Antiques Addict at large in the Cotswolds

I am an addict there is no way to avoid this confession, I just love antiques. I love them for the work that went into the making of them by mostly unknown hands, their beauty and the sense of connection to the past they bring. I feel with antiques as I feel often in Venice, the city of my soul, that if you can just, just move quickly enough along a tiny calle that you may catch sight of a 17th C slipper and a wisp of silk disappearing round a corner. The past is so nearly within touch, which is how I feel handling - even if I can't afford to buy it, some glorious item. My blog, linked with the early stages of my book the 'Dear Hyena', will be my thoughts and adventures in search of treasure.

I'm going to kick off with some thoughts about Folk Art. I'm about 50 years too late to acquire a major collection of folk art but I have been lucky with a few pieces, but what is folk art. Its a term bandied across internet auction sites and often means brand new work. I have one friend, a very experienced dealer and amazing artist and we often stand at his stall looking at something he's bought debating when is something folk art and when is it just plain bad. Actually the point at which its plain bad is when he and I start to step back to admire something, take a step further back while still debating the object and if we get to about 20 feet away and say - well, er its got a presence, then at 20 feet I reckon its just bad.

To me one element of folk art is it has or had a purpose beyond just being decorative. To illustrate this I have included a photograph of a boat hanging from a beam. The boat, incredibly light from many years spent soaked in water, is a Severn Estuary fisherman's bait box. The Severn is one of the few tidal rivers in England and at some point in the 1930s/ 40s a fisherman made this box to carry the live bait he used to catch eels in the estuary. These days fishermen I suspect put live bait into plastic lidded buckets which was not an option back then. So our unknown fisherman made a box and made it boat shaped - why? For whimsey, I don't think so. I think he made it boat shaped because it a boat is the shape it is to help glide through water. There are chains on the top of the boat box which would have attached to the fisherman's boat and the tiny porthole crosses which have allowed the flow of water without letting the bait escape. So it is an utterly functional working item and then it acquires the magic, for me, of being an unusual work of art with the passage of time. I bought it from a dealer who had bought it, I think from the son of the fisherman. Stupidly I didn't buy the man's fishing's knife at the same time - ah well so many antiques so little money.

More anon - the sun is shining and the Cotswold Hills have an icing sugar dusting of snow, it's time to get out and get hunting.