Great Bardfield Art Group

A friend today was talking to me today about the artist Edward Bawden, whose name I didn't recognise though his paintings looked familiar. It turns out he was born in the same place as me, Braintree, in Essex - there I was totally unaware that Braintree had any claim to fame in the art world. He was a member of the art group based in Great Bardfield in the 1940s and 1950s,  and included Eric Ravilious, who lodged at Brick House with Edward Bawden, plus John Aldridge and George Chapman.

John Aldridge

 


A slight by the by here as Great Bardfield also played an important role in the history of the Oxlip, a rare plant only found in the UK where Essex, Suffolk and Cambridgeshire meet. In 1842 Henry Doubleday and later Charles Darwin did tests on Oxlips conducted in Great Bardfield, concluding that they were not Cowslip/Primrose hybrids as previously assumed and for a while the plant was called the Bardfield Oxlip to differentiate from the common cowslip/primrose hybrid or False Oxslip.Confusing or what. When I was a girl in Essex, cowslips were called Peggles......



I was actually born in the village of  Black Notley, just outside Braintree, and in the 17th century a botanist called John Ray was also born there, one of the earliest English parson-naturalists, whose classification of plants was the first step towards  modern taxonomy - he classified by differences or similarities that emerged from observation. He was the first person to produce a biological definition of what a species is. ('Thus, no matter what individuals or the species, if they  spring from the seed of  one and the same plant, they are accidental variations and not such as to distinguish a species'  from Ray's 1686 History of Plants).


Still, back to Bawden......he  was a solitary child, drawing, or wandering with a butterfly net or microscope. At the age of seven he was enrolled in Braintree High School - the same one I went to I assume.  He went to Cambridge School of Art where he became interested in William Morris and other Victorians.He met Ravilious while training under Paul Nash at the Royal College of Art School of Design in London, and later produced work for London Transport, Fortnum and Mason and London Underground. He also collaborated with John Aldridge on lino-cut wallpapers. During the Second World War he served as official war artist, painting watercolours in Iraq. He taught at Goldsmiths, then the Royal College of Art; in 1968 he became a tutor at the Royal Academy and a senior lecturer at Leicester College of Art and Design.




 

Eric Ravilious was also appointed war artist in 1940, but died accompanying an RAF air sea rescue mission off the coast of Iceland in 1942.





Richard Bawden, Edward's son, also born in Black Notley, is an artist in a similar vein to his father, creating lino cuts and etchings of domestic scenes.




 S So all in all Braintree has a lot to be proud of!!! I think I might even be proud of it myself!

Terry O'Neill

Terry O'Neill is this week releasing a book of fifty years of his photography, only including people he liked. He started out as a jazz drummer in London in the sixties, was mates with the Beatles and Stones, so found it easy to begin taking photos of  stars for newspapers, he then moved to L.A. later in the decade, working on film sets as the celebrity photographer. He knew how to deal with egos, he reckoned, because he was used to being in the background as a drummer! His favourite subject was Jean 'The Shrimp' Shrimpton. To date he has had three retrospective exhibitions in London.

Looking through a large number of his photos, the single portraits are mainly too posed  for my personal taste, mainly front on, full on, often almost belligerent - I prefer those of groups or pairs of people, where they have someone else to play off against and possibly feel more at ease with. These include a number of surprising combinations - at least to me - Bowie and Liz Taylor; Sean Connery and Bardot; Lichfield and Britt Ekland; Bowie and the standing dog for the Diamond Dogs album cover; Paul Newman and Clint Eastwood, or Lee Marvin in another.  Seemingly even more relaxed are the scenes, possibly engineered, of  stars eating and reading papers - perhaps early in the morning before the subject can put on their persona! Also those of performers appear oddly more natural, even when the shot is of a flamboyant pose on stage from Elton John. He and Sinatra, another favourite, are doing what comes naturally to them, after all. Most of the Elton shots come from the 2008 book Eltonography.  On the whole O'Neill appears more at home with the music stars, presumably because they were friends: the Stones, the Beatles, The Who. It's in their portraits that O'Neill does what he is renowned for - capturing candid shots in unusual and unexpected settings.

Black Voices

Have just read that Laura Mvula's aunt is in Black Voices, a wonderful group of women who not only perform but also hold brilliant acapella harmony workshops, where you are taught by not just one but two or three of the group. I've taken part in two of these workshops and loved them for the songs we learnt and just hearing those women's amazing voices,. Laura Mvula used to perform with them - it figures somehow!

William Eggleston in the Real World

Michael Glover, art critic, The Independent: 'You seem to have both loved and loathed the American landscape. How much pain has the holding of such contradictory impulses caused you?'
William Eggleston: 'I don't remember loathing any of it.'

WIlliam Eggleston bought his first camera , a Canon Rangefinder, in 1957, when he was inspired by Robert Frank and Henri Cartier-Bresson. He began experimenting in colour in 1965, by the late 1960's it was his dominant medium. His exhibition of colour photography in 1976 at the MoMA marked the acceptance of the medium, and it's argued that the likes of Martin Parr, using the same high colour saturation as Eggleston, followed in his footsteps, was allowed the use of colour photography as an art form. In 1976 Eggleton's photos were criticised as banal, boring: there was no message, barely any subject. It took some decades for his influence to be absorbed and understood, but this year he was awarded the Outstanding Contribution to Photography Award at the Sony World Photography Awards. The Tate Modern has opened a permanent exhibition of his work (he was represented in their 'Cruel and Tender' photography exhibition which I saw 2003).

 These last two from Martin Parr's  Last Parking Space series would surely have been unthinkable without Eggleston.

 

S. O. S. continued - Steel on Shops

Have recently been to see Mark Steel for the second time. I heard him on the radio when he went to Bungay (where I grew up) which was funny although doctored for radio. Stories of the Chicken Roundabout (it's on wikipedia, but now defunct, the roundabout is still there but the chickens have mysteriously disappeared after years of local fame and quite a few months of national fame followed the foul-pest scare), of Harry Potter manuscripts and the Bungay printing works.

Then I went to see him in Halesworth while I was living there. More local stories, and especially his curiosity as to how Halesworth had managed to avert Tescos, one of his main pet hates.Possibly his main pet hate. He tours the country with his 'stand up' with a local slant, searching out the quirks and oddities of the places he is visiting, and is a belligerent advocate for the individual quality and characteristic of each community. Having laughed til it hurt in Halesworth, I bought his book, named after his tour, Mark Steel's in Town, which I also enjoyed.(I really appreciate his column in the Indy).

Now I'm in the Norwich area, and I spotted he was coming to the Playhouse here, so despite a sellout of two performances (he usually only does one night in each place ) and an extra night's booking the following week, by turning up on the night I managed to get an unclaimed complimentary ticket. Some people obviously look gift horses in the mouth. Or not. Though obviously I had to pay for it, not being a member of the right set, whatever that was.

Alan Partridge didn't get a look in, perhaps too obvious, but Kett got a long mention, in addition to other revolutionary characters, plus the Puppet Man, who everyone but me seemed to have heard of. In my time, in a previous life in Norwich, it was Marigold, but he didn't crop up either. Anyway, a good time was had by all, Steel reckons that Norfolk people are very welcoming nowadays, now that the revolutionary spirit seems to have dwindled.

From his website:
'On the way to a show in Skipton, in North Yorkshire, I noticed a road sign to a town called Keighley. So later, during the show, I mentioned this, asking the audience, 'Is that your rival town?' And the room went chillingly quiet, until one woman called out with understated menace, 'Keighley is a sink of evil.'
Based on his award-winning BBC Radio 4 series, Mark Steel's In Town, is a celebration of the quirks of small-town life in a country of increasingly homogenised high streets. Steel's bespoke observations on the small, sometimes forgotten, towns of Britain go right to the heart of British culture today, championing the very people who shape the places we live in now.

http://www.marksteelinfo.com/Commentator and stand-up comedian Mark Steel has presented several radio and television programmes, and appeared on Have I Got News for You and Never Mind the Buzzcocks. In 2006 he published 'Vive La Revolution: A Stand-up History of the French Revolution', and in 2000 stood as a candidate in the London Assembly elections.