Sorry readers, time has flown past yet again… Battleaxe has been busy. We had our old friends Sue and Alex down to stay for their annual September visit – the weather was so hot it was hard to do anything. It has also been local Art Festival time – Coastal Currents here in Hastings, and Rye Arts Festival also. Last weekend we visited Hop Pole studios out in Westfield, and today we went to Rye. This photo is taken from Hastings Pier on one of the balmiest summer evenings I can remember, even though it is September…
Today, of course, is September 11, the twentieth anniversary of the attacks in New York. I guess it is one of those days that we will all remember what we were doing when we heard/saw the events unfold. I can remember back to when Kennedy was shot – shows how old I am. On 9/11 we were in Birmingham, at home, watching the beginning of the story, but then walked up the road to where our friend Ken Dowden was in the process of moving in. We quickly unpacked his telly, plugged it in and carried on watching… like the rest of the world we felt a mixture of shock and confusion – it was so hard to make any sense of what was happening in front of our eyes.
Anyway, back to 2021. A short while ago I went to my first ‘live’ Stanza poetry meeting, where I met up with fellow poet and artist Judith Shaw, who I have not seen for months. Judith is a very talented woman – a great poet and an excellent painter. She invited me to her open studio session at the Hop Pole Studios, well off the beaten track, on the outskirts of Westfield. We went over on Saturday morning last week – not knowing what to expect, but when we got there it was a magical place – a rickety old farm which looked like something out of the 1950s, with artists inhabiting the outhouses. Unfortunately I don’t have a picture of Judith with her work, as by the time I had thought of it she had disappeared to collect a desk, but there are plenty of pictures if you click the link above. We bought a nice lino-cut of a roofscape.
Another artist with a studio in the complex is sculptor Bernard McGuigan – we have always admired his work, with its connotations of Hepworth, Moore and Epstein. He uses many interestingly different rock types. His current pieces are abstract, but he also produces great figurative work – a bit Eric Gill. We had a chat with him and here he is in his studio. However, his pieces are a little expensive for an impulse buy on a Saturday morning…
Philosopher particularly liked this one… we’ll have to save up!
We always enjoy looking round people’s studios, and saw plenty more lovely things. These paint tubes belong to artist Kirsty Baring. We also thought the artists could just use what was outside their windows… like this basket, apparently abandoned in a bramble patch…
Today we went over to Rye Art Gallery, where we had been invited to a private view of an exhibition of new paintings by one of our all-time favourites, Louis Turpin. Battleaxe readers will have seen his name crop up on here plenty of times before, and we now have three of his paintings on our wall. Honest, we are not getting any more… Although we bought our last painting by him just a few months ago, we last saw Louis in January 2020 when we went to his house to view/buy a painting of sheep. He was just then struggling with a terrible illness, and he told us our painting was his first work since recovery. Here is the post, and about how we got interested in Louis’s work. He has clearly been incredibly busy since then, and he looked, physically, very well. Here he is with one of his new paintings.
We are so lucky to have so many talented artists living round us here… seeing their work really enriches our life.
To finish, this is the hottest day in the Country Park. Look at that Mediterranean blue sea. Quite possibly the last day like this we’ll see this year. What is that enormous bird in the picture?
Oh, and here is Alex taking a photo of Sue in an alley in St Leonard’s…