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MEMBERS' NEWSLETTER : January 2002 Hello I'm Christine Butler and I am the new Editor. As Bob says in his article it would be good to publish members' contributions in the newsletter. Help me to make your newsletter an interesting read by sending me any 'arty' articles that you would like to share. You can phone me on 01952 541 687 and speak to me personally or leave a message on my answering machine. You can send your news via email to c.g.butler@virgin.net , or send me a good old-fashioned letter! My address is: 7 City Road, Ellerdine Heath, Telford, Shropshire, TF6 6QL. The next deadline is 6th June - I look forward to hearing from you. A new year - a new beginning. A happy new year everyone–I hope it will be a year which will bring you pleasure and enjoyment through membership of the Society. I hope that when you look at the programme printed on your membership cards you will find many events to interest you. A new year in a sense marks a new beginning–indeed the Members' Newsletter is one indicator of this. This first issue of 2002 has a different typeface to give it a new look and a new Editor–Christine Butler. I am grateful to Christine for volunteering to edit the Newsletter and I hope members will give her support by writing copy or sending in news of interest for publication. I am always grateful to those members who take the trouble to attend our Annual meetings and to those who courteously send genuine apologies when they are unable to attend. Annual Meetings are not usually the most stimulating events in our monthly programme but last October's meeting was, in one way, more encouraging than most. Several members brought along work–and after completion of formal business everyone was persuaded to talk briefly about their painting. The comments which members made about their work, revealed insights and ways of approaching painting that were interesting. The event convinced me that the Society should provide more opportunities for members to share their experience and expertise. Given our widely scattered membership this sharing of expertise could be developed through the newsletter or the web site. Newsletters are infrequent but the web site is more direct, you can now post a message to the web site about any matter which you feel would be of interest to the wider membership. Your messages could be posted to a bulletin board and displayed along with any replies. We can also publish them in the Newsletter as well. Why not make a new commitment to share your expertise with other members in the coming year. It doesn't have to be just a short message or suggestion it would be nice if our more professional members were willing to write articles about the way they work or some aspect of art which interests them. These could go into the Newsletter or be posted on the web site. Do please consider whether you can make a contribution. In a different respect though the Annual Meeting was disappointing. We were not able to appoint a Vice Chairman and at present, since I intend to resign at the end of my three year term of office, there is no obvious successor. We also need someone to organise our exhibitions and to handle publicity by writing copy for the local papers as Val Alexander did so well last year. There is also a place for someone with secretarial skills to replace Desmond Keig-Shevlin at the next Annual Meeting. Desmond and Richard Kite have jointly agreed to co-ordinate arrangements for the Spring Exhibition but neither will continue for the Summer. So we need members willing to handle the organisation of the Summer Exhibition if it is to take place.We are a strong and successful Art Society but we do need members to take an imaginative interest and who are willing to serve the Society by developing its activities. I am reminded of a story I heard recently:-
Does that sad story reflect the current attitudes of the membership? Members' Exhibitions 2002 Organising our exhibitions is causing a few headaches at the moment–do make careful note of the important notice for the Spring Exhibition which follows. The new hiring charges of the Harley Centre for 2002 have risen again. The rental for the Spring Exhibition is going to be about £565. Hitherto our Summer Exhibition–which has traditionally always been our main event–runs to almost three weeks since we always run it over the Bank Holiday week-end. This year rent of the Centre will cost the Society £985. We seriously considered shortening the exhibition to 2 weeks but after some thought we decided to keep the duration unaltered and to increase the rate of commission on sales to 20%. Spring Exhibition 2002—Important Notice for Exhibitors We have been advised that the Harley Centre at Ludlow college will not be available to us until the morning of Thursday 28th March This means that we have just two days to prepare the exhibition, with the Private View taking place on the Friday evening (Good Friday) of the second day. The Committee has nevertheless decided that we will proceed with the Spring Exhibition but it will be necessary to change the handing-in procedure by staggering the times as follows:- For exhibitors with the surname starting: A to G Exhibits to be handed in between 10.00am and 11.00am H to N Exhibits to be handed in between11.00am and 12.00noon O to Z Exhibits to be handed in between 12.00noon and 01.00pm We regret this necessary change in procedure which has been forced upon the Society and trust members will comply. A distinguished old savant and a new media guru. Ernst Gombrich, the eminent Art Historian died last year and his obituary appeared in The Guardian in November. He is probably best known for his outstandingly popular book 'The Story of Art', which over the years has given many people their first taste of art history. He was Director of the Warburg Institute in the University of London and during a distinguished academic career wrote many books which have changed the way research into Art History is carried out. He was rather sceptical about the anecdotal evidence which was once the stock in trade of Art Historians prefering to draw his conclusions from the evidence of an artist's working methods and the application of a more scientific methods of analysis drived from from modern experimental psychology. His essay on Raphael's 'Madonna della Sedia' in 'Norm and Form: Studies in the art of the Renaissance' is a good example of his method. The painting is one of a series which Raphael did in Tondo (circular) form. It is a masterpiece which became very popular in the 19th Century and engraved copies of it were widely circulated. At the height of the Romantic era a legend grew up around the painting that Raphael one day came across a beautiful girl with two angelic babies, he was inspired to draw them but had left his sketching kit at home. So he grabbed a piece of dried clay and used it to sketch the group on the bottom of an oak barrel that happened to be nearby. This is the legend in a nutshell, both the oak tree which provided to wood for the barrel and the girl herself, in typical romantic manner, both had a heroic history but I leave you to find the details of those from Gombrich himself. Art history from Vasari onward is littered with these romantic anecdotes and Ernst Gombrich was probably the first Art Historian to realise that such fables were irrelevant to the understanding of paintings. His analysis of the Madonna della Sedia is based on the evidence of Raphael's working method as revealed by his drawings. These reveal, so Gombrich claims, that Raphael's inspiration came not from a casual meeting with a rustic peasant girl but by developing the idealised classic forms that he had learned from his master Perugino and refining them through contact with the work of Leonado and Michelangelo in Florence. Raphael only arrived at the final composition of the Tondo after completing numerous pages of exploratory drawings. He was a professional painter running a studio enterprise in competition with other professionals. Around the same time that Ernst Gombrich' obituary was published David Hockney reappeared as a mutimedia Art Guru producing a programme on Channel 4 and a lavishly illustrated book on the material covered in the programme. David Hockney in post Gombrich manner concentrates on the working methods of painters from the 15th Century onwards. The programme focussed on the way in which artists used the 'camera obscura' and the 'camera lucida,' (like me you will probably have to refer to an Encyclopaedia to fully understand the difference). His idea that painters were dependent on these technical aids to construct complex images like the chandelier in Van Eyck's Arnolfini portrait is interesting and plausible. His thorough reconstrucion of how he believed artists worked made interesting television. But somehow it wasn't entirely convincing. It is plausible that the quality of the line and small size of the Ingres drawings of wealthy English families on the Grand tour pointed to the use of the Camera Lucida. But I cannot believe that a young prodigy like Velasquez would use a 'Camera Obscura'–a contrivance that involved drawing by candlelight an upside down image in a darkened room. If he did it could only have been as a very tentative starting point, the bravura of his brushwork displays a confidence that would make such a method superflous. As for all of those left handed beer drinkers in Franz Hals paintings, well Degas showed how easy it is to reverse an image by tracing it and turning the tracing over. His late pastels show him altering the poses of dancers in this way to make new compositions–no need for clumsy technology. Four of us sitting round a table in the bar at the Assembly Rooms were discussing this very point. Could it be that if you took a random sample of artists–with their tendency towards right-brain dominance–you would find a higher incidence of left-handedness than in the population at large? Many of the world's artistic geniuses, were left handed–Leonado, Constable, Picasso are but three examples. It turned out that three of us sitting at the bar table were left-handed–it is no surprise then that the standard of our Members Exhibitions is so good! Learning on the Web My library loan copy of 'Norm and Form' only had monochrome illustrations and I wanted to find a colour reproduction of the 'Madonna della Sedia'–the place to go is www.artcylopedia.com. This is a dedicated fine art search engine that accesses all of the world's major museums and galleries, you will be offered two colour reproductions of the painting. I also tried a search of Jan Vermeer to discover how he used the Camera Obscura That search was not very successful but I did discover a beautifuly presented in depth study of Vermeer's 'Lady holding a balance' on the web site of the National Gallery of Art, Washington. If you go to the online version of this newsletter there are two links that will get you straight to these paintings at the click of a mouse button–what could be easier? Here they are:
Dr Lilias H. Brazier b.1925 d.2001 It is with great sadness that I have to report the death, on 11th December 2001, of Lilias Brazier who ws an Associate Member of the Ludlow Art Society from 1983 until her death and also Secretary of the Society for the years 1992-97. Lilias studied medicine in Glasgow and qualified as a doctor in the early 1950's. She practised in derbyshire where one day, by chance, she met Philip St.A. Brazier; they married in 1958. Subsequently they moved to Birmingham were Philip worked, and Lilias concentrated on obstetrics and gynaecology until her retirement about 14 years ago. Lilias and her husband moved into Ludlow from Caynham when they had both retired. Phillip died in 1988 and Lilias leaves a daughter Anne who has two young children, a step-son Michael who lives in Australia, and a son Michael who lives in Texas. A very gentle person who was full of fun and such good company, Lilias will be greatly missed by all who knew her. The funeral service–held in St. Laurence's–was attended by well over 200 people. Desmond and Nancy Keig-Shevlin represented the Society. 2002 Programme–Change of Date The closure of the Ludlow Assembly Rooms during the traditonal May Fair has again caused a rearrangement to our published Programme. Joy Moorhead's talk on May 2nd will now be held on Thursday May 9th. Please make a note of the changed date now. Here's a thought Some good advice to motivate you in the new year–from an eminent RA, no less!
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