More sculpture from Yorkshire

We start this visit to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park where we left of the last time with Jaime Plensu. Only this time his outside sculptures. These seven figures (there’s one obscured from view) hugging the trees are all embossed with the names of various composers all over them.

These figures are obviously coming from the same place as the tree huggers – they’re in the same posture. These ones are made from various cut out metal letters (not just English letters) which have been welded together.

There are several of these figures around the park.

 Elizabeth Frink’s sitting man II. It’s painted face and the painted faces on the next pieces are from her interest in aboriginal art.

These three figures were inspired by Greek warrior statues discovered in Riace in 1972.

David Nash’s Three Stones for Three Trees

Could this be No 4?? What’s he doing up there?

Sophie Rider’s Sitting.

Bev examines Andy Goldsworthy – his work that is.

….And?

I don’t know anything about these things in the field. Well I do know that the big things in the background are trees and the things on legs in the foreground are sheep.

I was beginning to get a bit numb to Henry Moore. It seems that every council in the country has a set or two of his reclining figures and I’ve just seen to many of them of late. But here in Yorkshire they have a whole field of Moores, many which were quite new to me. It was good to have the man refreshed a bit, so I’ll leave you with a few of these.

This sheep seems to like sculpture.

Spooky tunes and much more

It’s been a busy couple of days in the music front down in here in the bottom left hand corner of Scotland. No sooner had I escaped from work than it was time for the Spooky Men’s Chorale at the school here in Kirkcudbright as part of their UK tour. It was a sell out. Not so sure that I want to embed videos in the blog as I think that on more ancient machines they can contribute to slow running but I’ll put a couple of links in where I can find them. The Spooky Men were preceeded by fellow Aussie, Kate Rowe, who kept us thoroughly entertained with a few of her songs.

For her final song, Space Rabbits of Brocklevoons, she brought on her other half, who I’m pretty sure (somewhere around 100%), is one of the Spooky men, to help lead the audience (that’s us) in the words and actions of the chorus. I was rather worried for my glass of wine – they do very civilised concerts here abouts.

More Kate here

Then it was on with the spooky men . I must say that they were excellent but it would be far more accurate for you to have a look at the links and pictures than for me to try and describe them.

Spooky Theme

Abba pah! this is the definative Dancing Queen.

Dont stand between a man and his tool

Their website here

Yesterday there was more music. There was an afternoon session in the Coach and Horses in Dumfries. A fine pub to play tunes in on a Thursday afternoon – quiet with nice acoustics, probably something to do with the stone floor and brick walls,….oh yes, and nice beer.

In the evening I popped over to Gatehouse where Mary Barclay was giving a concert of mainly self penned stuff with her husband Doug Carroll. I’d only ever seen her on the internet before. She plays mostly rockier stuff with a band and apparently this kind of concert is quite unusual for her. She and Doug writes a jolly good tune and she has a quite stonking voice. The first picture here isn’t them, it’s James Smyth who came on first for a few fine tunes.

You'll notice, more wine for this concert - Dumfries and Galloway is after all Utopia.

Blackbird

Jamie Wright (the song that is)

Mary and co here

I popped into the Masonic at Gatehouse for their usual Thursday session on the way back to find it delayed somewhat – everyone was at the concert. It was soon in full swing – much noisier than the Dumfries session in the afternoon but a good end to the day neither the less.

Poppies

Cliffe Castle in Keighley has a little enclosed meadow area. When I was there last month it was covered in poppies - glorious!

Those great big, in your face poppies are hard to miss but no less beautiful are the little poppies that are often to be found gracing our corn fields. The next few were taken at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park.