The Fortnightly Flag #07 - The Romans and Elvis

The Fortnightly Flag

26th September 2017

 

 

 

The first of this season's Archaeologists' Meetings was a lecture by archaeologist Harvey Sheldon on "Roman pottery manufacturing in Highgate Wood."  He has worked on excavations on the site since the 1960s so knows whereof he speaks.  I was especially interested as I come from this part of North London.  The Brownies used to hold their district meetings in Highgate Wood.  I had no idea there were Roman kilns under our feet.  They were not discovered until 1966 by which time we had moved to Hertfordshire so this is the first I've heard of it.

 

 

 

So to St Albans to visit the Roman Museum (above) which has an impressive collection of Roman pottery mostly of local or London manufacture.  Also some well-preserved wall-paintings, naturalistic subjects on the distinctive Roman red ground with gilded borders, and a number of beautiful mosaics.

 

Then on to the Fighting Cocks (Ye Olde Fighting Cocks as it is rather unnecessarily known) which claims to be the oldest pub in England dating back to the 11th century.  I had always believed the distinctive hexagonal shape was down to it being used as a cockpit for centuries but it was apparently only used for cock-fighting in the 19th century when it took place in the bar.  Cock-fighting was banned in 1849 and the pub was briefly renamed "The Fisherman" but as this stretch of the River Ver is not popular with anglers it reverted to the name everyone knew it by.  Its distinctive shape is actually due it being originally a dovecote, sited near the Abbey.  It was moved to its present site and became a pub after the Reformation, so not the oldest pub at all but one of the oldest surviving timber-frame buildings.  Oliver Cromwell is said to have stayed for one night during the English Civil War (1642-1645).  What he thought of it is not recorded (Bed lumpy? Food terrible? Premier Inn?  We don't know.)  It is very picturesque so popular with local artists.  Here is a sketch I did some while back from the other side of the park - Multi-media on paper.

 

 



 

The Romans imported wine and drank a lot of it judging from the number of amphorae dug up but nothing keeps a Brit from his beer which leads us neatly to the St Albans Beer and Cider Festival which is next weekend 29 September - 2nd October at the Alban Arena.  £3 entry unless you are a member of CAMRA (Campaign for Real Ale) in which case admission is free.  300 different ales and ciders are on offer.  You are not advised to try them all.

 

 

Back in Wales the Porthcawl Elvis Festival is in full swing and the town centre is given over to all things Elvis-related.

 



 

 

Ladies of all ages strut their stuff in 1950s style prom dresses, chaps dust off their leather jackets and daft furry ears and Hawaiian garlands abound.  Elvis songs belt out of every doorway and confederate and US flags flutter all along John Street and The Esplanade.  I am not aware that Elvis had any connection whatsoever to South Wales so it's completely barking but good fun and rounds off the summer season nicely.



The Fortnightly Flag #06 Leonardo to Rembrandt

The Fortnightly Flag  All about Art
12th September 2017



Rembrandt's Lion

I was walking home one day past Habitat's showroom. The floor to ceiling glass shop-front was plastered with jazzy posters by modern artists in bright garish colours which interested me not at all. My eye was caught by a small print 8" x 6" of a chalk sketch of a lion. It stopped me in my tracks. I just had to go over and take a closer look.

When I looked at it closely I had to laugh. It was by Rembrandt. The other artists were all pretty good artists but when you can stop someone dead in the street you have really got 'it' whatever 'it' actually is.

I am reminded of this because I have just been to the National Portrait Gallery's new exhibition "The Encounter: From Leonardo to Rembrandt" #The Encounter  npg.org.uk/encounter

The title is a bit of a tease because the collection only includes two sketches by Rembrandt and Leonardo, one apiece, neither of which is particularly remarkable. Tehran's contribution is a page of small doodles, quite superior doodles to be fair but doodles nonetheless in no particular context, while Leonardo's sketch is a small male nude which is just an exercise in proportion. I wouldn't go just to see them.

However the rest of the exhibition is a good collection of drawings by other Renaissance masters, the theme being the relationship between the artist and the sitter so most of the sketches are preparatory drawings for portraits.

From an English perspective the collection of drawings by Hans Holbein the Younger of subjects from the Tudor court are fascinating.

Artists need two things - inspiration and technique and, as usual, I wanted to study the latter. The artists use Silverpoint (a silver point on prepared paper - we now use pencil because it's cheaper), black, red and white chalk and sometimes all three, pen and ink, and chalk with a colourwash to give more depth or to highlight a feature like a red cap.

I can't show you any of the Masters because photography is forbidden in the exhibition but to demonstrate how important classical drawing techniques are to modern artists here are a couple of my sketches which use them.

The Head of a Woman uses the colourwash technique but by way of a modern twist I added the colour digitally. The original drawing is just pencil on paper.

The discus thrower, from a statue in the British Museum, is charcoal, red chalk and pencil on paper which makes the sketch a bit more dramatic.

And all because I could not walk past Rembrandt's Lion.

The Fortnightly Flag #05

The Fortnightly Flag

29 August 2017

WRITING AND ART

I went to visit the Bank of England Museum's 'The City in Literature' exhibition which celebrates the Bank's literary connections. A number of prominent writers have worked in banking but apart from Kenneth Grahame (The Wind in the Willows), who worked for the Bank all his working life, none of them seem to have liked banking very much although it brought several of them some financial stability.

P.G. Wodehouse, who joined HSBC in Lombard Street in 1900 "was often late and once disgraced himself by defacing a new ledger". The Bank charitably adds that he was keen on the staff sports club and his 1910 novel 'Psmith in the City" was based on his experiences.

Many writers and artists have been inspired by tales of fraud and financial crisis since this tends to affect everyone. There are cartoons on display by James Gillray who in 1797 first depicted the Bank as 'The Old Lady of Threadneedle Street'.  There are also cartoons by John Tenniel published in Punch in 1890 referring to reckless speculation by the merchant bank Baring Brothers. The collapse of the banking system was only averted by a rescue of £17 million orchestrated by William Liddendale, Governor in 1889-1892, which sounds vaguely familiar. Also the fact that misdemeanours committed by the Chief Cashier, Frank May, were deemed 'unactionable' although they led to the establishment of the Audit Department in 1894.

I found the exhibition fascinating and admission is free.

My own contribution to the City in Literature is a stage play 'The Liquidator' (cast of 6, 1 set) about a couple of nefarious bankers on the run from the eponymous heroine who is trying to track down their assets.

From there I went along Lothbury to the Guildhall Art Gallery, also free of charge, where the City of London displays around 250 of its collection of around 3000 paintings. My thanks to the City of London guide who was excellent. The Guildhall gallery has many fine paintings but is best known for its good collection of Pre-Raphaelites.




In the basement the Guildhall Art Gallery has the remains of London's Roman Amphitheatre which was discovered when the old building was being redeveloped.  Rebuilding was held up nine years while the site was excavated.  There is not a lot to see apart from some walls and ancient drains but the display is imaginative.  There is a black line around the square in front of the Guildhall showing the extent of the amphitheatre.  It is huge.



The Fortnightly Flag #04

 

The Fortnightly Flag

 

15th August 2017

 

WRITING AND ART  ARCHAEOLOGY AND HISTORY  STAGE AND SCREEN

 

WRITING AND ART

 

The Hive, Kew Gardens

 

Another must-see art event in London this summer is The Hive at Kew Gardens, an art installation intended to give an impression of what it's like to be inside a beehive, part of Kew Gardens' on-going campaign to regenerate our dwindling population of honeybees (kew.org/bees).  For my part I have planted more lavender in the garden.  Bees love lavender.

 

 

 

 

 

The Hive is a metal mesh structure 17 metres tall.  A feat of British engineering, it was commissioned by the UK Government and created by artist Wolfgang Buttress, Simmonds Studio and BDP.  Formerly it was the centrepiece of the UK Pavilion at the 2015 Milan Expo.


The Hive is in Kew Gardens until November.

 

 

 

 

 



 

 

Sadly by the time I got there the surrounding meadow garden had gone to seed but the Great Broad Walk, Britain's largest double border which stretches for 320 metres and is packed with 30,000 late summer perennials was gorgeous.

 

 

Art at Kew

 

There are two art galleries at Kew, the Shirley Sherwood Gallery of Botanical Art housed in a modern building linked to the 19th century Marianne North Gallery.  Botanical Art is a specialist genre, usually in pencil and watercolour to record fine detail.  Its purpose is to produce scientifically accurate drawings of botanical specimens. In the hands of talented artists some of these are very beautiful.  The Shirley Sherwood Gallery has a fine collection.  It leads to the Marianne North Gallery.

 

Marianne North

 

Marianne North, born 1830 to a wealthy and well-connected family, was an exceptionally gifted artist.  Her gallery, which she commissioned and arranged herself to show her works in context, contains 848 paintings together with the panel decorations which she painted herself.  Her paintings are exquisitely beautiful.  She travelled across the globe recording the flora and fauna and collecting plants which she sent back to Kew as she was acquainted with the first Director, Joseph Hooker.  Marianne's studies are not strictly botanical being in oils but, crucially, she painted the plants in context and additionally supplied a landscape showing the environment in which they grew.

 

Her landscapes are particularly fine.  They are smaller than those of her male counterparts - size evidently mattered to Victorian male painters - because she was constantly on the move and needed to keep her equipment portable - but the extraordinary range of her paintings from a North American autumn to South American mountains, from India and Indonesia to Australia, New Zealand and Japan surely puts her up there with the best.  No-one else that I can think of painted such a wide range of different landscapes.

 

The Gallery, for reasons of conservation,, has been plunged into semi-darkness, which makes it hard to see the paintings in all their vibrant colour but Kew offers for sale a very good biography "Marianne North: A very intrepid painter" by Michelle Payne shop.kew.org/kewbooksonline which gives a straight-forward and informative account of her life and work with many illustrations of her wonderful artwork.

 

ARCHAEOLOGY AND HISTORY

 

Greek DNA Analysis reveals surprises

 

I studied Greek history and literature in my first year at university so have a long-standing interest in the subject.  In a recent issue of Nature journal researchers published the results of their analysis of genetic data from skeletons dating from the Bronze Age.  The team, led by Dr Iosif Lazardis from Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts, focussed on the Minoan Civilisation of Crete (2600 - 1000 BC) and the Mycaenean culture of mainland Greece (1600 - 1100 BC)

 

Most of the people appear to be local deriving 62% - 86% of their ancestry from the people who introduced agriculture to Europe from Anatolia (Turkey) in Neolithic times but the Bronze Age Mycenaean and Minoan skeletons revealed ancestry from populations originating in either the Caucasus mountains or Iran.

 

Between 9% and 17% of their genetic make-up came from this source.  In addition, the team report the Mycenaeans, but not the Minoans, show evidence of genetic input from people who lived further north on the flat grasslands that stretch from Eastern Europe to Central Asia.  Between 4% and 16% of their ancestry came from this northern source.

 

We were taught - based mainly on linguistic evidence - that the Mycaenean Greeks were descended from the Dorians who came from the north.  This appears to be scientifically accurate and the new evidence gives us some idea who these Dorians were. 

 

Surprisingly the researchers found no evidence of suggested migrations to Greece or Crete from ancient Egypt or from the areas of the eastern Mediterranean occupied by the Phoenicians, who were famously a sea-faring nation.  This is especially surprising in the case of Crete which also had a maritime culture but only ten skeletons were examined from the island and it may be that a larger sample would provide a wider perspective.

 

STAGE AND SCREEN

 

Tom Hiddleston to play Hamlet at RADA

 

The Thor and Night Manager star will lead the cast in a fund-raising production of Hamlet for the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) which will run from 1 - 23 September at RADA's Jerwood Vanbrugh Theatre in London.  The production will be directed by Kenneth Branagh, RADA's president, who also directed Tom Hiddleston in his breakthrough movie Thor in which he plays the mischievous Norse God Loki.  All proceeds will go towards RADA's Attenborough campaign to raise £20m to upgrade one of their main London sites and provide accommodation for their students.

 

Gina McKee at Shakespeare's Globe

 

Gina McKee will play the title role in a production of Boudica, a  new play telling the story of Britain's famous warrior queen written by Tristan Bernays and direted by Eleanor Rhode which opens on Friday 8th September at The Globe Theatre on the South Bank.  blog.shakespearesglobe.com

 

 

The Fortnightly Flag #03 Senior Open Tintagel Royal Porthcawl Film and Drama news

The Fortnightly Flag

1st August 2017

 

 

 

WRITING AND ART            ARCHAEOLOGY AND HISTORY     STAGE AND SCREEN

 

 

WRITING AND ART

 

 

 

This week I went to the Senior Open Championship www.senioropenchampionship.com at the Royal Porthcawl Golf Club. 

 

The weather was atrocious even by the standards of South Wales which, let's face it, can be quite moist but the Royal Porthcawl is one of the best links courses (don't go by my opinion - this was from Tom Watson who described it as an 'unsung course') and the tournament was very well organised so, rain and wind apart, we had a good time and saw some of the top golfers we have followed since we were all a lot younger and less grey.

This got me thinking about how much sport in Britain has influenced our art and literature.  My favourite golfing book is P. G. Wodehouse's charming and funny collection of short stories as told by the Oldest Member 'The Clicking of Cuthbert'.  No prior knowledge of golf is needed.  It will make you laugh anyway.

 

                                                      ARCHAEOLOGY AND HISTORY

 

 

New discoveries at Tintagel - Life in Post-Roman Cornwall

 

My first novel 'The Serpent's Cove' was set near Tintagel and I am currently researching post-Roman Britain so I was excited by the news that archaeologists at the site have made important new discoveries there.  Last year's dig by the Cornwall Archaeological Unit, the first research excavation at the castle in decades, confirmed that it was certainly a royal site with links to Ireland, Scotland and Brittany south to the Eastern Mediterranean.  Finds included a fine Phocaean red slipped ware bowl from Turkey, imported amphorae from Southern Turkey or Cyprus and fine glassware from Spain.

 

Evidence showed that someone did live like a King at Tintagel on a diet of oysters, roast pork and fine wine, dining and drinking from good quality imported tableware and glasses from Spain.

 

It used to be assumed that the fall of the Roman Empire in Britain threw the islands into obscurity but finds at Tintagel confound this suggestion which is good news for me, of course, as it also adds evidence to the argument I put forward as a result of my own research in my book 'A History of Post-Roman Britain: The High Kings".

 

Jacky Nowaskowski, the project director at the archaeological unit says their plan in 2017 is to open up a much larger area on the southern terrace to get a good look at the scale and size of the stone buildings they have unearthed.  Photos and more information can be found at www.englishheritage.org.uk/tintagel.

 

Although the archaeologists say we do not know which kings lived at Tintagel this is not strictly true.  King Mark of Cornwall and the King Arthur of the Tintagel legend are both mythical but Constantine II, the nephew of the real King Arthur, was King of Cornwall and succeeded his uncle in 543 AD.  He is mentioned in Gildas (c 560 AD) as a contemporary who was still alive at that date.  His son, Conanus Aurelianus, also mentioned in Gildas, succeeded him, so we know of at least two of the kings from documentary evidence, who would have been based at Tintagel in the late sixth century and who were the likely owners of the objects unearthed in the dig.

 

Royal Porthcawl Golf Club - Local History

 

I unexpectedly learned a bit of local history at the Senior Open.  The Royal Porthcawl Golf Club is a historic local institution.  It dated back to the 13th November 1891 when H. J. Simpson and the Vivian brothers, Willlie and Harry (the Vivians were an influential family in South Wales - I once lived at Clyne Castle in Swansea which belonged to the family of wealthy copper manufacturers - along with some other locals met at the Angel Hotel in Cardiff to set up a Golf Club.  Porthcawl, which had originally been a coal port, had recently become a quiet holiday resort, as it was superseded by the larger docks at Barry and Cardiff to take the bigger coal ships that could not fit in the harbour at Porthcawl.  The first site for a nine-hole golf course was Locks Common but the club gradually moved north, leaving the original course which was full of cart tracks and holes left by cattle to the ladies (!) and an 18-hole course was established behind the convalescent home 'The Miners' Rest' (where Florence Nightingale once worked - I didn't know that either) where the distinctive red club-house still overlooks Rest Bay.

 

STAGE AND SCREEN

I mentioned in my last blog Alan Ayckbourn's new play "The Divide" (in two parts lasting six hours) will have its world premiere at the Edinburgh Festival @edinfest.  Edinburgh International Festival www.eif.co.uk runs from August 4th to August 28th 2017 presenting performers from the worlds of opera, music, theatre and dance for three weeks.

Also in August are two music festivals which feature performance art and visual arts as well as music.

For campers and glampers Wilderness is at Cornbury Park, Oxfordshire from August 3rd to August 6th.  The line-up includes Two Door Cinema Club, Grace Jones, Artwork, Nightmares on Wax, Bonobo, Michael Kiwanuka, Toots and The Maytals, Ray BLK and Sigrid.

Curated by Craig Richards (no relation) Houghton includes visual art and sculpture as well as a musical line-up including Ricardo Villalobos, Nicolas Jaar, Floating Points, Seth Troxler, Andrew Weatherall, Ben UFO, Optimo, Joy Orbison and Cassy.  It will take place at Houghton Hall, London from Friday 11th August 2017 to Sunday 13th August 2017.

Watford Palace Theatre are holding an 'Elton John's Glasses' Open Day on 10th September, which is free for all, in conjunction with their autumn production of 'Elton John's Glasses'.  There will be backstage tours and a display of objects from Watford in 1984 (I remember that!) including items from the FA Cup Final.  They are collecting for Watford Museum and the Hertfordshire Heritage Hub and are interested in objects, photos, clothing and memorabilia which illustrate what was happening in Watford in 1984.  My mother was teaching at a local primary school so may have some photos I can look out.  The theatre is asking people to bring their items along to be digitally recorded and/or potentially donated to the Museum.

Finally, Tom Hanks will be speaking about his book #Uncommon Type at @southbankcentre's London Literature Festival this November.  Tickets go on sale at 10:00 am on 2nd August.
po.st/TomHanksTickets#UncommonType.

 









The Fortnightly Flag #02

The Fortnightly Flag

18th July 2017

 

WRITING AND ART    ARCHAEOLOGY AND HISTORY    STAGE AND SCREEN

 

 

Writing and Art

The must-see art event of this summer is the exhibition of work by the Japanese master Hokusai (1760-1849) currently at the British Museum www.britishmuseum.org

 

 

 

Creation is my Master

Katsushika Hokusai was born in Edo (modern Tokyo) in 1760 and died aged 90 in 1849.  He often changed his professional name but was originally named Tokitaro.  Apprenticed to a woodblock cutter in his teens, in 1779 he joined the studio of Katsukawa Shunsho, a leading artist in the floating world (ukiyo-e) school of art which celebrated the hedonistic pleasures of Edo and remained with him until his teacher died in 1792.

 

One of the early works in the exhibition 'Yuzhi and her dragon' (1798) bears a seal declaring 'Creation is my master' - Hokusai's personal affirmation of an artist's vocation.

 

From 1807 is a lovely painting of the Warrior hero Tamatomo exhibiting Hokusai's skill as a fantasy artist, a style that has much influenced Western fantasy art, and the energy and life he instils in his figures.  It also demonstrates the hallmarks of his style, subtle colouring, a simple landscape as a background and, in this painting, a clever use of gold leaf to create the effect of autumn leaves, just dappled dabs of gold in drifts across the picture.  Tamatomo's black bow stands out against the muted colours.  It is just gorgeous.

 

In 1820 Hokusai re-invented himself as Iitsu (One Again) following the East Asian belief that at 61 a person's life-cycle begins again. His '36 Views of Mount Fuji' (there are actually more) was published in 1831 when he was in his early 70s.

 

He learned the use of perspective in European Art from Shiba Kokan (1747-1818).  There is an example of this artist's work in the exhibition showing his introduction of European perspective into Japanese art, use of natural colour and, one of Hokusai's favourite subjects, a breaking wave.  No artist comes from nowhere.

 

This use of perspective is in marked contrast to traditional Japanese style which shows perspective by putting different levels of viewpoint one on top of another with the most distant viewpoint at the top.

 

Hokusai quickly mastered the principles of European perspective and became adept at it.

 

'The Flower-viewing Party' (1824-26) shows how he demonstrated his skill by placing the distant garden in the lower part of the picture.  There are four levels of viewpoint in this painting - the grass in the foreground, the middle distance where the figures are standing, then, clearly placed behind and below them, the garden and cherry trees with the clouds and sky beyond them.  This must have seemed quite an extraordinary shift in perspective to Japanese eyes in the early 1820s.

 

The '36 Views' demonstrate the spare use of colour as well as Hokusai's superb technique.  In 'Irises and grasshopper' the water in which the irises are growing is suggested audaciously just with a wash of Prussian blue.  It is also used to represent water in the picture of the 8-plank bridge in Mikawa (1834) with unpainted paper providing the light on the water.  He also cleverly uses just straight lines to suggest the horizon.  At the same time, although the landscape is rendered with such simplicity, the figures, which are tiny, are each drawn as individuals in fine detail.  It's a real tour de force and, for me, another favourite.

 

He worked with his daughter Oi, who was a fine painter in her own right.  A lovely scroll of chrysanthemums caught my eye, beautifully detailed and richly decorative.

 

I bought the book published in conjunction with the exhibition, 'Hokusai: Beyond the Great Wave' edited by Timothy Clark, published by Thames and Hudson www.thamesandhudson.com and the British Museum www.britishmuseum.org.  It's a tad expensive at £35 (and heavy) but chock-full of wonderful illustrations comprehensively researched and will make a great addition to your Art Book collection or start one off.

 

Archaeology and History

Exciting New Finds at Vindolanda

A new hoard of Ancient Roman writing tablets has been found at the Roman fort of Vindolanda on Hadrian's Wall in Northumberland.  It consists of around 25 Roman ink documents on wooden writing tablets (letters, lists and personal correspondence).  The fragile, wafer-thin pieces of wood about the size of modern postcards were found during the excavation of a small area of the site three metres in length.  They are likely to represent part of an archive from the late 1st century AD.  Some of the letters are complete and had partial or whole confronting pages.  This is where the pages are protected by the back of adjoining pages and are the most exceptional discoveries providing the greatest chance of the ink writing being preserved.

 

The first Vindolanda tablets were discovered by Robin Birley in 1973.  These documents are the very personal accounts of the residents of the fort, mostly written before the construction of Hadrian's Wall in cAD120.  They form the most important archive of Roman writing from north-western Europe, a discovery that has revolutionised our understanding of life on the frontier of the Roman Empire.

 

More information and photographs can be found on the website at www.vindolanda.com/pressrelease

Twitter: @VindolandaTrust

Facebook: @thevindolandatrust

 

Stage and Screen

The Royal Court Theatre (@royalcourt) has announced its new season in which two thirds of writers and directors are women.  Compare this with when I started as a playwright in 1979 when you could have counted us all with your fingers and toes.  This is an enormous improvement. (Cheers) Having said that the Royal Court has never put on any of my plays. (Boo! Chiz! Shame etc.)

 

Alan Ayckbourn's #The Divide will play at the Old Vic Theatre (www.oldvictheatre.com) from 30 Jan - 10 Feb following its world premiere at the Edinburgh International Festival (@edinfest

 

The Divide is a tale that unflinchingly explores a dystopian society of repression, insurrection and forbidden love.  It is directed by Annabel Bolton, an Associate Director of The Old Vic. 

 

The play is set in the aftermath of a deadly contagion which a century from now has decimated the English population and rendered contact between men and women fatal.  Under the dictates of an elusive Preacher an unthinkable solution is enforced.  Separated by The Divide, the adult survivors are segregated by gender.  Men wear white as a mark of their purity and the still-infected women wear black as a mark of their sin.

 

It's a far cry from Alan Ayckbourn's signature Middle England comedies.  It will be interesting to see what he makes of the subject and, please note, another woman director. 

 

 

 

 



 



The Fortnightly Flag

Writing and  Art                                 Archaeology and History                       Stage and Screen            
 

Writing and Art

Just returned from a Writers' Retreat at Moniack Mhor, Scotland's Creative Writing Centre near Inverness, organised by the Society of Authors, Scotland. My first writers' retreat and my first visit to Scotland. Fifteen writers in a variety of genres got together to work in peace and tranquillity in idyllic surroundings and talk about literature, a thing almost unheard of in my long experience. Writers usually talk about money.