Own work: Life Drawing XLI

   Final life drawing now until September.  Another two pose, and another curate's egg.  I'm very pleased with the torso and legs but very unhappy with the face.  The second attempt too and very laboured.

Own work: Life Drawing XL

   The penultimate class of the year and an single two hour pose (half hour break in the middle - thankfully).

Own work: Life Drawing XXXIX

   The last three classes of the year I returned to pencil-crayon, a much easier medium to control in what is, after all, a time controlled setting.  Here is the first.

Own work: Life drawing XXXVIII

   I've a backlog of life drawings to post.  Here are the first.  A couple of watercolours with pencil shading and some wax resist.  Perhaps not one of my better days in the life room.  But like the curate's eg they are good in parts.

Own work: Portrait I

I've embarked on a new artistic direction inspired by the recent Hockney retrospective at Tate Britain: pencil-crayon portraiture of family and friends.  Here is the first which I did yesterday afternoon.  It has its faults!

Own work: Dietterlin

   Finally a new post!  Apologies for my absence; I've been having problems with my pc.  Here is my latest painting a Doric arch from the 'Architectura' ('Architectura: Von Austheilung, Symmetria und Proportion der Funff Seulen ') of Walter Dietterlin the Elder (1550 - 1599).  Dietterlin's treatise which was originally published in two parts was immensely influential in Northern Europe.  Elizabethan and Jacobean buildings are peppered with his decorative details.  

   I suppose that purist classical architects and architectural historians decry such stuff (and to be fair some of it is quite mad), but given a choice between Inigo Jones and Dietterlin I'd definitely choose the latter.  Much more fun.

Spalding III: Ayscoughfee Hall and gardens

     Adjacent to the parish church is Ayscoughee Hall, a late medieval house started in 1429 and added to and altered over the years.  It now belongs to South Holland District Council who run it as a museum, and is open to the public everyday except Tuesdays - Market Day in Spalding, along with Saturday.
     Built of dark red brick with stone dressings, and although a little municipal in feel, the Hall is a discreetly attractive, picturesque building - a mixture of 'genuine' Medieval Gothic, Georgian and Early Victorian Gothic and the classical; at times formal at others domestic. Sprawling.  For me the most interesting feature is the oddly detailed bay lighting the back of the hall. Almost as though it has arrived from the Late Medieval Holy Roman Empire. Interesting too that odd little door adjacent  very like the priest's door on one of the side chapels in St Mary's church. 

   The interior is fun but a little chill.  A sense that it was a bit of a challenge to fill the spaces.  As I have mentioned before one of the upstairs rooms was floor to ceiling with glass cases of stuffed birds.  All flown, alas. Period furniture and decor would certainly help warm the place up a bit.  The best spaces are the entrance hall, - a neo-classical refit of the original great hall - and the the warmly, Victorian, paneled library.  I could spend many happy hours there.  The great hall retains its original medieval roof, and and bay window.  

     In the early eighteenth century Ayscoughfee was the home to Maurice Johnson the founder of the Spalding Gentleman's Society, an example of thriving provincial cultural life.  Its members included Pope, Addison, Sir Hans Sloane, and the Lincolnshire antiquary William Stukeley.
     The hall stands in the remains of a formal, walled garden of c1730, which contains the the only building in Lincolnshire to be designed by the great Sir Edwin Lutyens - the town War Memorial of 1925.  In addition there are a number of sixties additions: a café and an aviary.  The 'Buildings of England' suggests that the designer of the gardens was the local architect William Sands.  The yew hedges have long since escaped their original bounds and now form huge billowing cloud-shapes.  It would be a shame to loose them in a full restoration of the garden, but certain features, like the enormous, and missing, gate pier at the back of the house could be put back to match the surviving pier and that would add hugely to the romance of the place.