Ilfracombe. Angel of the West? - Public Art

More entertaining than Damien Hirst, however.

Well I have! And it's a wonderful movie.

Except I once sat my younger son down to watch it on the telly, he was, I guess, 14/15 yrs old. He must have been too young for it. He didn't laugh at all and afterwards said he "didn't see the point".

Oh dear, youth is wasted on the young! We're a long way from public sculpture in Ilfracombe.

isthis -one of my favourite quotes from one of my favourite films! Never heard anyone else using it.

That sounds like the fuzzy end of the lollipop crimson.

Did he "like a drink" as well, that'd be a Full House! Bl**dy journalists.

One of the first loves of my life was a journalist/poet. I asked him to write me a poem; he thought about it for ages and wrote 'twinkle, twinkle, little star....'. His journalism turned out to be writing obituaries for a local newspaper in Launceston.

oldgreymare: Can't imagine how such a lovely woman was attracted to such a dishevelled, overweight man, it must have been his way with words

Excellent point, but maybe talent, like power, is a great aphrodisiac. I think Betjeman's poetry is superb, much under-rated. Imagine if he was muttering it newly-minted into yr ear, might you not forgive an unironed shirt and a few extra pounds round his middle?

And he might always write a total classic like "Joan Hunter Dunn" in yr memory! Irresistible I'd say. Certainly the incredibly beautiful woman Margie Geddes in that D Telegraph article thought so!

I saw Verity on Sunday. She's big. And that's all I can find to say.
She was having a lie down after her long journey - lying flat on her back with her big bronze foot up in the air and a tent over her head. The seagulls appreciated somewhere new to leave their "messages"

Oh, I thought for a moment you hated the Betjeman statue, isthis . I agree; the other one is horrid. We were in Cornwall when Betjeman was buried at the church in the sand at Trebetherick. He and Dan Cruickshank were instrumental in saving Spitalfields from the developpers as well, were they not?

Isthis, life is full of coincidences.

My friend, who was trying to prevent the Ilfracombe Hotel (the centre of the whole of Victorian Ilfracombe) from being demolished, knew the Betjemans, in fact was interviewed by Bevis Hillier for his biography of Betjeman.

Can't imagine how such a lovely woman was attracted to such a dishevelled, overweight man, it must have been his way with words or do we all have a hankering after lost loves?

JessM Horrible, I agree!

More I think about the Hirst the less I like it. Nasty. A dead, dissected pregnant woman. Why?

The BBC report at the beginning of my OP, oldgreymare clearly paints Ilfracombe as badly in need of rescue. And it's made to look jolly rough in the report, though there must be some folk round there with the readies to eat in D Hirst's restaurant! There was a mainly sympathetic item on Radio 4 Front Row tonight which especially praised the setting, with dramatic rocks and the harbour. It was fairly reserved about the actual quality of the statue. It looks about the same naffness as this awful thing at St Pancras station:

www.urban75.net/forums/threads/saw-that-tacky-statue-in-st-pancras-the-other-day.157791/

Though I'm fond of the Betjeman nearby, particularly for the quotes in the pavement:

www.martinjennings.com/Betjeman.html

I always remember his reply when interviewed towards the end of his life.

Interviewer: Do you have any regrets, Sir John?

JB: Yes, not enough sex!

Death of interviewer

Though he seems to have hardly ever kept it in his trousers:

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1539802/The-other-secret-love-of-John-Betjemans-life.html

What's "not enough"?

I`m afraid I don`t like it at all. Maybe I just don`t appreciate "art".

Not a Damien Hirst fan but I do like Anthony Gormley and LOVE Angel of the North. The sad thing for me is that I think you get the best view when you are coming back down the A! - heading back to the South.

Crimson what a lovely idea. ATR today did a lovely feature on Frankel, seems he was marked out for stardom from day one!
Sorry this has nothing to do with Ilfracombe, but the next bit does.
A good friend grew up in Ilfracombe and tried, some years ago and without success, to persuade the powers that be to retain the lovely old Victorian architecture. Notably a hotel, I believe.

Alistair is so eloquent, isn't he.His article about Gloria Victis was a real tear jerker. The man and his writing are SO different; I won't tell you what he said when we met him at Punchestown [well, not on a public forum, anyway ]. He came to one of our meetings and Chris gave him a scrapbook of his favourite horse [I think it was Rondetto; one of my old favourites, and he was really moved]. He does that sort of thing for all of our guests.

Crimson you must have been at Cheltenham (live) and missed Alistair Down's item about the memorial on Cleeve Hill, I think it was part of the preamble, or it may have been somewhere else entirely! It was very moving, I wish I could remember the details or add a link (can't do that either!)

One if my favourite statues is by Anthony Gormley and is in the crypt of Winchester Cathedral, a man looking down into his cupped hands. I love the 'Crosby men' too.

In Monaco, outside the Museum of Marine Life (I think that's what it is called) I saw another Damien Hirst, beautiful (by comparison, but actually rather ordinary) from one side, grotesque from the other(in my opinion anyway).It may have been a horse or a unicorn, OG says one, I say the other! Either way it was nothing like the statue proposed for Kent.

We're coming up to the time for the Somerset Carnivals which usually coincide with 'Bonfire Night'.

Isthis

I am not computer savvy to post photos or the like. Type in Glastonbury Carnival on Google search and it does throw up some photos etc.

I have to say they don't do it particular justice as you can't quite grasp the scale of the floats. Thousands of lights and about 2 hours long. It is quite unique and a treasure.

The names on the floats relate to the Carnival Club who made them and the description of the floats theme. Floats are scored on various things, such as best musical float, best still float, best walking entry etc.

Try and get there one year.

The best time to see the Angel of the North is when there is a mist in the valley and the Angel sort of looms out of the top of it. Amazing. I know I am home when we drive past it.

Just up the coast from Newcastle is Newbiggin by the Sea - they have huge statues of an old couple in the sea there - they're amusing, but not art to my mind.

I used to live in Cornwall and remember the camel well Would much rather have him than Damien Hirst's pregnant woman. At best (and I'm being complimentary here) he is a mediocre artist and obviously hasn't grasped the fact that making something very big doesn't necessarily make it very good. Compared with some of the public sculptures by Barbara Hepworth or Elizabeth Frink his looks like something off a film set. I have to admit I'm not wild about the angel of the north either - I've always thought the design is basically flawed, but perhaps it's just me.

It was only when I read about the Anish Kapoor that I realised there was more to it than at first glance. I actually loved the early warning golf ball thingys in Yorkshire [Fylingdale Moor], and hadn't realised they were no more, even though my CND years should have made me loathe them. I've never seen Stonehenge .

Of those public sculptures I listed above, the one that really sticks in my head (with joy) is the boy and the dolphin
j) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sculpture_Of_Boy_With_A_Dolphin-Chelsea.JPG

Round here, my partner (SO) cannot stand the sporting one:
b) www.flickr.com/photos/historyanorak/3034691604/
on the grounds that the body proportions are all wrong!

and I can't stand the Thomas Cook one outside the railway station:
e) www.crosbyheritage.co.uk/location/leicester/thomas-cook-statue/
on the grounds that it's just so boring, and somehow smug.

we saw the Kapoor (one of a number by him at the time in Kensington Gardens/Hyde Park) on a freezing cold day mid-winter. I think there was even ice on the pond. The light level was low, even mid-afternoon and the piece was hauntingly beautiful. Yes it looked like a satellite dish, but it was polished shiny. And, as you can just see in the Time Out photo, you saw wonderful reflected views of passing clouds. So, like the Crosby iron men, it was stationary but dynamic:
i) www.timeout.com/london/art/event/56072/anish-kapoor

No, Leicester racecourse is a closed book to me. Though I once went to a bicycle meet there (just as a meeting space, we didn't cycle round the course, though that might have been fun!) Everyone was very uncomfortable, I remember the water didn't work properly and the lighting was grim. Maybe that's another version of "quaint"

When a friend of mine in Liverpool, who was a hardened "follower of the turf" ie addicted gambler on horse racing, heard that I was moving to Leicester, he pulled me to one side and muttered, "I don't know how to say this but ...... it's not the sort of course you'd send your Number One horses to". Ouch!! True??

My son live at Attenborough; I must go and see it. The S.O. will know who he is, although he's a Forest fan. We go racing whenever we can. One year when we'd been to Cheltenham we walked to the top of Cleeve Hill. There's a bench at the top with an inscription that says something like 'To the world he was a soldier, but to us he was our world' and then it gave his name which I've forgotten. I found it very moving. Have you been to Leicester Racecourse, ever? It's dead quaint with wooden buildings. We went into a lovely tearoom there which has now been closed. We were well chuffed that we'd seen it before it closed down. Sometimes improvements aren't for the best, I fear.

Yes Crimson, random things in churchyards! They are in a way Public Art in themselves, maybe.

One more football one. I'd gone to a concert in Attenborough Parish Church nr Nottingham. And right on the corner of the tower, where the path turns a corner, there was a gravestone to a very famous Notts County footballer who died tragically young. Needless to say, I'd never heard of him.

And one extremely wet day, my then walking group and I were returning from a deluge of a walk (the town was flooding around us, I'm not joking) in Clun, Shropshire. As we cut through the churchyard, I was amazed to see a finely carved, fairly new headstone to John Osborne, playwright, author of "Look Back in Anger".

Clun seemed a very unlikely place for this, especially after his acerbic, barbed memoirs. Surely he'd more likely be buried in Sloane Square, Chelsea, outside the Royal Court Theatre.

But Clun it was, he'd settled there towards the end of his life, he'd loved them and they'd loved him. And that's where he's buried.

Yes; that's the one. When he died we all signed a book outside the stadium..for once The Rams and Forest were united. So sad that Cloughie and Peter Taylor were never reconciled in life [I believe]. I wish I could get the knack of this cutting and pasting lark. There's a statue of Charlie Chaplin in Southern Ireland that we came across by accident. There's something lovely about coming across a statue or a memorial unexpectedly. In a churchyard in Northumberland there was a plaque saying that a tree had been planted by the Kelso Laddie and the Jethart Callant in the 1930's. Not having any internet access I puzzled over this but it led us on a journey to discover the northern riding out ceremonies.. Jethart being the old name for Jedburgh and the Callant being the man chosen to lead the riding out ceremony.