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Great at first sight – Firstsite Colchester

Posted on April 30, 2012 by Richard Stokes

The beginning of the title of this blog is borrowed from Rowan Moore of the Guardian / Observer. A neat pun which expresses some of his caution about the architecture. As an ex curator myself (Minories – Ikon Gallery) I worry about the ratio of promenade space to real exhibition space. The promenade space can and does house free standing objects. The promenade space has little to no control over daylight so would be useless for any art which has any light fugitive properties. For me this circulation space has the feeling of a surrealistic shopping mall. The whoosh of the outward sloping curved wall to the right of the promenade has a gasp factor, but then what do you do after the gasp. The foyer is huge and suggests a much larger building behind, but in fact the building shrinks as you proceed down it, and yes it is downward in some places as there is some sloping to the floor.

Perhaps I am too much of a traditionalist wanting conventional vertical walls for flat paintings – some might say that art practice has changed so much that walls for paintings are less necessary than hitherto. The slope and curve of these walls would make it even difficult for video projection unless you required that kind of distortion.

The actual galleries when you get to them are conventional – vertically walled but they do seem quite compact after the towering space of the entrance.

As to the gold sheened exterior. it’s amazing what you can do with the Terry’s All Gold concept, but the gold in Terry’s and perhaps Ferrero Rocher’s wrappings is actually disposable – kind of temporary: this is not.

Colchester has certainly made a statement in this visual arts centre. When I worked at the Minories the the Council did not seem particularly keen on contemporary visual art, had it not been for Arts Council and Eastern Arts funding at the time I think the Council would have shown little interest in the work of the gallery. Kath Wood and her team must have done a lot to influence the Council.

Good luck Kath.

apologies for the dreadful photograph – a wet day and a smartphone

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Apple™ confusion – Leopard to Snow Leopard to Lion

Posted on February 29, 2012 by Richard Stokes

My brother recently acquired an iPhone, I had the lowlier HTC Wildfire S (interesting camera though) so I was a little envious. I told him I was a bit green and he said he was a bit disappointed. It was only after he had committed himself to his iPhone, taken it out of its box etc. that he discovered it wouldn’t work with his Mac mini because his software was too aged, I think he had either Panther or Tiger versions of OSX. I asked him why he couldn’t upgrade – he said he was just sure he couldn’t. Well, I have a Mac mini running Leopard and have just contracted myself to an iPhone (jealousy). The two seemed to work relatively seamlessly, syncing contacts at least, that was until I discovered iCloud (through the iPhone) only to find that it wasn’t really meant to work with Leopard, it wanted Lion.

I thought upgrading would be easy (I haven’t come to the end of this yet) so I went to Apple Store online. This is where my confusion started – in order to get to Lion you have to go via installing Snow Leopard. Easy I thought. No not so easy I find. You can get Snow Leopard on Apple Store on line – this means purchasing discs, I thought I would be able to buy Lion at the same time in the same transaction. Wrong; you have go to Apple Store to buy Snow Leopard online as discs, wait for them to arrive, and install. Then in theory you get Mac Apps and download Lion online.

Sunday 4th March

Snow Leopard arrived yesterday so it only really took 3 days to arrive. I am currently downloading further software to upgrade it further, another two hours it says but at least I can work this time. Looking at the net people are saying it can take up to 4 hours to download on a not-so-good connection. Mine is1.45mbps which I am told is not so clever and might mean a download is going to take forever or possibly fail. I am not going to risk a failure so have ordered Lion on a stick, more expensive but safer. Ordered it today so will see how long it takes to get here. I will have to without the wonders of iCloud for a few more days.

I now read that Lion does not support my Iomega MiniMax NAS (or vice versa) so Time Machine doesn’t recognise or find the backup HDD.

This series is not over yet.

I will keep you in touch in due course.

I hope all this messing around proves worth it.

Will get back soon

Footnote – my brother thinks his processor would have been a problem anyway – not being an Intel Duo Core 2.

Mac Mini set up

N.B The DVD/CD Read/Writer is a Buffalo as the slot on the Mac Mini is defunct. I got the logo with the iPhone.

Monday 12th March

I received Lion OSX 10.7 last Thursday and started to install it on Friday morning. I panicked slightly about my photos not getting backed up so joined Livedrive (which by the way – so far – seems excellent). Lion took an hour to install and then there were updates which took a further two hours. All pretty seamless except for some extraordinary reason I had decided to back up all pictures onto the desktop – backup panic I guess. I really can’t remember the logic for doing this, it was a crazy thing to do as it nearly bought the Mac to a grinding halt. I ended up having to learn Terminal to batch delete files with similar names, as moving stuff to trash was not easy.

Every thing is now fine although I still haven’t worked out the ultimate usefulness of iCloud. Oh and by the way Time Machine seems to be acknowledging the Iomega MiniMax (it is backing up as I write) so perhaps the money spent on Livedrive was a waste, however it is another string to my bow for photograph preservation.

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Another kind of lomography

Posted on February 20, 2012 by Richard Stokes

People coming to this blog might be questioning my abilities to take a decent photograph. I do myself sometimes. Just before Christmas I saw a guy in Waitrose, Lymington’s car park taking photographs of a strangely beautiful dusk sky. I thought ‘I wish I had a camera’ then remembered that of course I did on my phone so I went ahead and took some snaps. I couldn’t believe how they were coming out not remotely like what I was seeing but very weird and in a grotesque way, rather beautiful. I hadn’t a clue what I had done wrong.

What can go wrong with photography

When I got home and in good light I checked the phone’s camera and found that I had chosen solarisation by accident. Here is another spooky picture.

A weird dusk - solarised photography

This photograph seasonally shows the mistletoe in the trees.

Mistletoe in solarised dusk

The next photo shows how odd sodium lighting can look.

Sodium light

Having discovered this attribute of the HTC I took a couple of photographs of my patio garden – one of which is doubly tricked up by re-photographing it on the computer display to double the amount of solarisation.

Patio Garden Solarised

Patio Garden double solarised

For on short time I became a bit hooked on this peculiar photography. Here are a few more.

Abstract

Mystery photo

Oh I have just remembered taking the last picture. It was of two pizzas at the Conservative Club in Lymington. Somebody went berserk and bought 17 pizzas for some celebratory reason.

Back to the HTC Wildfire S. Well as a phone it is a bit quirky, I found that scrolling through the phone book/ contact list gave unexpected results, like it would certainly start dialling somebody you had just gone past. So slightly sadly I have let it go and contracted myself to an iPhone 4, a much better phone but the camera is not so quirky (I think).

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Life in the Costa Geriatrica

Posted on July 26, 2011 by Richard Stokes

The Costa Geriatrica is a wonderful name I have invented for the strip of coastal land stretching from Eastbourne to Bournemouth. I live in Lymington at the western end of this coast. It was named as best seaside resort town ahead of Sandbanks in an article by Richard Savill in the Telegraph 5th June 2008.

Typical of the South Coast, Lymington and the area surrounding has been losing larger industries for decades. Wellworthy, manufacturers of piston rings, a once major employer, closed in 1989. In its heyday in the 70′s the Lymington plants provided employment for about 5,500. One of the sites of its plants is now a major supermarket, the other Ampress Park now houses out of town businesses and a new hospital. According to a one time manager there the closure of the first site was a loss of about 400 jobs, the closure of the second was lost about 1,000.

Webbs Country Foods ( a chicken processing factory) was another major employer, that closed in 2001. Five hundred jobs were lost. The factory was situated on a large site east of the railway line, earmarked for housing. Commercial property developer and builder, Redrow, bought the 3 hectare site presumbaly hoping to make a a bit of a financial killing. They have been frustrated though by the awkward position of the site, the entrance to the site being adjacent to a level crossing. The site is also vulnerable to tidal and fluvial flooding. So at the moment there is not even the new building work that may have provided jobs for a year or two.

The town has lost the following pubs in the last forty years:-

Britannia;

Wheatsheaf;

Crown and Anchor;

Redlion/Whitelion 1998 I think;

Anchor and Hope;

Londesborough Hotel and the Country Bar at the rear;

The Bugle;

The Lymington Tavern (a.k.a. Dorset arms, Fighting Cocks, Champagne Charlie’s);

The Tap Bar – Angel

The Hearts of Oak

What else can Lymington lose. Well it nearly lost its saltwater swimming baths which were saved due to a large public outcry.

Never mind the retirement industry is booming. Oh, and Wetherspoon might come. See Whether to Wetherspoon on this site.

Author’s note – apparently there is another Costa Geriatrica in Spain – near Suerte I believe. Obviously someone was thinking along the same lines as me. I did not knowingly nick the name.

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The Number Four

Posted on June 22, 2011 by Richard Stokes

I was listening to Alex Bellos on favourite numbers on Radio 4 and was fascinated to know that he had created a survey website asking people for views on their favourite numbers. http://www.favouritenumber.net

I went to this and informed that my favourite was four, my birthday. Also the sum of 1 and 3, 13 being an auspicious number as I was treated once as child to go and see Peter pan on Friday 13th. I also mentioned that I liked to collect Macedonian tetradrachms.

I see in Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbers_in_Chinese_culture that four is considered by the Chinese to be inauspicious as nearly homophonous to the word death, fourteen is even worse “shi si” which sounds like “ten die” in Mandarin. In East Asia some buildings do not have a fourth floor. Eight however in Chinese culture is auspicious as it is similar to the word for wealth or prosper. The Summer Olympics in Beijing was scheduled to open on 8/8/08 at 8:08:08 p.m.

Back to four – Judaeo/ Christian symbolism - The Tetragrammaton is the four-letter name of God. The four matriarchs of of Judaism are Sarah, Rebecca, Leah and Rachel. Perhaps not so good is that the four horsemen of the Apocalypse ride in the book of Revealation. In the Kabbalah, there were four worlds of the Tree of Life. There are four creatures on the arms of Freemasonry, four primary mental functions according to Carl Jung, and four dimensions of modern science: length, breadth, width, and time. According to Plato the four virtues were wisdom, courage, self-control, and justice. Four is the smallest number of colors sufficient to color all planar maps.

൪ Malayalam: 四，亖，肆 Chinese: ארבע Arba – Hebrew: ٤,4,۴, Arabic

What else is there to say about a number.

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Changing the colour of links in iWeb

Posted on May 12, 2011 by Richard Stokes

I did think that you couldn’t easily change the colours of links in iWeb. It’s not true it’s very easy. Mac don’t seem to tell you this in help. All you do is go to links inspector and it says Hyperlink – Format. Having created your hyperlink go to Format – click on your link – it will show white rectangles filled with grey. Go to the colour palette, choose web safe colours preferably – click on the normal box and then click on your selected colour, do this again with different colour for rollover and visited. You can apply the selection to all links on your page if you click on Use for New Links on Page. I think MacMurphy makes it all a bit difficult. No, to be fair to MacMurphy he is talking about the iWeb generated navigation menu which I am now beginning to turn off because of the lack of control. I reckon it is just as easy to manually make navigation menus. Researching the menu topic I came across Suzanne on 11Mystic.com who is very good at educating you deep into iWeb.

I am now just worried that having put the Papyrus typeface into http://www.wisteria-lymington.co.uk that it it will look bad on Windows PCs, I think it gets replaced with a Lucida font. If any body with windows can tell me how awful it looks I would be grateful.

Inspector and Palette

And after

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City of contrasts – Birmingham UK

Posted on May 6, 2011 by Richard Stokes

Ikon Gallery: Chinatown

Canal, Birmingham

This photo was taken in Summer Row close to where the old Birmingham College of Art Experimental Workshop would have been.

A forlorn building on Henstead Street

Only a stone’s throw away from the brash new city centre.

The blue glass Radisson

Amazing - possibly awful

The Cube detail

Note the contrast between old and new. This is the owners take ” A world class building which dominates the Birmingham skyline. Exceptional apartments, state-of-the-art offices, exclusive shops, water side café bars, Birmingham’s first boutique hotel and panoramic rooftop restaurant all fuse together in one extraordinary location. Put simply, a building like no other.”

The Town Hall

Canal

I lived in Birmingham for approximately 10 years coming there as a student in 1968 and living there until 1979. Starting from the genteel but declining area of Moseley, crumbling Victorian villas converted into squalid bedsits and finishing in Vicery Close on the Bristol Road, an elegant late 30’s apartment complex set in a large garden. Going back the change is enormous. Broad Street, once a slightly out of centre shopping street with Everymans where I could buy artists’ materials and visit if I had the money – the Rum Runner a busy night venue. Oh and you could look over the Gas Street Canal basin- not the prettiest of sights. Now Broad Street is the major artery of the so called Westside area. Change was happening when I was there with the relocation of the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, then on a second sojourn, working for West Midlands Arts, there in the mid 90’s the Symphony Hall was apparent. There was talk of something called Brindleyplace, I thought it was going be just more offices, I know the Ikon was considering relocating to an old school in Oozells Street.

The Council House

Going back there last year to be involved with This Could Happen to You was a shock for me. First, the new Ikon. I was amazed at how a Victorian neo Gothic school could be turned into an amazingly trendy contemporary art galley. Brindleyplace wasn’t merely offices, it was an upscale commercial area with culture and retail. The canals had been opened up and re-furbished, one walked past new sculpture, good quality street furniture. What! They used to say Birmingham rebuilds itself every fifty years, well for Westside this certainly seems to be true. Last year I stayed in a SACO apartment, almost a penthouse, from where I could see this astonishing building the Cube going up. Well it is finished now and open. Now the new Library is on its way to completion. They only built the last one in the 70’s.

Sixties signal box

This is listed thankfully.

Canal boats

Difficult to take a picture of a glass lift

This the lift at the Ikon Gallery must be one of the most amazing lifts in the world. It has voices singing rising as it ascends and lowering when it descends. Go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLq7dk-QtGs or Google Singing lift at the Ikon Gallery.

Glazing on the Cube

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Ikon and John Salt

Posted on May 6, 2011 by Richard Stokes

I was invited to the private view of paintings by John Salt at the Ikon in Birmingham. John Salt was the first artist to show at the Ikon and then he had a major show in 1975 curated by my then boss Simon Chapman with many of the paintings lent by Ivan Karp of the OK Harris gallery, New York.

Originally from the Sheldon district of Birmingham UK, at the age of 15, John gained a place at Birmingham School of Art where he studied from 1952 – 1958. From 1958 to 1960 he studied at the Slade School of Art in London. Early influences were the works of Prunella Clough and American pop artists such as Robert Rauschenberg. After teaching for a spell at Stourbridge College of Art in the West Midlands he decided in 1966 to move to the United States and was eventually offered a place in 1967 at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore.

In Baltimore Salt noticed the work of photographers Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander and how the photographers’ documentary style relieved them of the need of any self-consciousness in terms of artistic technique.

Salt was to start painting from closely zoomed photographs of car interiors. The paintings were at the time still painterly interpretative representations of the photographs. He was later to attempt to remove traces of interpretation by following the photographs ever more closely. One painting of this more faithfully detailed style was taken directly from a Buick catalogue.

Salt was planning to return to England at the end of his Baltimore engagement in 1969 but when a New York dealer bought two of his works he decided to to move to that city. His work in New York moved away from consumerist portrayals of car interiors to work that was based on his own photos. After his discovery of a scrapyard under Brooklyn Bridge the images began to be of more mangled or wrecked cars.

It was in New York that Salt developed a relationship with dealer Ivan Karp who was on the point of opening his own gallery and who had a portfolio of artists associated with the then emerging Photorealist movement. Salt’s first one man exhibition was in New York in 1969. He was then to feature in 1972 in the prestigious Documenta 5 exhibition in Kassel, West Germany, where the American Photorealist movement first gained an international reputation.

Through the early seventies his work became even more detailed and realistic realistic painstakingly using an airbrush with stencil to obtain the photo-like precision he sought. His characteristic iconography was of photos of trashy trailers and beaten up cars taken in poor semi-rural areas.

As well as the astonishing realism there is a poignancy to these pictures and possibly the slight feeling of voyeurism in the way they go to depicting poverty. Perhaps there is something harking back to the rural works of the English 18th Century. Perhaps we will see these works on the chocolate boxes of the next century (hopefully not).

The above is an installation shot of Pink Trailer with Plymouth 1977 at the Ikon’s This Could Happen to You exhibition last year. For more images go to www.ikon-gallery.co.uk where you can view a pdf file.

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A quiet place in the New Forest

Posted on May 1, 2011 by Richard Stokes

Donkey

Royal Oak North Gorley

Fo peace and quiet go to North Gorley, 2 miles south of Fordingbridge. There is a small plain with wild cattle, horses and donkeys, tranquil ponds and a thatched pub.