Having been commissioned to write a review of two of Ruthin Craft Centre’s three new shows, I was already familiar with their ceramic exhibit On Your Table when I arrived for my fifth drawing day.
As the title suggests, most of the work in Gallery 1 is placed on table-like plinths, most at hip-height, or on shelves along the walls, making it a much more focussed use of the space and a very different challenge to that posed by Helen Yardley’s mostly wall-hung rugs.
Almost six months into the project and you’d think I’d be over my nerves by now. I’m not. In fact, sometimes they feel more acute, sharper. As a consequence the first few drawings are hesitant, scribbly and I long to throw myself and my sketchbook on the floor and kick and yell. I can’t and don’t of course and instead sit there making my marks and hoping, sometimes beyond hope, that things will improve.
The opening of the doors bring a flurry of people who bend over and peer into the bowls, jugs and cups on display.
Many look suspiciously like potters, particularly the tall woman in the black bobble hat who studies every pot with careful attention. Many take photographs.
The ceramics are divine and I want to eschew my so far failing attempts to capture these rushing animate beings and draw the pots in their calm, elegant stillness instead.
A couple stop to talk to me, one of whom is wearing an exquisite Scandinavian-style cardigan. “She’s an artist,” says her husband. “Yes,” she says. And then goes on to explain how she studied Zoology but ended up teaching. I ask if I can draw her as she talks. She reluctantly agrees and then begins a tale about some distant members of her family who had a small-holding in rural Wales. “One of the women used to travel to Newtown to sell her butter at the weekly market there. She’d rent a room for the day to eat her sandwiches in.” Then there was another woman, a great-aunt, I think, who, being “crossed in love”, took to her bed, staying there for twenty years tended to by her sisters. Eventually the stories run dry. “Can I go now?” she asks.
There’s a pause in the flurry and I draw Mizuyo Shamashita’s beautiful line of tall-handled vessels.
And then Irena Sibrijns’ collection of bowls, jugs and cups. Her mark making is so joyous.
I move to the other corner of the gallery. I find I can only draw one section at a time – an overview of the whole show is beyond me today. Then I hear the Lost Art Group (a support network for people with dementia and their carers) gathering in Gallery 3.
I watch them make their way into Gallery 2. They lean into the leggy black cabinets containing the suffragette-inspired handkerchiefs. I hear some them sharing stories about their female relatives from that era.
A man with a blue paper mask under his chin, his hands clasped behind his back, stops to look at what I am doing. He smiles but says nothing.
After three and half hours of drawing I’m spent. I’m not satisfied – I never am. But it’s all I can do today.
It’s my second visit to the Tobias and the Angel show at Oriel Davies, and even though I know what to expect, I am still nervous. Thinking it would give me a view of entrance and people going into Gallery 2, my plan was to sit in the corner behind Philip Eglin’s three figures. It was a decision that I immediately begin to doubt as most of the visitors naturally make a bee-line for ‘The Angel’. However, I stay put and start to experiment with placing Eglin’s figures in the foreground and treating the Verrocchio ‘worshippers’ as shadows.
There are so many nuances and textures to this show that cry out for a mixed media approach: the brittle whiteness of Claire Curneen’s figurines’ hands, the glazed shine of Eglin’s blue-splashed Madonna and Child, the creased and pleated curls of Cecile Johnson Soliz’ paper forms and the razor-sharp, ossified sinewy-ness of Beverley Bell-Hughes sea sculptures. I just need the courage to experiment and possibly fail.
A man strides into the gallery, a manuscript under his arm. He is impossible to capture.
A young woman stops to talk to me. A little diffident at first, she tells me that she began a Fine Art degree but left due to mental health issues after the first year. She still draws.
The striding man returns with a female companion. He brings her over to the Eglin group. “They’re probably too expensive, “she says.
One of the OD’s volunteers is doing a tour of the gallery with a woman walking with two crutches. He talks loudly and volubly about Verrocchio and the Angel. Peering in at one of the small Rembrandt prints the woman on crutches remarks that the dog reminds her of something. “I can’t think what it is, a white dog. In a comic strip…?” “Snowy?” I say, adding, “from Herge’s ‘Adventures of Tintin.” “That’s it,” she replies, evidently delighted.
The same woman stops to talk to me on her way past. I ask if she’s an artist too. “Yes,” she replies, “and I really understand how difficult what you’re trying to do is.” I find myself taking real heart from this.
A seemingly VIP group arrive in the gallery complete with their very own photographer.
Meanwhile I get lost in the ceramics. I love the white against white with the splashes of colour from Jacqui Poncelet’s papery curls and Eglin’s gorgeous blued Madonna. So much of what I am trying to do is about art in space. Sometimes the visitors are almost a secondary concern, inhabiting the temporary aesthetic as umbrae.
I want the stillness that the artworks offer, as the rushing about seems somehow inappropriate. Some stop and look, engaging face-to-face so to speak.
I stand up and move around the gallery with my small book and sketch another woolly-hatted woman gazing at a drawing of hands. Hands are everywhere. (I want to study them in more detail next time).
A blur of figures engage momentarily with Curneen’s angel, whose wings are bent and broken.
An almost empty gallery and I watch as the volunteer on duty gazes at the Verrocchio.
Ah, Eglin’s Madonna….
A quick break and a visit to the café/warm space where I draw Steffan, the director, lunching with Shani Rhys James, Stephen West and Ellie Evelyn Orrell.
A battle of a day and I am too tired to make sound judgements. All I know is that I long to return to both RCC and OD and do better…..