'If you make happiness your goal, then you're not going to get to it… The goal should be an interesting life."

Dorothy Rowe

Saturday 30 May 2009

I completely forgot

when I was wittering on about the cat yesterday, to tell you about our Friday visit to the Discovery Centre.

The current exhibition is of paintings by Frank Bowling.  Yet another artist of whom, I have to confess, I had never heard.

So we tottered up the stairs and into the gallery – and our jaws dropped.

The first painting was this one. Unfortunately this image doesn’t do it justice, as you can’t see that the pieces are layered, painted canvas on painted canvas. With added texture.

Notice the size. That was one of the smaller paintings.

It is tempting to list all the paintings and try to give you links but there are lots of images here. Not all are in the show [obviously!]

My favourite is this one. Although I keep saying I prefer abstract to representational art, it’s the most representational of the lot – but very atmospheric.

Why did I like the work so much? Colour – and texture. The wonderful use of many layered colour – but equally importantly to me – the texture. I could look at the lumps and bumps for hours. Very inspirational for an embroiderer.IMG_6751

From the sublime to the mundane - a pulled work sample for C&G.

Inspired by this one in the V&A.

My version isn’t very pulled, if you know what I mean, but I did enjoy working it. [the shine is, I’m afraid, the double sided sticky tape holding it down.

Going through these samples makes me realise that although my memory of C&G is of doing a lot of machine embroidery – badly – we did do a lot of hand stuff too. Perhaps because the pressure of time meant that I used the machine for a lot of the assessed pieces.

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