The Candid Arts Trust promotes arts and helps create a network of artists who sometimes exhibit there or is otherwise connected to the CAT. I spent an afternoon in Islington to go and visit the Photography, Illustration, Print Making and Graphics exhibition of the Islington Art & Design Fair at the Candid Galleries in Torrens street - just behind Angel tube station.
Well, I got sidetracked first. Thanks to years of neglect and other sinister reasons the Northern Line is completely out of action at the moment which meant I had to walk all the way from King's Cross station - or take a bus, but I felt too frisky for that - to get there. So halfway there I come across the Crafts Council. Who can resist? I popped in to find the finalists for the Jerwood Applied Arts Prize 2005: Metal featuring in the exhibition rooms. Among a paticularly long line of increasingly impractical and unconventional spoon designs I found - yes! - a cotton spoon. Clearly this was about artistic design rather than practical kitchen utensils. I was glad I came :-)
The French-speaking woman to my right couldn't explain the nature of the exhibition very well but there was another unusual lady drifting around looking officious all in black. Except for the girlish ponytail that is. Turns out she is security and she neatly guided me to the brochure at the entrance. She is also a photographer. Whatever.
Me: You know you remind me of someone?
She: Uh, no - who?
Me: A moviestar ... what's her name again? Oh yes, Polyanna!
She: Who's that?
Me: Uhmm, well she's not an actress, she's a character in an old movie. She's always smiling and jumping around. a very friendly girl. I think it's the ponytail that made me think of her.
She: No, I don't know her.
And she was honest. I guess that's a pretty old movie nowadays after all. Right, moving on ...
Oh, and the receptionist spoke faster than anyone I've met in the last I don't know how many weeks or months. Some people get so good at their jobs that every conversation seems predictable. Except when you start asking them about their favourite type of restaurant, haha. I think she doesn't get out much.
The IADF turned out to be pretty interesting. There were loads of artists and photographers - some professional some amateur - exhibiting their stuff. I remember one dude explaining that the naked woman peering from the noir confines of a boudoir photograph was actually from a brothel in Wales, for real.
And then there were the very colourful paintings of Yoshiko Tsuruta, and of Ferney Manrique. Ferney is a designer by day, but has a sizeable collection of paintings and drawings - an amateur artist with a passionate interest in his hobby.
Beautiful photographs by award-winning photographers Peter Greenhalf and Janet Pollard. They manage to make black-and-white look classic and delicate at the same time. Lots of landscapes, especially beaches.
Rebecca, another photographer who took beaches as her theme produced a very different package. Focusing on beach candy shops or empty merry-go-rounds during the out-of-season period, the unexpected stillness and absence of life sets up a naughty desolation and abandonment in otherwise ordinary-looking scenes.
Other artists such as Dawn Gray and Bea Lopez, who exhibited in the same corner, had different themes again. Dawn has stayed some years in Japan and works in what is a little-used medium these days: woodcuts. Japanese motifs of birds and trees permeate the brown landscape. Bea photographs flowers and plants up close and personal.
That was good fun. The CAT also has a fabulous cafe frequented by artists, spiritualists, and otherwise interesting and friendly people. An Indian Yogi came over to explain the West's misunderstanding of Indian philosophy, in particular as respresented in that other dictionary of Eastern philosophy, The Matrix.
In the evening we went to go and see Souvaris at the Buffalo Bar near Highbury and Islington tube station.
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