Rama and Sita

Today here is some treasure for your viewing pleasure. I'm very pleased with the scans as the capture the fragile, tactile qualities of these salvaged pages. In exchange for some meagre pennies I bought this illustrated copy of Rama and Sita from a book market in Bucharest, Romania. Forgotten and unloved for over a year I discovered it again in a red suitcase and decided finally to bring the woodcuts to light. I have a passion for prints but no money with which to satisfy it. So, for the moment, ripping reproduction woodcuts out of crumbling books shall suffice. These are stunning, mytho-poetic journeys in to a Hindu story of love and its obstacles. I found a short version of the story online and have decided to include it.

This is a story about Prince Rama, the great warrior, who was married to the beautiful Sita. Rama and Sita were really gods in human form.

Prince Rama meant to take over the throne from his father the king, but his wicked stepmother had tricked his father into sending him away into the forest. With him went his wife, Sita. Rama had begged Sita to stay safely in the palace while he stayed in the forest, but she declared it was a thousand times better to be in the forest with Rama than in the richest palace without him.

So Rama and Sita went to live in the forest together. They lived a simple, peaceful life in a small cottage.

But, before long, their peace was disturbed. One day, Sita was spotted by the demon king, Ravana. Of all the demons who lived in the forest, Ravana was the most terrible. He had twenty arms and ten heads, with eyes as red as coal fires and a mouthful of yellow fangs. When Ravana saw the beautiful Sita, he immediately came up with a plan to kidnap her and make her his wife.

One day, when Rama and Sita were walking in the forest, they saw the most beautiful deer you can imagine. Its golden hide was as bright as the sun, its silver antlers as bright as the moon, its hooves shone as black as night, and its eyes were as blue as sapphires.

So delighted was Sita when she saw the deer that she begged Rama to catch it for her. Rama was worried that this was some demon trick to try and split them up, but Sita pleaded with Rama, until he agreed to try and catch the deer for her.

As soon as Sita was alone, the demon Ravana swooped down and swept Sita up into his chariot pulled by winged monsters. Despite her terror Sita thought quickly and scattered her jewellery piece by piece - first her golden anklets, then her earrings, then her glittering scarf - as a trail for Rama to follow. Far below a white monkey looked up and, seeing the glittering jewellery, thought the stars were falling.

In the midst of the forest, Rama tracked down the beautiful deer. But when he caught hold of it, the deer changed into a terrible demon that broke away from Rama’s grasp and flew into the sky. Realising that he had been tricked, Prince Rama ran back to the cottage as fast as he could, his heart filled with dread. Finding Sita gone, he searched frantically until he came upon the trail of jewellery that Sita had left.

Rama followed this golden trail until he met Hanuman, the white monkey, who had seen Sita's jewellery fall from the sky. Hanuman was a very special monkey because he was the monkey king. Hanuman took Rama to the monkey city, that lay under the hills in a giant cave. All the monkeys of the city were called to the marble square in the centre of the city, and messages were sent out to monkeys all over the world. They came in their millions from the woods and caves, and with them came their friends the bears. Twenty-three million animals filled the city and covered the hills like a great shaggy sea. After they had heard what had happened, they spread out to search the world for Sita.

It was the monkey, Hanuman, who came to the island where Sita was being held prisoner. The monkeys and bears with him stared in despair at the giant crashing waves that surrounded the island, but Hanuman, the son of the wind god, climbed to the highest hill, took a mighty breath and leapt into the clouds, and over the crashing waves. He landed on the island and quickly found Sita in a grove of trees near the palace. There she sat refusing to marry the evil Ravana.

Sita was overjoyed when she found out who Hanuman was and she gave him a pearl from her hair to take to Rama. Then, Hanuman bounded away to fetch Rama and Lakshmana, and the great army of monkeys and bears.

But still the giant ocean waves kept Rama and his army away from the island. And so the army began to build a bridge of rocks and grass and sand.

The squirrels came running out of the woods to help, every animal - large and small - contributed to the building, and soon the bridge stretched a hundred miles to the island, and the animals poured across their bridge.

Long and terrible was the battle, as the animals fought the evil demons. Many great deeds were done, until at last Rama faced the demon Ravana on the battlefield. With his arrows Rama struck again and again at the heads of Ravana but, each time he chopped one off, a new one grew.

Then Rama took up his special bow and arrow that had been made by the sky god. He chanted a special prayer and shot. The gods of wind and fire flew guided the arrow and it pierced Ravana's chest in a blinding flash. Ravana fell dead in an instant.

All the world rejoiced. The reign of the demons was over and Rama and Sita returned to their own country to rule. In celebration, the gods showered flowers from the sky, and the people lined the streets with flags and garlands. In every home, an oil lamp was put in the window to welcome back the Rama and Sita and their great army. The royal ruled happily for many years until it was time for them to leave their life on earth and return to heaven.

The greatest mystery about this book which I found in Romania is its introduction and footnotes in Russian and the story in English. It is a strange compilation of unexplained origins and sources, perhaps it is a Russian schoolbook for learning English, I think? But then why the Hindu story? And how did it find its way to this market stall in Romania!? Now, on the next stage of its journey, disembodied prints find themselves framed on my bedroom walls in England.

Grey Bricks and Aquatints

As you may already know I happen to live in an art collection, hence the quotidian exposure to art. When I returned as a resident this year I was excited to find that the curator had found a space for our print collection along the grey brick walls of the residential corridors. The grey bricks are the subject of obsessions; love or hate they are a listed and therefore a permanent feature. As an atmospheric backdrop for the prints of the New Hall Art Collection I think they work very well, 'Grey Bricks and Aquatints' has a kind of poetry to it. Anyway when I return from doing laundry I make a point of travelling along the first floor so that I can see our prints, finally exhibited.

Liliane Lijin, Black Koran, Etching

Helen Fay, Cormorant, Drypoint

Pale reflections in the glass of picture frames reveal the ghosts of bedroom and bathroom doors. As much as Helen Fay's Cormorant desires its creative independence the life of the world around it influences and corrupts. There is something complimentary in the subtle tones of brick and the inky black and white of these prints.

Iona Montgomery, Aranda, lithograph

A walk along the corridor is an exploration in printing techniques; Lithographs, Etchings, Drypoint, Monoprint, and Screenprints. As these women represent themselves they also represent the breadth of their medium. I won't go in to a description of the various techniques here as that is the job of Wikipedia.

The pictures below will offer an insight in to the range of prints on display from wistful fairy tales, to bright dream-scapes and dark brooding landscapes.

Charlotte Hodes, Untitled, Etching

Jacqueline Moon, Lighthouse Tower, Etching

Ashley Cook, Finding your place in the world, Screenprint

Sarah Wilson, Nightgown, Monoprint

We also have one of Paula Rego's Nursery Rhyme etchings, but that's locked away in another room and is for another story.

Cage against the machine

Last year in the UK hundreds of thousands of people raged against the machine that is the X-Factor and bought Rage Against the Machine's song of rebellion, in defiance of powerful musical institutions. We got it to Christmas number one and suddenly everybody felt the power of the people, the power of Facebook to spread the messages of real people. This year there is a whole collection of similar campaigns, but I don't believe that any have the power to succeed. Raging against the machine was about fighting repetition and monotony and the predictability of the British music industry. If every year there is a facebook campaign then all we succeed in doing is initiating a new kind of predictability; we produce a new mould for music to be forced in to. However in the light of a recent Kettles Yard exhibition there is one campaign which interests me; Cage against the machine http://www.facebook.com/cageagainstthemachine.

John Cage's '4'33' is a composition of four minutes and 33 seconds of silence. The statement is inherent. We would rather listen to silence than your manufactured rubbish. But paying 79p for a track of complete silence on Itunes, is definitely not the point. It is an absolute waste. Cage's composition is a performance piece in which the audience are given a unique opportunity to experience silence and to consider their experience of this. When Cage's composition is a track on your itunes which can be skipped or that passes by as an unnoticed interruption, it loses all meaning and effect. This is how 4'33 should be experienced, and you can't recreate this in your bedroom;

The campaign also annoys me because I'm sure for many people Cage is unknown or obscure. I don't think his silent composition heard in isolation is a representative introduction to the artist. So here are some real reasons to be interested in Cage.

Not Wanting to say Anything about Marcel, Lithograph 1969

Mushroom Book, Plate X, 1972

River Rocks and Smoke 4/11/90 1978 and 17 Drawings by Thoreau 1978

Hopefully this introduces the expansive stretch of Cage's work,;encompassing music, film, painting and printing. At one moment cage has the precision of a printer, the chaos of mapping ideas and feelings and the next is free in his abstraction. With lyricism and musical sense in all that he does, if you are going to Cage against the machine, make sure you understand what it's all about.

Escaping to Barcelona

So I decided that we all need a break (me included) from posts about Cambridge, Kettles Yard and my dissertation. The winter has been bleak and the year ahead (my final year of university) looks to be relentless so I have been getting fidgety. In January I will be heading off to Barcelona for a few days and I can't help dreaming a little prematurely about what I will be getting up to.

A gingerbread house is the gate to Gaudi's park rising in to the Barcelona skyline!

In 2009 I had another brief fling with Barcelona, however my lasting impression was of the locked doors of the Picasso museum, on the final day of our trip we had succeeded in arriving on the day of its closure. With over 3800 of Picasso's work the museum offers a key Picasso collection connecting with the work exhibited in Paris and Madrid. The collection explores Picasso's early formative years, including the Las Meninas series, and Picasso's deep relationship with the city and culture of Barcelona. The website also tells me that it has a collection of his prints! By some felicitous accident I have booked my trip to coincide with the dregs of a brilliant temporary exhibition; Picasso looks at Degas. Take a look here; http://www.bcn.cat/museupicasso/en/exhibitions/current.html

Picasso The Dwarf, I had not considered it before but I can see Degas in the melted brushstrokes and the figure of the dancer. Picasso has proffered his own twist by dwarfing her elegance.

Internet searches have also helped me to discover The Antoni Tapies Foundation where there will be an exhibition of a Brazilian artist, Anna Maria Maiolino. Maiolino sought to reinvigorate Brazilian art by 'reconnecting life and art by echoing the social resurgence of the body and subjectivity' and this will be her first major European retrospective. Her work is in a range of media including; poetry, woodcuts, photography, film, performance, sculpture and drawing. I think it sounds absolutely amazing- prints and sculpture! Read more here; http://www.fundaciotapies.org/site/spip.php?rubrique995.

Other things I will be visiting will no doubt include La Sagrada Familia (which I will probably enjoy more now I am interested in architecture and sculpture), the Gaudi Park, the Museum of Contemporary art and possibly the Joan Miro Foundation. Although I can already see my time wearing thin. The whole city of Barcelona is a kind of Art installation marked as it is by the dancing and twisting forms of Gaudi and the winter beach lapping at its edge. It will be a blissful break. Mornings at galleries, afternoons at the beach, evenings drinking in the hostel? Sounds like a plan.

Afterlife- Fitzwilliam museum

I just wanted to say a quick thank you to all my followers, knowing that I have people reading this regularly fills me with a lot of joy!

There was no need to rush to this exhibition as it will stretch on until the 8th of May, but I did anyway. No doubt I will return again and again for the comfort and exhilaration it's beauty offers when work gets a little too much. This small exhibit in the Shiba Print Rooms definitely exceeded expectations. It also offers the perfect excuse to introduce my passion for prints and printing techniques. I am almost certain that this originates from my art teacher's love which meant that she had us researching printing methods, making our own linocuts, monoprints and organising days for us to try out screen printing. As an artist, printing revealed a whole new world of representation and experimentation. Since then I have found myself gravitating towards prints and print exhibits with an insatiable lust.

In the Shiba room I have been introduced to the prints of Picasso and Lino Mannocci, but Afterlife has been the most exciting exhibit so far. Exploring the contemporary potentials of printmaking, sometimes within the context of digital imaging and computer technology, this exhibition shows the diversity and beauty which developments make possible. Matt Collishaw's Insecticide series is really the most impressive example of the merging of modern and traditional processes. When cleaning his house for the birth of his new baby Collishaw found lots of insects, he scanned the bodies of these dead insects (mostly moths and butterflies) in to his computer and then used photogravure (a technique from the 1830's) to develop the prints.

We are transfixed by the poetic suspension of colour. These dead wings become abstract in close up, so that they metamorphose in to new imaginative creatures. The colour bleeds its dust in to the pure black of the background. These prints are utterly absorbing and I wish desperately that I could have them for my bedroom wall or better yet, that Collishaw hadn't made them first and I had!

For me the exhibition had a theme beyond that of the 'Afterlife'; it was also about the materials which artists take as their starting points. Whether it was Paul Morrison taking botanical illustrations and prints of old masters' work and enlarging them, or Paul Coldwell's Smoke, collotypes which used TV images of the bombing of Baghdad layered with everyday objects, or Jane Dixon's inspiration from plans for the regeneration of destroyed cities.

Hughie O'Donoghue's caborundum prints had echoes of the Turin Shroud about them, but perhaps this association was influenced by Three Studies for A Crucifixion by Donoghue which the Fitzwilliam also hosts. Taken from postcards the artist's father picked up in Milan in the 1940's these prints are details of the bodies of Mussolini and his henchmen after they were hanged in the streets of Italy. The wounded details of the dead flesh are rendered real and visceral. V and VI appear to be tortured faces dissolving within their hollowed eyes and mouths. Are we supposed to read a kind of martyrdom in to O'Donoghue's rendering of these bodies in the moment of their death? Reflecting upon the crucifixion series I can't help but do this.

The re-imagining of Goya's 'Disasters of War' by Jake and Dinos Chapman was also a strong element. The Fitz's small selection of the 83 etching series give a sense of the range of these prints. From the nightmarish horror of childlike drawings with hangman-style people spinning on a wheel of torture, to etchings of accomplished detail and skill such as the chaotic tornado of the crucifixion at calvary and the swastika of dismembered fingers, these are harrowing testaments to mortality. It is through this modernisation of horror that a connection with Goya is maintained.

These are just the highlights, but I have already written too much! I definitely have greater admiration for the works which have a strong sense of traditional printing techniques rather than those which are moving closer to being entirely computer-generated. Does this resistance mean I am getting old? Or is it justified?

If only Ben Nicholson would design my curtains

You may remember me writing that one of my highlights at Kettles Yard was Ben Nicholson's print on fabric which the Ede's appeared to have used as a bathroom blind. Here it is!

Letters and numbers, c.1933

Nicholson's linocut is an energetic algorithm speaking an abstract language. His letters and numbers appear to jump in their repetitions across the fabric avoiding direct meaning and communication. There is a framed version of the print in the corridor but it is the version in the bathroom which I like the most. I might be leaping to wild imaginative conclusions but it's display on a curtain rail makes it look like a blind. I think this speaks volumes about the function of art (something which David Jones and Eric Gill are always discussing); giving Nicholson's print a function imbues it with all kinds of richness and locates it firmly within the house. Anyway these are the nasty curtains I have to contend with in my college bedroom instead:

If only Ben Nicholson would design me a set of curtains!