Monday, 3 May 2010

Jack in the Green Festival

The Hastings Jack in the Green Festival over the May Day Bank Holiday weekend begins at dawn at 4.30am with dancing in The Ladies Parlour. The first day of May being one of the most significant dates in the Pagan calendar.

The weekend continues in the 16th and 17th century English tradition with people making garlands of flowers and leaves. Then adorned in foliage for the May Day celebrations, with further dancing and music around the May Pole and Morris Dancers with performances from Mad Jack Morris and Hannah's Cat and the crowning of the May Queen, The Queen of the May, the spectacle begins.

The green faced Bogie Drummers, the black faced Chimney Sweeps and Chimney Boys who celebrate the dousing of the winter fires and the start of a new season, attended by Black Sal and the focus of the celebration The Jack, a garland covered man who was originally the Chimney Sweeps' garland, which in time became a character of its own, known as Jack-in-the-Green, start to assemble at the Fisherman's Net Lofts. The Jack is the symbol of summer and when released a procession begins around the town.

Crowds follow the procession starting in the Old Town and ending up at Hastings Castle for the ceremony called Slaying of the Jack, this releases the Spirit of the Summer for another year.

Taking place over the whole weekend, combined with the enormous motorbike gathering along the seafront, the annual May Day Bank Holiday London to Hastings Bike Run event, which dates back to the 1960s, results in most of Hastings coming to a complete standstill.

Saturday, 1 May 2010

The Fire Hills

The Fire Hills, like Lovers Seat and Fairlight Glen, is another perfect spot for sketching rural landscapes. Parking in the car park last week, which was quite busy, and then looking around the Visitors Centre, I later took out my sketchbook and began to sketch the excellent views through the blooming gorse,  across the heathland and out to sea.

Sunday, 25 April 2010

A Follow-up to my Last Posting on Jacob Epstein

While sorting through some papers, I came across a box of notes I forgot I had written while at college. I stopped to glance through and I noticed part of an interview with Jacob Epstein, in my handwriting so I can’t discover where I got the notes from. But it reads,  

‘’I finally decided to leave Paris for good and coming to England, I rented a bungalow on the Sussex coast at a solitary place called Pett Level, where I could look out to sea and carve away to my hearts content without troubling a soul. It was here that I carved the ‘Venus’, the three groups of doves, the two flenite carvings and the marble ‘Mother and Child’.

Wednesday, 21 April 2010

Hastings Cliffs to Pett Level

Once you leave Hastings Old Town the entire length of the coastline here consists of cliffs and called the Country Park. You can’t reach the shoreline again until you get to Pett Level, unless you take the old path down to the shore at Lovers Seat, which is not recommended due to rapidly eroding cliffs and access is not encouraged for health and safety reasons. Both Lovers Seat at Fairlight Glen, a perfect spot for sketching rural landscapes and Pett Level for sketching the coast, the sea and changing weather effects, have attracted two artists both of which I would like to introduce.

Truth to Nature
At the age of twenty five William Holman Hunt visited Hastings. From mid-August through to December in the year 1852, wishing to paint directly from nature, he set up his easel at Lovers Seat, Fairlight Glen to sit and paint out of doors Our English Coasts,  (`Strayed Sheep') 1852.


The sheep that seem to have gone astray along the top of the cliffs were actually, I understand from letters, painted at the farm where Holman Hunt was staying. So perhaps the sheep, the crumbling cliffs by coastal erosion and this part of the coast constantly running the risk of an invasion, represents mans vulnerability. Holman Hunt may have been signifying the need for spiritual guidance and direction so that man didn’t feel vulnerable and abandoned.


The colours used in the landscape really give you the feeling of one of those sunny days you get in August, September or October, when you appreciate every moment of the day as this could be the last enjoyable day of Summer. Then as the orange glow falls over the landscape and the sun sets lower, the day gets visibly shorter and the temperature drops, you realise this is Autumn masquerading itself as Summer.

Passionate for the natural world, Holman Hunt waited through heavy mists and struggled in the cold, wind and rain to paint from nature itself, as truthfully as possible with incredible attention to detail. He was inspired by the advice of John Ruskin, the English critic and art theorist in Modern Painters (1843-60).

 'go to Nature in all singleness of heart, rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing'  

This was his encouragement to artists.


Truth to Material
From Paris, at the age of thirty three, Jacob Epstein decided to move back to England and settle at Pett Level, he loved this tiny remote coastal village. He is said to of liked the idea of carving away to his heart’s content without troubling a soul. He stayed here from 1913 until 1916, creating many of his most tranquil pieces. Encouraged by the sculptor and engraver Eric Gill (1882-1940) to carve directly in stone and to allow the appearance to emerge through the process, he was inspired by so-called primitive art and he associated tribal art with liberated sexuality and creativity, which he had gained familiarity with in the British Museum.

Both his eight foot high marble sculpture Venus 1914 -16 and Doves 1914-15 were completed in his four years at Pett Level.  As you examine both Venus and Doves, you are acutely aware of Epstein’s depiction of the male act of strength with a desire for love and beauty and his sensitivity to fertility. Together they reflect Epstein’s fascination in procreative themes.

When I was studying History of Art there was no reason to emphasise that these works were created near to Hastings. It has been of interest to revisit these two beauty spots again.

Saturday, 3 April 2010

Eating out




This arrangement of assorted fabrics and my paper knives, paper fish knives, paper spoons and paper forks, which refuse to gradually disappear, has been inspired by the inexpensive seaside cafes and smart fashionable restaurants, that are all part of the Hastings scene.



Holidaymakers may have turned away from the traditional English bucket-and-spade holiday, but families still flock here for a weekend away or their Bank Holiday day trips. Seaside towns have learnt to recognise latest trends.

Whilst enjoying a meal of locally supplied fish and chips or viewing the Sunday roast menus, out of sight at the table tucked into the corner or seated at the table gazing out of the window, you can daydream among attractively arranged tables with neat colourful linen cloths, in spots or checks and hark back to the days, when ladies congregated in summer floral print dresses, to take afternoon tea or arrange a family picnic on the beach.



Wednesday, 24 March 2010

Boarding Houses

 
I did these quick sketches while walking by a second-hand shop one day.  These belongings were all in the window and they reminded me of the bits and pieces left from the days of the boarding houses that Hastings used to be full of. Many Victorians would come here to stay for the season.  

I always wonder when I walk by these type of shops, who did these items once belong to and what stories, conversations and scandals could they all reveal. 

Sunday, 21 March 2010

Hastings Castle

The ruins we all see over looking us in the town are the remains of the stone fortress built after William of Normandy's Coronation, Christmas Day 1066, but today less than half of the original structure remains. The Church of St Mary in the Castle within the castle walls are the best-preserved part of the ruins.

The savage storms of the 13th century brought disruption and large parts of the castle fell into the sea and the castle fell into decay.

The ruins became the property of the Pelham family and the site was used for farming. In 1824, Thomas Pelham the 6th Earl of Chichester, excavated the castle and it became a Victorian tourist attraction.

My first visit to Hastings

I first fell in love with the Hastings area when, as a child, I used to look at the photographs in my families Shell and BP Guide to Britain. Using black and white photographs they went about discovering each place.

My first visit to Hastings was when my family purchased their first car. That summer we became car-driving tourists and I kept hoping that we might make it to Hastings.

The journey was a long one but I can still remember driving through Battle on the way there and catching sight of the Battle Abbey Gatehouse, then having a picnic lunch on Hastings beach, watching the Cliff Railway, before visiting the castle in the afternoon. Before we left for home, we drove by the Net Huts and through the Strand Gate in Winchelsea, having just driven by the row of houses photographed in the guide, on our way to quickly look at Rye and its cobbled streets in the late afternoon. Everything we visited that day was just as the Shell and BP Guide photographs promised.

My next trip to Hastings a few years later was to go house hunting because my husband was offered a job in the area, it was all very hectic and we finally moved to Hastings ten days before Christmas.

Today both my husband and I always think of Hastings as home without hesitation and all our children only know this as their home. Yet I still can’t believe that the place I first fell in love with as a child, is now the place I return to at the end of the day.