Design at paulcarvill.com, the home of Paul Carvill on the web

The new £20 notes have been issued – I was surprised by one when I withdrew cash from an ATM on my return from Morroco. I always love seeing the new designs. Currencies implicitly reflect the values and standards of their central issuing bank, and by extension those of the nation they finance.

The new 20’s continue a fine tradition of evolutionary design – the size and shape remain the same, the current purple colour is also still in place, though now a little brighter. What makes the difference with these issues are the subtler changes – the increased white space, the thick border, the more elegant denomination display. These notes looks so much more European. Timeless, stately, perhaps slightly diminished in personality and a little more anonymous.

Part two of my sculptural journey, which began with the Rodin show at the Royal Academy, is the Chola exhibition at the same venue – subtitled “Sacred Bronzes of Southern India”.

These bronze sculptures, dating from around 900 – 1250, not only depict and represent Hindu gods, including Shiva, Vishnu and Ganesh, but were actually believed to be physical manifestations of those gods and were worshipped as such. Prior to the advancements which facilitated the casting of these deities in bronze, they would have been sculpted from stone, heavy and immobile. Now, though, they could be easily removed from temples and carried outside on a tour of their lands, also allowing their followers to see and worship them at close range. The notches and loops where carrying poles and chains would have been fitted are still clearly visible.

On returning to the temple, the idols of the deities were bathed in milk, curds, butter, honey and sugar, before being anointed with sandal paste and dressed in the finest silks. This practice continues today, with the idol being woken up and put back to bed daily.

The condition of the sculptures is stunning, with so much minute detail preserved it’s hard to believe they’re over 1000 years old.

The first thing I noticed while viewing the show is how slender, elegant and sensual these sculptures are. There is a feeling of lightness in each one, of delicate poise, as if each is swaying to a rhythmic breeze passing through the room. Ganesh, the elephant-headed god, appears with his hip jutting at a jaunty angle, his human physique in no way weighted down by his elephantine appendage. Shiva, the Destroyer, appears in many guises, or avatars. But each, whether a warrior, a man-lion or a meditating husband, is as fine-limbed as the next. Not for them the muscled, super-human frame of godlike figures from other cultures – these are all too human, although with none of the fragility present in ourselves.

Thw female figures, however, do seem to have been sculpted to an idealised state of womanhood. The waist, hips and breasts are so gloriously out of proportion that the feminist-baiting Barbie doll springs to mind. The women’s breasts are potent and full, their frames even slighter than the men’s, their near nakedness worn easily and without embarrasment. To relate these figures to Rodin’s creations is to highlight the deification of the Indian sculptures. These are forms to be worshipped, based not explicitly on the human form but on a distillation of it, the result of thousands of years of interpretation of myths, legends and imagination. Where Rodin stared compulsively with the eye to reach the beauty inherent in the form before him, these idols represent the culmination of a culture’s dreaming.

Remember that these are not projections of gods, they ARE gods. And with that in mind I came to appreciate Hinduism, on this evidence at least, as being light of touch, as having humour, as having invested in their deities the all too human characteristics of mischeviousness, of joy, of fun. I thought back to the Catholic statues of my youth circling me in church, and recall an endless series of images of suffering and pain and anguish. It is quite a contrast.

I highly recommend this show. The artworks themselves are a joy, refreshing and surpsingly iconic in the modern sense of the word. And for anyone interested in the wider subject of Hinduism it is a delighfully light introduction to the subject. My only complaint is that the back-story of each god appears in detail in the exhibition catalogue, which I noticed after the show, but is not on display anywhere inside. I think the general public’s enjoyment of these works would be greatly enhanced by making the history and characteristics of each god more visible.

I went to see the Rodin exhibition at the Royal Academy recently. I have to admit I knew absolutely nothing about Rodin prior to going. For this reason the explanatory texts throughout the gallery rooms proved informative and indispensible in placing the sculptor in a wider context, that of the swirling art world of Delacroix and Duchamp.

Time and again we learn that Rodin revolutionized the sculptural art form, although I found this hard to confirm with no knowledge of the genre up to that point. At this risk of asking to be spoon-fed I wonder if the RA could have provided a short introductory history up to the point of the artist’s emergence.

But looking at the works here it’s immediately apparent that here was a man in thrall to the human body. Everything is smooth and fluid and balanced, every physique perfect and perfectly realised. To think of the amount of time the artist would have spent looking at his subject, admiring it, understanding it, is to share with him in some small way an obsession. An obsession with perfection, of the utter beauty of the human form.

Moving through the galleries this thought came to me again and again, as the sculptures and their various permutations became a series of repetitions on a theme. Rodin made many, many prototypes, sketches, tests and alternate versions of everything he worked on. Casts were reused for multiple works, the subject being revolved, flipped, enlarged or combined with other elements to create something new. Over the years he must have come to know every face and body he worked with as well as his own.

The presentation and setting of each piece brings out the best in nearly all of them – the lighting in particular was set up very well, highlighting the curvature of muscles and sinews, every details picked out to dramatic effect. The Thinker, especially, benefits from a grand setting all of its own in a circular gallery on a raised pedastal, where you can circle it entirely.

The show is fleshed out with photographs and a multitude of sketches by the artist, some fully realised diagrams, others nothng more than doodles on the back of envelopes or newspapers! In addition I would have liked to have seen more on the actual manufacturing process of creating the sculptures – how they were modelled, sculpted and cast, but perhaps that belongs in another exhibit.

The only disappointment was that the “Gates of Hell”, the huge 6 metre high structure created for , was completely unlit. It stands in the courtyard of the RA. It is made of dark bronze. As we know, England in the winter months gets dark at 4pm. After that time it is rendered almost completely indiscernable. Even the key, standing nearby and identifiying the various sections, is unlit.

But this is a small drawback in what is otherwise a captivating show, one that has inspired me to go on and seek other sculptural displays. First stop, I think, is the Chola exhibit of southenr Indian bronze sculptures also showing at the Royal Academy until February.

I can throughly recommend Nigel Cooke’s exhibition “A Portrait of Everything” at the South London Gallery. In it, his work continues his trademark style of short depth of field, low horizon landscapes, the “back wall” of the painting taking up the majority of the canvas while the foreground, condensed at the bottom, is described in rich detail, scattered with stones, rotting fruit and bandaged human heads.

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Gmail finally got a delete button! While the concept is anathema to Google’s search-based email model, and accordingly important to their keyword-based advertising model, they’ve obviously listened to their end-users and implemented a more intuitive and efficient delete process.

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Well, it turns out that information architecture, usability and accessibility aren’t high on the list of priorities where I work. In fact the single defining factor in the design of the new intranet turns out to be speed of deployment – how quickly can we get something live that looks nice, is easy to update, and doesn’t offend the brand sensibilities of either merging company?

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Just a teaser for what you’ve got to look forward to here. Over the next few weeks and months I’m going to be part of a group charged with redesigning our corporate intranet. This project has the added complication of merging two company’s information into a coherent whole.

I expect information architecture, usability and accessibility to play a key role in such a major overhaul and look forward to working from the ground up in cycles of review, design and test. I’ll be covering my progress here.