Thursday 19 August 2010

Henry Coombe and Edinburgh

Henry Coombe, Portrait of a Swiss Restaurateur(2009)




Today visited Glasgow School of Art to catch an exhibition before it finishes. The artist is Henry Coombes (www.gsa.ac.uk/exhibitions), and I was attracted by the invitation I had received. I liked the figurative and gently tonal look of this drawing/photo (?). I also thought the exhibition might be about our confused identification with animals.

Remote chance.... the show turned out to be a clever and comic scatological video about pre exhibition processes, as portrayed by naked man (who could have been
Coombes' father??) producing drawings by means of pencil stuck in his rear end. References here to art as shit etc, also to the nightmarish and distorted anxieties of exhibiting.

Also wall pieces, kind of paintings, collaged mixtures of cut outs and mark making, rich and dark and varnished,needing deep study. Quite interesting, bu
t not what I expected from the original invitation. And ... well I am glad I saw the video, it made me smile.

Then bus to Edinburgh from Glasgow. Bus queue very long due to Edinburgh Festival. I got a seat, but then spilt my cappuchino on the bus. Fortunately my copy of Guardian newspaper came in handy for mopping up the mess. Enough of newspaper left to read "Mrs. Cameron's Diary", a hilarious weekly column about the PM's wife as imagined by Catherine Bennett (look on guardian.co.uk, search for Mrs. Cameron's Diary)



Diana's velvet scarves with the horses!









In Edin
burgh I stopped off at the West End Art Craft and Design venue to have a look at my stand for next week. Then to the Royal Mile to deliver some velvet scarves to a shop there. I did some with a primitive horse motif. I like them!

Felt pretty tired but popped into print workshop for an hour or so and did some work on current lithograph. The head technician was doing some special work of his own in the litho section, and the atmosphere was highly charged. This is energising.

No comments:

Post a Comment