Own work: sketches towards 'The Great Stone'

 

      I thought I'd share with you the sketches I have made so far as I work towards a new pen and ink drawing 'The Great Stone'.  Hopefully it'll give you a good idea of the process of creating an artwork.

Own work: new Monoprint

      The first complete work I have done in a while, and for that I have to be thankful. However compared to the monoprint I posted last month this is clunking affair, stiff and over drawn. In short a disappointment. 15x12.5 cms, 120 mgs paper.  Monoprint and biro

June

June by John Clare (1793-1864)

Now summer is in flower, and Nature's hum
Is never silent round her bounteous bloom;
Insects, as small as dust, have never done
With glitt'ring dance, and reeling in the sun;
And green wood-fly, and blossom-haunting bee,
Are never weary of their melody.
Round field and hedge, flowers in full glory twine,
Large bind-weed bells, wild hop, and streak'd woodbine,
That lift athirst their slender-throated flowers,
Agape for dew-falls, and for honey showers;
These o'er each bush in sweet disorder run,
And spread their wild hues to the sultry sun.
The mottled spider, at eve's leisure, weaves
His webs of silken lace on twigs and leaves,
Which ev'ry morning meet the poet's eye,
Like fairies' dew-wet dresses hung to dry.
The wheat swells into ear, and hides below
The May-month wild flowers and their gaudy show.

St Teilo, Llandeilo Fawr

      Tuesday we visited Moelfryn, a garden high on a Carmarthenshire hill side, open to the public as part of the wonderful National Gardens Scheme, and it was an absolute treat.  Eccentric and delightful. 

     From there we headed into Landeilo for lunch - least said about that the better.  The parish church being open I took the opportunity to take some photos for the blog.  Apart from the austere, Late Medieval w tower the body of the church is wholly 19th century, the work of the ubiquitous Sir George Gilbert Scott.  In a story that one feels could rival Gabriel Chevalier's 'Clochemerle', Scott was called into design the church after a competition to design a church for under £3,000 fell apart.  In the end the church cost nearly double Scott's original estimate of £2,500.

     The site however, as I have written elsewhere on this blog, is much, much older.  The site dates back to the 'Dark Ages' and St Teilo.  I'd like to think that the large churchyard (sliced in two since the early 19th century (?)) replicates the shape of St Teilo's original monastic foundation.  Wishful thinking on my part.  In the huge retaining wall along n side of Church St is what is known as St Teilo's Baptistery; a cave like space - probably not that old in the scheme of things - where water gushes out of a pipe and a gated passage leads mysteriously deep into the hill.  It was looking all spick and span on Tuesday, when on previous visits there were vases of flowers etc.

     The style of Scott's church is Cambridge Camden Society approved Middle Pointed.  Dark, massive like a cast iron safe.  Formidable, even unfriendly in places.  The east end in particular has a metallic quality I think this down to the masonry.  The walls are of rubble masonry - to match the tower, no doubt.  'The Buildings of Wales' just says that the church is of 'hard grey limestone', but looking at the multiple buttress set-offs it's hard not think that these, at least, are of a different, lighter, close-grained stone, and have probably been cut by machine, as is the church's most extraordinary feature: a huge batter of perfectly cut blocks at the e end of the n aisle, that is half roof and half buttress.  Elemental, industrial-age Gothic. It could almost be the work of a 'Rogue Architect' such as Samuel Saunders Teulon.  You know, I'm not sure it will ever weather into mellowness.
     The interior - aisle-less chancel, nave with n aisle and s transept - is big and barn like.  No money for refinements.  In recent years the church has been subdivided.  It hasn't helped.  Some of the detailing is plain awful.  Not much in the way of furnishings except some memorials in the chancel.  The churchyard, being in Wales, has a range of forceful Victorian gravestones.  Obelisks, spires and the like.

'No Country for Old Men' by Cormac McCarthy

      'That is no country for old men'.... so begins one of W B Yeats most famous poems, 'Sailing to Byzantium'.  The country in question here, in this potent novel, is southern Texas on the Mexico border; part of what is often referred to as 'flyover country' that great hinterland of the United States between the east and west coasts, 'that vast obscurity beyond the city where the dark fields of the Republic rolled on under the night', and a place that Cormac McCarthy has visited before in his novels.  It is also his own country for, although born on the East Coast, the majority of his childhood and adolescence was lived in Tennessee.  He is a writer who has only really entered my field of few in the last few years, and this is the first novel of his that I have read.

     'No country for Old Men' is a three way tussle between the Ed Tom Bell the sheriff, Llewelyn Moss the petty criminal, and the psychotic Anton Chirgurh, the hired killer.  The novel opens with the discovery of a sprawl of corpses and abandoned vehicles in the desert.  Moss has stumbled upon some sort altercation between drugs gangs, or some such.  And among the dead and the dying he makes a further discovery, one that drives the narrative.  That fight in the desert is never fully explained, for this is a lean, tense novel, sparse in the way that Jean Pierre Melville's cinematic masterpiece 'Le Cercle Rouge' is sparse. (sparse of punctuation too) Information is withheld from the reader.  In one sense it doesn't matter, the novel is not about Mexican drug cartels as such but a personal conflict between three men. A concentrated affair, that is part thriller, part Western and part meditation.  The result of this economy of information, however, is that the reader is left wandering through, what I can only describe as, a nocturnal battlefield.  A novel of darkness and fire.  And one I would recommend.

'Conversation pieces of memorable quality': The Queen Elizabeth II Memorial

     So late this afternoon my timeline on Twitter has been mildly a-flutter with images of the five final 'concept designs' in the competition to design a fitting memorial for the Late Queen.  It is now time for a public consultation.  I'm not quite sure how this is to work out: we are given a limited number of visuals from which to make our choice and we are also told the 'winning' design may be altered/refined in the next stage of the design process - they are merely 'Early Proposed Design Concepts' remember, so it's all a bit vague.*  There is a real possibility then that the public will not get what it 'voted' for.  It's all a bit of swizz really.  A Potemkin exercise.

     'The memorial,' we are told, 'is envisioned to be a new national landmark of outstanding quality...'  That remains to be seen.  The proposals range from the flat-out bizarre to the mediocre.  So far, at least, what seems to be attracted people's favourable attention is the image from the Foster + Partners submission of the their proposed treatment of the equestrian statue of the Queen, that would standing on the s side of the Mall opposite Marlborough Gate.  A remarkably classical design for Foster, hitherto the epitome of sleek, anonymous Modernism.

     The five finalists (each receiving an honorarium of £50,000) are (as presented on the Malcolm Reading Consultants** website - they are handling the public consultation): Foster + Partners, Heatherwick Studio, J&L Gibbons, Tom Stuart Smith, and finally WilkinsonEyre.  And while I have some sympathy for anyone who entered this competition as the 'brief' is exhausting, contradictory and in parts mutually exclusive, I have to say I find none of the five very inspiring.  Perhaps they have been set up to fail.  Some, however, are more bathetic than others i.e. Heatherwick Studio and Tom Stuart-Smith. That said the Heatherwick proposal is, at least, visually cohesive; the other proposals tend to visually incoherent with a little bit of this here and a little bit of that there - there is, for instance, that ridiculous flame sculpture in the Foster proposal.  I am reminded of the scatter gun aesthetics of the coronation. Is this really to be the aesthetic identity of the new reign? Is this really the best we can do?

     Reading the blurb I am struck with just how complex and bureaucratic the whole design process is.***  Each design team has to have a whole phalanx of consultants. I can't help but see this as a projection of a lack of cultural confidence.  All that is needed really is an excellent piece of sculpture of the Late Queen, preferably equestrian, on a suitable plinth.  It isn't rocket science. The rest including, all the bridges**** and the landscaping, the places of reflection, and the cod symbolism is essentially superfluous.  And judging my the response on Twitter/X this afternoon I am not alone in thinking this. 

   'Envisioned', I ask you.

     (07.06.25  Reread Stephen Bayley's essay for 'The Critic' this afternoon.  He rightly says that the 'compulsory' platitudes viz inclusion etc. should be dropped.  Cassandra like he also evokes the spectre of a previous royal memorial, and to be honest one I had forgotten about, the truly dreadful Queen Elizabeth Gate, in London's Hyde Park.  Let it be a warning to us all.)

*  For instance, what will happen two those twin gates to St James's Park that stand on The Mall opposite to Marlborough Gate?  They are very French and were likely designed by Sir Aston Webb (and made by the Bromsgrove Guild) as part of his redesign of the Mall as part of the Victoria Memorial.)

**  I wonder how much they will be paid for there efforts.

***  This isn't an isolated example.  Watching the BBC coverage of the RHS Chelsea Flower Show I was surprised at how prescriptive and bureaucratic the process has become for those designing one of the main show gardens.  The risk in all of this is that designers will eventually walk away.

****  Two of the proposed bridges actually have names: from Foster 'The Bridge of Unity' and from Heatherwick 'The Togetherness Bridge'.  Not sure which is the more ghastly. 

Own work: Three monoprints

 

     Three prints to share with you.   All are augmented monoprints.  I did them some time ago, and have come back to them in the last day or so.  Distance has enabled me to re-assess them and perhaps they are not without some merit.  The first two are on photocopy paper, the third on watercolour paper.  The first has been worked on in ink & oil pastel, the second in biro & oil pastel and the third ink, watercolour & oil pastel.

Sir John Ninian Comper V:

     'Oh, No!  Not more about bloody Ely cathedral!  Hasn't he done it to death?' I hear you all cry.  Well, tough! says I.  This is just a short post on the work of Sir J N Comper (beloved of this parish) in the cathedral.  In the 1930s Comper was commissioned to decorate the fantastical chantry chapel of Bishop West, and so bring it back into liturgical use for the first time since the Reformation.  Comper provided  stained glass, and an 'English Altar', reredos, and altar hangings, all in his late 'Unity by Inclusion' style.  I think the stained glass and the riddel posts (which are of wrought iron) etc are superb, as are the altar hangings, but the reredos sadly is not.  It is too weak for its position, not being strong enough to withstand the visual onslaught of a large e window.  Something sculptural would have been better, perhaps.  Pevsner disliked it, and I have to agree.

Love, whose month is ever May: Poetry and Prose for May Day

May by John Clare (1793-1864)

Come queen of months in company

Wi all thy merry minstrelsy
The restless cuckoo absent long
And twittering swallows chimney song
And hedge row crickets notes that run
From every bank that fronts the sun

And swarthy bees about the grass

That stops wi every bloom they pass

Fantasticks by Nicholas Breton (1545/52 -1623/5)

     It is now May, and the sweetness of the air refresheth every spirit: the sunny beams give forth fair blossoms, and the dripping clouds water Flora's great garden....

     It is the month wherein Nature hath her fill of mirth, and the sense are filled with delights.  I conclude it is from the Heavens a grace, and to the earth a gladness.

Sonnet 18 by William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate:

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

And summer’s lease hath all too short a date;

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,

And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;

And every fair from fair sometime declines,

By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm'd;

But thy eternal summer shall not fade,

Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;

Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,

When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:

   So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,

   So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

A Survey of London by John Stow

     In the Month of May, namely on May-day in the morning, every man, except impediment, would walk into the sweet meadows and green woods, there to rejoice their spirits with the beauty and savour of sweet flowers, and with the harmony of birds.....I find also in the month of May, the citizens of London of all estates, lightly in every parish, or sometimes two or three parishes joining together had their several mayings, and did fetch in May-poles, with divers warlike shows, with good archers, morris dancers, and other devices, for pastime all the day long; and toward the evening they had stage plays, and bonfires in the streets.

The Driving Boy by John Clare (1793-1864)

 The driving boy beside his team

Will oer the may month beauty dream

And cock his hat and turn his eye

On flower and tree and deepning skye

And oft bursts loud in fits of song

And whistles as he reels along

Crack[ing] his whip in starts of joy

A happy dirty driving boy

When will my May come? by Richard Barnfield (1574-1627)

When will my May come, that I may embrace thee?

When will the hower be of my soules joying?

If thou wilt come and dwell with me at home,

My sheepcote shall be strowed with new greene rushes

Weele haunt the trembling prickets as they rome

About the fields, along the hauthorne bushes;

I have a pie-bald curre to hunt the hare,

So we will live with daintie forrest fare.

And when it pleaseth thee to walke abroad

Abroad into the fields to take fresh ayre,

The meades with Floras treasure should be strowde,

The mantled meaddowes, and the fields so fayre.

And by a silver well with golden sands

Ile sit me downe, and wash thine ivory hands.

But it thou wilt not pittie my complaint,

My teares, nor vowes, nor oathes, made to thy beautie:

What shall I do but languish, die, or faint,

Since thou dost scorne my teares, and my soules duetie:

And teares contemned, vowes and oaths must faile,

And where teares cannot, nothing can prevaile.

When will my May come, that I may embrace thee?

    

Ely Cathedral: The Lady Chapel

      To the north of the cathedral, like a boat tethered to a mothership stands the Lady Chapel.  It belongs to the period of Alan of Walsingham and Prior Crauden, and it is one of the greatest pieces of Medieval architecture in the kingdom.  The prolonged period of construction (1321-1349) due to the collapse of the crossing tower in 1322.  It is the largest Lady Chapel to come down to us from the Middle Ages, not only in England but in the entire British Isles.  It could be likened to a vast reliquary though it did not hold any relic of the Blessed Virgin Mary, or any one else, as far as I know.  It stands in the tradition of the demolished Lady Chapel of Peterborough cathedral, and the Wykeham chapel in Lincolnshire.  The exterior is ooltic limestone; the interior, however, is of clunch i.e. chalk, and in places Purbeck marble.

     In many ways chapel is a straightforward building; a simple rectangular plan, the long sides divided into five even bays, like that earlier Lady Chapel at Peterborough, each one clearly defined by large buttresses and prominent pinnacles.  It is easy to read.  There is a logic to it. These side elevations are not so different from that other fenland building of this type, the little known (and very hard to access) Wykeham Chapel, aka Chapel of St Nicholas, at Weston in Lincolnshire, which was constructed in 1311 by Prior Hatfield, and formed part of the grange of the Priory of St Nicholas, in Spalding.  The west façade - the one seen by pilgrims as entered and left the cathedral - is the most ornate, with rows of niches surrounding the great w window.

    Inside, however, that clarity is clouded.  Something more complex and sophisticated, and unique, than the exterior would lead us to expect, and which has elements of both the rational and the irrational. It is the irrational that strikes us first, but the best way to explain what is going on is to examine the rational first.  Mirroring the exterior each bay is defined by an engaged shaft that rises from the low bench that runs along base of the chapel walls to a wide, shallow lierne vault.  So far so good.  Except there is an extra layer, or 'lining' of architecture - an encrustation - that forms the major decorative element, a lavish 'cage' of carved clunch that is very plastic and sculptural and ignores, if not actively contradicts, the logic of the underlying architecture.  This 'cage' consists of two sections; a dado running under the windows and two tiers of tracery encasing the wall surface between the windows. The dado is the most sculptural and dynamic, with nodding ogee arches rippling in an out.  The design of the dado is consistently applied around the chapel; not even the doors in the s wall are to interrupt. The exception is the ruinous original reredos in the e wall.  In all it creates a very self-contained space.

     There is a profusion of sculpted elements to the 'cage' - rather Baroque in the blurring of categories.  Standing there amid such overwhelming and sensuous architecture it is easy to understand why Thomas Rickman (1776-1841) named this period of English architecture was named 'Decorated'.  There is scarcely any inert wall surface.  All is movement.

     Oddly, or brilliantly, each wall of the 'cage' is treated as a separate architectural element - they do not meet in the corners of the chapel. The upper sections are merely tethered to each other by diagonal ogee arches like they were the sides of a tent.  (Something vaguely similar occurs in Prior Crauden's Chapel.) The corners of the chapel are thus de-emphasized, becoming shadowy voids, perhaps of infinite depth. Something similar occurs to the vault shafts along the face of walls, where they are enmeshed in tracery, hidden by ogee canopies, and (originally) by two tiers sculptural figures supported on brackets.  The result of this is that the engaged shafts lose significance, so that vault appears to a separate, discreet element.

    In addition to the capitals, and corbels, crockets and finials the chapel originally contained a dizzying amount of figure sculpture, perhaps uniquely so.  All of this wealth of sculpture was coloured & gilded; the high vault was reportedly painted blue and speckled with stars, some of which remain.  In addition there was stained glass in the windows.  There must have been moments, at least, when the chapel came close to the state of Gesamtkunstwerk.* 

     Today the visitor stands in the wreck.  The iconoclasts have done their malignant work - the brackets are empty, the glass is clear, the stonework stripped of paint.  It is the bare ruin'd choir where late the sweet birds sang.  It is autumn.  And yet it is still sublimely beautiful.   Though of a new and different beauty.

     At the Reformation the chapel, as I have outlined in a previous post on the cathedral, became the parish church of the Holy Trinity.  An extra storey was added to Goldsmith's Tower to convert it to a bell tower to serve the parish.  And so it continued in its quiet parochial manner until, I think ,the Interwar period, when chapel was returned to cathedral use.  The monuments and memorials that had been placed on the walls were removed and the building restored.  I wonder what happened to them?  However the Georgian panelling on the e wall was later used by Stephen Dykes Bower in St Etheldreda's chapel at the e end of the Presbytery.  In 1945 Dykes Bower was called upon to design a new High Altar for the chapel.  At first it was hoped to restore the Medieval reredos, but the cost proved to be prohibitive, and instead he designed a new 'English Altar'.  And very fine it was.  Alas, it was replaced in 2011 with something a lot less sympathetic.  Of the statute of the BVM above the altar the least said the better.

 * Enough of the sculpture survived in the dado for M R James to reconstruct the original iconic scheme. It was based upon the late 'infancy gospel' known as 'The Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew'.  It deals with the life of the Virgin Mary prior to the Annunciation and the infancy of Christ.

Ely Cathedral: The Furnishings

      Finally to the furnishings.  And it must be said that Ely is particularly rich in them.  Their distribution is however not only uneven 'geographically' throughout the building (the majority of them are in the eastern limb), but chronologically (the majority are post-Reformation).  The latter is to be expected in a country where the Reformation was not Lutheran, but was, at times, decidedly 'Reformed'.  Time and neglect have done the rest.  Perhaps it might be valuable to see the cathedral subject to a series of tides that have both scoured the building of furnishings and left a flotsam of new ones in their place.  It also illustrates that we assume erroneously that buildings like cathedrals exist is some sort of stasis, when by their very nature the opposite is true.

      The most important survivals from the Middle Ages are the Choir Stalls (1338-48), and the funerary monuments.  In particular are there is the Tournai marble tomb of an unknown bishop; the Purbeck marble tombs of Bishop Kilkenny and Bishop Northwold; and the tomb of Bishop Redman which is credited to John Wastell - we've seen his work so far at Peterborough Cathedral, and King's College Chapel, Cambridge.  Very little Medieval stained glass survived the onslaught of the iconoclasts - the overwhelming number of such windows in the cathedral today are Victorian.  In a similar manner nearly all the liturgical furnishings are Victorian or later.

     Little survives of the period between the Reformation and the arrival in 1770 of James Essex except a series of fine Baroque monuments.  Sadly, the rather fine marble font was exiled from the cathedral at some point during the 19th century; the bowl is in Prickwillow church but the canopy has been lost. For shame. Late 17th century, it was the sort of thing you might in a Wren church in the City of London.  Of Essex's work at Ely next to nothing survives with the exception of two paintings in the s transept that served, in turn, as altarpieces for his High Altar.  Some it, surely, must have been ok?  And that takes us neatly to the work of Sir George Gilbert Scott - where to begin? Perhaps with the fine Italianate iron screens in the chancel aisles.  Scott also designed the new High Altar and its sumptuous reredos, the accompanying gasoliers, the marble and encaustic flooring of the choir and sanctuary, the organ case, the pulpit, and the choir screen.  It is perhaps no surprise to find that his time at Ely lasted some 30 years, no surprise either that his work has come in for some heavy criticism since.  Whatever the its merits stylistically the craftsmanship is top notch.  

     In the nave are two sumptuous tombs in the N aisle.  Both Victorian. The tomb of Canon Hodge Mill by Sir George Gilbert Scott, and tomb of Bishop Woodford by Thomas Garner.  In the north transept the furnishing of the Cambridgeshire War Memorial chapel is by the Arts and Crafts architect Sir Guy Dawber - more remembered for his domestic architecture.  To be honest I'm not sure if I quite like it.  In the 1920s Sir J N Comper furnished Bishop West's Chantry, but more of that in a further post.

    In recent years a number of contemporary art works have been installed in the cathedral with mixed results.  The best is, perhaps, by John Maddison in Bishop Alcock's Chantry.