25 years ago

I have been looking at the winter pictuers on Marja-Leena's blog, and wondering when we last had serious snow. It happens that this year I am also planning gifts for friends who had their weddings 25 years ago, and suddenly this morning it came to me. It was exactly 25 years ago that I last experienced a real winter!

It was in January, just before I was due to leave the USA to work in Zimbabwe, and my husband would be moving us back to the UK while I was in Africa. So on an impulse we decided to go on a loopy long weekend trip from Hollis, NH to the Corning Glass Museum, then to Niagra Falls, up to Montreal and then back. It was magical! A fearsome snow storm followed us, and each night in the motels we watched the weather forecast wondering if it would catch up and capture us in its blizzards - but no, we stayed just ahead in clear wondrous blue skies.

The picture above is of me at Niagra and in my final days of hippy gear. The photos below are of the most snow I encountered before we went to the USA. It was January 1955 and there was a humungous snowdrift right up to the roof of our two storey house. My father taught at the school I attended, and we dug a tunnel down the road to be able to go there for the few days that the snow remained.We lived in the countryside in both cases, and it makes a lot of difference of course to enjoying such quantities of snow. It's just rain and wind that we get now, and I do long for that white blanket.

Are women really more likely to be exhibitionists as artists?

In yesterday's Guardian newspaper Germaine Greer set off another volley from her canon. I find her articles provocative at the very least, but this column has me scratching my head too. Can it really be that self-depicters in art are more likely to be women? And why are the self-depicting pieces of women's art picked out as making them more exhibitionist than men who also have self-portraits or whatever in their body of work?
How I wish I had heard, or could read the lecture by Linda Nochlin to which Greer refers in order better to gauge the latter's response. I immediately thought of Picasso, Rembrandt, Egon Schiele, Van Gogh, Gaugin off the top of my head - are they the exceptions? And on the female side what about Paula Rego, Bridget Riley, Barbara Hepworth, Helen Frankenthaler, ...?Greer did not over-simplify the question as I have, but that's what jumped into my brain as soon as I started reading the article. I really shall have to do some research on this in my bookshelves and on the internet, and would be interested to read what others think.

Quick update on my reading

I really enjoyed Justine, despite my initial misgivings about Laurence Durrell's Prospero's Cell. I think that maybe there was just too huge a dollop of my own predjudice about the subject involved there. Also, sometimes one does need to find the right book with which to get to know an author. Many years ago I tried to get into Dangling man by Saul Bellow. I had not read him before, and this title is a slim one. I tried two or three times, but just could not get on with it. I happened to mention this to a colleague who was a great admirer of Bellow, and he immediately said that I should begin with Henderson the rain king. I did, and never looked back. I've read nearly everything that Bellow wrote, and loved it all - even Dangling man.

In Durrell's Justine I was seduced by the gentle pace through a literary look at the characters in Alexandria, Egypt in the 1930s - a time well before the problems of today. In this first book of the Alexandria Quartet I feel that this is but the introduction to those characters and the politics of the time and place. The writing is evocative: heat, dust, languid intellectuals with fluid morality, a book written then and not now.

In some ways I would like to continue reading all four novels one after the other, but I feel that that would be most appropriate on a long holiday somewhere in warm countryside - the South of France perhaps where Durrell went on to live, and indeed wrote another group of novels set there. (I shall get round to them some day too, I hope.) So I am jolting myself back to a brasher present, even though the author is in no way 'in your face'. I have embarked on what appears to be an amusing journey through The Sea Lady by Margaret Drabble. (No, I am not making my way along the Ds on my shelf - it's just a coincidence.)

Drabble is an author I enjoy; but I do not find that she stretches me in any way. She is often though-provoking, but in a gentle take it or leave it way. I have found as I have read each of the books she has published over the years that she seems to reflect the general stage of life I have reached.

I also read the catalogue of the forthcoming exhibition Cloth and culture now. I intend to see the show, but could not wait to read about it and the artists. Unfortunately the artists' statements are on the website and not in the catalogue. The latter contains interviews and beautiful photographs, so I had to print out the statements in order to read through some kind of comprehensive coverage of each artist. I find it fascinating how academic in approach the UK artists have been with their statements - with a bibliography in one case. I wonder if this counts as a publication towards career promotion!

The concept of developing out of one's culture has set me thinking about where my own work has come from; indeed thoughts that I am taking further. It has given me another topic with which to engage my mother.

Sea shore in winter

There is something about the mixture of cold, low light, and the wet shore when the tide is out which I find incredibly attractive. There is a feeling of being insignificant, invisible almost amongst the majesty of the elemental. The work we see here is inspirational - but cannot really be bettered.

Separate Landscape

Today has been miserable and frustrating in many ways, but it has also provided me with a glimpse of a wondrous piece of work. I went to see Separate Landscape - the exhibition of 55 paintings by Atsuhide Ito, representing the completion of his PhD.

In the fifty-five paintings, entitled Separate Landscape, Ito re-serialized Japanese printmaker Hiroshige Utagawa's famous series from 1833 and produced contemporary landscapes following the Tōkaidō, a 495-kilometer road connecting Tokyo and Kyoto. Captured are the fleeting images of non-places along the Tōkaidō, deserted, estranged and yet atmospheric and alluring.
That description itself would not have been enough to entice me to the show; but the reproduced images on the invitation intrigued me. I just loved the experience of seeing them all together. I must apologise for my dull photos, but they are simply to show how the paintings themselves are a journey round the gallery.
Presented this way the paintings are an attractive and thought-provoking comment on the modern journey, conjuring up all those non-places that are passed - simply part of the way from somewhere to somewhere else. The look of blurred photographs casually snapped of nowhere, in boredom perhaps, just to use the camera, passing the time - these places which have no real existence for us, a backdrop, at most just the life manifestation of that line on the map. These paintings are the sumptuous illustrations of a kind of limbo - I found them to be gorgeous.I was disappointed that I could not read the thesis, a copy of which was provided, but it is dense and needs time. In thinking about Hiroshige's prints on the same theme (example here, and here) the element which strikes me immediately is the inclusion of people and the interest they excite. I would therefore very much like to know why Atsuhide Ito decided to eliminate any figures, and include no sign of those travelling. I love the result and find it speaks so much of today - more contemporary than most other painted landscapes that I have seen, I think, and I am curious about this artist. I am looking forward to seeing his reconstructed website when it's ready.

Making a day

Design in further progress.

Thank you Marion for the flattering You make my day award. It cheers me greatly to know that there are folks out there who enjoy what I ramble on about. I certainly am now well and truly addicted to this magic link. I could not possibly go on to single out ten connections which make my days - all the links on the right bring me delight, chuckles, food for thought, and from time to time positive inspiration.

Sometimes the Fates, Muses, and Harpies are curled up on Mount Olympus leading to quiet days, but recently the Eightsome Reels have been fair pounding my floorboards, and there has just been so much making my days. First I shall mention the blog In a moment ago, which in the past I have only consulted occasionally for Sharon B.'s encyclopedic knowledge of stitching. But I was intrigued by her Take it further challenge for this month (as well as other posts subsequently this year) particularly because I was a little in design doldrums. So, I took her challenge to the design that was on yesterday's post.

I used both parts of the challenge. Matisse's paintings of women have always been a tremendous influence on my own work. I admire the artist in many ways beyond that narrow focus, but something about those women being used as part of the pattern, the colour composition, I have found utterly compelling. I don't wish to reproduce them, because I want my figures to imply a real life, but I thought I'd take that admiration further by using the colours supplied for the challenge. I have cheated because I have not strictly restricted my palette. Anyway, above is the design in further progress.

Second, I received from a friend a delightful postcard of an Inuit drawing of owls. Not only do I love the image, but it reminded me of cards I bought in Montreal twenty five years ago. They too were Inuit drawings of birds. It is wonderful to have nudges like this to return to previous delights, so I Googled and found this interesting site. Life is just too short to keep track of all my interests. Some just spill out of the bag, and folk tales which took up so much of my attention in years gone by have nudged themselves into my day in this way.

Third, music. I am intrigued, transported, and mind-moved by music. Like visual art and literature I respond to a wide selection: classical, pop, folk, jazz, and contemporary classical (which I always think is a dull title). However, I know next to nothing - well, nothing - about music. I just know what I like! I was delighted last Sunday in the Observer newspaper Review section to find a list of contemporary music blogs to try out. As I type this I am listening to Future Radio which I found through the On an overgrown path blog. (Coincidentally, Future Radio comes out of Norwich which is near where Marion is!) Also I like the Zen saying on the header of the overgrown path blog.

Fourth - continuing music I followed up a recommendation in today's Guardian newspaper review to listen to Fernando Otero, and have added his latest cd to my wishlist.

And fifth, back to the visual arts, yesterday I received an invitation to an intriguing looking exhibition of paintings at the James Hockey gallery in Farnham. Separate Landscape is on next week, and I hope to see it. This makes my day especially because the venue is close by and it is usually very quiet.

Sixth is the newly arrived catalogue for the upcoming Cloth and culture now exhibition at the Sainsbury Centre (again in Marion's area!). It is a beautiful catalogue and I'm really looking forward to reading it before at some point going to the show. The other lucky coincidence is that I finished Vol.1 of Richardon's Picasso biography (phew!), and I shall slip the catalogue in today before embarking on the Picasso Cubist exhibition catalogue.

Those Greek Mythettes are a weird bunch: all these positive inputs in the week when a woman smashed her car into the side of mine - no physical hurt apart from the metal - and various other boring things have gone wrong.

Sensational exercise

Design in progress

Yesterday I drove over to the photographer to pick up my stuff, and as ever was listening to BBC Radio 4 on the way. I was delighted to find that on Midweek was Nola Rae the mime artist. The piece was not only about her work, but a kind of interesting plug for the London International Mime Festival which is about to take place. I found it wonderful that the radio was doing a piece on mime - well, they do say that the pictures on radio are so much better!

It's just so exciting, I find, having one's imagination pulled and prodded by a deliberate blanking of one sense. Radio making us conjure our own illustrations; and mime making us choose our own verbals, descriptives, narratives, ... both without specific instruction. I find that this is so with the best of conceptual art too - where the manifestation engages not only something already within us onlookers, but sparks something new: a connection that had not been obvious before. Good examples leave traces of fizzing sherbet through the brain.

This is how I feel when I encounter Louise Bourgeois' Cells. I feel enfolded, stifled, suppressed, but also free not only to explore these sensations but to use them to journey both further in and further out in whatever direction sparked. An individual element or object, in repetitions, juxtapositions, alternative environments, can evoke such a variety of responses - just as watching a puppet show can tug at tragedy then comedy all with the same flat piece of wood or leather.

At this time of year magazines and newspapers are full of ways of getting physically fit - why are we not equally encouraged to exercise our senses?

Instant whip

Skipping (framed embroidery 2007)

Yesterday the post brought my ordered copy of the Fiberart International 2007 exhibition. I not only enjoyed my first skim of the illustrations, but was delighted to find this said by Dorothy Caldwell, one of the judges: The pieces that held our attention revealed their secrets gradually. Through the process of reviewing slides many times works came forward that taught us something new with each viewing.

It was so heartening to realise that there is at least one exhibition which expects their judges/curators to take their time to let the works speak to them. It can be so destructive to be dismissed on a single glance. I remember a pudding my brother loved: Instant Whip - butterscotch especially. My mother liked the product too because it was so instant. I much preferred the puddings which took time and filled the kitchen with delicious smells as well as a taste to savour.

Then I read in this morning's Guardian newspaper that Gagosian has opened a gallery in Rome. Jonathan Jones seems to think that this has been done to secure the Cy Twombly estate.
It may seem a ludicrous idea to open a major gallery, at enormous expense, just to please an artist. But this is nothing compared with what Pope Julius II did to get his hands on the best art. And, having visited the gallery, I think it could be close to the truth - except that gossip makes it sound so ignoble. I think it's wonderful, and totally in line with what Rome stands for. The truth is that most artists are mediocre. Most art is ephemeral. The good eye, the true patron, recognises and supports the best. (my italics)

I find it interesting that as I enter the year in which I shall complete 60 of being around, I feel the lack of time left to me - but important, even essential with that comes the feeling that what is good must be savoured. However, also a recent piece of news, impressed on me yet again how vital it is to have a groundsheet of first principles on which to erect the tent of our life.

It's this instant thing again. We are so lucky to live in an age when poking a couple of bits of metal or plastic brings us heat, communication, food, transport, ... without the need to understand how. Gone are the days when if it broke we fixed it - now we throw it away when the new design has a couple of extra things to poke. It has come to the point when it is acceptable to report that a young couple did not know what to do when scalding water came out of their cold tap, and thus did nothing, leading tragically to the death of their child.

I find it astonishing that there is no comment that a civil engineer (the father) did not know what to do about the anomaly of hot water coming from a cold tap. I despair - and do so more and more frequently as I read stories like this - that we are wilfully neglecting our responsibility to succeeding generations to educate. EDUCATE - not push over hoops stamped with the word university or somesuch. I do not in general dread getting older - but more and more I dread being incapacitated and in the hands of the uneducated. Shudder.

So hence my delight at reading Dorothy Caldwell's words. Seize the day - but savour it, so that you can better savour tomorrow.

Grasp (small quilt 2007)

A journey back in time

My photo of an old house in Corfu town.

Well, the Alexandria Quartet has sucked me in, and suddenly I remember what reading was like when I was a teenager. Books were an escape for me, and all through my secondary school years I would sit up in my bedroom in another world courtesy of authors like Aldous Huxley, D.H. Lawrence, George Orwell, Dickens, Graham Greene, Charles Lamb, Francis Bacon, and for light relief Galsworthy and Georgette Heyer. This now seems a heavy load for a child, and I am sure that most of it went over my head, but it did capture my whole head and whisked me away to other worlds. They were books which needed concentration, which made me seek explanations in the library, which showed me that I could draw on not only my two so different backgrounds of Greece and Scotland; but that there were so many other questions I never knew needed asking.

I had forgotten what it was like to float in that atmosphere of knowing and not knowing, of drifting though a strange land where the pleasure is to attend, to seek, to wonder. So much to my surprise and despite having spat my distaste at Prospero's Cell, I am enjoying this experience of reading Lawrence Durrell. I know that I am prejudiced against over-romantic views of Greece, and problems with members of my family have also left a bitter taste when it comes to mentions of Corfu, so I probably soured my own sampling of my first attempt at LD.

But I have surprised myself with the realisation that gradually over so many years I have not been stretching my brain nearly as much as I used to in those early days. I sighed with the recognition of the mental state - sighed twice over indeed because in those days I was escaping my parents, and here I am again providing myself with the antithesis of daily close encounters with my mother.

So the excellent exercise that one is urged to indulge in at this time of year for me is mental. I am progressing by leaps and bounds through the Picasso biography, and in bed I drift off to dreams of Cavafy and Alexandria. Oh, and I am working too: on this largish quilt form The yellow room, and a small quilt form version of Whisper. (This is a picture of the framed embroidery version which is very small.)