Dreaming in the Grey House

I have to start by apologising for all these dreams, memories, glimmers of sentimentality, and, for using T.S Eliot again. As I write I am listening to Nat King Cole...that's the perfect nostaglic atmosphere completed. I am still writing my essay about dreams and performing my own wandering daydreaming of another kind simultaneously. Today Chagall's blue dreams are haunting me.

The Grey House, Marc Chagall

' If you came this way,

Taking any route, starting from anywhere,

At any time or at any season,

It would always be the same: you would have to put off

Sense and notion.'

T.S Eliot, Little Gidding

In The Grey House Marc Chagall was returning to and painting his hometown of Vitebsk. I wonder to what extent Chagall, painting on the outskirts on the route in to the town, is putting off 'sense and notion' and how much of this is a reminiscent indulgence. I remember seeing this painting in the Bornemisza Thyssen Museum, Madrid when I was ten and being particularly interested in the small, blended-grey figure of a man in the left corner. Is it Chagall himself? Memory certainly has the power to split the self, between here and now, there and then. We have a sense that Chagall's memories have gained the status of folklore; the cobbled path, the wooden cabin, could all be a part of the scenery of Hansel and Gretel.

As I write this I remember that what I wanted to talk about was the dream-like qualities of Chagall. I am also realising that my knowledge of his work hinges on a single painting seen in Madrid and The Bride which Julia Roberts gives to Hugh Grant in Notting Hill. So although it may seem like an obvious choice here is The Bride.

There is so much in this painting that recalls the medieval dream. The upward motion of the composition in which gravity appears to have dissolved is very evocative, I can't help but feel myself freeing from the world and floating in to the canvas. The Bride is illuminated, her red dress and ethereal veil drawing her from the blue even as she is absorbed in to it. At her veil is her dream guide, coaxing and encouraging. Then there is the small bestiary of animals that accompany her stiff dance in to the sky. This is like the anxious pre-wedding dream of a bride; it contains all of the fear and all of the excitement of this impending celebration. The blue of the painting is the typical dream-scape on which Chagall creates, but I think I need to do more reading before I can say more on this.

Dreaming with Chagall is a beautiful, soothing diversion.

Paintings of Trinidad

I love Chris Ofili. I appreciate his boyish fascination with elephant poo; he smuggled masses of it back in to the country from Africa and used it to mount and embellish his paintings, and even made one particular lump in to a self portrait, 'Shithead', which included old teeth and locks of his own hair. I also appreciate his humour, his bitter and brave play with black culture. When I saw No Woman, No Cry for the first time in the flesh it made me cry; partly because of the tragedy of Stephen Lawrence which it is a tribute to, but also because I had not expected the painting to be quite so big, or quite so overwhelmingly beautiful. I loved Chris Ofili because of, or despite all these things, but I love him even more now that he has spent a good long time maturing in the heat of Trinidad and emerged from night time jungle walks a painter. Because painters are a rare thing in the modern art world. Ofili proves his medium's validity with such torpidity and power.

The Raising of Lazarus, 2007

'I wonder if biblical was always a way to get to the spiritual, for me. When you live somewhere like this, you just become aware of different types of energy. The place itself has an undeniable energy. The force of nature is overwhelming.' Ofili on painting in Trinidad

The Healer, 2008

'I painted the first images of The Healer outdoors during a total lunar eclipse. He is born of the imagination sparked by forms in the clouds hovering over the hills at night. The figure of The Healer is a very dark character, black in fact, who feeds on the bright yellow of the sun.' Ofili

Habio Green Locks, 2009

'I've found that the night and twilight here enhances the imagination. In the city our relationship to the night is very particular because it's always illuminated, but here it's unlit, so you're relying on the light of the moon and sensitivity of the eyes. It's a different level of consciousness that is less familiar to me, and stimulating through a degree of fear and mystery.' Chris Ofili on painting in Trinidad

Hughie O'Donohue Excavations

I went to see an exhibition of Hughie O'Donohue's work at Trinity Hall College Cambridge. Huge paintings cramped the walls of a small dark room and the only prints on display were obscured beneath glass so that detail was lost. Can you detect my disappointment already? I have encountered O'Donohue at the Fitzwilliam museum; his epic Crucifixion triptych and a series of Caborundrums of the corpses of Mussolini and his henchmen, subtle, visceral prints. I hoped to see more of this.

His paintings, which are a combination of photographic elements and abstract layers of dirty paint, are not as beautiful or understated as his prints. They are huge works, and as the Porter pointed out, very expensive. The print above advertised the exhibition; the richness of colour is surprising and exciting. But I can see all this from my computer screen better than I could behind reflective glass.

‘O’Donoghue’s working method, in repeatedly building up and breaking down a paint surface, so that it is as if an image is, as it were, discovered or unearthed within it, brought to light, might be compared to a process of digging and probing the land. It is figuratively speaking equivalent to a kind of archaeological excavation‘ Aidan Dunne

The glass case which contained this print and accompanying sketchbooks was my highlight, a glimpse in to working practices and the development of ideas and experiments. I can see from this that O'Donohue is a collator and excavator, he is an archaeologist.

'Archaeology as metaphor and the theme of collective human memory has been at the centre of Hughie O’Donoghue’s practice as a painter.'

When the paintings were at their best they disorientated perspectives in their incorporation of figures in to the murky painted landscape. The paint suggests a kind of recognisable terrain but never confirms it leaving the lifeless figures lost in ambiguity.

Finally, here is the crucifixion triptych which is displayed in the Fitzwilliam; atmospheric and raw, it commands its size.

The Turner of the Waves

I love the sea, it is this immense body of water which I am sure so many thousands of people feel a deep, strange affinity with. It's a sensation, as waves roll in and out on the dark beach, that I struggle to put in to words. But when I saw Maggi Hambling's wave paintings I felt I had found an expression. Hambling paints the British sea, the North Sea, the 'raging beast' that 'eats away and is changing our coast forever'. She grapples with its power, with courage and force she paints the sea.

'Good morning, death - Good Morning

Early in the day I draw the sea with graphite in a sketch book. Back in the studio I create waves that break again, in oil paint, bronze or etching ink. People, animals, birds emerge from the subconscious as I work and are there to be discovered.

[...] Terrifying, beautiful, rapacious, embracing, never still, always hungry, always seducing, always mysterious, always there.

As a child I would walk a short way in to the sea, stand still and talk to it, ten-to-the-dozen. Now I listen and identify with the shingle, as the sea, like time, forces inevitable erosion.'

Maggi Hambling, April 2010

I can identify with Hambling's relationship with the sea. When I go to the beach I walk all the way down its long spine at the waves edge, picking up treasures and telling myself stories. There is a kind of walking with your feet in the sea which I find irresistible. The waves at my ankles feed my thoughts and I am totally lost in their music. Then there is a fear which is inevitable, of a force which controls you. In the dark, on your own, that's when you feel it most, a tidal pull upon the human.

However I do not like Hambling's wave sculptures; they look dead to me. Bronze is a medium which does not translate all of the shifting fluid and torpid qualities of the waves. In paint Hambling manipulates the liquidity of her medium, in metal there is only the turgid, frozen movement of the waves.

The Pigeons 1957

'At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;

Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is.' T.S Eliot, Burnt Norton

This is about living for the moment, this point here, this moment of dancing and joy. Barcelona already feels like a distant memory but these lines from Eliot's Burnt Norton were with me as I walked the streets. I met an odd man named Mino Bambino who gave me some simple, yet important advice; 'past is tears, future is fears, live for now'. As he said it I remembered Eliot and how he had written it with such great eloquence and with so much more magic than Mino Bambino. It is this painting by Picasso: The Pigeons, Les Pigeons, Els Colomins, which captures this wisdom for me.

In the Museu Picasso Picasso's pigeon painting was displayed with photographs of Picasso on a balcony surprising pigeons from some branches. The photograph captures the pigeons in flight and a mischievous glee in Picasso's eyes. The painting was itself a window in a room filled with ceramics and light. Those Mediterranean years, and then, finally, there is the sea and the birds looking out. Art is all about our associations, our stories and emotions. When I saw this painting I mapped a set of stories on to it which are now inextricably a part of the fabric of the canvas.

First I saw my own surprised joy at discovering that it was canaries making the music in the trees in the park:

And then, my own pigeon story which happened a few days later, when I stumbled upon this square in which the pigeons appeared to levitate, shifting with the secret forces of crumbs and kindness laid out on stone:

And finally of course, there is the Barcelona sea, and me looking out:

I wonder if I have done what T.S Eliot and Mino Bambino asked me not to. Am I locking memory and past all in to the moment? But these memories are so much about moments, about flights and liberations, that I don't feel guilty for doing it.

Dreams and Visions

I have decided that a little bit of my blogging energy needs to be redirected towards my degree. It is my final year after all! Anyway, for the moment I am not ready to give up the blog so you will just have to deal with posts with a slightly more limited theme. Nevertheless I can't help the distractions and inadvertences which naturally come after hours of study. So the links between what I write and my degree will sometimes be tenuous, perhaps exciting.

Women, bird and snake in front of the sun, Joan Miro

I've just started my work on a new paper, Medieval Dreams and Visions, and I have been reading a lot of dream theory and a lot of debates about the relationship between dream and art, truth and fiction. I can't help thinking back to Joan Miro in Barcelona. Beginning in 1925 Miro painted around a hundred dream paintings in an attempt to represent the unconscious.

'Dream is something quite separate from reality as experienced in the waking state; one might almost say it represents a hermetically sealed existence, divided from real life by an unbridgeable gulf. It detaches us from reality, erases normal recall of the same in us, and places us in a different world and in a quite different life-story, which deep down has nothing to do with the real one.' Hildebrandt

The Surrealists were constantly trying to expose deep, hidden meanings in their art by using methods such as automatic writing and the 'Exquisite Corpse' which involved choosing words at random from the dictionary. Miro's dream paintings reduce the world to symbols and archetypes; stars, women, birds, fish and animals drawn together in a constellation of representation.

The question in the medieval period was whether any truth or prophecy could be extracted from the unstructured images of the dream. This question still seems relevant in Miro, beyond the poetry of his canvases is there any higher wisdom being communicated? What can the dreamer, the viewer of Miro's painting, bring back in to the real world? A sense of beauty, a thing close to comprehension perhaps, but not the full knowledge of the thing.

The other question (which I might have to answer today in my seminar) is whether there can be art about an insignificant dream? Doesn't the pure communication of it make it significant? If you have a dream and tell no one, it is more than likely that it will disappear, when you try to recall it at the end of the day you find that it has dissolved. But if you repeat the dream, the articulation of it usually means that it resists that dissipation for a while longer.

Chaucer reading to the court

Chaucer is not quite as abstract as Miro, perhaps his meaning is easier to read.

Texture and Tapies

Like Vicky in Vicky Cristina Barcelona I found myself doing a little research in to Catalan artists while I was in Barcelona. I think that is potentially one of the most annoying things I have written, ever, because I found that film and all of its inane attempts at cultural immersion very annoying. Did you know that Woody Allen didn't know any Spanish music before his film so his soundtrack was just a selection of chance discoveries? I don't think that says anything meaningful about his creative practice, it just explains the hollow, fickleness of his film. Anyway this is not supposed to be a rant about Woody Allen, it is about my discovery of Tapies.

Tapies struck me with his vast, textural landscapes of canvases which attack and arrest the viewer. Tapies is part of the school of materie painting or Art Informel which is interested in the materials of painting. In a world where artists are continually abstracted from that original medium of paint and canvas this return to the fecund possibilities of paint and its textural richness is refreshing.

Tapies' work draws you in to that earthy dream world where paint has the power to create and destroy. Using stone, sand and other bits of detritus his canvases become tactile landscapes. I got in trouble the other day for comparing Tapies with a contemporary Spanish Artist, Miquel Barcelo. Barcelo is less abstract, his work combines the organic qualities of paint with organic forms, but it plays with paint in the same liberal and confident way.

Are they comparable?

A final highlight from 2010

2010 was the year I started writing about Art. It has always been my dream to be a writer, although I often I doubt my capability. This year I discovered that in Art I can find an inspiration that appears to make my writing possible. This was an experiment in creative writing inspired by individual works of art after I went to see the amazing Tate Britain show about Chris Ofili. Ofili's old work made me cry, as I had studied it for so long but never had the chance to see it in the flesh. I needed a little more time with the new paintings as they were so different to what I knew.

1.1 Dance in Shadow

I am overwhelmed by the darkness; the darkness which swirls about me and sweeps around me in to oblivion. The lunar eclipse has extinguished all colour. There exists no memory of it, no trace in this waste land. How can I imagine, in this waste land?

‘Now the paintings talk, and I listen’ he says. I listen, I want to hear. Like holding a seashell to your ear; I soak up sunny colours like guava nectar and drink of that deep, deep, voidless blackness. Purple and yellow and orange in its dark, mysterious orbit. The colour lingers on. It lingers on but is swamped by palm fronds of darkness and absent trees that tower and sway above someone, somewhere.

Softly, for a moment, I believe it will take me there. Like light breaking through the sweeping rush of dark leaves as I sit and wait the colour begins creeping out. An orange-rind sunset-seeping of oil from between leafy fingers I hold up to the light, to see if my fingers will glow. I keep hearing English tunes and try to blot them out. I could have danced all night. I’ll be seeing you. Striking discordant with the steely rhythms of colour.

This is the closest I have ever come to Trinidad. Perhaps it is the closest I will ever be.

Have I forgotten the lovers? The lovers who dance in the mango glow. The lovers who dance in shadow.

They are everything; sweeping onto the canvas in a rush of black and waltzing out in the whispery traces of light. Feetless; as if dancing on midnight air. What dance have they strayed from? What cruel lights have chased them away?

And she; the smile that tangos across her lips is her only distinguishable feature. And he; touched by her purple-passion-fruit vibrancy would be otherwise lost in the dark. She draws him to her with that bright arm.

I wonder if he will kiss her? I stop looking, close my eyes and listen. The colour persists; a sketchy map on my eyelids. The imprint of her papaya tinged aura, which marks out her unclasped waist and the swooping bell of her skirt, shimmers before me. They are forbidden lips that wait and their dance is banished to leafy shadows.

Here, in this vegetative glade, in the pitch of night, I am the only intruder. They swirl and sweep, tracing the endless patterns of their dance. I witness all, but the secret is safe with me.

In the gallery shop I buy a postcard of my trip to Trinidad. I forget to buy a stamp.

Virago Green Spines

The Cambridge University Library are offering a £500 prize for a collection of books put together by a student. With £500 as temptation and motivation I thought I might have a try. As the collection will not be judged on size or monetary value perhaps I have a fair chance. Many years ago I joined a website called ReaditSwapit, and one of the books which came rushing through my letterbox on a whim was Elizabeth Taylor's Angel. The book fascinated me; the feel of its binding in my hand, it's green spine, the silhouette of an apple at its top and then the Portrait of Madame Lacroix by Giovanni Boldini which acted as its cover illustration. A little research only increased my fascination. What I had stumbled upon was a feminist printing press established in 1973 by Carmen Callil to publish the work of forgotten or overlooked women writers from the literary canon and to promote the writings of new and emerging women. Virago has been an obsession ever since.

Part of my fairly modest collection.

I felt sure I was the first to have made this discovery and began a treasure hunt in local charity shops, second hand bookshops in Cornwall and London and internet swapping communities. I was under the impression that they were difficult to find (they were in Harlow!) and that I must be the only woman on earth who actually wanted them. Since moving to Cambridge I have found that I can no longer buy eeach one that I find as the Virago press was genuinely prolific, (Heffers even reprints the originals to add to its stock). I have to be a little more selective in my search now that I am a student.

A picture of a larger and more impressive collection, stolen from Fleur Fisher

For the University Library prize my collection requires a coherence and an intellectual strain of thought to support it. My collection is of the early originals, published in the 80's with portraits of women for their covers. My interest is both literary and artistic; the cover paints a portrait of the central character just as the books themselves are studies of the female voice which leads them, these novels are word- portraits.

Cover: 'The Bather' Kees van Dongen

'I wanted to live at the centre of a focus of pleasantness, and harmony, and things coming right. And instead I was tossing about in a whirlpool of useless passion and frenzy.' The Thinking Reed

Cover: 'Portrait of Ira P' Tamara de Lempicka

' "Hardly anyone is dancing," said Charlotte to the unknown man beside her, "yet whenever I put out my hand, I touch someone," But the stranger seemed not to have heard her.' Strangers

Tamara de Lempicka was an amazing painter during the 20's and 30's who had her own distinctive and feminine approach to Cubism. Working in Paris she was associated with Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau and Andre Gide. The portrait used for the cover of Strangers is a powerful portrait in red and white, between innocence and passion.

Cover: 'Catherine Carrington' Carrington

'I am forward-looking girl and don't stay where I am, "Left right, Be bright," as I said in my poem. That's on days when I am one big bounce, and have to go careful then not to be a nuisance. But later I get back to my own philosophical outlook that keeps us all kissable.' Novel on Yellow Paper

I just finished reading Stevie Smith's Novel on Yellow Paper for my London dissertation and I love her loose writing style. It is like a 'stream of consciousness' but with an innocence and enthusiasm to it that is completely independent of the fluidity of writers such as Virginia Woolf.

I won't pin all my hopes on that book collecting prize, but I think I have a story and a chance, so wish me luck.

Alfred Wallis- dreams of the seaside

This post is a little goodbye to Kettles Yard for the christmas holidays. I had to stop reading for my dissertation and start writing so by the end of the week visits to that big pine table and all those gorgeous art books trailed off. While the snow begins to mount up outside the sun keeps shining in Kettles Yard. Its sunniest paintings are the collection from Alfred Wallis, arranged for the comfort of those studying the books.

White house and cottages- the Old House, Porthmeor Square, St Ives 1930-32 and White houses- Hales Down, near St.Ives 1930-32

Wallis was a Cornish artist who began painting at the age of 70 after the death of his wife. Painting provided a solace and became his 'company'. The paintings have an instinctive quality and people often call his work 'childlike'. I think that 'childlike' is as far from the truth as possible, Wallis paints like a man at 70 who has never painted before. At 70 he knows that he has no time to refine and practice that instinctive skill. He paints with himself, raw and open. He paints now because this is the last chance he has to paint. My mother does some art therapy at a local centre for the socially disadvantaged and some of her students paint like this; secret artists who have been denied paint and brushes for all of their lives.

Two fishermen in their boat with one mast steeped and Three-masted ship near lighthouse

These paintings are like a revelation. In Kettles Yard the paintings are kept together because they are a collection, we can imagine that they are personal works of art that orbit the artist as significant elements of him.

'He enjoyed talking about his paintings, speaking of them not as paintings but as events or experiences.' Ben Nicholson

Springing from the same colour palette, (the palette of Cornwall- sea water, cliff and sand) these works have a continuity, a fluidity which allows interconnection and reflection.

Looe, Cornwall, from a trip in 2008

Cornwall has a history of inspiring art and hosting small artists studios in its narrow, winding streets. I still remember looking jealously at my friend's art project at school. Her family have a house in St.Ives and she had collected all kinds of materials from Tate St.Ives and the Barbara Hepworth museum. She was forever painting delicate watercolours of beach scenes with a style all her own. Cornwall is a place with its own language, national identity and particular aesthetic. An aesthetic which the Ede's brought back to their home like the spoils of beach combing.

A Polperro sunset, 2008

People can be very dismissive of the British seaside, but Cornwall with its aquamarine stretches of turbulent sea, delicate boats buoying on the water and infinite coastlines of fine golden sand and rocky cliffs, blows all criticism out of the water. You can argue that it is dull to go on holiday in the same places every year but Cornwall requires that kind of affection from you. I will remember my holidays there forever, like a lost treasure.

Some links for you.

Great introduction to Wallis: http://www.andyblair.co.uk/alfredwallis/

Tate St.Ives http://www.tate.org.uk/stives/

Barbara Hepworth garden: http://www.tate.org.uk/stives/hepworth/

Escaping to Barcelona

So I decided that we all need a break (me included) from posts about Cambridge, Kettles Yard and my dissertation. The winter has been bleak and the year ahead (my final year of university) looks to be relentless so I have been getting fidgety. In January I will be heading off to Barcelona for a few days and I can't help dreaming a little prematurely about what I will be getting up to.

A gingerbread house is the gate to Gaudi's park rising in to the Barcelona skyline!

In 2009 I had another brief fling with Barcelona, however my lasting impression was of the locked doors of the Picasso museum, on the final day of our trip we had succeeded in arriving on the day of its closure. With over 3800 of Picasso's work the museum offers a key Picasso collection connecting with the work exhibited in Paris and Madrid. The collection explores Picasso's early formative years, including the Las Meninas series, and Picasso's deep relationship with the city and culture of Barcelona. The website also tells me that it has a collection of his prints! By some felicitous accident I have booked my trip to coincide with the dregs of a brilliant temporary exhibition; Picasso looks at Degas. Take a look here; http://www.bcn.cat/museupicasso/en/exhibitions/current.html

Picasso The Dwarf, I had not considered it before but I can see Degas in the melted brushstrokes and the figure of the dancer. Picasso has proffered his own twist by dwarfing her elegance.

Internet searches have also helped me to discover The Antoni Tapies Foundation where there will be an exhibition of a Brazilian artist, Anna Maria Maiolino. Maiolino sought to reinvigorate Brazilian art by 'reconnecting life and art by echoing the social resurgence of the body and subjectivity' and this will be her first major European retrospective. Her work is in a range of media including; poetry, woodcuts, photography, film, performance, sculpture and drawing. I think it sounds absolutely amazing- prints and sculpture! Read more here; http://www.fundaciotapies.org/site/spip.php?rubrique995.

Other things I will be visiting will no doubt include La Sagrada Familia (which I will probably enjoy more now I am interested in architecture and sculpture), the Gaudi Park, the Museum of Contemporary art and possibly the Joan Miro Foundation. Although I can already see my time wearing thin. The whole city of Barcelona is a kind of Art installation marked as it is by the dancing and twisting forms of Gaudi and the winter beach lapping at its edge. It will be a blissful break. Mornings at galleries, afternoons at the beach, evenings drinking in the hostel? Sounds like a plan.

The David Jones Pilgrimage

I agonised over the scans of these images. The scanner was continually auto-correcting, filling Jones's flowers with brighter colour and making everything else black and white. I had to change it to professional mode so that it would just pick up what was there, and do justice to all of the subtle inflections of Jones's work. But this isn't the point, the scans only give you a glimmer of an idea of what the work really is. Today my David Jones Pilgrimage reminded me why seeing work in the flesh is a breathtaking, tear-inducing and necessary part of appreciating the artists that you love. For Jones, not being widely read meant that the printing costs of his books were problematic. Most of the reproductions of his paintings, drawings and prints are poor quality, in black and white and often underwhelming. In Kettles Yard, guided by the women who work there, the importance of Jones's art was brought back in to sharp focus.

Vexilla Regis, 1948, Graphite and Watercolour on paper

This might just look like a tangled and wooded work of chaos, but behind the door in Jim Ede's bedroom you can take a moment to look a little deeper in to the tangle. New dimensions and perspectives buried in the branches shift in to focus. We discover Stone Henge embedded on a hill in the distance, mythic horses charging the break and sculpted angels mounted on deteriorated plinths. There is a connection between Jones's paintings, his inscriptions and his poetry; here is all of mythology actively present in the landscape, here is the wooded quarry of Jones's imagination made manifest.

Flora and Calix light, 1950, Graphite and watercolour on paper

Jones's Chalice painting provides an alternative window out of the house. It is a celebration of the wild detritus of a fading bloom. Once again all perspectives exist in tandem so that the floral fireworks and transparent chalice give way to the frame of the window. Often mistaken for a simple vase, the chalice holds imaginative potential and symbolism as a mystical object.

Quia per incarnati, 1953, watercolour on paper

I have already used a scan from this inscription in my post about 'the field between poetry and painting', but the copy was from The Anathemata and was already a grainy black and white reproduction. When I walked downstairs to find 'Quia per incarnati' in the house of the Ede's I had the real revelatory moment of my pilgrimage. Within the pages of the book it is easy to fall in to the fiction and imagine the words carved in stone and to see the inscriptions as a separate genre of work entirely. But this is very much a David Jones painting, the letters finely carved with watercolour and brush, inflected with light touches of colour are a development of visual languages.

I have decided that I could quite happily spend the rest of my life being a super geek and working in the Kettles Yard house. First of all it is just a beautiful space to work in and secondly everybody just kept telling me stories; about Dai (David Jones) dropping sculptures when he came to stay, recalling things they had read in the books (including Jim Ede suggesting Jones was assertive and slept with Petra), and remembering the reactions of visitors to his work.

My new work station amongst the art books!

It would be a pleasure to be adopted in to the small circle of adoring Dai Greatcoat fans. Perhaps stalking Kettles Yard is the way to do it!

Wu Guanzhong- retrospective

First of all I have to apologise for the extremely cropped scans, it is difficult trying to get good scans whilst protecting the spine of your book! When I was in China I saw a retrospective of the this giant of Chinese Modern Art, Wu Guanzhong. These examples may look like fairly typical of Chinese painting but placing them within the context of the rest of the museum it becomes evident that Guanzhong's delicate diversions from the traditional model make him stunningly modern.

'Exploring in the world of art is just like hunting tigers and panthers in deep mountains or shooting eagles. If they do not catch their preys, both artists and hunters will be greatly depressed and have nothing to fall back on. An artist may use up all of his energy for persistent hunting in the field of art. But his spirit is reviving.' Wu Guanzhong.

Only the Chinese can get away with being quite so imagistically poetic.

After I saw his exhibition I couldn't look at China without seeing it through the lyrical brush strokes of Guanzhong. His paintings have come to represent for me what I love about that country.

Maggi Hambling

I have been feeling a bit ill, and there is nothing like a bit of creative nostalgia as comfort. Anyway I have a habit of buying hundreds of postcards and never sending them anywhere or to anyone, but I do usually write things on the back of them. I suppose you could call them notes to myself, postcards from daydreams far away! Here are some from a Maggi Hambling exhibition I saw at the Fitzwilliam at the beginning of the summer. On the second post card I have copied out a poem by Hambling from the exhbition.



I didn't get to the beach properly this year, oh how I still long for the sea!