Dear Members
Our annual Garden Party event in Dulwich held
on 19th June was well attended and greatly enjoyed by members and friends of the group including John Allen and Jon Crane. It was particularly good to see Mary Anderson and Barbara Jeremiah who had travelled some distance to be with us. Once again, our sincere thanks go to Ann who kindly opened her beautiful house and garden. The lunch was delicious showing off the culinary skills of our members who generously contributed to a variety of scrumptious dishes. As the weather was fine we enjoyed sitting outside, renewing friendships, catching up on news and later wandering around the stunning garden.
July seems to be the time for parties and this year has been no exception. The other day I met my friend Julia Tester, who, after a career in education, bravely embarked on a Fine Art’s degree at Camberwell. I knew she was very interested in the American artist Cy Twombly and had based her final thesis on ‘Handwriting, scrawling and graffiti’. Always on the alert for current trends as well as thinking about our next exhibition in May 2010, I decided to do a little research on the subject as it may have some relevance to our theme of ‘Letters’.
Graffiti is defined by the Encyclopaedia Britannica as ‘a form of visual communication, usually illegal, involving the unauthorised marking of public space by an individual or group…..graffiti can be understood as anti-social behaviour performed in order to gain attention. It is also a form of art.’
Graffiti is now international: we see it on urban subways, railway sidings and carriages, underpasses and bridges, almost anywhere there is a derelict wall or building.
Since the late 1960s when it began to be used by political activists in Philadelphia, many scripts and personal styles have been developed. It is the bane of town councils who spend thousands of pounds on its removal, only to find it reappears. Young people are particularly attracted to it and as one teenager stated ‘Maybe if Northampton council put up a legal place 4 us lot 2 graffiti then we couldn’t do it where it wasn’t wanted.’ and ‘Some people are never going to get their work shown in a gallery, so the only way of showing it is on a wall.’ Like it or hate it, graffiti is here to stay and is now widely regarded as an art form which can be traced back to our early ancestors writing on walls and the Egyptians with their hieroglyphics.
Cy Twombly, highly regarded as an abstract expressionist painter was born in 1928 and last year had a retrospective exhibition at Tate Modern. Along with Jackson Pollock, he has attempted during his lifetime to break the conventions of classical painting in order to create something new. His approach, not unlike the automatic techniques used by the Surrealists, is to build up a series of marks which come from within rather than a representation. He uses numbers, letters, splatters, scribbles and scratches in crayon and pencil on multiple layers of paint. Combined with his love of poetry, classical mythology, light and landscape his work has certain affinities with Turner.
As embroiderers, I think we can find inspiration from his paintings by studying our references intently i.e. sketches and photographs , then setting them aside to work with our inner vision using the materials in a more spontaneous and hepatic way. This can often produce more lively and interesting results rather than a carefully planned design. Some members may remember reading the groundbreaking book ‘Stitchery’ by Nik Krevitsky (Reinhold 1966). This talented multi-media American artist showed at the American Museum of Contemporary Crafts and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. He also had a one man show of ‘Stitcheries’ which toured between 1963-64, in addition to contributing much in the international field of education. As I recall, this book illustrated a very direct approach to the materials and his love of stitchery was richly innovative and exciting.