Cheltenham Open Studios are exhibiting at The Times Cheltenham Science Festival.

Members of the studios have created a series of works around the festival theme of decadence. Catch up with the free exhibition at the Town Hall and in the Waterstone bookshop tent. The work will be on show throughout the festival from 9–13 June. Put it on your list of things to do at the Science Festival this year!

Curated by Cheltenham Open Studios, in conjunction with the The Times Cheltenham Science Festival.

Following on from the success of the Painted Quartets exhibition at the 2009 Cheltenham Music Festival, our instruments are now off on their travels around the UK.

The first stop on the Painted Quartets tour is the Salthouse Gallery in St Ives, Cornwall. The instruments are being displayed by Bob Devereux, one of the artists involved in this project – see his violin displayed alongside fellow local artist Anthony Frost’s viola, and a whole host of other instruments by artists from across the UK.

The exhibition then lands at the Bate Collection in Oxford, one of the most magnificent collections of musical instruments in the world. Our Painted Quartets, including a violin by designer Cath Kidston and cello by Lincoln Seligman, will sit alongside instruments made by world-renowned makers and from pre-eminent collectors.

The exhibition continues around the country…

Whether or not you managed to see the 50th anniversary Hoffnung exhibition at the Summerfield Gallery during the 2009 HSBC Cheltenham Music Festival, you may be interested to know that Radio 4 broadcast a play on Hoffnung on Monday 28 September – and you can Listen Again here until Sunday 3 October.

One tubby British comic genius – Little Britain’s Matt Lucas – plays that other tubby British comic genius from another age, Gerard Hoffnung, in a play that also features Gina McKee (as Hoffnung’s wife Annetta), Hugh Bonneville and – playing herself in the present day – Annetta Hoffnung.

Hear the play on BBC Radio 4 →

Hoffnung

Unique to Cheltenham in the 50th anniversary year of his death, this is a rare chance to see the full range of Hoffnung’s comic and artistic genius — childhood drawings, illustrative water colours, bespoke musical instruments and the originals of all his beloved musical cartoons.

Gerard Hoffnung died tragically young at the age of 34 in 1959. His precocious talents for drawing and charicture led to enormous success throughout the 1950s as an artist, cartoonist, broadcaster and musician.

Painted Quartets

Painted Quartets honours Haydn, the ‘father of the string quartet’ with 20 violins, violas and cellos like you’ve never seen before. Leading artists from Cheltenham and around the UK are joined in this project by figures from the world of politics, design and music.

Hoffnung and Painted Quartets opening times

Summerfield Gallery, Pittville Campus, University of Gloucestershire

• Saturday 4 July — 10am–6pm
• Sunday 5 July — 10am–6.15pm
• Monday 6 July — 10am–4pm
• Tuesday 7 July — 10am–7.15 pm
• Wednesday 8 July — 10am–4pm
• Thursday 9 July — 10am–8.15pm
• Friday 10 July — 10am–6.45pm
• Saturday 11 July — 10am–5pm
• Sunday 12 July — 10am–4.15pm
• Monday 13 July — 10am–4pm
• Tuesday 14 July — 10am–7.15pm
• Wednesday 15 July — 10am–4pm
• Thursday 16 July — 10am–7.15pm
• Friday 17 July — 10am–5pm
• Saturday 18 July — 10am–6pm

Like sheep being herded into a pen, we gathered all the painted instruments together for the first time on Saturday morning, and took them to Bishops Cleeve for a photo-shoot (at least they didn’t need to go into Hair & Make-Up first). It was an unusual cargo — violin and viola cases almost as sorry-looking as the instruments they’d contained crammed into the car boot, a couple of loose ones sheathed in bubble-wrap, two cellos spread out on the back seat and one in between legs (where a cello should be, after all) in the passenger seat.

I say ‘all’ the instruments, but I mean ‘all the instruments we’ve had back so far’. In the last week or so, with the end of June deadline approaching, a good few more have arrived back from the artists. If you commission articles or programme notes — as I have been recently, for our programme book which is just about to head off to the printers — the commissioned work gets delivered in an e-mailed attachment. These instruments have different ways of making themselves known. The first time I caught sight of Gillian Lever’s richly-coloured and layered viola was as an impromptu exhibit in last weekend’s superb Cheltenham Open Studios, sitting with a strange beauty on another artist’s living-room bookshelf.

Ana Bianchi’s beautiful Lilly violin was handed over to me at the entrance to the magnificent Fresh Air 2009 sculpture show in Quenington — which Ana has expertly curated. Paul McKee’s broodingly dark violin arrived in the office in a plastic bag (more bubble wrap of course). And with some trepidation I collected Mila Judge-Furstova’s cello (pictured) from her Cheltenham flat. Mila’s remarkable instrument is unwrappable. Not only has she cut out panels from the cello’s belly; she has adorned the fingerboard with intricate, swirling paper sculpture. No cello case could contain or protect that.

PJ Crook and Richard Parker Crook kindly allowed this unusual photo-shoot to take place in PJ’s Bishops Cleeve studio. Arriving there, it was my first sighting, too, of PJ’s two violins and viola, and of Richard’s baby cello. More smiles and handle-with-care wonder. Once I had worked out the musical riddle on Richard’s instrument — you will have to see it for yourselves — we set to work taking front and back shots of each instrument, 16 or so now. 24 are expected by the start of the Festival. 16 (four quartets) will be displayed at the Summerfield Gallery at the University of Gloucestershire’s Pittville Campus. A single quartet will be displayed in the window gallery of the Cheltenham Art Gallery & Museum. And the others are destined for shop windows in Cheltenham — Waterstone’s, HMV and Cavendish House for starters.

Alongside the arrivals of these three-dimensional instruments, hundreds of cardboard cut-out violins are turning up at the office too. We’ve distributed 1500 of these to a range of schools, community groups, art groups and the National Star College. On one side was a blank, violin-shaped canvas. On the other was a brief account of the string quartet’s history, from Haydn right through to Different Trains. We also gave each group a 30 minute CD sampler to listen to while they were working on their painted fiddles. It’s quite an interesting exercise putting together, and then listening to, a CD that starts with Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, takes in Bartok, Janacek and Shostakovich along the way, and ends with a snatch of Eleanor Rigby and the Fawlty Towers theme music.

All these cardboard violins are going to be displayed in Cheltenham during the Festival – mainly in the Brewery shopping centre’s impromptu art space, adjacent to Henrietta Street. Do come and see this riot of violin-shaped colour. And do come and hear a real, live string quartet — because, ultimately, that’s what this is all about, making the connection between the Painted Quartets and the eight-concert World Quartets series. Tickets for the Endellion Quartet with Wendy Cope and Meta4 with Ingrid Fliter are now very limited. I would strongly recommend hearing the Smith Quartet and their 4th of July American night — electric quartets by George Crumb, Philip Glass and Steve Reich — and the French Quatuor Diotima, who have just performed twice at the Aldeburgh Festival and are performing Beethoven, Ravel and a Cheltenham-commissioned work by Matthias Pintscher.

Related events:

• M4 Endellion String Quartet
• M9 Smith Quartet
• M31 Meta4
• M53 Quatuor Diotima
• M61 Australian String Quartet
• M66 Ashes Octet