One of the pleasures of attending the Chatsworth Arts Festival, Art Out Loud, is the opportunity to explore the grounds in between sessions. I have never really had a chance to appreciate the great West Front, which one sees from across the river and was designed post-Talman, possibly by Archer, or even the first Duke himself:-
I was loitering on the ground floor of the National Portrait Gallery waiting for the doors of the National Gallery to open when I discovered a display on the ground floor devoted to work inspired by the long-standing friendship between Ishbel Myerscough and Chantal Joffe. I hadn’t known that they knew one another or that they were at Glasgow School of Art together. I found it oddly powerful to see the way the work of two very different artists interrelates, each one painting themselves alone and together, with children and from behind, totally different in technique, but touching in the way they depict themselves.
This may be my last post about Ai Weiwei, because, after a very full-on couple of days, the exhibition is now open to Friends for a few days before opening to the public on Saturday. It has been fascinating watching someone of such international celebrity remain so calm and unexpectedly low key, pleased mainly to be free and with his son. I finally succumbed to the universal urge to photograph him when he met Edmund de Waal. There was an encounter between two people with a particular interest in the craft of making:-
Now that the exhibition is installed, it is possible to get a sense of the full scope of its ambition before the crowds descend. It’s on a grand scale, as Sidney Smirke’s galleries both allow and encourage, each space discreet, but flowing fluidly into the next. The grandest of the galleries is devoted to an arrangement of metal bars in a wave, symbolising the lost lives of children in the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan owing to poor building construction. 96 tons:-
Trees are up in the courtyard, thanks to the contributions of more than 1,000 people to our Kickstarter campaign. The paraphernalia of installation has been removed and the surrounding barricades, but not the old black armchair which this morning looked like a piece of detritus, but turns out to be carved in marble and based on Ai Weiwei’s father’s armchair:-
I went into our exhibition first thing this morning to see how it looks and how those who have been installing it have fared over what has obviously been a long weekend. I found the exhibition hard to judge last week because the process of installation has been so long and complicated with our own art handlers supplemented by others from the studio. It’s nearly there, just waiting for the finishing touches and probably work on the lighting. I like seeing exhibitions going up and how they come together. This exhibition has, of course, been conceived and planned remotely which makes it all the more remarkable.
I woke up early in order to be able to climb Martinsell, one of the neolithic promontories on the southern edge of the Marlborough Downs. I was taught to revere these hills by my mother who remembered them from her youth when her brother was at school and she must have accompanied him on botanical expeditions as she was able to locate the orchids on Milk Hill forty years afterwards.
This is Giant’s Grave:-
The view eastwards towards Burghclere:-
We had our annual visit to Wiltshire to the gardens at Oare, where the trees are turning to autumn and where there are exotic species collected by plantsmen.
The cyclamen was out in the avenue:-
We had the press conference this morning for our Ai Weiwei exhibition in which all of the world’s press, including the television stations, descended on the RA, as will probably be evident from the news programmes later today. What was interesting was the quality of the discussion and the fact that it was as much political and cultural as it was artistic. There was repeated questioning about the emotional impact of his incarceration and inability to travel and a dawning recognition of the significance of the fact that, after more than a hundred exhibitions which he has done internationally over the last four years, this is the first one that he has actually been able to see.
I have only recently realised that the very Aldo Rossi-like building which greets one’s arrival to the increasingly impressive set of developments by Argent north of King’s Cross is by David Chipperfield. With tubular cast iron columns, cast by the Hargreaves Foundry in Yorkshire, set out in a rigid rectilinear geometry, it could easily have come out of postwar Italy:-
| Charles | Saumarez | Smith | 
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