stone dead, not just through the nineteenth century but into the twentieth, all these pictures weighed down the lightless sludge of the background. and what a joy to see the vivid green in the backgrounds of pictures by graham sutherland or the fantastic craigie-aitchison pink behind willard white in ishbel myerscough's portrait.
November 21, 2011
kate tempest
a friend told me about this (thank you, phil bloomer). a late junction session in which the performance poet / rap artist kate tempest plays (for the first time) with the elysian string quartet. largely improvised after a day's rehearsal, i think, it's quite extraordinary. made me a little tearful in parts, esp. 'where the heart is'.
if you're very quick you can still podcast it.
October 20, 2011
rip sy?
putting aside trivial matters such as this morning's possible capture of colonel gaddafi and the violence at dale farm... kim gordon and thurston moore have split up, thereby possibly heralding the demise of sonic youth. which makes me really quite sad.
(though this particular photo fails to capture mr moore's (r) extraordinary height)
October 17, 2011
land grabs
new forests company have evicted 22,500 people from their homes in uganda. it'll take you 2 minutes to read about the situation and send an e-mail via oxfam to the chairman of the company, robert devereux.
October 14, 2011
office chart
the invisible city, BJ Nilsen
for 2, alva noto
stepping into the dark, chris watson
(a tribute to) jack johnson, miles davis
taking tiger mountian by strategy, brian eno
string quartets, eliot carter, arditti quartet
October 13, 2011
the phoenix rises
you're probably more likely to click on the link if i offer no explanation whatsosver. but it's going to be a very fine thing...
October 11, 2011
crunch @ hay
i'm doing two things at the crunch festial at hay next month. a talk / performance, flying and swimming (saturday 3:30), which i recently did at the playhouse, oxford and the ilkley festival. and a round table discussion, new awakenings, about creativity, with susan hiller and josie 'o'rourke, chaired by john tusa (sunday 4:00).
October 5, 2011
carter on r3
i contributed some amateur enthusiastic opinions to a short programme broadcast last week about eliot carter generally, and his third quartet in particular. it's part of what promises to be a very enjoyable series, 50 modern composers. me, i feel uncomfortable listening to my own voice, but i seem not to have made a fool of myself and you never know, you might be tempted to seek out a bit of carter yourself. the short clip of carter himself speaking is wonderful. such a combination of fierce intelligence, good humour and self-effacing generosity. 102 and still composing...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/r3mc
(you can listen to the quartet itself on the website, too)
granta v mcsws
there's an ongoing tussle, in my head if nowhere else, between granta magazine and mcsweeney's. mcsweeney's is always going to look better (granta is never going to be pubished as 5 separate mini-volumes held together by a magnet) though granta often has wonderful photoessays. the literary content fluctuates inevitably, however, and whilst granta through a long grey patch but it has been edging ahead by several lengths over recently, not least because of the pakistan issue (no. 114) and the latest, ten years after (116) which deals with the after-effects of 9/10 in fiction and reportage. both issues introduced me to writers i'd never have stumbled on in any other way. i got educated en route as well.
October 3, 2011
cigarette cards
... from my parents cupboard under the stairs. of which a very very small gas attack themed selection...
more later. plus some of the magic lantern slides if i can find a way of copying them.
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