Face to Face

‘Black & White’
‘Mother & child’
‘The girl next door’

 There is something so much more wholesome about speaking to another face to face. I am the worst person for having a conversation with over the telephone, it involves speaking. One can’t rely on the subtleties of facial expression for the acknowledgement that you are listening. I am also not that great in a group, I find it difficult having snatched conversations and can get distracted by the fact that others are around. So face to face is definitely my preference. So what do I think of face time? I am not quite sure I have fully grasped what it is yet. I have used Skype on occasion but still I think I prefer in the flesh.

Having advocated all the social networking media for promoting yourself as an artist, we are finding that if my husband actually goes into a physical gallery in person, or meets a gallery owner at an opening in person then he is more successful. He has a presence that is hard to convey by the written word especially as it is translated twice before it gets anywhere!

I have also changed the face of this page, I am not too sure about it yet, I felt in need of the change but it is still not quite right. Work in progress. I have had the time to play around with the setting as my husband has been in London again this week. This time with some appointments at galleries. So things are moving forward, albeit slowly.

Tonight is the preview of Face to Face at Espacio Gallery, 159 Bethnal Green. An exhibition exploring portraiture and is on until October 2nd. I could go into more depth about each piece and portraiture but I’ve faced the computer enough these last two evenings.

Design links

Last week was London Design Festival and some of my husband’s work went down with designer Anthony Hartley‘s furniture. One of our digital prints was sold which was fantastic news! Anthony has a fantastic space in Haworth which my husband is now showing some of his work in, www.damsidemill.com. It is a great up and coming project which collaborates these two fantastic designers and others. They met at The other art fair but both work out of Yorkshire.

In my last entry I spoke of fashion and art and the same applies to design and art. where does one start and the other end? Sometimes the boundaries are blurred. In the same way my blogging boundaries are becoming a bit blurred. I am starting to have an internal debate about whether I should branch out and have a blog, for entries like this dedicated to what is happening in the world of Sam Shendi Sculptor , to be more factually about event and news and leave The sculptor’s wife to the entries of my own ramblings matching images of my husbands work. What do you think?

Cut and Blow dry

These images would have been best posted in the last entry, so it’s post preview but these little men are still in the hair salon getting a cut and blow dry 🙂 Very much into the branding at the moment the men are out and about and so are the eggs, as we have now rolled into London Design week….(will write about that next time)

The brilliant thing about getting this exposure is then what comes from it. Finally the connections made and the networking are starting to pay off (not quite yet in the monetary terms but it’s not all about that at this stage)

Contrasts

It’s London Fashion week, (so probably also in New York too..right?) I wouldn’t have known except for making the connection between the title of my husbands group exhibition this coming week. (Preview this evening) It’s just fashion baby, get over it! on at the Interchange Gallery London. There is a merging of fashion and art and also a dividing. The vocabulary, the networking, the ambition, the ‘worlds’ that fashion and art seem to create; a parallel reality. Like the way of life in London in comparison with Yorkshire.

My husband just called to tell me all about the preview, the setting was an exclusive hairdressers where he was shocked to see that a man’s hair cut would cost practically 10 times what it would do here. The vast difference between city and rural Yorkshire prices. Left wondering what they would do with his closely cut crop…he asked if there would there be a discount??? (Not that he was getting a cut this evening) Hard to imagine how an exhibition works in an alternative setting but it seems very much in vogue at the moment. The chatter and the buzz I could hear behind him, the hive of activity of cafe and restaurants open also contrasts with the silence I hear outside. Lots of men in suits he observed (perhaps those are the ones affording the overpriced coiffure cuts and most probably many people dressed in high fashion, affording it at what cost?

Think I would look a bit odd going to my play in the wood sessions in a Maria Grachvogel pair of trousers!

( The Girl Next Door )

Wild from the woods

Not only does this beautiful bronze look a bit like earthy bark, both in colour and form but the whole piece represents me today. I am sat writing warming up with a cup of tea after a fantastic play in the woods with my youngest boy. It was all of those basic natural delights; fire, sticks, mud, fresh air. Finding Fungus, looking at leaves. Watching, observing, learning. Windswept and whiffing of smokey woods. We loved it!  Out in the semi wilderness this morning and braving the elements, I envisaged the cold that will come. I have got a bit to used to my creature comforts and it is too easy to forget that long ago people survived and still do from the outdoors alone. Foraging for firewood, finding shelter gathering berries, being connected with nature. When my little boy fell and slightly grazed his hand, the second injury of the day, he wanted some more cream as I had already coated his cheek in some hypercal, which has properties of calendula. I pondered on what would have been used as herbal healing treatment in days of old.

These images are the newly taken photos of a bronze I blogged about in one of my first posts. These images really show the smooth texture of the original clay material which my husband sculpted with his hands. Then cast in a patinated bronze which enhances the whole mother and child. A mother and child at one with nature.

“and though I had been taught in school that the wilderness of the world was cold and uncaring, unfeeling and ruled by tooth and claw, I did not find it so. It gave me all I have and began to teach me a truth I had not learned in school, a truth plain in it’s every line, and movement and turning. For nature does not know how to lie. It is such a simple observation that there are no straight lines in nature but it is a door into Nature’s heart”, Stephen Harrod Buhner.

Read a few blogs recently about this sort of thing;

a local one I just discovered and someone I used to work with.   http://www.annieberrington.co.uk/

Can’t find the specific entry I  was looking for but the whole ethos of this blog: http://knowthesphere.wordpress.com

‘Mother & Child’

It is such an age-old theme tackled by artists time and time again and it very difficult to name it anything other than ‘Mother and Child’. For those with an untuned eye at ‘the art of seeing’ in abstract/ minimalistic art; if you look at the top image, the shadow on the wall created by the sculpture gives you a shadow of what could be the shadow of a reclined figure. You can see the head and then the knee and lower leg.  I wish had the serenity of a mother lying down, with this ‘calm pink’ oosing out in an aura of loveliness. The curves of the piece, the natural flow of line gives the shape of natural peaceful parent. I feel, however, that these last six weeks of summer holiday was more an image of me as a cartoon cardboard cutout  and a mama with the blues for one reason or another. So this piece sums up my own ‘head and heart’ grapplings with motherhood at the moment. Today was the first day back at school for my eldest into his second year and it felt more emotional than his first. He is growing up and I think in tandem with my youngest reaching two years, those early baby days are starting to become days of the past. (The baby hopefully obviously the negative space in the middle of the sculpture)

I noticed this morning that the wind was whisking the leaves of the trees already, autumn approaches and yet where was summer (think this contributed to the bluesy feeling in the latter part of August). Change is in the air again.  This week the anniversary of my husband’s mother’s birth and death. This in itself, a reason why the theme of mother and child is so prominent in his work. Part of the cycle of life, we watch our children grow and we watch our parents age. The seasons change like the stage of life. Everything has it’s moment to flourish and grow and the time to withdraw and slow down. We have to remember to be in the moment to appreciate what we have.

????

Thought I’d better sneak in a cheeky post just to bump up my August posts stats to 2. However, I still haven’t got a clear enough head to think about quite what to write about and which images to put up. We have just had some fabulous new pictures taken and some of the work I have already posted about is transformed by the higher quality of image.

Makes all the difference. It’s amazing how a different perspective, another view-point or angle can show you something you didn’t see before. Obviously, I am not only talking about a sculpture now. This summer has been busy and yet quite at the same time. The school holiday and the dynamics of having both boys at home everyday, a mix of weather from very hot to almost wintry and Ramadan has made for a quiet, reflective very home based holiday. With lots of thinking and still some to do so I can re start in september, like a new blogging year. I will leave you this to ponder on…

‘Candy People’

'The keyhole Family'

People are a lot like Candy!

They’re all so different and dandy.

The way they look and what they do.

Which sweet am I? Which treat are you?

Skin like honey or milky fair,

or coco brown with chocolate hair.

Custard yellow or molasses dark,

or rusty dust of cinnamon bark!

Some friends stick around like toffee,

they’re lasting sticky and strong.

some friends are more like chewing gum:

Their fun and flavour won’t stay long.

Lean like liquorice or lollypop round,

all shapes and colours by the pound.

Small hazelnut or almond eyes,

our wrappers disguise such surprise.

some candy people that you meet,

are mushy and gooey and sweet.

Some come from life’s jawbreaker bin,

but time will melt to mint within.

People are a lot like candy!

Bonbons so different and dandy.

Step to the window, gaze and stop,

at God’s great goodie sugar shop.

People are a lot like Candy!

They’re all so different and dandy.

The way they look and what they do.

Which sweet am I? Which treat are you?

(Dawud Wharnsby 2011)

Balance

‘The gymnast'

Life is about balance. I went away this weekend for the first time in a long time , just me, no boys. I went on an amazing hen weekend. Wake boarding! Not only did the break realign my balance, the active outdoor adventure and the stimulating conversation with other woman was a great re energiser.

Speaking with the other ‘girls’ made me realise how woman are always trying to balance all the different aspects of their lives. As my friend, bride to be was one of my rowing friends most of the woman there had some connection with rowing at Durham, Oxford and GB Rowing Olympiads. Some trying to still fit in rowing whilst others had parted ways and started new adventures. With the Olympics approaching and all the buzz around it, the athletes  will be  trying to find a balance to remain composed before they start the ‘big race’. Some use the race as an analogy for life, but in that sense  we need to think about where we are heading. We need to stop and take stock, reflect in the moment and re address our balance.

Windows of antiquity

'Pregnant, in the window at Rupert Cavendish, London'

It’s interesting how shop windows are designed to pull people in where as in our homes we put up blinds and curtains to stop people looking in. Understandably of course, we don’t want to attract people to peering into our windows. It makes me reflect on the beautiful Japanese homes I visited where the garden would be in the centre of the house and the walls would slide to let you open out into it. I don’t recall windows. Almost like little boxes with moving window walls.

I have often thought about the expression ”our eyes are windows to the soul”.  For a painter the eyes are symbolic of romance, passion, mystic. For a sculptor the eye is always dead, whatever the scale of the sculptor ‘s ability there is no way of creating it. Perhaps that is proof enough that our soul is visible through the eye.

To contrast from my last two blog entries, not so locally, in Kings Road London ‘Pregnant’ the piece by my husband has been positioned cleverly in the centre mirroring the geometric shapes in the painting behind (Andrew Burgess). Quite an impressive window display. Ralph Waldo Emerson so eloquently put that,” the eyes indicate the antiquity of the soul” this is so much more expressive. There is something, rich and fine about antique objects and to indicate the depth of soul in such away gives more meaning than simply a window.

The piece stands out within this antique setting as the modern colours are bold and vibrant against the classical soft browns and blues. With the universal rules of mathematical proportion but the quirky playful touch reminding us it is modern day.However, it is not lost here. Like some futuristic object that has found a home amongst fellow works of art, its antiquity resonates. A real masterpiece in the window. It stamps Egyptian style, drawing on the antiquities of the past.