Grand slices of life
Wedding Cake has two circular viewing areas and a tiny top one.© Stockley
What a setting: North front of Waddesdon Manor. Photo © Chris Lacey
Romance. Joy. Excess. Frivolity. Fun! Finally free from the pandemic, everyone who can is determined to make up for all that lost time, from drinks with friends to a trip round the world. It doesn’t matter what as long as it is joyous and celebrates life. Two new exhibitions at glorious Waddesdon Manor, Buckinghamshire, capture that prodigious mood with two uplifting and beautiful experiences in this magnificent setting, itself designed to propagate joy and delight: Wedding Cake (opens June 18) by Joana Vasconcelos and Do You Remember Me? by figurative painter Catherine Goodman.
Joana Vasconcelos © Lionel Balteiro for Atelier Joana Vasconcelos
Acclaimed international Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos (above) shows Wedding Cake, an astounding ceramic and powder-coated building-cum-confection in an idyllic grove at the manor, near the Dairy. Five years in the making, the extraordinary structure, designed as a sort of Folly-cum-Folie de Grandeur in which love, life, and genuine weddings can be celebrated (as well as in pre-booked tours by the public) would give any Serpentine Pavilion a run for its money, but unlike a Serpentine Pavilion is made as a long-lasting attraction. At 12 metres high and eleven across, its three iron storeys (or cakes), carefully constructed of 3500 wrought iron parts with thousands of kilos of iron sheet supporting the fancier bits, are enrobed in especially made glistening tiles traditionally made in the Viuva Lamega factory in Sintra, Portugal. A three-tiered cake apparently slathered in glistering white royal icing with masses of gaudily joyful piping work, but one that, like Alice in Wonderland, one can go inside, and to the top.
Laying the groundwork. Image © Merriman Photography
Structure of first tier erected. © Merriman Photography
There are more than 25,000 tiles in 99 styles plus more than a thousand other ceramic ornamental parts in 52 styles, on top of which, later on it will also be able to light up, while water cascades into small porcelain bowls, in a remarkable display.
The cake is decorated with thousands of joyful faience elements. © Stockley
Walking in through the peppermint green wrought gates, the inside is a ceramic riot. Bobbly yellow bosses drip from the ceiling; china monks pray on the walls; curving, wrought stairs lead up to the curliqueued walkways, evoking a pleasure bus and a funfare. Many dimly recalled romantic delights interweave. And who doesn’t love a promenade on an elevated terrace? The Eiffel Tower naturally springs to mind. Gazing over the trees, one is tempted to lick it, just in case it melts.
Painter Catherine Goodman (centre) inside the cake © Stockley
In apparent stark contrast is British painter Catherine Goodman’s (above) first exhibition of monumental landscape paintings, Do You Remember Me? But in fact, both shows are connected by porcelain, for the famous bleu céleste colour (invented for Louis XV) on some of the Waddesdon Sèvres partly inspired Goodman.
Part of Catherine Goodman’s stunning Frieze. Image © Stockley
If these saturated gulps of tree, air and sky are anything to go by, let’s all go to Corfu immediately. The wide azure sea is glimpsed between reassuring, heavy old branches of an ancient olive grove on a promontory; branches flung wide like welcoming arms. Sunlight cross-dapples paths between them, powerfully reminiscent of Impressionist paintings, while some of the trunks have a delightful Winnie-the-Pooh quality in what any reading child might view as Wol-holes in their nubby torsos. But the work itself is modern, modern; energetic: great sweeps of human arm and brush and oil paint in dazzling colours, sometimes eye-popping colours: laced with purples; searing reds and oranges; with singing blues, which build by sweep and strand into the strongly visceral works.
You can almost hear these paintings and you can imagine the artist at work. Hard work. In the resulting, main set of big paintings, seven huge equal-sized canvases stride down the wall towards dusk to create one work called Frieze, in the manner of a Hellenic frieze, the artist says; linked to the story of Daphne in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Champion of tradition Goodman (co-founder of the Princes Drawing School; a winner of NPG Portrait artist of the year) is deeply thoughtful and intellectual, her work springing in new ways from old traditions as the best art must.
Triptych of paintings, part of Do You Remember Me? © Stockley
Along with a film, and a triptych in a side room, Frieze is in the bright Stables Gallery, whose linear space fit it perfectly. There’s a pendant show of chalk pastel studies in the house, done on A2 paper sheets carried to the grove over several of the 12 years Goodman prepared for this show. It’s satisfying how close in spirit the pre-works are to the results, even though medium, dimensions and proportions are so different.
Mysterious, romantic: Oleander Snow. © Catherine Goodman
Albania. Pastel on paper by Catherine Goodman. © Stockley
These uplifting but intensely thought-provoking pictures, the result of years of contemplation of trees in their natural browns, greys, and silver-greens; a whole different palette, convey the emotional power of an artist to transcend, inspire and enliven. Goodman transmogrifies the ancient, cloistered, contemplative secrecy of a sun-dappled Corfiot olive grove into an invitation to think, dream, and experience delight — in Buckinghamshire.
Do you Remember Me? runs 7 June — 29 October; Wedding Cake opens 18 June 2023
Waddesdon, A Rothschild House and Garden, Aylesbury, Bucks, HP180JH. www.waddesdon.org.uk Tickets must be pre-booked.
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