Keep Them Coming

The influx continues and the standard is consistently remarkable. As our Henry Moore competition of creativity continues we are consistently surprised at the great work that you send in to us. Here are the highlights from this week.

Two Large Forms by Sobczynski / Khouri

Plaster Sculpture by Sarah Heenan

Bronze Chimney Route by Daniel Dutton

Bronze chimney by Daniel Dutton

2 is 1 by Désirée Ickerodt

Beautiful, I’m sure you’ll agree!

London Le Cool

We’ve been getting some great media coverage for our free interactive sculpture tour. If you don’t believe me you can check the Time Out listings.  BUT, what we are even more excited about than being in Time Out is being featured on Le Cool London. Le Cool is the effortless organiser, the trendy insider; your friend in the know and they know a good time. That’s why it is particularly flattering that they should choose to feature our audio tour. Thanks a million guys!

You should also check out Cherry Sorbet, home of the lovely Jo who wrote the Moore Outside feature.

Splendid Entrants

Musician by Vasyl Dzhabraylov

Sans Titre by Simon Fuek

Timeline by Sue Tarbitten

As regular readers will already know, Moore Outside is running a competition of creativity. We’ve had lots of wonderful and talented artists submit their work to be judged and I’ll continue to post the most exciting submissions up here. For now, here is just a little taste of things to come…

From the Desk of Mr. Deedham

Now I hope you’ve been enjoying our Quote of the Day (which we do try to keep on top of!) and if you have then you’ll surely like this. Mr. Deedham has kindly allowed me access to his personal musings on Moore. I will be periodically uploading passages from his archive that I find particularly interesting on this blog.

The intense vitality is what first struck me, something immediate, something carnal. The man carves stone like no other Englishman I am yet to encounter. These askance figures are uncompromising – they are indifferent and seem to hold no concern as to beauty whatever. They are not ‘pretty’ in the classical sense; far from it. They sit on display like columns of mud; strong, supportive. And yet there is beauty there. Such as there is in a still forest pool in the dim dawn or more still in a shoulder of lamb…

For such manageable beasts they seem quite immovable, finite; carved from the memory of an evolutionary past. The motifs are common but do not drudge in the annuls – the damp corridors of the history of Art. In fact for some reason that quite perturbs me; they don’t seem quite like Art at all. Instead Moore has fabricated something truthful and mythic. Something… eternal; modern day relics not from Patagonia but, strangely, Yorkshire.

The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for the rest of your life. And the most important thing is, it must be something you cannot possibly do.

Henry Moore.

Whitechapel’s High Priestess

Alice Neel with Paintings

don’t have enough words to sing the praises of this humble, remarkable woman. A talent bigger than language and an oeuvre to match. Alice Neel is Bohemian Ideology made flesh; a testament to the virtues of perseverance and unwavering artistic intent.

If you are in London any time between now and September I urge you to take the trip to the Whitechapel Gallery for her palpably pleasing solo show Painted Truths. Prolific throughout every decade from the 20s until her death in 1984 she scarcely showed any sign of slowing.

Alice Neel was born in the Victorian age, but damned if that was going to hold her back -she painted the literati, the gliterati and the everyday man alike. Her primary concern as a painter was that she made art; second capturing a likeness; third capturing the sitter’s essence and fourth that her work embodied a decade’s zeitgeist. And boy does she deliver on all accounts. A comparative unknown until well into her 60s (her overwhelmingly human portraits were cynically shunned in favour of the en vogue Abstract Expressionism) Neel reluctantly rose to prominence as a figurehead of the American feminist movement before becoming widely recognised as one of the most significant female painters in 20th Century art.

Her dynamic, impassioned paintings are well worth any praise bestowed upon them and the touching documentary being screened is worth the price of admission alone.

For the Smart Phone Users

You have had this technological tidbit whipped up for you by the whizzkids in Tate’s media department. Now you need not download all of the individual mp3s – simply click the link to open a podcast with guides to all of the sculptures in one easy to access place! Genius.