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WELCOME TO THE EAST FINCHLEY OPEN ARTISTS AUGUST NEWSLETTER
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THIS MONTH - Aubrey Beardsley - Bricks - Members News - Summer Quiz Pt 2 - Stephens House Appeal - Art on demand - and more
If you are viewing on gmail remember to click 'display images' and 'view entire message' when you reach the bottom.
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At EFOA we are monitoring the Covid situation at our regular Zoom committee meetings. Things are still very fluid but we will watch for opportunities to show our work and contribute to the local community as they arise. For artists, (now officially ‘creative practitioners’ for grant purposes), suffering financially there are funds available through the Arts Council, amongst others.
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To support the organisations and people working in arts and culture at risk due to the Covid-19 crisis, we're delivering the government's emergency funding package, and complementing it with our own grants programmes.
Support from the government
The Culture Recovery Fund: Grants programme is making up to £500 million available for organisations, while details of a Culture Recovery Fund: Repayable Finance making up to £270 million in long-term loans will be shared soon.
Support from the Arts Council
We've re-opened National Lottery Project Grants, increasing the budget by £18 million to make £75 million available to individuals, community and cultural organisations.
To help creatives step up their work in new ways, we're re-opening Developing Your Creative Practice this autumn, and increasing the budget from £3.6 million to £18 million.
We know that freelance workers in the sector, from technicians to producers, have also suffered, so we're investing an extra £2 million in funds that support these workers. More details will follow shortly.
National Lottery Project Grants
Our open access programme for arts, museums and libraries projects.
Who can apply: Individual artists and practitioners, community and cultural organisations, museums and libraries.
What you can apply for: Arts, museums and libraries projects that engage people in England with creativity and culture.
Key dates: National Lottery Project Grants is open all the time, there are no deadlines. We have a budget of £75 million available until March 2021.
https://www.artscouncil.org.uk/projectgrants
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Aubrey Beardsley was a British illustrator and author
MIKE COLES writes:-
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Sales details of LP records are not always reliable but Rumours by Fleetwood Mac (1977) is reckoned to have sold over 40 million copies. Two Beatles albums, Sergeant Pepper (1967) and Revolver (1966) have sold 32 million and 27 million respectively - add Yellow Submarine at 5 million and that’s over 100 million records featuring 4 different pieces of 30cm x 30cm cover art. These four covers have one unique connection – Victorian British Illustrator Aubrey Beardsley.
American photographer Herbert Worthington who conceived and photographed Fleetwood Mac’s iconic 1977 album cover for Rumours acknowledges Beardsley as an inspiration as does designer and bass player Klaus Voormann for the design of the cover of Revolver and Heinz Edelman for Yellow Submarine.
On the cover of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely-Hearts Club Band designer Peter Blake includes in the top left-hand corner a photo of Beardsley.
Aubrey Beardsley was born in the seaside town of Brighton on August 21, 1872. His family was well off at the time and the young Beardsley received the expected education that a middle-class boy would get. His mother, in particular, who was the daughter of an Indian Army surgeon, was cultured and ambitious for Aubrey and his older sister Mabel, ensuring they had a solid education in music, literature, art and performance.
In 1879, aged 7, Aubrey contracted tuberculosis, which was effectively a death sentence in those days – each recurring bout could be fatal. However, despite this he was an artistic and musical prodigy. By the time he was 12 his father had gone through the family inheritance and Beardsley and his older sister Mabel (who would later become an actress) performed musical duets in public concerts to raise funds. He was apparently a witty child with a wicked sense of humour. At the age of 16 he got a job as a clerk in London, first with a district surveyor, then with an insurance firm, where his salary helped maintain the family.
In 1891, at age 19, Beardsley and his sister visited the studio of painter and illustrator Sir Edward Burne-Jones. Beardsley showed the artist his portfolio. Deeply impressed by the youth's obvious talent and imagination, Burne-Jones recommended Beardsley to the Westminster School of Art. There, Beardsley was tutored by the well-known painter Frederick Brown. During his time at Westminster a tuberculosis relapse brought his inevitable death closer and meant that from then on, he lived on a knife's edge, relishing in a lust for life even as he faced the prospect of an early death.
So, 1891 saw the beginning of the seven main creative years of his life.
In 1892, Beardsley travelled to Paris, where he discovered the poster art of Henri Toulouse-Lautrec and the Parisian fashion for Japanese prints, both of which were major influences on his style. He quickly made his mark. The elegance of his designs coupled with his bizarre sense of humour and fascination with the grotesque and taboo simultaneously intrigued and repelled his Victorian audience. Naturally his work was linked to some ‘isms’, particularly Decadence which grew out of Aestheticism
and Symbolism. Beardsley's block prints allowed his work to be easily reproduced and widely circulated. Its controversial content, aesthetic beauty, and its ready availability as prints, meant that he quickly became the most influential illustrator of his time.
Aestheticism is an intellectual and art movement supporting the emphasis of aesthetic values more than social-political themes. This meant that art from this particular movement focused more on being beautiful rather than having a deeper meaning — "art for art's sake”
The Decadent Movement was a late-19th-century artistic and literary movement, that followed an aesthetic ideology of excess and artificiality. The movement was characterized by self-disgust, sickness at the world, general scepticism, delight in perversion, and employment of crude humour and a belief in the superiority of human creativity over logic and the natural world.
More than mere illustrations, Beardsley's images attacked repressive Victorian concepts of sexuality, beauty, gender roles, and consumerism. In 1893, not long after leaving art school, Beardsley received an offer from publisher Joseph Dent to illustrate Sir Thomas Malory's epic, Le Morte D'Arthur.
His Le Morte D'Arthur illustrations made Beardsley reasonably famous and led to his introduction to Oscar Wilde, a provocative author and important figure in the Decadent and Aesthetic movements. Wilde was an outspoken critic of repressive Victorian sensibilities. The artist's relationship with Wilde, though it initially bolstered his career, quickly became tumultuous and in 1895, ultimately cost Beardsley his position as art editor for The Yellow Book, an important Decadent magazine of the time.
Beardsley had discovered a simple style by which he could deliver complex images of the grotesque. His technique was hybrid. He looked backward, studying medieval woodblocks and Renaissance drawings—he once claimed he got the inspiration for the blackness of his black line from a passage in Boccaccio: “The grass was so green that it was nearly black.” But, in creating his black lines, he also looked forward, to the emerging technologies of his own age. “Beardsley showed the way to bring art to the public speedily and with a lowered cost of production: He exploited the photomechanical technique known as ‘process’ or ‘line-block.’ This new technology allowed Beardsley to create mass-produced prints”.
In one of his best known works, “The Climax”(1893), an illustration for an edition of Oscar Wilde’s “Salome,” - "Salome floats above a pool of black ink, cradling the severed head of John the Baptist in her hands, poised for a final kiss. The coils of Salome’s hair drift upward toward the top of the drawing. Salome’s hovering body and John’s disembodied head pop out of the white at the centre of the page—and line-block printing preserves the drawing’s urgency".
During his short career, Beardsley had further recurrent attacks of tuberculosis. With frequent lung haemorrhage’s he was often unable to work or leave his home.
In December 1896, he suffered a particularly violent haemorrhage, leaving him in a precarious state. By April 1897 his deteriorating health prompted a move to the French Riviera. There he died a year later, on 16 March 1898, of tuberculosis at the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Menton
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He was 25 years old.
Dada painter George Grosz noted in 1946 that Beardsley influenced "practically every modern designer after 1900." The artist's designs were particularly important to the development of Art Nouveau. Some other important artists who took note of Beardsley are Kandinsky, Picasso and artists of the Glasgow School, such as Charles Rennie Mackintosh
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Beardsley's work continued to cause controversy in Britain long after his death. During an exhibition of Beardsley's prints held at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in 1966, a private gallery in London was raided by the police for exhibiting copies of the same prints on display at the museum, and the owner charged under obscenity laws.
Beardsley was also seen as important in the Women’s Movement that was gaining traction in the late Victorian Period – Feminist writer Erin Smith notes:-
‘In England by the late 1880's, although much of the mainstream art and literature still upheld Victorian values and social order, an avant-garde movement of artists and writers began to criticize and satirize Victorian society. Aubrey Beardsley was an illustrator who took part in this movement, and became known in the larger context of Art Nouveau. In criticizing Victorian society, Beardsley focused on the sexual sphere. He was fully aware that challenges to Victorian values came not only from the avant-garde, but from the Women's Movement, which by the 1880's, had made some gains in the areas of education and economic rights. Through his bizarre and symbolic style, Beardsley's drawings blur gender lines and mock male superiority. They also play on Victorian anxieties about sexual expression and men's fear of female superiority. The phrase Fin de Siecle came from the title of a French play, and became a popular expression which symbolized the mood in England from the 1870's to the turn of the century. During this time, Britain was a power in decline. Economically, the industrial middle class was feeling strain from the "great depression" of the 1880's and increasing foreign competition in trade. Victorian notions of authority were also being threatened by extended franchise, and the Irish demand for home rule. These factors helped to create a mood of pessimism which influenced cultural life.’
Aubrey Beardsley is at Tate Britain until September 20th 2020 - see details below
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MIKE COLES writes:-
German-American architect Mies Van der Rohe once said “Architecture starts when you carefully put two bricks together. There it begins.”
Have you ever wondered why bricks are more or less the same size all over the world? You probably haven’t wondered for very long, it’s all to do with the size of a bricklayer’s hand. The average span of a man’s hand is apparently four inches – so bricks are four inches across. 2 and a half inches tall and 8 and a half inches long which makes the brick acceptable in weight and offers enough flexibility for different shapes and sizes of building.
Civilisations have used bricks for building for thousands of years. Bricks date back to at least 7000 BC. In some parts of the world human habitation evolved from natural materials, wood, straw and stone but where clay was available, that was used too. Originally clay bricks were shaped and dried in the sun but they became a great deal more usable when, around 3,500 BC, the fired brick was discovered/invented. From this moment on, bricks could be made without the heat of sun and soon became popular in cooler climates. Firing them in a kiln made them stronger and more durable, particularly in extreme weather.
During the period of the Roman Empire, the Romans spread the art of brickmaking throughout Europe, but when the Roman Empire fell, the art of brickmaking nearly vanished, apart from in Italy and some parts of the Byzantine Empire. Reviving In the 11th century, the use of bricks became popular again and returned to other areas of Europe. This created the brick Gothic period with buildings mainly built from fired red clay bricks.
In England the remains of buildings prove that the art of brickmaking was highly advanced by the time of Henry VIII (1491-1547). After the Great Fire of London in 1666, the city was rebuilt mainly with bricks. Bricks crossed the Atlantic with Dutch and British immigrants with some brick masons among them. (Many early American skyscrapers are clad in brick or terracotta. It took 10 million bricks to build the Empire State Building)
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In the 19th century, the fields around London were built up with new housing. Usually, a field would be excavated to expose the London clay subsoil which was then turned into bricks on the site by moulding and firing them. The bricks would then be used to build houses adjacent to the brick field – (transport was expensive). Once the building work was nearing completion the brick field would be levelled and built upon while a new brick field further out would supply the bricks.
London is a brick city. Bricks were made by hand until about 1885. Once the Industrial Revolution was established, brick making machinery was introduced. Due to London’s frequent heavy fog, bright red bricks were chosen which made buildings more visible. Although the amount of red pigment has now been reduced in brick production, red remains the most popular colour for bricks to this day.
Bricks were also made from clay in the countryside surrounding London. During the 19th century and early 20th century, five million yellowish stock bricks a year were supplied from the brickfields of Yiewsley and Starveall (Middlesex). Bricks were also made in Kent, Essex and other areas where they could be imported to London by rail. Peterborough, Luton and Bedford still have large Italian communities descended from Italian brick makers migrating here in the late 19th century.
In the early part of the 20th century a new company, for a while called the London Brick Company, acquired many other independent brick firms giving it a dominant position in the brick industry. By 1931, the company was making a billion bricks a year. In 1935, output exceeded 1.5 billion bricks, or 60 per cent of the brick industry output, and peak pre-war output reached 1.75 billion bricks.
Brick expert Alan Cox notes:-
The London stock is a type of brick the manufacture of which is confined to London and south-eastem England (particularly Kent and Essex). It is made from superficial deposits of brickearth overlying the London Clay, which are easily worked and produce a durable, generally well-burnt brick. This durability actually increases, since the London stock brick has the fortuituous advantage of hardening with age and in reaction to the polluted London atmosphere. Other characteristics of the London stock result from its method of manufacture, two stages being especially important. The first of these is the practice of mixing the clay with what bas been variously known as Spanish, soil, town ash, or rough stuff - that is, London's domestic rubbish, which contained a large amount of ash and cinders. The addition of this sifted ash provided a built-in fuel when the bricks were fired, thereby considerably reducing the cost of production. During firing, the particles of ash were consumed leaving characteristic pock-marks on the surfaces of the bricks. These create a porous brick that allows moisture to pass freely in and out of the brick, so that even when it becomes saturated, the water quickly drains out; and as a result, the London stock is normally resistant to frost damage. Unfortunately, there was the constant temptation for brickmakers to try to make even more profit by mixing too much rubbish into the clay, and to try to get away with selling or using the sub-standard bricks which were produced.'
BRICKS IN ART
Carl Andre’s Equivalent VIII – Tate Gallery 1976
Seldom has the subject of masonry ignited such passion. Yet the explosion of interest that surrounded the Tate Gallery's exhibition of US artist Carl Andre's Equivalent VIII, better known as The Bricks, triggered a national debate.
Now, more than 44 years after Andre's 120 bricks provoked outrage, newly released documents show how bitter that debate became and how the embattled Tate fought its corner. They reveal how the gallery was shocked by the ridicule it was subjected to after buying what appeared to be ordinary bricks.
Equivalent VIII was purchased by the Tate for £2,297 in 1972 and exhibited without controversy. The curators were taken aback by the criticism when it was shown in 1976.
Andre described his work as conveying a sense of "wading in bricks" and like "stepping from water of one depth to water of another depth", but many people expressed disappointment after failing to see the artist's creativity in arranging the 120 identical bricks in two uncemented layers, in a six-by-10 rectangle.
In other words, without a credible context it was crap. (or was it?)
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Some interesting brick structures
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MEMBER NEWS - CHRISTINE WATSON
Top EFOA artist Christine Watson has been invited to show six pastels in the exhibition below.
Drawing from the Heart
An exhibition featuring members of the Pastel Society (PS) and other leading British pastel artists
This exhibition brings together a varied selection of pastel paintings that provide us not only with an insight into the specific techniques used by pastel painters today, but also seeks to reignite an awareness of, and appreciation for, this medium.
FRIDAY 7 AUGUST - TUESDAY 15 SEPTEMBER
The Gallery at Holt, 23 Lees yard, Holt, Norfolk, NR25 6HS
www.thegalleryholt.com
Christine has also had four mezzotints selected for the Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair 2020. Exhibition open 12th to 15th November at the Royal Arsenal, Woolwich, London SE18 6ST
see www.woolwichprintfair.com for further details.
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HOW WELL DO YOU KNOW YOUR ART?
The boffins at EFOA have set another intriguing quiz
The answer to each clue is the name of an artist
1 His hare looked at him and he wrote about it
2 Hackney Council knocked her house down
3 His eggs weren't laid
4 His rays did not sting, or did they?
5 His garden is a bit special
6 You can find her shell on the beach at Aldeburgh
7 Cut outs later became his stock in trade
8 Etiolation, that's the name of the game!
9 Beautiful chap, I just wish he had put some clothes on
10 Why all the fuss about her smile? Maybe she just had bad teeth
11 They go out for tea at 5 every day then home to watch Heartbeat
12 Watch out for sharks!
13 Did he really use elephant dung?
14 St Paul's certainly thinks his videos worth having
15 Once an arial cartographer, now he just looks at the sky
Answers at the bottom of the newsletter
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STEPHENS HOUSE & GARDENS APPEAL
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Covid Art and Humour
The pandemic has been a tragedy for many but artists have tried to look on the bright side
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ABOUT EAST FINCHLEY OPEN ARTISTS
Find out about us on our website www.eastfinchleyopen.org.uk
There you will find details of all our current members plus photo's of their work and contact details plus information on recent and upcoming exhibitions
MEMBERSHIP: If you are interested in joining East Finchley Open Artists please contact the Membership Secretary Monica Peiser
empeiser@gmail.com
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