Eight into Nine

Eduard Vuillard: The yellow curtain

I think of Vuillard as summing up this year for me because 2008 has felt rather like an anteroom. Not only have I spent many hours literally waiting, but since that car jolted into mine in early January it's as if my active life has been on hold. It was only at the end of this year that I was deemed not to have been in the wrong in that incident - and the acknowledgement of that seemed to release me with a sigh.

Strange, because this still is the Year of the Rat in the Chinese Zodiac - my sign, and so playfully thought that things would largely go well for me. Perhaps in a quiet way they have.

So, I am completing this year with a delightful hibernation: I have one book to read-in-the-daytime-without-guilt. It has been a wondrously varied collection: Alexander McCall Smith's The comfort of Saturdays, Cromwell's Head by Jonathan Fitzgibbons, Henning Mankell's The pyramid, and finally Dinner with Mugabe by Heidi Holland. This last should shake up the little grey cells and get me focused once more.

There seems to be a poignant moment every end of year, and for me it is the death of the playwright Harold Pinter. It is over forty years since I studied his work, but it made a huge impression on me, and I have always enjoyed encounters with whatever he has been doing since then. This morning in The Guardian newspaper is a reprint of a lecture he gave in the 60s, and it provides thought-provoking content for us all. The one particular thought which I shall carry into the new year is this:

What I write has no obligation to anything other than to itself. My responsibility is not to audiences, critics, producers, directors, actors or to my fellow men in general, but to the play in hand, simply.

Perhaps 2009 will be remarkably different for many of us - whether imposed, or chosen. In scribbling messages of goodwill to friends and relations over the past few weeks I have come to a realisation that what I want to wish for is that in 2009 everyone gets what they need.

Seasons

I count myself lucky to be living in an area of the world where we see changing seasons. When we lived in New England I could even detect distinct changes between months too. It was glorious, with new discoveries nearly every week - especially as that whole area was new to us anyway. But it is possible to notice subtle changes even within familiar surroundings.

Now that the solstice is past, it is winter that will present itself for discovery. Already it is colder than it was last year, and the light sharper when there is less cloud. More birds have disappeared - perhaps letting us know of conditions yet to come.

Christmas is not a huge celebration with us. We put up the tree and decorate it on the day of Christmas Eve, and I wander round the garden gathering greenery for a display or two. The cards which have been arriving and set to one side will now be added to the leafy decorations, and we will settle down for a week of reading and watching films. When there were just two of us we would go out to the seaside for a bleak but wonderful picnic on Christmas Day - but now the tradition with my mother is to eat our bird, open our presents, and then watch a film which she will enjoy - this year it is to be Mama Mia.
But the festive season is but a blip. What interests me is how each winter, like every other season, brings new sights and sounds outdoors for me to discover and ponder, but winter also is a time for slowing down, reflecting on the past year and anticipating the next - and best of all, reading books at few sittings without (much) guilt as spring gradually creeps up with the imperceptibly lightening mornings.

Happy Hibernation - however you choose to snooze or not!

Whose eyes?

One process I have difficulty with is abstracting - especially landscape. Images which leap to my mind to make into work generally come from something felt rather than something seen. And so when I try to make a view, for instance, into a piece of work, I come a cropper.

This abstraction business, therefore, is a subject which fascinates me, and I am always trying to learn from artists whose work I admire. The other day we went to see an exhibition which sets out to do just what I want to see - to show how Ben Nicholson developed from early landscapes 1928 (foothills, Cumberland)

to the abstracts for which he is better known.Sept.8.54 (Torcello)

We set off with pleasure, even on a dank drizzly dark morning, because we were heading towards the sea, a favourite building, and what promised to be a rewarding exhibition. I have been stuck in the house for the past month or so, so as a passenger on the way there I savoured even the grisaille landscape - there is so much to see if one looks, even if it is all mostly mud-coloured. For instance the berries are still abundant, and with the leaves gone from the trees it is evident what a bumper crop of mistletoe there is.The sea always rewards us: even the faintest light is captured and reflected back to us, cheering the heart. The beach at Bexhill is a shell-full shingle, very clean of detritus, but still with the odd interesting visual encounter.
The exhibition itself did not disappoint. A great many of the works are from the Tate's collection, and the the show will go on to Tate St Ives in the New Year. And I found myself not only searching for the clues I wanted for my abstraction process questions, but also wondering what it must have been like to see these solutions. Not only what was going on behind Nicholson's eyes, but those of his contemporary audience.

Nowadays the views of harbour seen through a window with a couple of mugs in the foreground are a cliche - the best examples being by Mary Fedden, such as The Tabac Jar 1996 below. Emma Dunbar also produces attractive paintings in this now popular style. But for me they lack the purity of line and the pared beauty of even a jolly Nicholson with its family resemblance to the warm minimalism of the painted relief.It is relatively easy to see the attraction of the simplified stylised still lifes of Fedden and Dunbar, but even now the Nicholsons are obviously that greater step further - especially as in those like Torcello above in which he captures the light, colours and tones of the land and landscape in a still life. How much more difficult to see with the eyes of someone at the time.

I keep trying to equate my responses of today to various examples of conceptual art to a response to the shock of modernism as it must have been. As a huge fan of the latter and its serious positive outlook on the joys of the human situation, it is a struggle to adjust my eyes away from today's irony, gloom, and glibness. Not to mention all the use since made of past art in advertising and other popular visual arts.

I am a great believer in trying to see with other eyes. I find that it can be as enlightening as learning the nuances of a foreign language - seeing a subject from a different angle. It was both a benefit and a curse to have started my serious creating of art through the medium of commissioning illustrations. As a publisher I had one view, but it gave me deep satisfaction to be able to approach understanding what an artist wanted to say, and thus even write a text myself to try for the closest fit with their work.

On the other hand, when I wanted to create my own work I had to learn to see with my own eyes, and not with those of artists I admired. The most exciting exhibitions from a creative point of view are the ones which generate the impulse to develop one's own work rather than stimulating an urge to make a version of that artist's vision. I am hoping that by studying Nicholson's development to abstraction that his process will help me to evolve a process of my own.

Bountiful baskets and bowls

I even found a basketware pencil case in Indonesia

My intention - aspiration - is to have a place for every thing, and have everything in its place. My despair at never reaching this aspiration is most acute when I've lost something. So from time to time I engage in a tidy up, which throws up all sorts of delights as well as dreadful discoveries.I like to have containers which can be moved about, and fairly early on started using baskets and bowls. I even had two vast flat baskets in Zimbabwe as my in and out trays in my publishing office. Unfortunately I gave those away there - how I wish I had brought them back. Lucky enough to travel about for both work and pleasure I have collected quite a few examples. The photos show a small sample of the many I have in here, my sewing room - and there are more all over the place in the house. Even the tiny baskets hold the specific threads used for a particular project - very useful when a piece is put to one side for a wee while.

Playing

I do like looking for things because in doing so I stumble across other items which I'd forgotten. In this case I found a scrap of silk I'd painted, and a folder containing patterns I'd designed for my knitwear. I scanned one pattern of mermaids (it made a lovely shawl) and the silk scrap, and roughly put them together. I think they probably live under this loch.


In the meantime, however, I still have not found what I was looking for. I wonder what other distractions I can uncover in my continuing search.

Elements of Bridgetower

Jazz piano detail (my portrait of Julian Joseph)

Last week we enjoyed a glimpse into Julian Joseph's jazz opera Bridgetower. It was strange really, experiencing a concert of elements with commentary and explanation, taken from a form of opera which we had not previously encountered. Opera itself is a kind of bastard form: the product of love and passion. Jazz opera in many ways seems so natural an idea, but I would so much have liked to see improvised vocalising and movement - and visual passion too with it - the Black Mountain trio of Cage, Rauschenberg, and Cunningham of our time.

But as I say, it was a fascinating evening with wondrous music and an interesting introduction to previously unknown history, and has set up trains of thought - not least making me want to develop further my drawings of JJ of a couple of years ago.

The fascination of Debt

Sharper 2005
(wire grids, felt, and flints, hand tied, and hand stitched)

I have just finished reading Payback by Margaret Atwood, and such an interesting springboard it is. It covers the subject of debt in its wider sense, not just the monetary. Atwood uses her facility with the imagination to rewrite the Scrooge story too, to take us on the ghostly midnight journeys examining the past, present, and future misuse of Nature's wealth. There are reviews here, and here, and here, and here, with an extract here, and an interview with the BBC Woman's Hour.

Atwood examines episodes of debt and its consequences in religion, and in literature, and co-incidentally in today's Guardian newspaper there is an interesting article, The borrowers by Colin Burrow on indebtedness in literature. It is such a wide subject, and although so many are suffering right now from the consequences of 'lifestyle' living - whether they deserve those consequences or not, debt is a topic which covers so much of our social interactions.

Obligation and value are touched on in the Burrow article, talking about literature. These spill over into all creative activities, and not only on the material side. There is that whole black hole of emotional indebtedness into which most of us can be sucked at some time or other. It is in that shadow of obligation and its cobwebby corners guilt and anger that so many live. Women especially.

The piece pictured at the top of this post is an expression of my own tussle with feelings of obligation and guilt, and anger and self preservation. The sharper of the title is from Shakespeare's play King Lear: "How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child". I have made several pieces of work arising out of my difficult relationship with my mother, and the ironic - spooky thing is that she likes most of them, not knowing what they represent to me, of course.

The element in Margaret Atwood's book which spoke most loudly to me and my particular circumstances was in talking about revenge. She mentions forgiveness - the fact of Nelson Mandela determining as he emerged from imprisonment to forgive those who had tresspassed against him. It's an idea to aspire to, and a road to freedom indeed. I'm indebted to Margaret Atwood for the inspiration!