Alec Finlay – Flag | Skying – edition for The Flag Club

Alec Finlay – Flag | Skying

Edition for The Flag Club, 2013

acid free box, 34 x 26 x5 cm

containing:

soapsuds & whitewash – flag, silkscreen on white spun polyester 160 gms,
150 x 225 cm

soapsuds & whitewash – embroidered tea towel, 52 x 67 cm

Skying – portfolio with 12 archival pigment prints on innova soft white cotton 280 gsm,

in acid-free portfolio, with title page, index list and signed and numbered colophon page, 21 x 29,7 cm

poemlabel - membership card The Flag Club 2013, stamp and ink on label, 4,8 x 9,5 cm, numbered and signed

colophon sheet, 21 x 29,7 cm, numbered and signed

Published by The Flag Club and Peter Foolen Editions in an edition of 25 copies

price  € 350

The Scottish artist Alec Finlay designed this year, after Thomas A Clark in 2011 and Peter Liversidge in 2012, the new flag for The Flag Club, based in Kolham, the most Northern part of Holland. This flag was launched in Kolham on 22 June 2013. The Flag Club now very proudly presents the new edition of Alec Finlay for The Flag Club, which contains the flag, but also an embroidered tea towel with the same text as on the flag: 'soapsuds & whitewash'. This text was used by a 19th century critic to describe a painting by W.M.J. Turner, entitled Snow Storm – Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth making Signals in Shallow Water, and going by the lead. The Author was in this Storm on the Night the Ariel left Harwich (1842, now in the collection of the Tate Gallery). According the story Turner would have replied to this criticism: "soapsuds & whitewash! What would they have? I wonder what they think the sea's like? I wish they'd been it."

The once negative loaded words of this critic could nowadays be very appropriate as a poetical description of the beauty of clouds or the sea and the sky in a positive way.

Further the box contains a portfolio with a suite of 12 prints. These prints are a series of poems by Alec Finlay about forms of producing renewable energy in the landscape. The prints have poems by Alec Finlay and photographs by Alistair Peebles, Alexander Maris, Tomohiko Ogawa, Amy Todman and Peter Foolen, from landscapes in Scotland, Japan, England and The Netherlands. The Dutch photographs are showing the windmills in the landscape around Kolham, the HQ of The Flag Club.

The title of this project by Alec Finlay on renewable energy is Skying, a term used by Turner and Constable to name the practice of painting their small 'cloud-studies' (see http://skying-blog.blogspot.nl/2012/05/john-thornes.html).

These connections with the work of Turner and Constable made the work of Alec Finlay for this edition of The Flag Club also a tribute to the Dutch clouds and skies which were loved very much by Turner and Constable, inspired by our 17th century landscape painters.

www.alecfinlayblog.blogspot.com