Oldies but goodies at the Ashmolean

Visited the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, and its current exhibition on The Lost World of Old Europe.

Classical and pre-classical civilization artifacts have always seemed potent objects to me, and this collection really had me fascinated, especially so as it was representative of a culture that was previously unknown to me: the un-named (as pre-text) peoples around the Danube valley from 5000-3500 BC. That predates even Ancient Egypt by a good millennium and a bit, and Stonehenge by maybe over 2000 years.

The 'Old Europe' tag by the way is correctly counter to Donald Rumsfeld's definition - he would have referred to Bulgaria, Romania, Moldova as New Europe, but hey, turn of the millennium geo-politics and prehistoric archeology probably shouldn't mix.

What impressed me most about this exhibition and this culture, was the really staggering sophistication and variety of imagery and techniques represented in the collected objects. Figurines of big-bummed women (a council of sunbathing goddesses), animals, great ceremonial drinking vessels beautifully designed for decoration or worship (what's the difference?); fired clay, jewellery in gold, copper and shells provide the Old European bling.

I can't help but be drawn to the abstractions and ritualistic imagery that occur in the design of artifacts from different cultures, and these Old Europeans had some great visual motifs up their sleeves: pre-paisley spermatozoic shapes recur, zig-zags, concentric rings, odd maze-like partitions and corridors of lines.

A new word to me: pintadera. This is a baked clay object with a pattern in relief, like a seal, used to print designs onto other pottery and fabrics. A lovely intact example had the handle sculpted to the shape of a tiny foot. 7,000 years ago these pre-Bulgarians were pretty nifty little designer-makers.

The other highlight of a trip to the Ashmolean right now is a selection of drawings and paintings donated from Howard Hodgkin's private collection of Indian art. These works from Mughal Empire (pre-British Raj) India all depict elephants: tamed, howdah-topped elephants in procession, on hunting expeditions, elephants that are comical, horny, dignified, majestic. The draughtsmanship is exquisite, the colours rich; these are lovely images. Old boy Hodgkin not only has great sensibility and ability as a painter, but he's got bloody good taste as a collector too.

Hodgkin Zings

Recent paintings by Howard Hodgkin are on show at the Modern Art Oxford gallery, in an exhibition called 'Time and place'. The old boy is getting better and better, his work becoming bigger, smaller, looser, purer, rawer.

For this traveller, footsore and soulweary, his paintings were a real pick-me-up. Halfway round the show walking into the upper gallery, I couldn't quite stifle the slightly undignified art critical response: 'Gawd, I'm going to cream my pants; fucking gorgeous'. The direct cause of this half-stifled profanity was from being faced with a series of four very large paintings on unprimed plywood. The second one. I want. Badly. It is titled 'Where the deer and the antelope play' (the other three in the series also titled from lines from the song 'Home, home on the range'). As a series from left to right they can be seen as chapters in a visual essay on landscape painting, from the literal - blue sky above a horizon, to the suggestive - scattered daubs of blue or green, broken, sparse, punctuating the surface.

'Where the deer and the antelope play' is closer to the literal end of the scale than one normally associates Hodgkin. A view (presumably a remembered American landscape, the rural idyll of the song being referenced), seen possibly from a sheltered or interior space. A sunlit field below vibrant reds and blue. That sunlit field is the honeypot: its zingingest yellowgreen almost too much for the eyes. Painted for that sudden alchemic lighting that slams its subject closer, throwing the viewer forwards from a shady spot into the light towards its subject. For me it is that moment when passing through a shady wood you are confronted with a patch of brightness ahead, almost too bright, shimmering, appearing unreally close, where the sun has burst through the canopy of cloud and tree-cover.

There are over twenty other paintings on show in addition to the centrepiece big four and nearly all evoke weather and landscape as their obvious themes, and as ever with Hodgkin, the emotional memory associated with them. The titles reference this more literally too: Mud, Leaf, Sky, Big Lawn.

I know Hodgkin finds the term beautiful to be an insult when applied to his paintings, but fuck it, Howie baby, I think they are fierce, challenging, difficult, often violently emotional and increasingly raw, potently immediate, but these paintings are gorgeous.

In contrast to the massive scale of the big four, there is an exquisite miniature titled Leaf. A single brushstroke, a fluid folding sweep of green on board, trace of oil separating deliciously from the pigment into the grain of the surface. It evokes the purity and simplicity of line of great Japanese woodcuts. It is also interestingly quite conventionally framed, though you can see even so that his brush licks the inside edge of its borders.

A Hodgkin trademark is the layering and reworking of paint over not only the canvas but its frame. Here there are several paintings that subvert even that, and also attest to Hodgkin's looser more immediate style, where he has painted his framed works on the reverse of the frames. It is as if in need of something to paint on, he has seen an older painting hanging on the wall, and simply turned it round the other way and got to work. Sounds simple, but I find that quite a lovely idea, though a tell-tale twist of hanging wire would perhaps be too much. I resisted the urge to sneak a peak at what was on the other side.

I came back a few days later, and loved all of these paintings again, more.

Trip to the countryside

So, nature boy, what have you seen?

I have seen a fox. I startled the fox, but it didn't seem very startled. The fox looked more as if it was calmly retimetabling a dinner appointment.

I have seen the bunny that the fox wanted for his tea. The bunny looked like Thumper but deader. Prepped for Reynard, a crimson medal proud on his puffed chest; a transfer of lippie on cotton wool. If you caint say nuthin nice, don't say nuthin at all, unThumped his last. Reynard said nuthin at all: actions, words, volume.

I have seen pylons linked across the landscape, noticed their shiny bits, not just their matte grey bits.

I have seen swans and their ugly cygnets. I gave them no chance to break my limbs with a single beat of their wings.

I have seen butterflies, that I played chicken with. I am the king of butterfly chicken, but I don't always win. Some butterflies force the lose-lose/win-win/tie, like the computer playing noughts and crosses in WarGames: Mutual Assured Indestruction. Nick Berry plaintively sang 'Every Loser Wins'. He was wrong.

I have seen dragonflies, but dragonfly chicken is different. Dragonflies, even the flirty blue ones with their winking lingerie wings, exist in a different temporal plane, flitting, jaunting in and out of vision and space. They have probably visited far off times and places in other dimensions in the time it takes one oaf-stride to land desire-pathwards.

I have seen a mallard that, effortful flapping, rushed skywards, said 'Duck!' and thought of Groucho Marx (me not the mallard).

I have seen Wind-in-the-willowsy riverbanks and checked them here and there for submerged bodies, peering up at me, naked probably (the bodies and me), but didn't see any. I didn't have the dredging equipment or the dredging inclination to explore deeper, more thoroughly.

I have seen horses (2). One trying to open a fence, failed. The other trying to eat grass, succeeded. This is nearly a joke, but isn't one. Except of the 'it's funny cos it's true' variety. Not all true things are funny, ask unThumper.