Constantin Brancusi

I don't have many regrets in life; regrets are inevitably things which we make a choice to hold on to because of our guilt and so it's far easier just to let them go. However the Romanian sculptor, Constantin Brancusi, does represent one of my regrets. Since its his 135th birthday today, Google are using his work as their banner and he is trending on Twitter, I thought I would attempt some kind of reparation.

The Google banner today really is a work of art in itself, the digital sculptures really capture the sense of solid dimensionality.

In 2009 I spent my summer in Romania, the birthplace of Brancusi, where they cling on to his legacy with fierce pride. I was located in a town called Craiova in the region of Oltenia, a hot industrial town with the skeleton of a grand casino planned by Ceaucescu abandoned at its centre. I was not far from the Brancusi sculpture park in Targu Jiu, people continually suggested it as a day trip but I stubbornly believed that I did not like sculpture and never went.

Madame Pogany in the Craiova Museum

All I saw of Brancusi in Romania were two sculptures in the small, neglected museum of Art in Craiova. But I returned to England with an ingrained sense of his importance as well as a Romanian love of meat, gherkins and a gushing pride in Oltenia Terra Nova. Yes, i returned from Romania part Romanian (but that is another story). Since being back in England, and falling in love with sculpture, I have hunted Brancusi wherever I can find him.

The Kiss in Craiova Museum of Art

The Kiss is one of Brancusi's most famous sculptures, it recalls Rodin, whom Brancusi studied under for several months but demonstrates his strong individuality. There is a beautiful simplicity in this equal pair locked in an intense but also tenderly innocent embrace. We can find comparisons for Brancusi's work in contemporaries such as Modigliani or Gaudier-Brzeska but in the end the sculptures are distinctively his own.

Sleeping Muse, I think I may have seen versions of this in various places...I went to a Van Doesburg exhibition at the Tate Modern because it advertised work by Brancusi and then found only this solitary sculpture to satisfy me. That's not to say that it isn't beautiful. There is a purity of line in Brancusi, a peaceful stillness of the inanimate material made animate by the artist's thought.

"There are idiots who define my work as abstract; yet what they call abstract is what is most realistic. What is real is not the appearance, but the idea, the essence of things."

Sculpture on the Piano Lid at Kettle's Yard

"Am șlefuit materia pentru a afla linia continuă. Și când am constatat că n‑o pot afla, m‑am oprit; parcă cineva nevăzut mi‑a dat peste mâini."

"I ground matter to find the continuous line. And when I realized I could not find it, I stopped, as if an unseen someone had slapped my hands."

Brancusi moved to Paris and spent his life working there in the thriving art scene, but he did not forget his Romanian identity; with folktales and culture influencing his work, clothing and his home. As an honorary Romanian, I think that is what I admire most of all.

Travels in Graffiti

Graffiti has been vindicated in recent years as Banksy has brought his work off the streets and in to gallery spaces. There is a lot more appreciation for the talent and thought which informs this underground culture. On my European travels I have always been interested in documenting, with my camera, the particular graffiti-culture of the cities I visit. It seems that each country and each city has a different approach to their medium and a unique motivation.

Madrid- characterised by bright, vibrant graphics, powerful letters, explosions of colour.

Yesterday when I wrote that sculpture more than any art form is in dialogue with its surroundings, I was not considering graffiti. Graffiti doesn't simply furnish buildings, roads and pavements; when we visit a city we absorb its graffiti as an integral part of its vista. But graffiti is not a permanent feature, its power is in its transience. While architecture remains an archaism, a monument to the past, graffiti is that part of the city which adapts with its people, with the moving, breathing, developing culture.

Bucharest- Romania, 'Women! Don't tolerate misogyny' in Romania graffiti appeared to have a bitter political ambition, scrawled with a fire and an urgency or stencilled with powerful irony.

Prague-Czech Republic, appeared to me to be obsessed with stencil graffiti, with repeating patterns across the city.

Portugal

Budapest, Hungary

Rome was all about the effortless scribble, as if the entire city were a notepad for the scrawls of its people.