The Round-up
October 14, 2014 in Events, General, Links, News
The Lakes International Comic Art Festival starts this Friday, 17 October, and runs through the weekend. Taking place in Kendal, it features talks, panels, workshops, screenings and more for cartoon and comic enthusiasts of all ages.
Those appearing at the event include creators of graphic novels, kids’ comics and newspaper strips, such as Dave Gibbons, Scott McCloud, Sarah McIntyre, Eddie Campbell and Stephen Collins along with cartoonists from The Phoenix and Viz. The latter’s promotional image, above, is a cheeky Fat Slags parody of the British Library’s Comics Unmasked exhibition poster.
A new exhibition called Hogarth’s London opens at the Cartoon Museum in London next week (22 October). It will feature William Hogarth’s images of the London of 250 years ago, both the highs and lows, which are some of the most recognisable pictures in the city’s history.
As usual the musuem will have a series of events to tie in with is main exhibition (which runs unril 18 January) including and evening of Baroque music and dance, gin, beer (and some cartooning) called The Hogarth Hop
Also opening on 22 October at the Chris Beetles Gallery in St James’s, is a new selling exhibition of original artwork by Donald McGill, the acknowledged master of the saucy seaside postcard who was dubbed “the Picasso of the pier” by Dennis Potter. The show, which features more than 100 cartoons, runs until 8 November and ties in with a new biography of McGill by Bernard Crossley.
Also also on 22 October (busy day), Procartoonists member Chris Burke can be seen drawing and painting live at The Porterhouse in Covent Garden, in an event called Turner on the Terrace to promote the release of the new Mike Leigh film about the great artist (Turner that is, not Chris Burke). More details here.
Finally, our thoughts go out to the family of the cartoonist Bryan Reading who has died, aged 79, after battling cancer. He was a friend of many Procartoonists members and is remembered as a very funny cartoonist and a master draughtsman, as this cartoon shows.
by Glenn Marshall
Hats off to JR
February 10, 2019 in Comment, General
Caricature by © Rupert Besley
Rupert Besley writes:
…John Ruskin, that is. It’s his 200th birthday in February and there are events lined up to mark the occasion. One such is Chris Beetles’ forthcoming exhibition ‘Ruskin’s Artists’ (13 Feb-2 Mar), celebrating the work of those he cherished.
Helen Allingham ‘A Devonshire Cottage’ (from © Chris Beetles Gallery catalogue)
A shame for me I don’t have a spare £6.5k kicking around (so far, searches of jacket linings and sofa backs have brought in only one parking ticket and two licorice imps). With that kind of money, I’d be straight on to Beetles to buy up one of those Helen Allingham watercolours.
Ruskin was a polymath of the first order. It would take more than a page to do justice to the full range of his accomplishments. No mean artist himself, he achieved a great deal more as art critic than any since. He was hugely important in championing the genius of Turner and he played a big part in the 20,000 artworks of the Turner Bequest being saved for the nation. He greatly influenced the Pre-Raphaelites and was the inspiration behind the Arts & Crafts Movement that followed on (Wm Morris, CR Ashbee, Walter Crane etc, whose fine creations currently star in the BBC series on Fri nights).
Wasn’t it Brian Sewell who was given to making disparaging remarks about ‘mere cartoons’? This, certainly, is a BS quote: ‘there has never been a first-rank woman artist. Only men are capable of aesthetic greatness.’Refreshing, then, to see (as the Beetles Gallery blurb points out) that, well over a century back, Ruskin was equally supportive of female and male contemporary artists and that he considered Tenniel cartoons to contain ‘as high qualities as it is possible to find in modern art.’
Ruskin was much mocked in his time and repeatedly since. Leaving aside as less important his poor form in the marital bed, Ruskin the thinker and writer was way ahead of his time. Gandhi claimed Ruskin as a major influence, as had Tolstoy and the founders of the Labour Party. Outraged by the downsides of industrialisation, capitalism and urbanisation in full swing around him (ugliness, pollution, disconnect from nature and, above all, exploitation of and deterioration in quality of life for the working classes), Ruskin positively exploded with solutions, all of them still attractive today. Much of what he proposed had to await the arrival of the welfare state, but institutions that owed much to his thinking, such as the National Trust and the National Parks movement, came about in his lifetime or soon after. Other concepts that he worked on, like the greenhouse-effect and fractal geometry in nature, had to wait their time, some century and a half later.
Visionary, conservationist and social revolutionary, Ruskin put his ideas into practice where he could. Believing in the power of art and natural beauty to transform lives and restore human dignity, Ruskin taught a generation to see things differently. And he took on establishment snobberies that allowed intellectuals to look down on manual work. As Oxford’s first Professor of Fine Art, in 1874-5 he got undergraduates – including the young Oscar Wilde – to work on road-mending in N Oxford as a way to teach them the virtues of physical labour.
Ruskin’s high-minded aims in art rather outshine the me-me-me, self-publicising commercialism of so many artists fêted today. JR is one to remember, I reckon.
Tags: Chris Beetles Gallery, Helen Allingham, John Ruskin, Rupert Besley No Comments »