Rolling Power

This is a painting called "Rolling Power" by the American artist Charles Sheeler. It was finished in 1939 and it's an oil painting on canvas.

Lou Reed (1942 - 2013)

I still remember the first time I heard the Velvet Underground.

It was the autumn of 1984, the miners were on strike and I was a student at Manchester just starting my second year. Paul my flatmate and I lived in a cold, damp ground-floor flat in Hathersage Road, Longsight.

We'd been invited to a party somewhere in the area, and around midnight, sitting on a stair, bored and lonely and thinking about leaving, I suddenly became aware of a strange driving hypnotic song coming from the stereo in the sitting room. It kept me planted on the stairs, entranced, and then propelled me into the living room where two or three girls danced in a rather ironic way (the song featured a very 1960s Hammond organ sound). Once it was over, to be replaced by the inevitable Smiths or Simply Red song, I asked the host what it was. He handed me a dark green album with a tacky and faintly tasteless graphic featuring a too short mini-dress and leopard skin knickers. It was a live album by a 1960s group called The Velvet Underground. A day or two later I bought the album, and quickly discovered the song in question was called "What Goes On." A little while after that, I bought the famous 'banana album' by the Velvets and was hooked.

Thoughout my twenties I was a passionate Lou Reed fan, who owned many of his albums and loved the bitter twisted anger expressed in a lot of the lyrics, which were often paired with rather jolly happy three chord songs. The production was often minimal, and even the most unpromising material would often feature a passage or an aphorism or simply an odd yet true observation. 

I saw him perform twice - once in the unlikely surroundings of the London Palladium in 1989 promoting the excellent New York album, probably his best solo effort. I believe some of Britain's highly critical music press voted that performance 'gig of the year' in their end of year reviews. A few years later I saw him again with the reformed Velvets on the Paris leg of their rather chaotic once-only reformed world tour. It was nice to hear the standards performed live by their originators, and I was struck by how avant garde the music still sounded and what a good musician John Cale is - he seemed to play everything at that concert including the electric viola which produced screechy haunting very 'avant garde' kind of sounds whilst destroying the bow he was using - at the end it looked more like a horsehair whip than a bow.

Time moved on, I got older and my interest lessened. The last Lou Reed album I bought was Songs for Drella, his collaboration with John Cale to commemorate and celebrate their mentor Andy Warhol. None the less I was saddened by Lou's death and was pleased to introduce M (far more a music lover than I) to some of his best work recently.

Post Holiday Blues

It's been a strange few days returning back to work after a week off.

I picked up some kind of infection (probably from the kids!) and have been struggling with time and motivation since Monday.

Some random, but wholly predictable events led me to the Courtauld Gallery this afternoon, where like millions of others, there was a kind of identification with, yet great distance from Manet's barmaid at the Follies Berges.

The gallery is excellent - comparatively small in terms of space, yet the quality of the pictures is superb. Then it was back down the river to get some late lunch and head back to the office.

Mark Rothko

Mural for End Wall (1959)

K and I went to catch the Mark Rothko exhibition at the Tate Modern on Saturday before it closes at the end of the month.

I'd seen Rothkos before of course, but there's nothing like seeing a lot of an artist's work to get a feel for what their art is all about. This collection featured work from 1958 to 1969, mainly series of paintings done for specific locations or commissions.

I have no formal art history training, so have difficulty judging abstract art beyond impressions and feelings. Here's a jumble of them about Rothko:

• They are generally very 'friendly' works, they don't appear threatening or aggressive in the way that a lot of contemporary Brit Art seems to be.
  

• The size of the canvasses is huge. This sort of art needs well lit large public spaces (duh like art galleries duh) for display. Few private homes are large enough to actually contain a Rothko, unless you hung it on the stairs or something.
  

• K is trained artist, and she drew my attention to the subtlety of the technique; a mixture of gloss and matt paint, lots of layers, feathered edges. Also the choice of colour is deliberate and precise.
  

• As so often with big exhibitions of this type, the crowds got in the way of the experience. This especially applies to Mark Rothko; I love to plonk myself down on a bench opposite one of the giant canvasses and just let the colour wash over me. You couldn't really do that at the Tate Modern on a Saturday afternoon. Some fuckers even had their toddlers with them - why not take the sprogs to see "Battleship Potemkin" afterwards? Poor kids - bored to death with something totally unsuitable for them. Damn the cheap bastard parents who can't be bothered to pay for a babysitter.
  

• Fave series of paintings were three or four out of the 'black' series of seven. These really were rather impressive technically, and looked years ahead of their time - painted in the mid 1960s, they would have looked perfect in a 1980s setting (see below).

Number 1 (1964)

You could just imagine that painting in Patrick Bateman's sitting room.

Thanks Mark!

Andrew Wyeth - Christina's World (1948)

We'll finish "art week" with another American classic, this one is by Andrew Wyeth.

Nick Watts - Aston Martin Victorious

This painting (a numbered print actually) hangs above the fireplace at home. It's a fine painting, particularly in artifical light, but it was basically an impulse buy at the Retromobile exhibition in Paris in 1995.

I don't much like Aston Martins, I have no connection with the 1959 Le Mans 24 hour race, and I don't even like many of Nick Watts' paintings!

This one attracted me because:

• It was quite cheap
• It's signed by Watts and the two drivers of Aston Martin No 5 - Carroll Shelby and Roy Salvadori. The fact they both survived the "blood sport" era of motor racing is a minor miracle.
• It's a dramatic 'heroic' sort of painting that appeals to the romantic in us all
• It doesn't make the le Mans 24 hour race look remotely like fun - instead it's portrayed as a grim ordeal, which it is.

The car is an Aston Martin DB 3 sports racer from a long long ago when Astons were small and agile and pretty.

David Brown (DB), the owner of Aston Martin, stood a fraction over five feet tall.

Let's hope that solitary Le Mans victory made him feel high for a while.

Tamara de Lempika - Woman in Blue with Mandolin (1929)

Making-the-blog-more-visual continues, today is the turn of Tamara de Lempika. It's a pity you can't see this painting full size - it's awesome (as a Valley Girl would say).

Edward Hopper - New York Movie (1939)

My favourite painting: romantic, realistic, well executed, a really unusual composition and ultimately it terrifies - has the boredom of work ever been expressed so well?

Maxfield Parrish - Daybreak (1925)

This haunting piece of art-deco classical fantasy nonsense hung in the waiting room of the doctor's surgery in Lowell, Mass.

I'd never come across Maxfield Parrish before, but later learned he was America's most popular artist in the 1920s and 1930s.

The intention is to get the blog more visual, at least for a little while, so there are more paintings to come.