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Monday 8 April 2013
MUSTARD ON WHITE .(scribbled at 09:00 )
...or hot buttery toast. Either way, this 1963 Lichtenstein work is now adorning my bedroom wall in the form of a 65p postcard. The frame is a bargain I picked up from an Oxfam up in the Midlands when I went home to visit my parents' houses the weekend before last. I do love a bit of museum and gallery memorabilia. From Stedelijk Museum Oyster card holders to pin badges from dOCUMENTA 13, I am literally a walking advertisement for every gallery gift shop out there. It's a bit embarrassing.
Here is just some of the cheesy stuff I picked up from Amsterdam, hahah. (From left to right): Rembrandt-shaped eraser, Rembrandt-figure pencil, Modriaan Cup, Vermeer mug, Vermeer Umbrella. The teabags on the left are pure cinnamon and the package on the right of the Vermeer mug is a gift that my youngest sister crafted for me in her Design Technology lessons. It's pretty adorable actually; a rather abstract looking metal pendant which is attached to packaging that she made herself (and even made a 'Tate' logo on the back, haha). I wish my classes in secondary school would have been that cool... my lessons didn't extend much beyond learning how to make a net for a cardboard box.
I'm posting this because I'm proud of the enthusiasm I had for hanging my own pictures after 8 hours at work taking frames off walls. I had to trim the mount for
Youth With an Ivy Wreath , which I picked up at the
Leonardo: Painter at the Court of Milan exhibition at the National Gallery a few years ago. Yes, that exhibition was all the way back in 2011 and I've only just bothered to dig it out from a cupboard. The other works are all by Ed (
http://mrmoltonium.tumblr.com/) , the top one being a gift and the other two I bought at last year's Zine Fair at the New Art Gallery in Walsall.
So, my sister is studying Pop Art as part of her GCSE in Art, so I offered to have her stop the night in London so she could catch the Lichtenstein retrospective at Tate. Which isn't a huge deal of effort on my part, as the 141 bus stops literally outside my house and goes directly to London Bridge, but it involved a huge deal of effort to not implode each time she referred to Lichtenstein as 'Roy' ...as if they were on first name terms. I mean, if you're friends with Damien, Tracey, Jake & Dinos then refer to them as that by all means. But I'm beginning to get a little angry at the GCSE Art syllabus if its condoning referring to artists by their first name. Arghhh. Thankfully, after 30 hours of me reminding her that Lichtenstein died whilst she was barely a 6 month foetus, I have now taught her the ways (ha.). Regardless of all this, I'm pretty damn flattered that she's chosen to draw me repeatedly for some of her GCSE project work:
It was a pretty crazy couple of days, but I managed to give her an insight into what I find so cool about London in less than 30 hours. Starting off at Shoreditch High street to explore Boxpark and the surrounding shops, we walked down Brick Lane via one of the 24hr bagel shops to grab a few cheese bagels for breakfast. My sister is now hooked to those, and the oreo cupcakes that are sold at the café a few doors down from there. Although my sister wants to be a florist (!), she's also got a thing for Rachel Whiteread, and instantly snapped up one of her Olympics 2012 posters (you know the one with all the circles on?), so I thought it only made sense to walk past Whitechapel Gallery so she could see her sculptural work in the flesh, on the Gallery's façade.
I'm a little obsessed with Tower Bridge, so we walked over that and then snacked our way through Borough Market up until we reached the Tate Café, where we stopped for a spot of Earl Grey before enduring half an hour in the queue for my sister to collect her ticket. Hardly surprising, but she spent just as long in the gift shop buying Tate publications as she did actually looking at Lichtenstein's paintings. I spotted a book with a Maurizio Cattelan's Untitled (2007) on the cover (a horse stuck in a wall, basically), which is about the various elements that make up the contemporary art world, so I'll pop by next weekend and pick that up. I hate it when you see something you like in a shop, and how you can utterly obsess over it in your head for days/weeks until you get it. I have no willpower or self control with these things. I only lasted 2 weeks obsessing over investing in a high quality bag before I caved in and bought a 14" Cambridge Satchel in their Covent Garden store. I got a 'V' embossed on its front though, so I guess my first born child will have to be called either Violet, Victor or Veronica so I can pass the bag on to them.
There's this room at Tate where you can arrange your own text and image to create your own Lichtenstein inspired wall piece. It's aimed at anyone under the age of 10 really, but a good 15 minutes was spent there at the beginning of our visit:
We walked over Millenium Bridge and marvelled at St. Paul's before heading back to make pizza (from scratch, obvs.) and pig out on cream scones and trashy horror films. Parfait.
I'd taken a day off work the following day, so after a lie in we made time to bake (some of Jus Roll's, ha!) croissant pastry. Sammy and I both filled ours with an entire bar of dark chocolate each, to replicate a more rich take on
Pain au Chocolat. You can pick it up from Sainsbury's for under £2, bargain! We'd planned to start our day at the
Treasures of the Royal Courts exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, so we hopped on the number 19 bus, which travels on a very architectural-friendly view of London on its way to Knightsbridge. I might start getting this bus to work actually; the views of Westminster would be so beautiful at 7:30am every morning!
Sammy's croissants were to die for!
Freshly squeezed orange juice as part of the David Bowie Is exhibition.
After checking out the Tudors and Stuarts exhibition at the V&A and a few quick gift shop purchases, we hopped over to Harrods for our mid-morning patisserie fix. Sammy opted for a delicious glittery glazed doughnut, which lost most of its icing in the bag, unfortunately:
I on the other hand, had my heart set on making a lego building of chocolate and scoffing it all. These are adorable and admittedly, a little overpriced, so I couldn't afford to build/scoff anything larger than a 2 bedroom semi.
The rest of the Easter weekend was mainly spent eating a ridiculous amount of desserts and buying lots of
new homeware things from H&M, like this new duvet cover (I feel middle aged for getting excited about new bedding...) but I did make time for baking a batch of Slutty Brownies. These are
so easy to make, and theoretically it is cheating as the ingredients don't extend much beyond a few packets of Betty Crocker cake mix, but they are worth baking if you haven't already! The recipe is from
Rose, who writes for my favourite blog; The Londoner. Her posts are quite literally
beautiful. I was a little short on time to take proper recipe photographs, but these should give you the gist of how wonderfully moreish they are:
Labels: ART DESIGN AND ARCHITECTURE, Baking, Baking and Patisserie, London Blog, Mustard on White Postcard, Slutty Brownies, tate
