Art From London Markets, a-n feature

SUGAR AND SPICE AND SOUTHERN LIGHT SHIFTING INTO NORTHERN VASTENESS

SUNDAY, 21 AUGUST 2016
All the work is delivered and hung and ready to view at Sugar and Spice. come along and meet the artists on Tuesday 6-8pm.

While down in the Lot on my holidays I learnt about the role of Silk in the medieval arms race. Did you know that the importation of silk in the middle ages improved the functioning of the longbow? When silk replaced a wool twine which had been used for the bow the silk did not stretch in the rain, given that this was a British bow that is a big advantage. In addition it was used to tie the feathers on the arrows more effectively too. To find out more about the influence of commodities and their import on culture come along to Sugar and Spice.

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In the rural south at night, when the sun went down there was something so gorgeous and velvety about the truely dark night, where the newly cropped fields were black washed with yellow and the forest retained the tinest hint of green until it all becomes a solid black and only the stars shone… or sometimes the windows….

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While in Cahors a glipse of a locked up instrument in the same courtyard where there was a beautiful Steinway out in the open being practiced on, reminded me of William Henry’s stringless instruments in the last Plastic Propaganda show: Music locked away.

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And on my return up through France I was struck not only by the changing landscapes as we moved North, but also the changing lightscape. I commented last year about the blue on the distant horizon reminiscent of Leonardo landscapes in the background of his portraits. As you move north the colour scene is much more familiar to a southern English person, the blues less intense, the shadows softer, the edge of the horizon closer to black than blue, although the vaste flatness of the Loire is something else to behold. Fields and fields of crops in swathes of colour across flatness, so that even though there is a sense of just how enormous it is, the sky takes up most of your field of vision. It reminded me of Wyeth’s “Christina’s World” in MOMA.
Anyway I have been tweeting like crazy and spending far too much time online and it is still the school holidays, so along with some paper work I need to do, I also need to prioritise my children and some more holiday fun and a bit of painting squeezed in.

I also became facinated with all the apertures in the medieval buildings, and what were they for, but I’ll write about that another time.

The marketprices in France show the effect of inflation, as despite the fantastic growing season Euro prices were up from last year. Even normal market prices compared with Borough rather than normal UK street markets. Today I discovered the bargains to be had at Borough Market at the end of the day, and so we made fig jam. Lots of sugar and spice! Enough for 4 jars of jam and only £4.