Red Lodge

Don Quixote de Bristol?

Fleeing the crowds in Park Street yesterday (they'd come to see Luke Jerram's fabulous Park and Slide), we ducked into Red Lodge, the Tudor house on the hill above Colston Hall. As ever, the house was cool, calm and full of surprises, my favourite things this time around being the fireplace in the Print Room with its 18th century tiles, and the Skinner chair.

A bit of a mish-mash, period-wise, but I love the tiles

Scapegoat

Not at all sure what this is supposed to be, a sort of duck-billed horse?

Details of the carving on late c17 chair made for Bishop Skinner, showing Actaeon being turned into a stag by Artemis

Here she is, looking quite fierce

Actaeon about to be eaten by his own hounds. Prince Albert once sat here, apparently

Detail of stone carving in awesome Great Oak Room

Red Lodge was a guest house when Elizabeth I came to stay at the Great House down the hill, where Colston Hall now stands. Nowadays it's a welcome retreat for people undergoing treatment or supporting loved ones through illness at the hospitals down the road.

FFI: Bristol City Council

The Slow Death of Banksy's Reaper

Banksy's Reaper: rowing nowhere slowly

I was sitting recently outside The Ostrich, one of those Bristol dockside pubs that has seen its fair share of comings and goings over the centuries, nursing a half of cider and looking across the water at a picture I see several times a week. In fact, other than paintings we have at home, I probably see it more often than any other artwork. This picture is rudimentary in the extreme, a hasty sketch in white paint on the hull of a boat, just above the waterline.

My daughter tried to persuade me the other day that the picture is of a monkey, but I'm fairly sure it's supposed to be the Grim Reaper, rowing a boat as hundreds of people do in the Harbour every week. Not that this Reaper would actually be going anywhere, were he really rowing: he looks more like a gruesome old signalman yanking at his levers to change the points (and, no doubt, send two trains hurtling towards each other).

on Stokes Croft

This rowing reaper was painted by the Bristol street artist known to the world as Banksy, a man renowned for his ability to create quite substantial paintings in public without anyone noticing. He hasn't often taken to water, and this note in his book 'Cut It Out' suggests why:

One night I painted the side of Bristol's new harbour bridge [Pero's Bridge] with  a message about the slave trade, which got painted over within six hours of daybreak. Afterwards, I made the slowest getaway in criminal history, splashing through the darkness in a tiny rowing boat before stopping off to paint my name on the side of the Thekla.

This tag was removed, against the wishes of the boat's owners (Thekla houses a music venue and nightclub), by Bristol City Council, whose long campaign against Banksy has distinctly Pink Panther-ish overtones, so the maverick dauber came back with the Reaper. It has survived the Thekla's 2006 refit and paint job, so that today Death occupies a square of dark grey on the otherwise green hull. Various patches of paint in greenish-greyish hues show where other tags have been deleted.

Blue paint cleaned off by BCC

I'm not suggesting that the Rowing Reaper has any great significance, but it interests me a lot more than some of the officially sanctioned art on display nearby. What I love about Banksy's Bristol pictures is that they are expressions of an inventive and wily character at work; they tend to be tucked round corners, just off major thoroughfares like Stokes Croft and Park Street, in the sort of places you could stick up a scaffold or a ladder without anyone noticing; the rats and monkeys and so on just pop up as you're walking along. They make you smile, or not, depending on mood. To the kids they're unremarkable, part of the fabric of the city like the statue of Cabot outside Arnolfini.

While Banksy's fame grows around the world his Bristol pictures are deteriorating quietly. The guy hanging out of the window off Park Street has been pelted with blue paint, while a gorilla was recently painted over by a property owner who obviously doesn't keep abreast of the news. No effort has been made to protect any of these paintings, which would presumably be extremely valuable if they weren't fixed forever to a wall in Bristol. Perhaps there will, in due course, be a preservation campaign which will see the best of them sealed behind perspex; perhaps not.

Fun while it lasted: Banksy vs the Bristol Museum (2009)

When the Reaper fades into the rusty hull of the Thekla I can't see many people waving their arms about in horror and consternation. More likely there'll be a shake of the head and a wry smile. It was fun while it lasted.

UPDATE! As of August 2014 Banksy's Reaper has been removed from the side of the Thekla, iron plating and all, and will apparently be exhibited at the nearby M Shed Museum. I hope Banksy paints something else on the side of the ship, otherwise my walks into town will never be the same again...

Mary Fedden at the RWA

Mary Fedden, Fruit Dish, 1992

These are strange times at the Royal West of England Academy, an institution which has traditionally served the region's artists with a genteel lack of concern for footfall or fashion. With the appointment of a new director, Trystan Hawkins, the old dowager has been given a thorough makeover, with a cafe installed where the New Gallery used to be and a summer exhibition designed to pull in the crowds and - judging by the merchandise on offer - part them from their cash.

There's a giant Damien Hirst sculpture of a 1960s Spastics Society collecting box on the balcony and an exhibition, combining behind-the-scenes photographs and paintings, of professional ballroom dancers. The paintings are by Jack Vettriano, who is 'arguably one of the country's most popular living artists', according to the exhibition flyer. The photos, by Jeanette Jones, capture the tension, excitement  and fear of a tough competitive world; the paintings offer a less emotionally intense, more glamorous vision.

Mary Fedden, Window Still Life, 1994

The president of the RWA, Simon Quadrat, has recently resigned in protest at the populist programming, and you can see his point. The director's response is that people will come to see Hirst and Vettriano and, having paid their £5, will have a look at paintings by Lisa Milroy, sculpture and works on paper by Elisabeth Frink, and a mini-retrospective of Mary Fedden.

There are three gorgeous etchings made by Frink in the 1970s, but I really came to see Fedden, an RA and former president of the RWA who is now in her nineties and still painting. She was born in Bristol during World War One and, after studying at the Slade, returned to paint and teach here. The Second World War and marriage to Julian Trevelyan took her away from the city, and today she lives beside the Thames in London.

Mary Fedden, Red Tulips, 2010

The Portland Gallery in London held a major retrospective of her career a couple of years ago, but the RWA show is different. For one thing, it has the great virtue of being small. While a big show can be a lot of fun I think I prefer a one-room exhibit; rather than rush from picture to picture, trying to take them all in, you can relax, focus on one or two favourite paintings, and compare work easily. It's fascinating to see a still life painted in the early 1950s (and perhaps in need of a clean) beside one made in the 1990s.

There are some intimate details - a watercolour of an elephant painted for a friend - but most of the work is of a familiar kind: still lifes of fruit and flowers and jugs, with perhaps the view from a window beyond, also some landscapes. What one tends to lose when looking at reproductions, apart from the texture of the paint, are the subtle variations in colour that add so much to the feeling of a painting. There really is no substitute for seeing a painting live...

Perhaps the next stage in the 'Your Paintings' scheme should be for participating museums and galleries to put on a whole host of one-room shows - not massive, expensive affairs but small, manageable exhibitions. Look what 'Ravilious in Essex' has done for the Fry Art Gallery and tourism in Saffron Walden (3000 extra visitors in a couple of months). Many other artists have a dedicated hard core of fans who would willingly travel for a small, well-thought-out, show.

Mary Fedden, Lilies, Bird and Zebra, 1999

The pictures shown are from the database of Mary Fedden's work at the Portland Gallery, London, which represents her.

You can see photos of the work hanging at the RWA here (scroll down a bit)...

Bristol's Lost Quarter

In November 1940 cities across Britain burned. On the 24th of the month the Luftwaffe's assault on the City Docks missed its target and instead left the heart of the city in ruins. Until then, Bristolians worked, shopped and played in and around Castle Street and the surrounding area, where cinemas, restaurants and chain stores like Woolworths stood cheek by jowl with the metalworking shops, haberdashers, costumiers and a host of other independent commercial enterprises.

Since the demolition of the Norman castle some three centuries earlier, the area had evolved into a bustling centre of commerce, only a short walk from the City Docks. If Park Street was then the most prestigious shopping street in the South West of England, Castle Street attracted the crowds. They came from the north along Gloucester Road, from the south over Bristol Bridge and from the east along the wide boulevard of Old Market - a street that combined the qualities of thoroughfare and marketplace as Whitechapel Road does on the eastern approach to the City of London.

Old Market today is a broken stub of a street, cut off from the city centre by the traffic-filled canyon of Temple Way and from the eastern suburbs by the outer ring road. And while Cabot Circus and Harbourside pull in the crowds, the space between them is still empty.

The humps and hollows of Castle Park give it the air of an ancient site, but the humps and hollows are not vestiges of the castle, but of shops, factories and cinemas.

After the war, the Broadmead shopping centre was built and this convenient space used as a car park. There were plans for a Museum of Bristol on the site, but in the 1950s and 1960s forward-thinking city councils built roads not museums. The past was pedestrian; the future had wheels. So Bristol got its Temple Way and its M32, and the city sprawled outwards, away from its historic centre.

Castle Park, the office worker's favourite summertime haunt, became the city's green oasis more or less by default. In wider terms it's a classic piece of SLOAP - Space Left Over After Planning.

So what should be done? As debate continues to rage between developers and park-lovers, the Architecture Centre is hosting an exhibition put together by Architecture postgrads at UWE. Recovering Bristol's Lost Quarter explores the history of Castle Street and the surrounding area, then suggests ways in which it could be improved, with a wide deck over Temple Way to tie Old Market back into the city and myriad inventive ideas that aim to connect the park to the surrounding streets and structures.

And underlying the various schemes for museums and health centres, gardens and bike parks are a well-thought-out set of aims and principles - designed not to try and recreate a lost city but to learn from it as we continue the decades-long task of rebuilding.