Permesso di soggiorno

I have taken many pictures of people, but I don’t often look at them. I don’t have a wallet full of family photographs. (I do have photos on my iPod, but I often forget they are there.) However, the oldest thing in my wallet does have a picture of my wife on it. It is the permesso di soggiorno issued to her when we lived in Italy.

I am not a supporter of ID cards. However, it has to be said that the Italians have made an art of them.

The first thing to note is that this is not a card although I will continue to refer to it as such). It is a piece of fabric. After nearly 22 years it is not surprising that it is a little frayed at the edges, but I am confident that it would last a lifetime if necessary. In fact, its design life does not need to be any more than five years — as indicated by the rubric alongside the picture:

La presente tessera, valida per la durata della missione o comunque non oltre cinque anni, costituisce documento di identificazione a tutti gli effeti di legge…

The other noticeable thing (especially at this distance in time) is how simple the technology is. The basic information is printed on the card, and the details identifying the bearer are typed on, with space for signatures in pen. The photograph itself is riveted to the card, as well as being embossed with an official seal.

The overall effect is of something ephemeral, yet built to last. I am not sure how secure it is. How easy would it be to forge a cloth-card as opposed to a paper one? Could the typing and handwriting be removed and replaced with fraudulent alternatives? I don’t even know if this kind of card was unusual. It is labelled as being a “Cerimoniale carta d’identità — organizzazione internazionale o missioni estere speciali” so it is possible that ordinary ID cards were produced in a different form. Whatever the case, I think some care went into the creation of this as an artefact — not just as a means of identification.

Filed under: Uncategorized

June 1937 (painting)

I grew up with this painting.

That’s not to say that we had the original — just a print from the Tate Gallery (and a better quality image than the one below). But it was always there, on the walls of at least three houses (and probably more). As a result, I find it very comforting. I know this is not a typical response to a piece of abstract art, especially one as rectilinear as this, but it is an honest one.

As I grew up, we only ever referred to this painting as ”the Ben Nicholson”. I knew nothing about it, and less about its creator. All I knew was that I loved the way that the blocks of colour suggested the Golden Rectangle, but didn’t fulfil that promise, or the fact that the picture could be a Modernist architectural plan.

Last year, I finally saw the real thing. It is not often on display in the Tate Gallery in London, but it did form part of an exhibition first shown at Abbot Hall Art Gallery in Kendal, and then travelling to the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea and Tate St Ives. The exhibition put the work in context, but did not diminish its power for me.

The context is given in part by the Tate Gallery’s own description of the painting.

Nicholson explored the way the illusion of space could be created through flat colour alone. The arrangement of colour in this unusually large painting has been compared to the disposition of objects in a still life. The juxtaposition of a few strong hues with a range of different tones of blue is typical of Nicholson’s work. Though distinct, such works reflected the artist’s familiarity with the art of his friend Piet Mondrian.

Having seen the picture, I am intrigued by its size. Our print could have been no more than three feet wide. The real thing is over 6ft 7in wide and nearly 5ft 3in high. At Abbot Hall this meant that it was hung slightly away from the flow of the rest of the exhibition, which exaggerated its otherness. (I would be interested to see how it looked in the other locations. (At St Ives it appears to be hung together with its peers.)

The other striking thing is the colour. The selection of colours in this picture (and a few others painted at the same time) is a complete contrast to the earthier and drabber colours in Nicholson’s painting during his time in the North of England and then later in Cornwall. I thought they were probably a different type of paint, but an article in Tate Etc. suggests not:

The accent colours Ben used at the time in his paintings were usually near-primaries, cadmium yellow, cerulean blue, red oxide, magenta, sienna, black and white; and when at the end of the day he poured turps on his table and ran the colours together with a rag, they might merge into some sort of pale brown, depending on the amount of turps, or they might become a pale ivory or a translucent greyish blue; and then there might be the happenstance of a streak of bright colour that had somehow got stuck in the web of the cloth, a sharp red or yellow. On some canvases or boards there might be several layers of previous grounds, so that when Ben scraped with his razor blades he would make discoveries that would set the rhythms of his creative thought in motion. And the vocabulary of his paintings was invariably the intersecting outlines of bottles, jugs and wine glasses. But vocabulary is not language, and the language of his paintings was landscape.

In this account, the drabber colours are merely extreme mixes of the bright ones seen in this picture.

In case it is thought that the colours in the image above have been enhanced, they have not. In fact they are probably not bright enough to compare with the reality. For a 72-year-old painting, the colour is surprisingly dramatic and fresh. I wonder if that is exaggerated by the crispness of the lines between the blocks of colour. I examined the painting as closely as I dared, and there was no indication that Nicholson had worked with anything other than precision — another contrast with the he used razor blades in his later work as described above.

I still feel warmly about this picture, but that warmth is now enhanced by having seen it close-up. In a sense, and somewhat paradoxically, the warmth grows out of the precision and care with which it was clearly made.

Filed under: Art

“Big Night” — the final scene

Stanley Tucci’s directorial career has not been as full as his acting one. However, his first feature, Big Night, was a very respectable start. It is full of boisterous moments, family crises, love sought and heartbreak. And then it ends like this.

There is so much going on in this five-minute scene that it is difficult to know where to start. Every time I see the film, I am struck by something new. From the outset, I loved the simplicity of the creation of this simple meal — a heated pan, olive oil, three eggs beaten, a pinch of salt, lightly fried (with a little light mixing) and turned once. then served onto two plates (with some held back for a third serving). I think it is rare for a film to show a meal being created from scratch and then eaten. This scene is remarkable over and above that for showing the creative process in one shot — there is no cut from table to cooker, or from face to face. The omelette is brought into being from the rawest ingredients before our eyes, without artifice.

After the cooking, the simplicity and efficacy of the kitchen itself is worth noting. The flow of Tucci’s movements around the room — taking the eggs as he comes through the door, walking to the counter, reaching for a pan, lighting the gas, pouring the oil, beating the eggs, dropping them into the pan, moving round to the shelves for plates and forks, taking them to the table, back to the cooker, flipping the omelette, plating it, breaking the bread and finally sitting to eat — is simultaneously economical and balletic. There is nothing superflous: it is a working kitchen that works with a minimum of fuss.

On screen, the image immediately before this scene is dawn breaking over the Atlantic. The whole final scene encapsulates the calm of morning after a long stressful (and disappointing) night. The revellers have departed, and we are left with three tired people. Two of them (the brothers Primo (Tony Shalhoub) and Secundo (Stanley Tucci) whose restaurant it is) have fallen out during the evening. This simple repast, cooked by the brother who acts as maître d’ rather than the chef, allows the film to end with a reconciliation. As the camera pans round to centre on the two brothers, the waiter Cristiano (played by Marc Anthony) discreetly leaves the stage. I say “stage” because this final mise-en-scène owes much to the theatre.

So there are well-crafted elements to this scene, and the whole construction is equally well put together. It works on its own (a kind of short story within the larger film) and as a fitting conclusion to the whole piece.

Filed under: Film

Introduction

Recently, I was introduced to the Mutton Birds song, A Thing Well Made.  In it, the singer describes his trade — a shop selling sporting goods. At the heart of the song is the following eulogy to a gun he picks up:

To make a thing like that you’d need to know what you were about.
You’d need to know where you were going and go there in a straight line,
And everything else you’d have to shut right out.
Can you see the man who made that?
Can you see him putting it down and standing back?
Can you see the moment when he said “that’s it, that’s perfect?”
At a time like that you wouldn’t care about your job,
Or your mortgage,
Or the fight you had with your wife.
‘Cause when a man holds a thing well made, there’s connection.
There’s completeness when a man holds a thing well made.

Over the years I have seen, heard, felt, or owned many things that gave me just this feeling. This song is one of them. This new blog is a place to gather those things together. Some of them are design classics or well-known in their field to be well-crafted. That is irrelevant to me. The only test is whether I have experienced them directly and whether I think they are things well-made.

Filed under: About, Music