Great little collection on show at the Museum of the History of Science, Perspective: an English View. A rare opportunity to see a selection of 18th and 19th Century English instruments for drawing in perspective. The exhibition includes a portable drawing machine by James Watt (see image).
The James Watt device was mounted on three legs, and consisted of a box which opened out to form a flat surface, with an adjustable arm holding an eye-piece.
Jointed parallel rulers mounted beneath the board held both a brass point and a pencil, used to trace and sketch the object to be reproduced. The whole device could all be folded up.
The exhibition also includes a copy of Thomas Malton's A compleat treatise on perspective... who's frontis piece displays a fascinatingly surreal engraving of eighteenth century gents wandering around large dodecagon objects.
I finally got the chance to go and see the fantastic collection of works on paper by Graham Sutherland at Modern Art Oxford. Among these rarely seen watercolour and ink studies are some stunning small topographical images.
Curated by 2011 Turner Prize nominee, George Shaw, An Unfinished World is a reflective exploration of the lesser-known work of one of the most compelling artists of his generation.
The exhibition concentrates on Sutherland’s early Welsh landscapes from the 1930s, works created during his time as official WWII war artist, and after his return to Pembrokeshire in the 1970s.
Far from traditional studies of landscape and environment, these works not only depict but also exude a world that is as dark as it is magical, as elusive as it is recognisable. Strangely bereft of human life, the works navigate the real and imagined; where country lanes loop into each other, horizon lines fold into foregrounds, and nothing is as it seems.
George Shaw presents these works through the lens of a contemporary painter, describing them as ‘a lament to the passing and changing landscape, a monument to the earth itself’. He adds, ‘the exhibition shows us Sutherland as an artist as much rooted in the past as in the world before him – a world forever unfinished’.
An Unfinished World brings together for the first time over eighty rarely seen works on paper from public and private collections across the UK.
