When Clouds Have Vanished And Skies Are Blue.

I found a picture portrait of a young lady while clearing out the stores of a man who, when asked, described himself as a hoarder, collector.

“With the emphasis on the hoarder” I jokingly replied.

He laughed.

Why I volunteer for these jobs I will never know.

Up to my knees in boxes, wading in junk. I love it.

Yes there is one side of the vocation I have chosen. The public talks and valuations of great sculpture and the appraisals of valuable works of art.

Then there is reality. In a dark dank space, sorting through other peoples discarded possessions. Wiping away the dirt and mould hoping to reveal hidden treasure. 

Its like being Indiana Jones, of Junk.

Yes, if it was that easy we'd all be doing it.

Sifting and syphoning. With a torch. Falling over stuff. Upside down, feet sticking out of tea chests.

Oh and the old Singer sewing machine that unexpectantly fell apart and landed corner side, on my foot...and broke my toe.

That hurt.

If it was not for the adrenelin of being drunk on junk, I would have cried as I watched the black and blue toe balloon grow ever larger.

Man, that was painfull. The things I do for my job.

I took this little picture of a pretty lady home and placed it on the top of a mirror which I had no space to hang, so it was tilted on the wall.

My brushpan hit the mirror and off she toppled to the floor breaking apart in front of my eyes.

Now, once I take an abandonded and forgotten item into, my care, I get upset if I break it. I want to give things a new lease of life, a new home. There it was on the floor, ruined.

I brushed the scattered pieces on to the shovel and to my surprise there were some things that had fallen out from between the picture and the frame.

Leaning in, I shuffled them around. To find, a carefully and lovingly placed lock of hair, in the corner of an envelope.

And a newspaper cutting. With a poem.

I sat down and read it out loud.

When clouds have vanished and skies are blue,

I'll come back, sweetheart, to you,

Back to the best pal I ever knew,

Your smiles and your love so true:

Back through the gateway of golden days,

There my dream love always stays,

When clouds have vanished and skies are blue,

I'll come back to you.

I looked into the gaze of the pretty lady wishing I knew who she was.

She had touched my heart as I shed a tear.

I repaired the little momento of anothers past and placed it in a better spot where it won't ever get harmed.

And now, this anonymous lady,

Is a part of my life too.

She stares back at me, as if to thank me:

The pretty girl I never knew,

Her, with those smiles and love so true.

©Wayne Colquhoun

Harry Clarke Stained Glass Windows. St Mary's Nantwich Cheshire UK

I was first introduced to the work of Harry Clarke by a lady, who one day entered my shop and made friends with me. 

A very interesting person, she was a maker of stained glass who had completed several commissions, in stained glass, for religious buildings in Perth Australia, where she was living. 

She had been born in Liverpool, but like many had emigrated with her parents at an early age.

She showed me his techniques and I was fascinated by his palette of colours.

We became good friends.

I purchased a first edition of Edgar Allan Poe, Tales of Mystery and Imagination. Falling under a spell.

This was not cheap at the time. Though it looks so now.

It was illustrated by Harry Clarke and I was taken by those illustrations that had the colours of Arabian nights with a Dublin Hue.

 Many were in black and white showing the Aubrey Beardsley inheritance of all illustrators at this juncture in time.

They had an aggressive stylisation with a feminine touch.

 (No I can't work that one out myself either).

I then stumbled across some information that he had been commissioned for stained glass at St Mary's Nantwich in Cheshire. I had to go.

Its probably fifteen years since I first saw them.

I had thought about going for a day out but it always seemed a long way off the motorway, when I would see the signs for the town.

I did get a chance during a recent visit to Nantwich to pick up a Joseph Hoffman glass vase.

I was taken by the whole setting of the church and the respect it retains in the centre of the market town. 

I have become used to seeing historic structures trashed in Liverpool as the clowns who ran the city ruined the listed buildings by allowing innapropriate development.

So that many of those listed buildings have lost their worth.

. 

But not here, in Nantwich. They want their history.

I wanted to see if I could make out the difference.

In the way that the light plays on the stained glass and the feeling that is within, and from several different centuries.

 I played 'Spot The Harry Clarke' and in no time at all I found them.

 It was dull day but the light came shining through the pale pinks and lilacs, and his unmistakable style finally became apparant in the drab light. 

It is at first glance, another stained glass window, in another church. but the more you look, the more you see. You can identify its him by his palette.

So I did a little video that I would like to share.

This was a Harry Clarke alright with all the usual symbolism and hidden meanings that I now associate with his remarkable way of seeing the world. Completed in 1919. The eyes have it.

And through his eyes you can journey into a distant place. 

Of Chivalric Knights and dragons breath and mythical places that feel real in your own imagination. 

That awake when you venture into Harry's thoughts.

This was a window commissioned in sad times but it has a glory in its melancholy.

Richard Coeur de Lion was as bold as I recall.  There is an atmosphere.

There is more than stained glass on view.

The Church is wonderful with its history evident for all to see. 

I won't put it all down here.

You can find more information here. St Mary's Nantwich. 

There are some remarkable carvings inside and on the outside of this medieval sandstone church that was restored in the 19th Century by George Gilbert Scott. 

I know the work of the family well. 

Growing up with the imposing Anglican Cathedral of Liverpool by Giles Gilbert Scott, also in sandstone.

There are a series of Misericords. I love that word.

A misericord is a small wooden structure formed on the underside of a folding seat in a church which, when the seat is folded up, is intended to act as a shelf to support a person in a partially standing position during long periods of prayer.

There are so many beutiful artifacts and historical features that I will have to go back again.

 In another fifteen years maybe?

 

Is Wales The New France?

 I got dragged to Wales when I was a child.
As a teenager with a serious paper round it would cost me wages to go away and I always tried to stay home alone, so as to be free for a week.

Well when I say Wales, it was North Wales and every other person seemed to be from Liverpool.

 I recall one week at the summer peak most of the customers on my paper round seemed to be on the same Caravan site, or maybe the next.

Gradually I broke away and become friends with many of the locals, who would call for me when I was there and we would go off to the arcades and the fairgrounds looking for holiday makers, hoping to Kiss Girls Quickly and Squeeze Them Slow.

Or was it Kiss Them Slowly and Squeeze Them Quick.

Well both really, I wasn't that fussy.

This is the time before Facebook and Social Media so it seemed impossible to plan ahead. So you pick up friends where you are.

 Staying in touch was difficult.

When I got a bit older my Welsh girlfriend didn't have a phone so every Tuesday and Thursday she would walk over the phone box and call me. Or try to.

There used to be queues outside phone boxes, remember those big red monsters sitting on the pavement usually on the corner of roads.

I would phone and a bloke would answer it waiting for someone to call him.

“Its not you again is it? Will you get off the line I am waiting for a call”

I would hear my lady friend asking “Is that for me”?

“I don't know, you will have to wait” It was a joke.

I would ring back a few minutes later and the phone would be engaged, and engaged and engaged again seemingly forever. I would go the loo or something and come back to the phone and my sister would be on it, gabbing away one of her friends. Smiling......

“How long are you going to be” I would ask. She would be talking for an age and eventually I would make the call and the phone would ring out. She had been waiting that long that she went home.

This went on and on for a long time.

The kids don't know they are born today with their mobiles.

Now I am starting to sound like my old man.

I always recall when we came into the road to Prestatyn and looked over the valleys and even though I was interested in previously stated.... other things as a youth, I could not deny the outstanding natural beauty.

Being a fisherman my treat was to get into Wales with the grown men, who were all accomplished Anglers who would show me how to lay the ledger down in a eddy swell and wait for a chunky Chub to snatch my luncheon meat.

Or trot a float down river for some distant shoal of Dace. The hope of hooking a Grayling was always there.
 I did many times, becoming an accomplished angler. I took it very seriously indeed.
https://waynecolquhoun.blogspot.com/2015/03/pilkingtons-vase-decorated-by-richard.html 

I stayed out of trouble by fishing the rivers and lakes of Wales sometimes getting as far as Bala. Rain, hail and snow and the glistening sunshine in the summer there was no obstacles to my adventures.

My mates at school called me Findus for a while. 

Findus The Fisherman. I hated that.

Captain Haddock was another. It just shows you how much they knew as I did not go sea fishing.

Some of them would get into trouble later on. How could I tell them back at my school for hard knocks, about the excitement of seeing a Kingfisher land on my rod. And that its iridescent red breast feathers shone like beacons against the pure white snow. That snow that had drifted in overnight. That we had travelled through watching the wildlife wake up. While  the more nocturnal creatures such as foxes would be seen scurrying home before the dew had drifted away on the breeze. The air always tasted different. There was no taste of smoke or industry.

It was then that I decided I will come back when I am older but apart from antique buying trips, I only occasionally travelled back through the country.

It never disappointed even if sometimes the food did.

That's all changed now.

To stock my India Building shop I would travel to the continent sometimes twice a month, circumnavigating most of France and then all over it again.

Like a grown up kid looking for treasure I searched for Circa. Circa 1900, Circa 1920.

 Art Deco became my favourite style and France seemed the place to pick it up.

I must have been to some cities 40 times over twenty years. There are some I know as well as my home town.

I don't know whether its the fact that the language barrier means you miss the mundane, but the food was always good and the perk of the job was that I could eat out most nights.

 I have eaten some good food in France, I mean really good.

Though some of the best was cooked in French style in Belgium, but that's another story.

What a beautiful country full of twists and turns and friendly people.

But the grass is always greener on the other side.....of the Channel in this case.

But as with the poem that has always stayed with me says.

We shall not cease from exploration

And at the end of my exploring

I will arrive where I started

And know the place for the very first time.

I don't know if its just because you are older but It is a delight to journey through the Welsh hillsides with all their surprises. I think that the lack of industry and investment in some areas has been sadly missed but there are areas that look as if they have not changed for ever.

And this now, is that countries charm. Or at least that's my opinion based on the areas that I have recently frequented.

This means that in some places it has saved its rivers and lakes from pollution so you can quite easily go wild swimming in crystal clear pools that are hardly off the beaten track.

See waterfalls with that sweet fresh magnetic smell.

Rolling hills and sunken valleys with trees, branches moss laden with emerald velvet shimmering in the April showers. Yes, there are showers but that is the price to pay for the lush life and that spring growth that seems to regenerate your soul.

Its the spring, when the Welsh come out of their strong sturdy slate stacked piles, from their winter slumber. In just enough time to spare, to greet the new wave of woolly jumper-ed walkers who too, need to taste that fresh air with its bitter sweet taste of cold dew, lifting from the winter wake. They come from all over the world. 

Though lingering in the memories of The Welsh is Tryweryn. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-34528336

It is easy to provoke but if you play a straight bat you are alright.

And when you go into the history and the language.

Welsh is in fact ancient Breton.

The English are speaking a mixture of Viking, Angle and Saxon. The Welsh have kept their independence and you have to respect that.

The English are the ones who have been conquered many times.

I recently found underneath the pews in a listed slate built Welsh Chapel, a simple piece of pitch pine. Signed John Felix. Taliesin.

https://www.dyfiospreyproject.com/blog/emyr-mwt/2020/01/26/short-story-10-john-felix

 And dated 1895.

https://www.facebook.com/dyfiospreyproject/photos/a.194204187277130/2911469942217194/?type=3&theater

Frank Lloyd Wright one of the 20^th centuries great architects called his design company Taliesin. His company would be responsible for the curving Guggenheim, amongst many other memorable structures. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taliesin

This brings into my minds eye several stories of King Arthur's bard and poet of the same name, who may have been washed up in a leather satchel on the beach of Aberystwyth.

 The Arthurian legend is as much Welsh as it is French in the guise of L'Morte D'Arthur.

I am amazed at how little I have been made aware of the great history of Wales.
I really do look forward to exploring the myths and legends of old Wales.

Its time to pay respect and appreciate the history and independence and learn a bit of the old Brythonic language.

Wales Definitely Is The new France …...For Me.

La Piscine Roubaix-One Of My Favourite Things

You get around a bit and see things and then you think you have seen it all and cant have your socks blown off that easily, and then you come across a little gem like La Piscine.

I had been meaning to go for a decade and it always seemed a little out of the way and in a part of the world that you would not normally go to, unless you were in Brugges and its not far a detour to get there. Its an old industrial town that the world seems to have forgotten about, it seems to be a bit smog stained still from its past. Though it has a bit of your usual French style architecture a lot of it seems heavy and a little overworked. It seems a little like, well I wouldn't say Bradford, oops I just did, but I didn’t mean it. 

What I meant to say is that at one time it was a proud place with Civic pride and then the industry moved out and it fell down the pecking order. What all places with this past history is trying to do, is re-invent itself. Bilbao tried it and won. Liverpool copied the idea and failed with the museum of Liverpool that destroyed some of the cities most cherished views.

Roubaix has got a more difficult job. 

There are no cheap flights there is no tourist industry here and, why would you want to go there?

Well they have quietly created a gem a palace of pride in what appears at first drive, a barren wilderness.

And it is wonderful. After the approach that you take to get there and take in the underwhelming façade of La Piscine, what is after all a swimming baths, you get inside and it has everything.

We only had less than two hours but I wish I had a full day. 

I wish I would have been able to eat in the restaurant with its art Deco wrought iron balustrade that was lit with the sunlight that flooded in to the structure, through modernist style sky lights.

Now I have seen a few bits in my time. Sometimes being at a quality antique fair, I have been able to see thousands of items of beauty. You can sometimes see better, stuff, than what’s in most museums, especially if you discount how curators are like pack animals and follow the leader, and buy things that other curators or art journals say are needed.

There are curators who go out on a limb, but rather a lot of them fail, and they cant be allowed to fail because, curators are clever.....aren’t they?

Well this curator who put all this stuff together was clever. It is one surprise after another. Maybe its because the theme is Art Deco and French, but maybe its because they are just bloody good at their job, and have sewn together some magnificent things that are class, and not too pretentious, but have an unassuming sense of style, of what the period that I love has to offer.

We get the term Art Deco as a reworking of the 1925 Exposition Art Decoratif et Industrial in Paris. 

Someone or other, who may have been Bevis Hillier coined it.

This museum is both entertaining and absorbing.

 I sometimes like to think I know a bit but it was a tantalising, tingling of the senses that ensued that left me amazed. Combined with a sunny day, the sense of surprise that left me hunting for more. I was so disapointed when I had to leave, as I was on a work trip and needed to be somewhere else.

I will have to go back. I need to go back.

 Not just for some of the most amazing sculpture in a beautifully polychrome tiled swimming baths interior that was designed to be reflective and I don't mean looking back reflective I mean jewel like.

What it must have been like with water inside and beautiful French ladies in stylish bathing caps inside and around the pool, in its heyday I can only imagine, and I did.

Here it contains works of art by the likes of Paul Jouve, and the sculptor PomPom and my favourite, Rembrandt Bugatti ( the son of the furniture designer and brother of the car maker). These mix with lesser names that make you question what art means. There is a Jan Martel.

Can art, by a artist you have never had pumped up by a writer, be as good as a work by somebody you have never heard of. I know it can. You cant sell a dud to me.

The ceramics section was encompassing, not huge. 

There were ceramic works designed by the amazing French furniture designer Emile Jaques Rhulman for Sevres. 

Along with works by a ceramicist whose work I bought new a couple of years back in Lille, called Amina Roos.

There's the proof that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

There are Picasso ceramics and a huge 8ft high pot that defies the art of firing.

Bit it is the way it all melts together that is the beauty of this place.

 I believe they were going to knock it down one at one time. It is my pleasurethat the did not.

From an age when swimming baths were palaces designed to be an experience just like cinemas and theatres were.

There were so many ceramics on show I have to go back.

 I used a whole memory stick photographing nearly every piece, but I need to go back and have lunch and take my time.

The whole area that houses the paintings would be worth a trip in itself but the experience of the whole is remarkable.

There are temporary exhibitions that are made to be contemporary and to attract people and give the whole experience a contemporary quality.

Who so ever is running this show has class and is not afraid to challenge.

Unlike the people running my local museums they understand that a museum experience should not be designed to resemble a penny arcade with flashing lights, or a creche were people can dump the noisy kids on to people who are studious in their approach to art and may be a little bit more serious than the “I don't know much about art but I know what I like brigade”

If you ever are within a hundred miles of this place, La Piscine in Roubaix Belgium, make sure you detour.
I guarantee you.
 It will be worth it.

 http://www.roubaix-lapiscine.com/

Caravaggio-The Taking of Christ-One of My Favourite Things.

I was going to write about the Caravaggio oil http://waynecolquhoun.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/caravaggio-whats-all-fuss-about.html painting that I saw in the Irish national gallery in Dublin.

I have not been able to. I couldn't start writing, mainly because I didn't feel I could express the power of the painting that knocked the stuffing out of me, that rendered me speechless, if only for a quarter of an hour. (that may be a feat in itself)).

I didn’t think I can find those words that I need to highlight the prowess of this work.

I know we have thesaurus to pluck words from, but for me that’s not enough, I don't want to use a dictionary, and I cant find those words that are needed in simple form then I wont.

When you say something is marvellous, well we know what it means, but what happens when it is ten times better, what the bloody hell do I say then.

I don’t need to be clever in what I say, just to portray a meaning.

I don’t have a degree in English literature. Sometimes bleedin' 'ell is good enough to express the power of something that hits you, between the eyes, like a sledge hammer, that stops your breath and causes you involuntary reactions that you cant explain.

Well that's a Caravaggio all right.

I recall those series like 'Civilization' where Mr Clarke the cultured man, eloquently told me, on TV in my living room, about the great masters.

I almost believed him he was so good at it. I don't believe anyone.
You need to have seen a bit to be able to argue a way through a bluff.
Personally I don’t prescribe to Clarke’s waffling through the series especially about Henry Moore. Especially when you know he was being given sculptures by the artist on the cheap, by the sculptor he was waxing lyrical about. I think he got it wrong, and most of his work is no more than a formula.
His wartime underground paintings are rubbish. They sum up nothing other than a man with a bit more talent than most, doodling. Whiling away the hours.

People are usually up there because you are on your knees looking up at them. AA rolling stone gathers moss. One writer carries on where the previous left off, the myth grows. Who will question an art critic who is published?
I always want to question the credibility of any writer, as I find that the people who write about artists couldn’t emulsion a wall if you gave them a 10 inch wallying brush.
I once said to a lady who wanted to write about throwing a pot, “Why don’t you learn to throw one then you can write about it”.
That didn’t go down too well, she argued that you don’t have to be an artisan to understand the emotion of a craft.
I argued that you have to have a certain amount of understanding of skill to be able to talk about it, there are those that do, and those that write about doing it.
You have to have seen a decent amount of art good, bad and Henry Moore, in order to be able to differentiate from what you are being told, and what you should think, what you understand and what you may think, you may understand.

How can you understand emotion, when art bleeds if you haven’t bled yourself?

How can you understand how difficult this is to achieve if you have not got a brush out and give it a go.

Even if you get some way and fail at least you know how hard it is. There are always those who say “I cant do that” and then give up. Others that have to work at it and comes later after a lifetime of study.

And then there is Caravaggio.....genius, pure utter genius.

Its like he was born with a brush, from a womb of paint instead of placenta.
Its as if he knew how to mix it from birth, as if someone has shown him a secret way to see life. Dare I even say he was born to a holy angel who really did sprinkle something over him that nobody else has.
Something that renders all those who come after him a student and all those before arguably irrelevant.
Its not my style, most old masters are stuffy but this paint packs a punch, a Rhapsody in Black with an unbelievable rawness that allows you to have involuntary movements.
That curls your lip and makes you cry, or die, on your feet. For you know that once you have seen, and I only mean, really seen, into the depth of his imagination, nothing will ever be the same again.
I tried not to be embarrassed when I discovered The Taking Of Christ...........there were people all around. Some of them were even watching, waiting for reactions. It is right that you don’t care what anyone thinks that your involuntary spasms mean more to you, that you don’t care. Because you just cant help yourself you have been floored with an uppercut, and it was done with paint and a brush.
This is before you even look, at the picture and the detail and what it is about. This is religious and you know most of the story was made up to kid the silly plebeians that there really was a miracle from two loaves and three fishes and that some disciple didn’t sneak away get the rest of the food to feed the five thousand from a shop down the road, in the town and they sneaked the food into the party.
This sight would even convince me that there was a God and Jesus was his son, and the Jesus was betrayed by Judas....... because Caravaggio was there, and he saw it, and what’s more he took a picture of it, and then copied it down meticulously after the event, and it was just like it was.
Then your mind starts thinking how stupid that would sound if you actually said that.
So how did he get this onto a canvas from a thought, from a story?
Vag must have been so absorbed in the whole world of what he was painting that he must have been near to popping with his blood boiling. He must have been a simmering pot, a pressure cooker. What makes someone take this route? Just what did he take to pump his adrenalin through his veins and make religion believable? Even to non believers such as myself.
The subject, ah, yes the subject. He decided to make it the very moment that Jesus is betrayed as if a war photographer had raised his lens at the very time a bomb had gone off and captured an explosion, in real time.
Vag does it better, with laborious strokes of bristle. It must have taken forever to paint such is the apparent skill. The marvel is, how do you make something explode when it takes so long how can you capture a split second when it takes a year.
How can you sum up the work of a genius that makes you cry, on the spot, and not because of the story but because of the character in the faces, and the shades of reflection, from the lamp, held aloft, that makes a spot on the armour glisten, and then reflects a spot which shows you just how the lamp bounced the light around.......a painting.
I hear Hendrix in my head and then Tubular bells then Choral cantations, throw in a verse or two of some gut wrenching blues, and all the time I hear nothing.
He takes you into a world that you never knew and you are there, you troll the canvas looking for mistakes and it only captivates you more. Then after ten minutes longer you see something that he knew would take ten minutes to see, and then there is more.
When an artist makes flesh tremble it makes mine do the same. Shivers run up the back and karate chop you in the neck, making your head move. You go up close and see the brush strokes, the hand of a master with a indefatigable hand. A hand so strong and yet so delicate as to paint the white spot in the corner of a betrayed eyes, oh and a dot on a quivering hand and I am not even looking right now at a copy, I can remember the picture as if I am looking at it now.
It is singed into my memory I knew he was described by the likes of Clarke as a master but he is more that that, he is a link to another world before camera obscurer and pin hole magic happened. How can you make such raw with ground up pigment from the earth.
Eventually I got up and walked away, I don’t know if that has ever happened to me before certainly never with such intensity of soul.
All the other paintings I looked at seemed tame by comparison. I walked into room of Yeats artwork. He had become the darling of the Dublin-esque, and I laughed.
I had never seen anything that failed so miserably. To compare is not fair, a confidence trickster with a magician. I laughed out loud at the disgrace that had invaded my space. An insult to my senses. But for sure even without the controversy of his life, Caravaggio will only come along once in a century and for fifteen minutes, I met him.


The painting had been lost http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Taking_of_Christ_(Caravaggio)
 It had been hanging in the Dublin Jesuits dining room for only a few to see and was wrongly attributed as a Dutch Master it was rediscovered in the 1990's and now hangs proudly for all to see.

This is what the NGA says about it(the spelling mistakes are theirs nit mine)  http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/caravbr-2.htm

The painting represents Jesus Christ being captured in the Garden of Gethsemane by soldiers who were led to him by one of his disciples, Judas Iscariot. Tempted by the promise of financial reward, Judas agreed to identify his master by kissing him: "The one I shall kiss is the man; seize him and lead him away safely" (Mark 14:44). Caravaggio focuses on the culminating moment of Judas’ betrayal, as he grasps Christ and delivers his treacherous kiss. Christ accepts his fate with humility, his hands clasped in a gesture of faith, while the soldiers move in to capture him. At the center of the composition, the first soldier’s cold shining armor contrasts with the vulnerability of the defenseless Christ. He offers no resistance, but gives in to his persecutors’ harsh and unjust treatment, his anguish conveyed by his furrowed brow and down-turned eyes. The image would have encouraged viewers to follow Christ’s example, to place forgiveness before revenge, and to engage in spiritual rather than physical combat. Caravaggio presents the scene as if it were a frozen moment, to which the over-crowded composition and violent gestures contribute dramatic impact. This is further intensified by the strong lighting, which focuses attention on the expressions of the foreground figures. The contrasting faces of Jesus and Judas, both placed against the blood-red drapery in the background, imbue the painting with great psychological depth. Likewise, the terrorized expression and gesture of the fleeing man, perhaps another of Christ’s disciples, convey the emotional intensity of the moment. The man carrying the lantern at the extreme right, who looks inquisitively over the soldiers’ heads, has been interpreted as a self-portrait.

On a dark dank Dublin day, the day I discovered Caravaggio, the day I came face on to a genius.