Rain on the Aldeburgh Beach

 A grey beginning to the day.

The first thing Lucy and I do is to install the scrim work in the top tower room.

Stretched tightly against the sides of the projecting bay, this speciality textile is normally used to line old canvas during conservation. But its very stable weave of  a synthetic fibre means it has low elasticity so that when stretched its weave does not lose its straight of grain and it stays square and true. The result is satisfyingly magical; light plays on the surface, dimly revealing the merest shadows of the winds beyond; the sounds leaking into the tower from the outside world are pushed far into the distance. I am very pleased with this.

Next up is the transformation of the boathouse itself. I do a trial run of yarn stapled to the timber lined space, then draped with folded sheets of graph paper like a clothes line.

This required much folding of the reams found on eBay. A good task while it rains. Francis helps competently, amusing us with stories of when he was a bank clerk, adding columns of figures by hand.

Lucy and I start in stretching and stapling the lines to the walls, here across the front of the fireplace.

Up and down the ladder she goes to reach into the pitched roof and cutting across corners. 

The yarn creates interesting shadows

By evening the skies have cleared and it is a beautiful evening.

Sam and Jane, friends of Caroline and Francis, are staying for a few nights and we decide to dine inside the installation. After scrambling all day, I have a quick shower and join everyone for a glass of excellent fizz on the beach, courtesy of Sam

Once again, Caroline conjures a feast with no apparent effort.

 

A spectacular array of fresh seafood on greens - prawns, dressed crab and hot smoked salmon, followed by a spinach risotto bejewelled with a whole brie.

In the back, here and above, a fully clothed wall of paper is just visible.

Totally knackered and I fall into bed.

Once upon a Tide - one week in Aldeburgh

First day of residency here in Aldeburgh at Caroline Wiseman's South Lookout. I am working in the low white boathouse at the foot of the three-level tower. From inside the boathouse, a low window looking north.

The shingle beach has very small stones furthest from the North Sea's edge.

The Artist's bedroom, in an eyrie by itself, where I am staying for the week.

Late afternoon view out my window overlooking King Street,

and then towards the open sea.

As I'd imagined, the colours of sky and water are what I am trying to capture in gouache.

Each vintage watch face crystal is a different colour, but composed only of white, a green and a blue.

Also to be used for my tide drawings, where I am dipping water colour paper into the sea multiple times to affect the paper's surface. Or so I thought, as this is last  I saw of the tray holding several sheets as it floats off from the shore and is swept away by the force of the waves! So sorry to lose your tray, Caroline!

Instead, I get a small bucket of sea water and start over, just saturating paper and letting it dry. Will be continuing this until Thursday when I must do the drawing to get them to the framer spot on 10.00 Friday to mount.

Caroline cooking dinner at her fabulous Aga.

The lovely Lucy, newly graduated from Loughborough (with a First!) who I am happy is interning for this week, learning about how galleries work from Caroline and how artists work in residencies from me. She is carrying one of Caroline's visual feasts to

Francis, sitting at the dinner table set up on the beach.

What could be a more delightful setting?

And this is what Aldeburgh is all about.

Sat with candles until about 22.00, meeting new neighbours, one of whose son's, Joe, is looking to do art at school when he starts in the Autumn. He has been easily persuaded to assist me in installing inside the boathouse. Lucy, you now have an assistant!

Centre for Recent Drawing exhibition

Easy installation as my friend Christine helped me manage the huge drawings up to my old studio space. Each sheet weighs in at just over a kilogram, or over 2 1/4 lbs - 6 sheets are a floppy, unwieldy 6kg or 13+lbs. They had to be carried flat.

Arriving at the space we find Roisin, who manages the space, scrubbing the bathroom it to within an inch of its life, as promised:

 Very helpful interns Will and Michael looking at the chimney breast...

and measuring with the spirit level to get things relatively horizontal. Good thing it was them going up and down the ladder.

Jason Hicklin, my printmaking tutor, clued me into how to hang heavy sheets. The trick is to remove the springy bit of the clamp.

This leaves a very clean unobtrusive bit.

When I trialled this at home the paper was so heavy it kept slipping out of the clamp. What to do? Ah, a quick dig in my storage bins revealed a non-slip foam rubber matting, normally used for bar trays on which freshly washed glasses drain, and used in a prior work, Confessional .

Carefully trimmed to size and slipped within the clamp's jaws, the heavy sheets stay in place.

Tiny (1.5 mm diam) hardened steel headless nails I found in Paris five years ago are the perfect, albeit somewhat brittle, 'hook' upon which to hang the clamped drawings. And a final shot of Christine against the drawings for scale.

I didn't take enough shots of the installation process but here is the interview with Simon Wilson:

Art Scene 2.0 - a copper kiss

The area around Istanbul Modern is called Tophane. Close to water's edge it nonetheless looks landward. Small streets are starting to fill with uberhip coffee shops and galleries between the motorcycle repair shops and other hardware stores.

Sarkis, the artist whose work I had seen at SALT Beyoğlu in April has a solo exhibition in a very nice artspace in Tophane called Galeri Mana.

The space is industrial chic and beautifully done - airy, simple, with nice exposed brick and sittable window ledges. Since this exhibition filled both the ground and first floor, the crowd and drinks were out in the street.

I went back the next day to photograph the space and Sarkis was there giving an interview upstairs, as he was scheduled to give a student talk nearby that afternoon.

While I am not sure what this work is about (other than it is what it is) I very much like the cymbal on a slowly oscillating chain made of connected short copper springs. The cymbal's excursion is only about 20cm and as it approaches the copper clad puck (same diameter as cymbal) there is the tiniest 'chunk' - not enough vibration to sound the cymbal, but a tiny cupping of air trapped within the void of the cymbal's concavity affecting the sound of gentle impact - a kiss, in fact.

I'm always a sucker for oil spread. In this case, however, I also very much like the way the work on paper is presented. The backboard is birch ply, encased in a perspex lid. The paper is very simply pinned to the back board. A nice compromise between just pinning a work to a wall and strangling a work behind glass, cutting off all escape with mitred frame corners.

These look like Muji pins to me.

Shopping in Kadıköy 2.0

A return to Kadıköy by myself this time.

With a birthday party looming today I decide upon those jewel-like preserved vegetables

for Andrew who is 'too old for presents'. Naturally this means I must return to the shop with the fabulous almond paste sweets, Cafe Erol. Looks a bit like a Konditerai, inside and out.

Some of the almond paste sweets are rolled in crushed pistachios (rear right), but I am a purist (rear centre).

These particular jars of boiled sweet historically indicated that the Jannisary, the Sultan's crack troops, were pleased with their paypacks. Still called “akide şekeri” (lit. “good faith/allegiance candy”) the colours are splendid.

I then pop over to the organic spice shop to get a small bottle of sumac molasses, an extremely tart syrup similar to the more readily available pomegranate molasses, as a thank-you to Korhan. The items dangling from the shop awning are strings of sun-dried red peppers and, on the far right, thumb-sized patlaçan, or baby eggplants, cored and all ready for stuffing at Çiya.

The shop assistant is particularly nice.

Jars of various spices

tempt me to take 100 gr of both powdered sumac and red pepper flakes.

Returning to the ferry, I pass a stall offering these these prepared (honestly, pre-pared!?) artichoke hearts, as seen on this Yotam Ottolenghi  clip from his Channel 4 series on Istanbul and other Mediterranean cuisine. The clip shows how all the outer leaves and inner stickers are removed for you. A bag of 4 cost TL10, or about £3/$5.

And they are massive! I simply steamed them and ate them cold, sliced with a little lemon and mayo. Yum.

The return ferry travels past a massive structure, the Army Barracks, seen in the background at the horizon.

This is where Florence Nightingale came during the Crimean War and started the practice of modern nursing. There is a small museum devoted to her, apparently in one of these towers.

And it is right at the commercial part of the waterways, with cranes and container ships everywhere.

And this is one of the smaller vessels!

Composition in orange and blue.