Verdun

Verdun, an ancient fortress town strategically placed on the road to Paris. It has a long history of siege and conflict. During W.W.II it became a symbol of French resistance when it survived a long and terrible assault from vastly superior german troops. The painting by Felix Vallotton was contributed as this week's prompt by Magpie Tales

Sharp. Angular. The forms
man brings to bear. How
apt! Snapped shut or open.
Scissor-wise. Knives 
in pincer movements cut.
Shred. softer forms
that Nature spread
in kinder days.
Man's browns
have muddied
purer greens. Where pastures were
strange landscapes have replaced
their peace with heave
and blast of earth.

I say: if ever this great onslaught ends
(somewhere beyond the death of friends
I do not doubt),
then shall the landscape
fall into a silence, speak
the death of speech,
the death of sapiens. Only
the homo in us will survive.

I dare to say of this: if ever it should end --
the stuttering machine gun madness;
exploding earth and cries of pain;
then shall we hear:
no birdsong;  whispers
from no furry creatures
in the non-existent undergrowth;
no rustling of dead leaves.
No sounds beyond the sighings of 
the dead in search of graves.

If it had eyes, this landscape 
would lie silent, staring into space,
a dumb and broken thing. See now:
beyond the small hill's brow
shapes piled that might be corpses --
or fallen trees... or simply shadows
thrown by the light of hell.

I say again: if ever this great onslaught ends
there will be nothing left for light to show --
except the most impenetrable darkness
man has ever seen.

The Wisley Sculpture Trail

Here are some of the images I promised you in Thursday's post. As I mentioned, The Surrey Sculpture Association's annual sculpture trail at Wisley is a great favourite of ours. This year there were 64 exhibits, mostly set in sympathetic surroundings. Inevitably, the quality varies considerably but for me the chief delight is seeing them in those attractive surroundings, and it was this aspect more than any other that I tried to capture with the camera.

Peacock (Steel)

     Fish (Steel)        Golden Eagle (Bronze Resin)

Promise (Cement)and Faith Hope Love (Slate resin)
Self Preservation (Serpentine stone) : Otters (Iron resin)


Embrace (Aluminium resin)

The Eyes of Miro

Constellation: The Beautiful Bird Deciphering The Unknown To A Pair Of Lovers by Joan Miro

Infinity of infinities
(love being one).
Infinity of eyes
(for how could love 
exist except
by means of eyes
and what they see
and how they meet?)

Miro saw eyes everywhere -
even in the most
unlikely places:
on trees and
out among
the constellations
far out in space.
On body parts not of the face.

He saw an angel once*
(of the apocalypse)
with many sets of wings
and eyes that covered it
the way scales blanket fish.
It lived with him for evermore

Here eyes are riders
of unbridled colts.
The colts
are insights
into mysteries.
The mysteries
are partial truths
of the unknowns.

Here twin gun barrel eyes
bore into us,
the curious,
the must-know strangers
unknowing and unknown.

The twin gun barrel eyes
guard her red
and black vagina,
birthplace of new versions,
constellations yet
to be created,
home of primal soup.

(The future may be better known to us
than our own day.)

The bird above her head
sings into being
through parrot beak and skull
all that the eye,
all-seeing, sees.
Her lover turns his back -
but not his eye.

.......................................
Written for Brian Miller's Theme Thursday, Eyes
* A fresco in a local museum.

On Not Getting It.

I drift in and out of sleep when the show is on, that way I find that it makes sense. (Quote from the comments on a BBC Radio 2 Blog.)

---

David Lister, writing in The Independent a few days ago (26.08) and commenting on the current popularity of The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain, gave an amusing account of its recent rise and rise. Music generally has been more in demand it seems, which more than one commentator has attributed to the financial downturn and the need which the populace has suddenly discovered for tranquility and a spiritual dimension. Certainly music can supply both of those commodities, but The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain... I am not sure.

According to Lister it has been variously described as Hilarious. Glorious. Original. Well, just about every superlative under the sun. His comments were prompted by The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain having been given a full billing in the BBC's Promenade Concert Programme. He went along to see. The occasion occasioned great excitement, he wrote. It was a complete sell-out. There were queues all round the block, he told us. Many, including the director, had brought their own ukuleles along. He made it sound like A Last Night at the Proms.

For Lister at any rate the promise was more than the reality, it seems. He reported that atThe Ride of The Valkyries he smiled. At Beethoven's Ode to Joy he half-smiled. After that the novelty began to wear off. Finally, he admitted, he just didn't get it. Now I have to admit that I have not heard The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain, so cannot pronounce upon its achievements, its musicality or anything else. Whether or not I would have got it had I been there, I have no idea. What struck me, reading Lister's column, was the universality of the experience. It is universal in the sense that it happens, has happened, to us all (hands up any brave individual who wishes to claim that he has never been in the position of not getting it) and it is universal in the sense that it is common to all the arts. Maybe there have been times when it wouldn't have been so all-embracing, but today it is.

Which leads me again (I have raised it before, as no doubt the chorus of groans, could you but hear them, would indicate) to the question of what do you do when confronted by an alleged or intended work of art that you truly do not get. I am not referring to an encounter with a piece of art that just doesn't happen to be to your taste - I can be an even bigger bore on "taste", but that's not for this post, you will be pleased to hear. No, we are not talking don't like, but truly don't get.

I have in the past waxed prosaically about the poverty of the instruction I was given at school concerning all things aesthetic. Okay it was war time and there was a dearth of good teachers, but nowhere and at no time were we given any clue as to how to approach art, poetry, drama, music or any other art form that life might one day have placed before us for our approval. So far as literature was concerned the approach was that of good old comprehension. Well do I recall moments such as the following from a reading round the class session:

Me: Lady, you are the cruellest she alive if you will lead these graces to the grave and leave the world no copy. (Quoted from memory.)

Dicky Bird: What did he mean by that, King?

Me: He wanted her to have her portrait painted, sir.

Roars of hysterical laughter from the class. (An unusual success for me.) Roars of something quite different from Dicky Bird - and the rest of the session spent sitting in the corridor.

Not the sort of teaching - nor the sort of behaviour on the part of the pupil, I admit it - likely to send you out into the world equipped to cope with the difficulties of Eliot's Waste Land or post-modern literature - and remember, as I sometimes forget, That Eliot had written The Waste Land some 25 years before this, also that we were then well into the period of Post Modernism, we who were still reading The Jackdaw of Rheims, Lochinvar and other such versifications. I never did hear any mention of Eliot within those hallowed walls, much less Ezra Pound. What chance then, that Marcel Duchamp's famous "Fountain" - for which think: urinal? might get an airing in the art room?

There is an oft reiterated question which to my mind brings this whole question sharply into focus: "Ah, but is it art?" We have all asked it at some point, I guess, if only to evade a more difficult or soul-searching response, but it is a question which says more about the questioner than the questioned, for it is saying , in effect: "Yes, I do see that this found object, or this installation, or this whatever it may be, has something about it, but please point out what it has, specifically, that rings my art bell, falls within the parameters that for me define what is and what is not art.

Art must have its boundaries. Only the true anarchist thinks otherwise, but there always will be works and artists pushing at those boundaries. It is as though we have our own internal Venn diagrams. There is a circle for art (or maybe several), one for poetry (or maybe several), another for philosophy (or maybe several), and so on. We are confronted with an installation and the brain clicks in, weighing up the possibilities, where does this one fit? Maybe it goes in one of the overlaps, it's both this and that as well...

Back in my fourth paragraph I asked the question: what do you do when confronted by an alleged or intended work of art that you truly do not get. We must have our boundaries, but surely we must keep them flexible. When something truly original comes along it will not quite fit, for it will be something you had not foreseen when drawing up those boundaries. Indeed, by definition it will be something that no one had foreseen. So what could be the response? You could ask yourself: What preconceptions do I have, what assumptions have I made in the past that are preventing me from getting it? (The answer may be none, of course, the fault may not be in you, it may be another case of the Emperor's New Clothes.) The first occasion on which I can recall the question arising was back in 1952/3. What I recall is a public furore over Reg Butler's sculpture The Unknown Political Prisoner. (Butler is shown with an earlier version of the work, in my first image.)Had it ever been built it would have risen 300 - 400 feet in the air. It was, Butler said, specifically in memory of all who died in the concentration camps. The final maquette was destroyed by a Hungarian refugee whilst it was on display at The Tate Gallery. Everyone had a view about it. Few were complimentary. I cannot recall any work of art before it being given such a high profile. Certainly nothing to do with the arts had ever caused such controversy and consternation in our rather typical (I would think) household. The media then were not what they have become since, of course, but such as they were they went to town on it. It was exhibited at The Venice Biennial and at The Tate Gallery. Everybody that I knew - and I knew no-one who was in the habit of showing any interest in, let alone speaking about art - was talking about it and asking: But it's not art - is it? I, for my part, was thinking: Mmmmmm, it's got something... but it's not sculpture! Sculpture was solid. You chipped it out of a socking great block of granite. This was something, alrighty, but not that!

But then another thought dawned, a really transformative thought (I could have written about this for my contribution two post back): it's not beautiful in the normally accepted sense. I had to come to terms - for I was by then determined to fit The Unknown Political Prisoner into my Venn diagram labelled Sculpture - with the fact that it had nothing to do with beauty per se. Nothing to do with seeing in the visual sense at all - other than the fact that you had to see it for the brain to register it. So then scrub beauty, scrub the idea that art MUST have to do with beauty, scrub the idea that sculpture has to be something solid, like a gravestone - or bigger - and then.... well, and then, what? Does accepting all those modifications to the boundaries of your mental Venn diagram open the door to something else? Is that one of the obstacles that have prevented you from getting it? Does the work now offer you something that had not occurred to you before? Does it give something by way of compensation for the treasured belief(s) you might have surrendered?

I know what Dicky Bird would have advised. He would have said to read around the subject, the artist or the work - if the latter is big enough, important enough to have had books written on it. Much more chance now, of course, with all the reference materials of the Internet at our disposal. There are those - and sometimes I am one of them - who will see a problem here. The work of art should stand by itself, without explanation, without reference to the fact that the artist's wife had just suffocated their two children or what ever. And so it should, but for those who are of another time or culture, and so not immersed in the power and spontaneity of the artist's sources, who don't know the symbolism, the history, can't see the parallels, or for those who are faced by something new in the history of art, it can help to have notes - such as those on The Waste Land, for example, though they are hardly sufficient, given the extraordinary number of references. Indeed, unless you have an encyclopedic knowledge of Eliot's references it might be considered essential to do a great deal of reading around the subject - eventually, though not for the first reading(s) I would suggest. Let it sink in first. Let the words and their cadences do their work before looking further afield.

What would Dicky Bird have made of this, I wonder: from The White Threshold by W.S.Graham.

Let me always from the deep heart
Drowned under behind my brow so ever
Stormed with other wandering, speak
Up famous fathoms well over strongly
The pacing white haired kingdoms of the sea..

I walk towards you and you may not walk away.

Always the welcome-roaring threshold
So ever bell worth my exile to
Speaks up to greet me into the hailing
Seabraes seabent with swimming crowds
All cast all mighty water dead away.

I rise up loving and you may not move away.


I know what Dicky Bird would have done. He would have written out a prose translation or equivalent of it. It wouldn't have done him much good, I think. I found it completely incomprehensible first time I encountered it. No strategy unlocked it. Only let it sink in from repeated readings did any good. (You might think that the poetic equivalent of drifting in and out of sleep. I wouldn't feel inclined to argue, but it worked for me - I think!) Whatever. You just have to find your own way in. There's no right way and wrong way. If Graham could have written it more simply, I am sure he would have. Interestingly, when I went to look up the quote, I found these words by Graham:-

The most difficult thing for me to remember is that a poem is made of words and not of the expanding heart, the overflowing soul, or the sensitive observer. A poem is made of words. It is words in a certain order, good or bad by the significance of its addition to life and not to be judged by any other value put upon it by imagining how or why or by what kind of man it was made.

I think Dicky Bird would have felt more comfortable with this from Tom Thumb by RF Langley - though maybe he should not have!

We should accept the obvious facts of physics.
The world is made entirely of particles in
fields of force. Of course. Tell it to Jack. Except it
doesn't seem to be enough tonight. Not because
he’s had his supper and the upper regions are
cerulean, as they have been each evening
since the rain. Nor just because it’s nine PM and
this is when, each evening since we came, the fifty
swifts, as passionately excited as any
particles in a forcefield, are about to end
their vesper flight by escalating with thin shrieks
to such a height that my poor sight won’t see them go.
Though I imagine instantly what it might be
to separate and, sleeping, drift so far beyond
discovery that any flicker which is left
signs with a scribble underneath the galaxy.

If you're still with me, you deserve a medal, but instead I am giving you a challenge: to find something that would not normally be associated with art, poetry or music but which when brought into focus by you begins to work on you in some way that might make it a candidate for one of the art circles in your inner Venn diagram. Which is to say, can you find a piece of found art? It could be a phrase on a corn flake packet, a snatch of conversation overheard in a shop, a mis-shapen potato, a smashed-up car or a workman's tool of some sort. It might be a sequence of sounds recorded on a country walk. (No, why country? Might just as easily be in some town centre.) You get the idea, I'm sure. Something that did not start out as a piece of art, but which, now that you have picked it out and shone your light upon it, begins to act like one. I, for my part, am going to cheat. I already have mine. Two posts ago I posted some pictures from a day spent at Wisley. One of many remarkable interludes from that day was walking among the fruit trees. At one point we sat down for a few moments. A family came by, and one member of it, a girl of - I would guess - about eight years, was pointing to the pears and saying what they suggested to her. (Thinking back to my childhood and climbing ladders to pick the fruit, I could not but be impressed by the fact that all - and I do mean all - of it was within reach, could be picked from the ground, most of it by a child.) This particular child was letting her imagination rip: this pear was an old man's head; another was sand castle. Amnd then this:
Look mum, a honey bubble dripping from a spoon! So we could argue about the word dripping being used of a bubble; maybe she had conflated two images, but not only was the phrase couched as a perfect iambic pentameter, but she spoke it rhythmically and the image was exactly right: the colour, the shape, and the sun imparting to it the appearance of a slight translucence. So it's not a world-beater, but if I come up with a better one, I'll post it for sure.

Looking at a Work of Art (1)

Two things happened this week to inspire this post. the first was that I came across a painting I made way back in my student days. It is mainly gouache on cardboard but there is some traditional watercolour. The paint is mostly applied with a brush in the usual way, but some of the watercolour is sprayed on with a fixative spray. There is also a little flicking on of the paint with the brush. It is a beach scene. Figures were drawn from life on a beach, but before being transferred to the painting the two outlines were moved closer together, producing not just a thinner figure, but a bulbous one. I was studying book illustration at the time and the painting was something of an experiment, not intended to ape what I and others were producing on the course, but obviously influenced by it. The colour, for example, was intended as decoration. This painting, not a success in my book, was included in my first ever exhibition - by which I do not mean it was a one-man exhibition! It was a student exhibition held in a pub/restaurant. The local press attended and made a vox pop of diners' and regulars' opinions of the exhibits. Adverse comments to do with my works, my mind immediately binned, as you would expect, so those that have survived were all positive. But not always what I would have wished. One I remember, for example, was of a woman referring to my beach scene in words something approaching: You know exactly what it was like to be on that beach. The colours tell you. Obviously, the colours suggested something to that lady, but they were not used by me to communicate anything about the beach. (That in itself, I guess, could become a talking point, but bear with me.)

The other thing that happened this week was my surrender to the temptation (first ever!) to write to the Times - see previous post - to comment on a painting. It struck me that in all the posting I have done on this blog in the last two and a half years, I have never discussed a painting. I have talked about schools of paint, genres and styles of painting, even individual painters, but never have I focussed on a particular work of art, as I did, of course, for my paragraph for The Times. (Do not fret thyself, I am not going to focus on my Beach scene!) Did that indicate a weakness of some kind, I wondered. And then it struck me that if so, then in this I am in good company, for I have long had a theory that when it comes to the visual arts, we English choose to talk in the most general terms possible: we would rather talk about Primitivism or Purism than, say, Amedeo Modigliani or Le Corbusier, and are more comfortable commenting on Henri Rousseau or Aubrey Beardsley than on Boy on the Rocks or The Eyes of Herod. And then, when we are forced down to the particular, to a single work of art, our first instinct, as so often in poetry, is to look for its meaning, for the symbol or for some effect of the colour on our emotions, its mood perhaps, something that will unlock the painting for us. The lady who spoke about my painting was - in my view - missing the mark, but she was responding in a long tradition, in the way she had no doubt been led to respond in the past, a very English way.

And so it was that I thought I might occasionally look at a single painting or sculpture - the danger, of course, is that I may lead everyone astray in a quite different direction. I have chosen for my first artist - yes, I confess it, I chose the artist before I chose the painting. I chose an artist who I believe does produce paintings with very definite moods... but - and I will come to the buts later... an artist who is a plein air painter - out in all weathers - responding uniquely to the natural scene. The painting I have chosen to focus on is one by Ivon Hitchens, A Lake and Outflow.


When I look at my Beach Scene I see a picture that might have been conceived in black and white and later thought to be in need of a bit of colour. When I look at the Hitchens I see a painting in which colour is integral to the original conception. It is integral because, though muted, it is the picture's light and that light is its space.

And then as I look at the picture my eye is first drawn in by the large, centrally placed mass of foliage, before running diagonally up and left, travelling along the outflow pipe above the small fall to the yellow rectangle, from where it travels back across the canvas, this time just below the top edge, until it reaches the end of the dark canopy. From this point it slides down the back of the curved mass with which we started. Reaching the bottom edge of the picture it is released into the secondary vista (as I will call it) which takes up the right hand fifth of the canvas. This is rather more naturalistically portrayed than one would expect from Hitchens, and the eye now travels up and back into the distance through a short flight of steps provided by what I take to be a boat, a sluice gate and a stream winding away into the distance. From the top half of the picture it is now led forward, down and left until it once more encounters the curved central mass. This time, though, it is carried over this natural obstacle by a bridge of light pigment to a more loosely rendered pool.

I speak of the eye being carried back (into the picture) and forwards (out of it), for the picture has depth. Not so its individual constituents, though. However round and bulky a mass of foliage might have been in its natural setting, in the painting it is a flat sweep of colour (sometimes just a squiggle of pigment). Typically for Hitchens, there is no moulding - except in the notable exception of that right hand vista. The trees, the canopy and all the major elements of the scene result from the painter's inner response to what is before him. It is a genuine abstract painting: he has abstracted from the scene that which created the internal response.

The areas of canvas left white are vitally important to a Hitchens painting. Try covering up the two lightning-like flashes splitting the bank of trees to the left of that vista. The eye now travels quite differently around the picture, for the most part travelling in circles around the canvas's major space and only taking the most cursory notice of the smaller one to its right. If I had left those flashes of white canvas where Hitchens left them, the integrity of that bank of trees would have been shattered, but try covering up the little scene to their right. The depth is not destroyed, as I would have destroyed it, for it does not come only from the perspective of that small vista, but also from the bank of trees in spite of (or because of?) those flashes of naked canvas.

The actual experience was therefore the source of the impulse, but the impulse was not some kind of reflex action. It was the result of prolonged reflection and it had to take its place in an architecture, a space, that he was building to contain it. The response rebuilt the experience, so that where some painters give us the shape, form and detail of, say, the tree that was before them, and where others present us with the paint that reinterprets the tree, Hitchens gives us the tree existing as paint.

To achieve this Hitchens developed a visual language that was personal to him. He explained that there are seven instruments in the painter's orchestra. They are:line, form, plane, shape, tone, notan and colour. There are also seven principles of composition: transition, opposition, subordination, rhythm, repetition, symmetry and balance. But he also said that all this was too formal and that: No amount of theory will make a painter. I try to understand my subject and find out what I want to say about it... remembering that in the end it will be the natural handling of the paint that will give me pleasure. And that is all I have to go by.

This last point is vitally important. It is in my opinion the outstanding quality of Hitchens's works. The quality of the paint and the way it was handled is exemplary. I have never seen the slightest sign or suspicion of him having tried to improve things somewhere along the line. This is a great problem for many of us non-geniuses, of course. We lesser mortals are completely vulnerable to the artist's greatest fear. It is a fear that besets us when a drawing or painting is really taking off and spreading its wings. Just when we should be feeling ecstatic is when it strikes hardest. It is the fear of uniqueness, the very attribute we should be open-hearted to welcome. Sometimes, too, when we have begun to lose the plot, when we are trying to rescue our lost vision, it will strike, often in the form of encouraging us to make it more like some other painting or some other person's paintings that most folk think good. I never get the feeling that Hitchens feared uniqueness.

And yes, to finish with one of my earliest points, there is a mood to the painting. In that sense it has a meaning outside the formal elements which comprise it, but they and not the mood are what was important. I do not get the impression that Hitchens began with the mood; he began with his individual responses to the various elements of the scene. It was the consistency of those responses which has led to the mood.