Dancing Ostriches and Scrambled Eggs

Hallo,

New year is approaching so I have been sorting through all my sketchbooks from the last 12 months, and looking back through it all made me realise I really have had sucha nice time. 

The best exhibition I visited was Malborough London's Paula Rego Ostriches, which showed her huge pastel drawings of a frumpy, ageing ballerina posed as an inelegant bird on a shabby leather sofa. Best album of 2016 was pretty Beach House's Thank Your Lucky Stars. 

I talked to Grayson Perry about the weather, finished a big commission for two oil paintings, saw Beach House n Parquet Courts live, found a top notch pair of Little Mermaid sunglasses, danced on a kitchen table, had work exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery, sort of learnt how to knit, visited Derek Jarman's house, made a big plastic book about meaty flesh, left school and started my art foundation which has all been really lovely ! 

There's not much else to say except below are selected pages from my last three sketchbooks, and I leave my 2017 Resolution here in the form of a song x 

BE NICE / CHARLIE BOYEUR AND THE VOYEURS 

R Tist trying

Happy New Year friends hope u all have a smashing time 

x G

Seen and Not Seen

Hallo,
I have just got back from an inter railing trip round Europe with some friends which was the loveliest thing, and I've filled a sketchbook and a half this summer so far. We visited Paris for a day and then Amsterdam, Berlin, Vienna and finally Budapest: going to art galleries and exploring all day, plus hours and hours of train journeys.

I also went on a day trip to Dungeness to see Derek Jarman's home by the beach and wander between the lighthouses and the huge power station. There was a perpetual wind blowing and Prospect Cottage's black and yellow silhouette stood out against the orange wildflowers and stone sculptures. It was v sad as well as beautiful seeing Jarman's deserted garden preserved as he grew it and reading the Donne poem carved on the wall among the plants.

 Thou, sun, art half as happy as we,

               In that the world's contracted thus.

         Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be

         To warm the world, that's done in warming us.

Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere;

This bed thy center is, these walls, thy sphere.

Dungeness

(Also my portrait is finally on show in the room before the BP Exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London!)

I am listening to..

Elliott Smith / XO

Blood Orange / Freetown Sound

Parquet Courts / Human Performance

Good luck for anyone getting their exam results in two days!!

from G

Eff Off New Tate Modern

The new Shift Building connected to Tate Modern is underwhelming and disappointing. I expected young, unknown artists from less privileged backgrounds, and a host of new artworks I had never seen before, but I was met with the familiar "Stack" by Tony Cragg in Room 1, a white male artist who peaked in the 1980s in Britain  (I literally just googled "rubbishy cube of wood tate modern" to find out what that was called and it was the first option). So much for Shift's promise to push boundaries and widen their horizons..

I do understand that the new building features far more ethnic minorities and females in its rooms than the previous Tate, which is an improvement, but why is it all still so stagnant? The featured artists on the whole are not young, (some of them even dead) nor are they breaking any boundaries. I saw room after room of minimal sculpture, installation and video, but not one painting. (The Louise Bourgeois room being the exception.) Of course, the creative arts have moved further away from plastic practices such as drawing etc. but that doesn't mean no one does it any more- Without a single work that demonstrated technical skill or even the sign of a human hand, the pieces on exhibition were sterile and showed no sense of humanity, which is Not representative of the modern art world today. I felt shut-out and unconnected, so I decided to stop taking it seriously and added a note to the Comments board in their foyer.

I also wanted to mention the so-called "interactive" art downstairs in the Tanks, that were supposedly aimed at a direct connection with the visitors through performance and sculpture. Rasheed Araeen’s Zero to Infinity, for example, lay untouched in a perfectly-assembled square on the floor, as the audience silently stared at it. Nothing happened. The artwork's purpose was for its spectators to move it around and TOUCH it when it was first made, but when I took one step closer, a surly guard in a Tate uniform with a walky-talky told me to "stand back Miss".

I went into Tate yesterday excited and hopeful, with an open mind.. and there are of course lots of positive things to say- one of the fifth most visited museums in the world has decided to (slightly) widen its depiction of the art history canon by introducing more artists from overlooked groups ! Great.
But overall, I shouldn't have found so many things to be disappointed with.

I found the atmosphere uninspiring and intimidating, which I think is sort of depressing, as a young artist.

(The macaws that were supposed to be in this installation weren't even there.)