'Widdershins' - Moorland Mythic Arts in Moretonhampstead

Moretonhampstead is a little town on the eastern edge of Dartmoor. It's not far from where I live, but we seldom have a reason to go there, so yesterday was the first time I'd visited Green Hill Arts, a former primary school which has been turned into artists' studios and a very nice exhibition space.  What drew me there was their new exhibition 'Widdershins', featuring paintings, drawings and sculptures on mythic and mystical themes by some of the artists based in or around the nearby town of Chagford, whose most famous members are Brian Froud and Alan Lee.

How I would have loved this exhibition when I was fourteen!  Back then, Froud and Lee were my heroes, but I never got a chance to see any of their original artwork - I just had to pore over their illustrations in books like Faeries, which they illustrated together in 1979.

Nowadays I would usually run a mile to avoid the sort of people who insist on spelling 'fairy' with an 'e', and Froud seems to have abandoned forever the quirky and beautifully observed landscape backgrounds and strange, foreshortened spaces which were what I always liked best about his work. But it's still good to see some of his pictures up close, including this 'Green Man', (above) which is also used as the exhibition poster.

Wendy Froud, his wife, makes what are basically dolls: troll dolls, faery dolls (definitely faeries with an 'e').  She makes them wonderfully well, but unfortunately I feel about dolls the same way that many people feel about clowns - Eugh, they're so creepy, with their little beady eyes and their winsome, waxy faces! RUN AWAY! Still, she has one piece in this show that I did like very much - a 'wood troll' with gnarled stick-like hands and a bunch of actual sticks sprouting from its back. It could have stepped out of one of her husband's paintings from the '70s, and it's clearly a relative of the mystics in the film The Dark Crystal, which Brian Froud designed and Wendy Froud worked on.

Alan Lee is in New Zealand at present, busy with the Hobbit films, but he's well represented here, with a couple of pencil drawings and the painting of the sleeping Smaug from the illustrated edition of The Hobbit , as well as one of Fangorn Forest from The Lord of the Rings. There's also a piece of his concept art from the LOTR movies - a loose pencil sketch of Eowyn vs the Nazgul, the battlefield suggested with old-masterish skill and economy by wiry, wandering pencil lines.  And there's one of his pictures from Faeries too, done in his older, tighter style, and a cover illustration for an anthology called Hist Whist which I think I can remember being fascinated by (and trying to copy) before I even knew who he was.

His daughter, Virginia Lee, seems to have inherited some of his talent: there's a rather beautiful little relief plaque here of a scene from The Fellowship of the Ring (below, though a photo doesn't really do it justice). My favourites were two of her pastel drawings; imaginary landscapes in which stone angels' wings and carvings of the Tinners' Hares take the place of the stone circles which crown some Dartmoor hilltops.

And it was particularly nice to see some pictures by David Wyatt (with whom I was lucky enough to work on the Larklight trilogy) hanging here among the Frouds and Lees.  His pictures have similar qualities to theirs, while being entirely his own: beautifully drawn, full of invention and visual humour, and steeped in the landscape and atmosphere of Dartmoor.  I've pinched the image below from his excellent blog.

Widdershins continues at Green Hill Arts until 10th August. In addition to the artists I've mentioned there is also work by Terri Windling, Rima Staines, Hazel Brown (whose little boxes of miniature objects have something of the genuine weirdness of 19th Century fairy art), Neil Wilkinson Cave, and Paul Kidby. And Green Hill are running a tie-in programme of events and workshops, too.  If you are in Devon, or planning to visit during the summer, this is well worth a look.

Details on the Green Hill Arts website or Facebook page.

An Announcemint from the GOBBLINS

Greetings, Pathethtick Sofftlings!

Yes, it is yore old frennds the CLOVENSTONE GOBBLINS here, with anothver top-notch GUEST POST. Thiss time we has bin arsked to alurt you to the PERRIL posed by DWARVES.

Menny people fthink thatt DWArVES is NICE. They wotches rubish films like SNO WHITE AN THE SEVEN SAMURAI and THE HObBBIT AN UNEXPECTORATED JOURNEY and they getts the idea thatt Dwarves is all joly an brave an hard wokring an such.

This is NOTT TROO.

Iff you read the ace new burk GOBLINS VS DWARVES (available NOW from all good sofftling bumwipe sellers) you wil learn about the trubble we had when a bunch of the stumpy-legged beard-faces decided to staRt mining up Clovenstone, where we live, an draniNg our precious lava lake from hoo's mystic depths (that's litterature) all GOBBLINGS is hatched.

Nott only thatt, but we had even MORE trubble when Skarper and HeNwyn tried to persuade the sofftlings to help us fight oFf the Dwarvish mennis.  An why? Because the sofftlings had all been reading Sno White an The Hobbtit or simliliar  unlilkely tales an so the beleeved thatt Dwarves is brave hard workling etc and that Gobblins is all EVIL and SMEL.

(Acshually we DO smel, so maybe they was right about thatt. But we digress...)

All this trubble what we hadd has made us reelise thatt most Sofftlings does not know their arras from their elbow when it cOmes to Dwarves. (CLUE: an ARRAS is a sort of tapestry, and ELBOW is a boRing softliNg band.)

In our next Blogg post wee will be tellin you THREE WAYS TO TELL IF YOU HAS GOTT AN INFNESTATION OF DWARVES an whatt you cann do aboUt the little bliters. In the meentime:

KEEP CARM AND BUY GOBLINNS VS DWARVES.

Ps:  Here is wott one nice sofftling bumwipe reviewer said about it, an all the others will be sayin nice thinggs too IF THEY KNOWS WHATT IS GOOD FOR THEM.

PPS: sOry some of this bloGg is a bit faded: GutgUst did a wee all over it.  

PPpS: PriNceSs Ned says yoo should probibly wash Yore haNds aFter yoU hav read it.

The Hobbit - Unexpectedly Enjoyable

I don't usually bother reviewing films I've watched here any more - there are so many other reviews sloshing around the internet that it's hard to imagine why anyone would be interested in mine.  But most of the reviews I've seen of The Hobbit - An Unexpected Journey have been bad, so I thought it might be worth posting my own minority report.  I saw it last Sunday - a final treat on the last day of Sam's Christmas holidays - and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

It may be, of course, because I had read all those negative reviews and went along with very low expectations.  I love The Lord of the Rings but The Hobbit has never held the same place in my affections, and the idea that it was going be chopped into 3 parts and stuffed with bits from the LOTR appendices and the completely unreadable Silmarillion was far from attractive.  Also, I'd heard it was three hours long! (I think a film needs to have a very good reason to last much over 90 minutes.)

Anyway, I only went to see The Hobbit because Sam wanted to - all his friends had seen and enjoyed it - and I was quite surprised to find, almost from the kick-off, that I was charmed by it.  Perhaps because I know The Lord of the Rings so much better, I found the film versions of it hard to watch: it didn't look how it looks in my head, and I winced at all the cuts and changes.  The Hobbit means less to me, and my memories of the text are vague, so I was happy to sit back and enjoy the film.  I can see why others don't, of course.  Structurally, it's a disaster.  It might work better as a TV miniseries, spread over three or four nights, than viewed in one bum-numbing chunk in the cinema.  But Peter Jackson and his cohorts have presumably made a deliberate choice to sacrifice cinematic structure in order to delve in depth into the book's story and its world, and if you can accept that, there is much to enjoy.

The opening sequence about the fall of the Dwarvish kingdom works well enough, and serves to set up the dwarves' back-story and hint at things to come in the later films.  Its followed by a redundant scene between Bilbo and Frodo, which made my heart sink, but is presumably just there to hammer home the point that THIS FILM IS SET BEFORE THE OTHERS - it's soon over, and from then on things pick up pretty quickly.  Scene succeeds scene in a sort of leisurely, picaresque procession, some taken straight from the book, others borrowed from the LOTR appendices, and a couple presumably made up out of thin air.

The most prominent of the latter involve Sylvester McCoy as the wizard Radagast, and I suspect your attitude to them will colour whether you like or loathe the film.  Many people have spoken (or at least Tweeted) disparagingly of this Radagast, with his rabbit-drawn sleigh and urgent quest to save a sick hedgehog.  But Tolkien's The Hobbit is first and foremost a children's fantasy, and a pretty old-fashioned one at that - an odd, whimsical mash-up of The Wind In The Willows and Beowulf.  I thought Radagast and his rabbits fitted in pretty well. He's certainly no sillier than cockney trolls or the revelation that one of Bilbo's ancestors invented golf, both of which come straight from the book.

There's also a new sub-plot involving an orc called Azog, who seems to be there to make Thorin more of a badass action hero* and tie the various episodes together a bit (which sort of succeeds, though I don't know if it's necessary). And there's a Council of the Wise scene, bringing in Galadriel and Saruman at Rivendell, which  is much less fun - wise people should never be allowed to get together in stories . Still I suspect it's setting up the big events of the second movie, and was pretty to look at, at least, being set in a lovely Arts&Crafts /Alan Lee summerhouse with streams running around it. (Having seen the way the streams on Dartmoor rise after heavy rain, I wouldn't want to live in Rivendell.  But then I wouldn't want to live in Rivendell anyway; the elves are insufferable, spooky-eyed, Spocky-eared vegetarian types who lounge around tootling sub-Enya folk tunes on their flutes and all vote for the Green Party, it is worse than Totnes, my deres.)

Anyway, the elves are soon left behind (yay!) and it's onward to the Misty Mountains, where there is a battle between some stone giants which doesn't really work (boo) before we get to the best bit; the long sequence set inside the caverns, as the dwarves escape from Goblin Town and Bilbo meets Gollum and acquires the Ring.  The ramshackle goblin colony is a wonderful creation, although the battle there bangs on a bit (like all filmic battles in these days of CGI - or am I just getting old?).  But Gollum  is great, even if he does look disconcertingly as though an experiment to clone Steve Buscemi has gone Horribly Wrong. It's interesting that in a film full of battles, chases, escapes, monsters, and swooping helicoptery shots of New Zealand the most memorable bit is still these two characters swapping riddles in the dark.

Oh, and Martin Freeman was great as Bilbo Baggins. Just as he was as Arthur Dent in The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, another film I didn't expect to like, about another comfortable, fussy Englishman dragged off on adventures by weirdos.

So anyway, that's what I thought of it, and Sam, who isn't exactly the Attention Span King, sat through it all agog and wanted to know when the second one was coming out as soon as the credits rolled. My advice is, read the bad reviews, then give it a try anyway: you might be pleasantly surprised.

(Incidentally, I saw the film in 2D, so I can't comment on the controversial 3D version.  I don't think I ever have seen a film which has been much improved by 3D though.)

*Or a Superhero: there's a very interesting take on that in Entertainment Weekly.