THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT...

A nice sketch, just a scratchy pen and ink drawing with watercolour, no technical aids, not even any under drawing as far as I can see and reproduced here pretty much life size. An illustration, one of a series recording the day to day life of a boy scout troop... an age of innocence long gone.

And no, they are not by me. Those of you who follow this blog on a regular basis might by now have picked up the occasional references to Jonathan @ Artistic Type and may have realised - by dint of the fact that we both share the same surname - that we are related; he is my son. The sketches on this post are however by another member of the family and I have only just realised, when I was writing this post that my father, whose sketches they are, was only 15 when he did them. I had assumed he was at least 18 or 19. In a perfect world he would have loved to have gone on probably to train as a commercial artist, as you did in those days - we are talking of the mid 1930's here. Life however is not that perfect; his parents couldn't afford to send him off to be apprenticed to a studio so he started life as a wages clerk. Conscripted into the RAF he spent the war in a spitfire squadron; postwar he went on to qualify as an accountant and ended up as a financial director.

He never lost his appreciation of art though, and it was through him that I came to appreciate Rembrandt, who was his favorite artist. I never really had the chance to talk to him about these sketches and how he did them, and he would no doubt be highly amused to know that after all this time some of them are now seeing the light of day for the first time, out in the public domain. The sketches are from an exercise book that he kept as a log-book over a period of some six months or so in 1934 -35 and I suppose it's a minor miracle that they survived at all. The sketches are shown here as they appear on the pages - click in the images to increase their size.

They are here now anyway; enjoy them... and just to show that the artistic skills of the family are in safe hands, the final sketch is by Jonathan's daughter Edie Mae, age 4 - my granddaughter. Hey, Dad, its ok - the kids are alright...

ON REFLECTION...

Late on in 2008 I went down to London to see the Francis Bacon exhibition at Tate Britain. Having only recently come to appreciate his work, it was a unique opportunity to see a large number of his paintings together at one time and to get a glimmer of his working process - a feel for his artistic development over a period of time. The exhibition was extremely impressive and one left with a feeling of emotional exhaustion - very powerful works.

One room in particular remains in my mind, being a room hung with dark sombre portraits. 'Man in Blue IV ' shown here was one of them, together with another three or four similar canvases; large ( some 2000mm x 1400mm ), brooding, austere, the canvas sucked you in as you approached, the dark field of background colour enveloping you in its cloak. Except that it didn't, because as you approached you suddenly became aware that the canvas was framed and glazed and your eyes, your focal point suddenly shifted to picking up the reflection of the gallery, the group of three or four people looking at the painting with you, the lighting in the room, the crowds moving through the gallery behind you. It immediately became impossible to appreciate the painting in its state as a independent artifact; it now became a background, a component in a constructed image of the gallery experience. The second and third images posted here, whilst not of the same painting, demonstrates this effect quite clearly.

And this got me thinking - at what point, certainly with contemporary art, does a canvas become glazed, and who decides? It certainly can't have been Bacon's intent, when painting the canvas, to have it viewed in these circumstances - the surface texture, the visceral effect of paint on canvas is now subsumed to a reflective surface that highlights the environment in which the canvas is hanging at any given time. Is it a curatorial issue, a decision by the owners to provide a degree of protection? And why is it deemed necessary? The Rothko 'Four Seasons' suite hanging in the Tate Modern has never - god forbid - seemed to require this treatment and a brief consideration of how their power would instantly be totally compromised by glazing would suggest that it is a fundamental issue when it comes to determining how a canvas should be viewed; an issue moreover that I have to my knowledge not seen discussed elsewhere. Comments please?

Nevertheless, an excellent exhibition and one that lead me on to read 'Francis Bacon's Studio' by Margarita Cappock - a fascinating exploration of Bacon's studio as it was left after his death. Both forensic and archaeological in its depth and scope, it was occasioned by the purchase of the studio by Dublin City Gallery and its subsequent dismantling, removal from South Kensington and reconstruction in Dublin, where it is now on permanent display. Leaving aside the more esoteric question of ' is it now still the real studio?', another curatorial debate, as an investigation and analysis of his working methods it reveals far more about Bacon than perhaps he would ever have wished. It remains silent, however, on the enigma of the glazing...