Things on the Dark Side

Heard in a waiting room: "This? Kazuo Ishiguro.'Never Let Me Go'. Can't put it down. Very Dark. All his books are dark. Love him to bits!"
"You're into 'dark' then, are you?"
"To me, a story with no dark bits is like dinner with no garlic!"
"What does that say about you, I wonder?"

Not too much, I hope, for I, too, am a fan of Ishiguro and enjoyed "Never Let Me go" very much. "Enjoy" may not be the right word, but this is not the right place to debate it. The point of quoting that little exchange is to say that it started me thinking about the dark side as it has been explored in art and poetry - and to wonder about its prevalence.

Darkness comes in various forms and guises, though. There is the darkness of, say, Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach, which is perhaps an all-pervading pessimism of outlook. There is the fatalism of Yeats's "Two Songs of a Fool", and there is the darkness beneath the beauty of Blake's "Sick Rose" from "Songs of Innocence and Experience", in which the rose is sick because of its dark secret, its repressed sexual urges. They are illicit and hidden that should be open and shared with others.

I find my self most moved by stories of the everyday in which the dar elements are hidden and come upon you in ways which are unexpected and/or inexplicable. As Auden's "Musee des Beaux Arts" puts it:
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the plowman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

Sylvia Plath has surely suffered from an over-concentration on what I might call the "not waving, but drowning" perception which the public has of her in general, and of the whole dynamics of her marriage, together with the overshadowing of her work by that of Ted Hughes. (Almost, she could have written the Stevie Smith poem herself.) Some of her poems may appear at first glance to be childishly simple, but such terrain can hide life's dark things as effectively as mountains can hide brigands or terrorists.

"Mary's Song" is an excellent example of the shadow in the everyday:

"The Sunday lamb cracks in its fat.
The fat
Sacrifices its opacity....

A window, holy gold.
The fire makes it precious,
The same fire

Melting the tallow heretics,
Ousting the jews."

"The Birthday Present" begins with a child's simplicity, though the vocabulary is not childish:

"What is this behind this veil, is it ugly, is it beautiful?"

but in no time at all the world we are in becomes first of all eerie and then violent:

"When I am quiet at my cooking I feel it looking, I feel it thinking"

Then:

"The world will go up in a shriek, and your head with it,"

In The Beekeepers Daughter the bees provide a world in which the threat and menace go hand-in-hand with all that is erotic, even amatory, not to say lustful. The event powering the poem is the death of her father

"The great corollas dilate, peeling back their silks,"

"A well of scents almost too dense to breathe in,"

But then:
"My heart under your foot, sister of a stone."
She uses the image of a stone frequently in her poems. Here, of course, it speaks of subjugation. more generally - and here - it speaks of being reduced to a state of inertia, almost comatose, a minimalist core perhaps. One more quote to convey the feeling of the poem:
"In these little boudoirs streaked with orange and red
The anthers nod their heads, potent as kings
To father dynasties. The air is rich.
Here is a queenship no mother can contest -"


For my painter, I have chosen Odilon Redon
Actually, there are two Redons: there is the Redon who was an admirer of artists like Corot, the Redon who created light, airy landscapes, vases of flowers and suchlike, almost an impressionist at times, and there is the Redon whose art was an exploration of dark dreams and visions, who gave us plants with animal heads, and whose picture frames were filled with dark and gloomy images executed in large part in black chalk, charcoal, pastel and gouache. For this Redon black was his "Prince of colours", and his subjects ranged from isolated figures in rocky landscapes to Biblical themes. Typical titles were "Angel in Chains", "Faust and Mephistopheles", "Apparition" and "Cactus Man".


Imagination always took precedence over observation, and there would always be a dark, velvety blackness at the heart of an image.

One important influence was his friend, the botanist, Armand Clavaud, who was pursuing theories of his concerned with the animal characteristics of plants, so we find a dwarf embedded in a tree, fused with it might be a better description ("Spirit of the Forest") or the figures of Death and Lust similarly fused in works inspired by the writings of Flaubert.


Here is what Redon himself had to say about his monsters:My monsters. I believe that it is there I have given my most personal note. I worked and studied a great deal on anatomy to arrive at the conclusion that everything is man- in every living being one finds under individual forms the lines of the human skeleton. It is with this principle in mind that I deformed, made larger or simplified an aspect of my embryonic beings. If any part of my work should last I believe that it should be my monsters.

Poetry Workshop

For those who would appreciate the chance to participate in a poetry workshop, but for one reason or another are unable to take advantage of the excellent offerings around these days, I think I have found the ideal alternative. It seems to be for me, at any rate.

Two or three weeks ago I chanced to visit the Books section of The Guardian Unlimited website, where I discovered there to be a monthly poetry workshop.

April's workshop was being run by Carol Rumens. The task she had set was to write a triolet. This, for those who do not know (I didn't) is an eight line poem in which the last two lines are the first two repeated - and just for good measure, the first line is also the fourth. (Incidentally, the word triolet seems to refer to the fact that the first line appears three times.) A rather contrived little arrangement, I thought, but a bit of fun trying to make something out of it - silk purse and sow's ear sprang to mind. Certainly, it does not leave the poet much elbow room. What I found most difficult was to come up with a first line that would fit easily and naturally into its next two, slightly different, slots.

I was in fractal mode, as some of you might appreciate, and so tried to write a triolet about fractals. You will not be surprised to learn (I wasn't) that my effort was not shortlisted - but then, if I only wrote about my successes, there would not be many posts! Shortlisted poems are commented upon by the poet running the workshop, who also leads into the activity with an introduction both useful and interesting - certainly that is so in those I have tried. (Past workshops are available on the site.)

Here, for what it is worth, is my slightly embarrassing effort.

The Fractal

A deepening rose the fractal is,
a sea forever opening,
unique and samely, like a kiss.
A deepening rose the fractal is
where beauty and disorder tryst
and numbers go on partying.
A deepening rose the fractal is,
a sea forever opening.

Hopefully, it will at least give an inkling of what is a triolet. To try the Guardian Unlimited workshops, either click on this blog's title or click here for The Guardian site and navigate your way to the books section.

Fractal Zoom

I have had another flood of emails asking about fractals, both of them raising the same two questions. (Hey, what about using the comment facility, fellahs, so's others can join in and help me out?) However, I will do my humble best. Before that, though, a word of warning: both emailers seem to have scooted off to my website expecting some sort of enlightenment there. Far be it from me to dissuade anyone from visiting my website or to suggest that enlightenment is not to be found there, but I feel I ought to point out that enlightenment on fractals is conspicuous by its absence. Much else you may find in the way of spiritual insight, but not that.

The first point raised was that it is difficult, when presented with a series of individual plots, to see the relationship between them. I don't think I actually presented a series in that sense with that intention, but here's one which I hope will help. You will see that I have marked on each the area to be magnified for the next plot.



The other query is of a rather more technical nature. I realised, reading the emails, that I had not explained - or not explained clearly enough - the process by which a fractal is produced. Fractals are produced naturally or artificially - in a computer. In either case (matter in the first instance, data in the second) becomes the input for a process which wreaks a small change in it. The slightly modified data or matter (the output from the process) then becomes the new input. It is fed back into the process and modified again in the same manner, before becoming output once more. The new output is fed back in... the process being repeated, usually thousands of times without variation, to produce the fractal, which may be either of two types: self-repeating or self-similar.

Two Sites

It is always a great feeling that accompanies the rediscovery of old friends, and I have recently rediscovered two, both of which I think it worth while to mention.
A week or so back I decided that the links on my website were well overdue for a spot of checking and, no doubt, maintenance. In fact, amazingly, they all seemed to be working - those that were there! Several were missing. One of those was the website of a friend from college days, Bill Booth's "Themes Familiar". I had made a number of changes to my site in the not-too-distant past, and it must be (I thought) that when working on it I had inadvertently dropped some of my favourite links - for all the missing links fell into that category - but when I asked Bill if he had any idea when they fell off, so to speak, he told me that he had never been able to find his! I am at a loss to explain, for I know that his did appear on the site in two places, though not on any of the usual links pages, as I had intended to give it prominence! All I can do is to try to make amends. The link appears at the bottom of this post and I also append two drawings taken from Themes Familiar. I know you will find the site of interest. Take a look for yourself, the interest is wide-ranging: music, material on his native Yorkshire and much else. I still have not restored the links from my website, but I will, I will...

---

Helen Bar-Lev is the other friend with whom I have re-acquainted myself. An internet friend from the time of my first, faltering steps to producing my own website. We exchanged links and she gave me much encouragement.
She was born in New York City in 1942. She has lived in Israel for 36 years. She holds a degree in Anthropology from California State University, Northridge, 1972. Since 1976 Helen has devoted herself to art: painting, teaching and writing poetry. From 1989 until 2001 she was a member of the Safad Artists’ Colony in the Upper Galilee where she had her own gallery. In January 2007 she and Johnmichael Simon
moved to Metulla, the northernmost town in Israel.




To date Helen has participated in 80 exhibitions, including 30 one-person shows. Her poems and paintings have appeared in many online journals such as The Other Voices International Project, The Coffee Press Journal, Boheme Magazine, The Poetry Bridge, Sketchbook; River Bones Press, The Hypertexts, Palabras-Press, Poetry Super Highway, etc., and also print anthologies including Meeting of the Minds Journal, Voices Israel Anthologies, Manifold Magazine of New Poetry (U.K.), Lucidity Poetry Journal and Across The Long Bridge, An Anthology of Award-Winning Poetry, Sailing in the Mist of Time, An Anthology of Award-Winning Poetry, Harvest International, Poesy first international issue; For Loving Precious Beast, An Anthology of Poetry edited by Yolanda Coulaz.





A book entitled CYCLAMENS AND SWORDS with poems of Israel by Helen and her partner Johnmichael Simon has been published by Ibbetson Press of Boston, Mass. and is available via Lulu and also may be ordered from the authors hbarlev@netvision.net.il. Her watercolour paintings and sketches are featured throughout the book.

Helen is a member of Voices Israel English Poetry Society and The Israel Artists’ and Sculptors’ Association. She is the global correspondent in Israel for the Poetry Bridge and Editor-in-Chief of the Voices Israel annual Anthology.

Above are some images from her On-line gallery.

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Links

Themes Familiar
The Helen-Barlev on-line gallery
The Poet's Chair

The Last Word?

This is by way of being a footnote to some earlier posts (eg 18 Jan: "It's how he sees it" and 5 Feb: "It may not say what it says").
In a book review by Adam Thorpe I found the following quotation from Yves Bonnefoy, the French poet: "poetry is what descends level by level through its own text, forever in metamorphosis... until it gives up...knowing that the essential is still to be uncovered."
I suppose you could say that the quotation descends level by level through its own text, forever in metamorphosis... until it gives up...knowing that the essential is still to be uncovered!

Digital Doodles

Just some more doodles from the digital darkroom

What's it worth?

Grayson Perry was in the news again last week. A piece of ceramic sculpture attributed to him was to be sold by Christies, the auctioneers, who expected it to realise £4000 - £ 6000. The piece in question, a representation of a boar entitled "The Children's Bore", was inscribed with the sort of comments made by nagging parents: "Get the hair out of your eyes", "Sit still", "Keep quiet", etc.

Perry had made such a piece way back in his early days, and had sold it to a friend, who had become, thereby, his first collector.

Alerted by Christies to the forthcoming sale, he at first thought that it might indeed be by him, but then realised that it was technically too good to belong to that stage of his career. He informed Christies, with the result that it was immediately reclassified as "English School" and given an estimated value of £100 - £150, which raises the question, as such incidents always do, of just what is the true value of a work of art, and how is it to be assessed. Is it, as maybe in a perfect world it would be, intrinsic? Or is it reasonable for a work to reflect the standing of its creator? Is the Mona Lisa more valuable because it was painted by Leonardo da Vinci, or would it be no less a work of art if painted by one of his students? Perry, who you may know to be one of my all time favourite commentators on all things aesthetic, believes that the way we view art derives from religion, that its artists are its holy fools and saints, that their works take on some of the attributes of relics, and that our attitudes towards them have much in common with those of the religious towards their relics, and are valued accordingly.

Well perhaps. A work of art, it seems to me, acquires its value in the same way as any other artefact: it is worth exactly what the purchaser can be persuaded to pay for it. Which maybe begs the question of what forms of persuasion can be used. Can it be seen as an investment opportunity? Which further begs the question of what, at some later date, will persuade another purchaser to pay a larger sum. Is it just its beauty or some other attribute that will make it desirable? Or is Perry on the right lines? That possessing a piece by a famed creator makes us feel closer to, in some sort of relationship to, that person? Or perhaps we do not fully trust our own instincts, in which case the knowledge that it has come from an impeccable source will be some sort of guarantee that we have the "genuine article". Perhaps it is just fashion? Or do we simply need something that is unique - and guaranteed to be so - to reinforce our own status as unique individuals, uniquely ourselves? We have what no one else has. Whatever the mechanism at work in any given case - and the mechanisms must be legion - they would seem to have more to do with psychology than aesthetics.

Memory

A piece by Frieda Hughes in Monday's Times. Subject: Blakes poem, "The Tyger", taken from "By Heart, 101 Poems to Remember", edited and introduced by her late father, Ted Hughes, who, it seems, was a passionate advocate of memory excercises, not least among them the well-known technique of memorizing lists by attaching each item to an image, such that these that can then be linked to form a narrative.

Rhyme is also a useful aide-memoire, she points out, and recommends both playing her father's memory games and memorizing poems. By such means, she hopes, it might be possible to stave off the approach of Alzheimer's. It would be wonderful to think so, impossible to say she's wrong, and so maybe worth giving it a go.

She gives various other useful spin-offs that might be ours as a result of memorizing poems, the ability to recite them “hands-free” whilst doing other things, being one.
Some people, I know, recite memorized poems for stress-relief, to help them sleep, to defy the boredom of repetitive work, or simply for the pleasure they give.
Like many others, I am sure, I can still “rattle off” a great deal of verse which was required learning when I was at school - and quite a lot more that was not. Some of the required stuff, I would dearly love to be able to erase from my memory banks, but alas, that does not seem to be a possibility! Both the choice of poems, and what we were taught about them, left a lot to be desired, I fear.

Critics often bemoan the fact that children in school are no longer required to learn poetry by heart. That is, no doubt, a great loss, but I am comforted by the thought that they do get introduced to the work of living poets, whereas I, who was born just eleven years after Eliot wrote The Waste Land, went right through school (including grammar school) without knowing of his or its existence. It was not until I left school and went to art school that the world of contemporary (or near contemporary) poetry opened up for me. At school I was stuck with Lochinvar coming out of the west, “The Pied Piper of Hamelin”, and the journey of the good news from Ghent to Aixe. - Not quite true; we did “do” Homer!
It seems there has been both progress and regression.

It's been done!

I have encountered just a couple of comment-worthy news items in the last week or so, both of which put me in mind of a Punch cartoon I saw aeons ago. A sculptor atop what is obviously his Magnum Opus, a towering work of great height and complexity. Marble chips are flying from his chisel. We are on his eye-level. A diminutive figure many feet below is looking up and calling to him: "It's been done!".
It seems that Martina Navratilova has been working with artist Juraj Kralik on a painting to show at the Roland-Garros Stadium. Her part in its creation was to hit paint-soaked tennis balls at a large canvas pasted to a wall. To judge by the photograph, the result is a wonderful impression of a wall splattered with paint-soaked tennis balls. A strong feeling of déjà vu ensued, though the artists who sprang to mind (Bridget Riley, Vasarley, Michael Banks, Ibbison, Sarah Hughes) would no doubt have been offended by the comparison. Maybe this was a case of the process being more important than the outcome? Or Martina's real part had something to do with publicity for Juraj? Or Juraj hit upon (pun intended) the method as a means of achieving a degree of randomness? If the latter, he might have chosen someone with less accuracy to their hitting. But if Martina was in fact chosen for her accuracy, could not he have chosen a more efficient means of delivering the paint blobs?
The other news item was in some ways like unto it. Another German artist (if Juraj is, indeed German), H. A. Schult has produced something that at a glance looks remarkably like a certain famous Chinese army, though his figures are composed of rubbish and called “Trash People”. Impressive, but again, if one forgets the method, it's definitely been done before. I do wonder, though, if something of the title has been lost in translation: is material that has been recycled as something as useful as an installation, still rubbish? I leave it with you.

Post Script

Following my recent post I received a couple of emails (via my website - and no, there are no fractals there and I have no plans to include any) seeking further information on the business of mapping fractals. I thought it might be more useful to answer them in the form of a further post.
The maps below represent a sequence of Mandelbrot Plots, each one being a magnification of a fragment from the previous one. The section to be magnified is indicated with a small rectangle. They show, I think, the process of investigation.
These maps, unlike those in my last post, are the product of a generator, The Mandelbrot Explorer, which I have since downloaded. You can obtain it, free, by clicking on the title to this post or by popping Mandelbrot Explorer into Google.

The Most Beautiful Piece of Prose Ever - Probably.

Where the world ceases to be the stage
for personal hopes and desires,where we, as free beings,
behold it in wonder, to question and to contemplate,
there we enter the realm of art and science.
If we trace out what we behold and experience
through the language of logic, we are doing science;
if we show it in forms whose interrelationships are not
accessible to our conscious thought but are
intuitively recognized as meaningful, we are doing art.
Common to both is the devotion to something
beyond the personal, removed from the arbitrary.

I came upon the piece of prose upon which I still lavish superlatives, must have been twenty years ago. Perhaps more. It was in a book called "The Beauty of Fractals" by H.-O. Peitgen and P.H.Richter, a book which for some years became a sort of Bible to me. There was back then a bit of a fad for fractals. They were cool. Made possible by the advent of the computer in home and school, it was not long before every teenager had one on his bedroom wall. Or so it seemed. They were part of our fascination with Chaos Theory and the intriguing idea that a butterfly flapping its wings in Hong Kong might cause a hurricane to hit the Florida coast. For me, fractals and everything about them are as fascinating now as they were back then. They have not lost their magic. They bring together art, science, mathematics, technology and music (There is such a thing as fractal music.)and represent a form of geometry we had not seen before. Some had intuited it, but no one could see it before computers opened their window on it. It was as unbelievable as much that was happening elsewhere in science and had already happened in the arts.

The geometry they taught me at school was Euclid's. It was about shapes in two and three dimensions. They had sides and areas that we could measure and/or calculate. (That was the point of it all.) Fractals possess none of that. They have neither sides nor areas that are measurable. The perimeter of a fractal is infinite. Incalculable. A computer allows you to zoom in on your chosen fragment and to see it as under a magnifying glass, a microscope if you will, even an electron microscope. And however much you magnify it, it is as if you were still looking at the original, your starting point - except that its spirals, whorls, folds, spikes and vortices have become ever more complex. In places it may appear to be disintegrating into dust, but the detail is infinite. You will never get to the end of it.

Example: Take an equilateral triangle and place centrally on each of its three sides, another, similar, but with sides one third the length. You now have a Star of David. In the center of each of the new star's twelve sides place another equilateral triangle, its sides again reduced to one third of the previous triangle's. You get the idea. You now have 48 sides requiring triangles with sides again reduced by two thirds. And again on each of the resulting 192 sides. And on through all eternity. The length of the shape's perimeter expands infinitely, yet the triangles you keep adding will never collide with each other. Furthermore, if you were to draw a circle around the first triangle, to touch all three points, your fractal will never stray outside that circle - and you will never draw the complete fractal, not this one nor any other you might attempt by whatever method.

The fractals I have drawn here were all produced by an on-line fractal generator, of which there are many. There are also down-loadable versions. There is much experimenting to be done, and anyone can do it. You do not need to be a mathematician. I have chosen fractals from what is known as The Mandelbrot Plot. For the mathematicians among you, they are fragments from the graph of Xn+1=f{Xn} - but, as I say, you do not need to understand that. The variety of results is - you've guessed it! - infinite, the product of where on the plot you decide to search and the parameters you choose. (The fractal generator pages will lead you by the hand.) Happy hunting - oh, and whose pen was it crafted my opening lines? Albert Einstein's.

Minority Interests

I have received an interesting e-mail (from my website) suggesting that my comments about the unpopularity of watercolours (most recent post) could equally well be applied to poetry, another minority interest. To which I am tempted to answer: “No, no, no, no, yes.” They are, it is true, both minority interests, but when we speak of watercolour painting having few followers we are surely speaking of it having few practitioners, whereas in the case of poetry it is readers who are in short supply. The writing of poetry (in this country at least) is in good shape. Indeed, it seems at times that there are more people writing poetry than reading it. Perhaps we would do well to devote some thought to the reasons why this might be so.

Ruth Rendell has made the point that “there are people enjoying poetry, but they are the ones who stayed in touch. Getting in touch from scratch is hard. "Death of the Reader" But why should that be so? Why should it be so much harder to get in touch with poetry than, say, with film, novels, plays, music or painting?

There are two obvious suspects to consider when looking for the culprits responsible: on the one hand we have the poets themselves, and on the other those convenient fall guys, the reviewers and critics. I will begin with the latter: their first offense is to be too few. They simply are too thin on the ground, the reason being that newspapers simply do not give wall-to-wall coverage of what is going on in the arts in general, never mind in the Cinderella art of poetry in particular, but worse than that, many would say, and Neil Astley is one of them, that reviewers very often write as though they are writing, not for their readers, but for their doctorate dissertation. At best they write as though for a specialist poetry magazine. What should be their primary function, to help their readers decide whether or not this latest volume is for them, and to help them over any intrinsic difficulties with the verses, seems secondary.

But that there are likely to be difficulties must surely be the major reason for poetry's unpopularity. Most people, I think would put post-moderns, in the dock for that state of affairs. It has, they would say, put poetry beyond the grasp of the ordinary reader, and by “ordinary reader” they would mean the non-academic, non-specialist, non-research reader. Post-modernism has made poetry impenetrably obscure and at the same time has robbed it of the sensuality, the lyricism and all that would have made the effort worthwhile. Recondite references, compacted syntax and the like, together with a lack of help from those who should provide it, make such works seem elitist and remove them from the general orbit.

Yet there is a potential audience out there. W.H.Auden was one who was often credited with being elitist, yet when “Four Weddings and a Funeral” hit the screens his “Stop All the Clocks” received enthusiastic acclaim from a broad spectrum of the (usually) non-poetry-loving public.

More often when a poem or a poet's body of work receives such acclaim it is as much for the poet as a person as for the work. John Betjeman is one who springs readily to mind. The public took to its heart a lovable old English eccentric and accepted, even got to love, the poetry along with the poet. In one sense this is no doubt but another example of the current cult of personality, and as such it is worrying, but it at least suggests to the general public a more positive image of the poet than the traditional individual: half tramp, half nutter and lost to the world.

Meanwhile, back in the ivory tower, there has, over recent years, been a huge increase in the number of poetry readings and competitions. Poetry has become a more vital part in the many Literature festivals. There has been a significant increase in the number of poet-in-residence posts and in the amount of poetry published, both in hard copy and on the net. And if much of it is of a deplorable quality, the same could no doubt be said for all the other arts, both now and at any time in the past.

Watercolour Needn't be a Wishy-Washy Medium

Okay, I put my hands up to it, I pinched the title from an article by Grayson Perry in The Times (March 7). As it happened I had, over a short period of time just before that, heard or read several examples of watercolours being badmouthed for their many failings. Here at last, I thought, catching his headline, is someone making a case for them - well, wouldn't you? (Disappointingly, as it turned out, Grayson decided to sit on the fence with a yes, but narrative. I have to forgive him though, for - and this seems as good a ime as any to say it - I find him the most lucid and interesting of any critic or commentator I have come across with a regular column. I wish I could write as well. His page is always the first I turn to.)


The article set me thinking about the reasons for the unpopularity of watercolours - which for some reason he did not go into. Unpopular, that is, with professional or serious painters as opposed to amateur and "Sunday" painters, for it has always been popular with the latter - and there, I think, we have the first strand of the problem. Grayson referred in his piece to a downsland encounter with a group of these watercolourists, and to the clink of brush in water jar as they squinted at the view. It is a telling image encapsulating the attitude of many (most?) "serious" artists. (I recall its prevalence among the students at art school towards the "amateurs" with whom we had to share some evening classes - and an embarrassing encounter with a guy call Epstein, but that's another story, and if it is to be told, must await another post.) Feelings of superiority are a sad, but I think an important part of the problem.



Watercolour's reputation for impermanence may also be a factor. I am not sure that it is that much less permanent than the way in which oils are sometimes used, and certainly most watercolour works would be considerably more permanent than much that has reached the galleries (and private customers) over recent decades, but reputation counts for a lot in such matters.


That watercolour is difficult to manipulate may also be a factor, though you might have thought that this would affect the amateur rather more than the professional, who ought to be more sure in his technique and more capable of overcoming the medium's limitations. Still, the fact remains that if you are not happy with something you have done in oils, you can just scrape it off and start again. Watercolours do not allow you that luxury. You really need to get it down the first time and then leave it. Start to correct or fiddle with it and the thing goes muddy and looks awful. It just will not co-operate.


The point is often made that watercolours do not lend themselves to the large scale or the grand gesture, and there is some truth in this, but as Graysn Perry's title suggests, it does not absolutely have to be like that. Artists have produced watercolours with dimensions of twelve feet and more - and their works have not always been wishy-washy. Think of some of those produced by William Blake, Paul Klee, Turner (le God), David Cox, Francesco Clemente (a great favourite of mine and mentioned by Grayson Perry), Eric Ravilious (esp. his war paintings), Samuel Palmer (an all-time favourite of mine) and the recent experiments of David Hockney. I could go on, for there really are far more than some would like you to believe.



Strange as it may seem, no one talks of watercolour's advantages - other than its "convenience", for "sketching" en plein air, for example. I say "strange", because one of them is the way in which things can happen unexpectedly as you paint, often suggestively. Not every artist would want that, of course, but I would have thought that it might have fitted in very nicely with the world view of many artists from the Moderns onward. If you are a Klee who likes to take a line for a walk it might be more to your liking if it could be a walk during which exciting things happen. Equally, if you happen to be an artist who knows before he starts the statement he wants to make or, if you prefer the more grandiose term, begins with a vision, then again watercolour might fit you purpose admirably.


This, I suppose, is the crux: artists choose a medium that will suit their world view, their vision, whatever. If simple, direct qualities are called for, then watercolours might be the chosen option, but in fact it seems that most artists prefer the grand sweep, the dramatic gesture, the large scale, and that's fine, but over the course of a couple of centuries or so, painters in watercolour have built up an accepted language for their medium, a way of working, a menu of techniques, a grammar of appropriate speech which has become too constraining. They guard it jealously, as grammarians always do. What we need is another Cox, who perhaps will need to be even greater than the first, to throw off the shackles we have placed upon the medium.


Some links you might like to try:


Francesco Clemente
Francesco Clemente
Ravilious
William Blake

and speaking of taking a line for a walk....

Paul Klee in the Naples Aquarium

The world of Jean Anouilh was shapeless or
Was shaped by art. In oceans behind glass
Klee watched a world transform itself, saw grass
That jived in mating rites, a flower claw
Its prey and mossy stones traverse the floor,
MacDiarmid-style. Aspect, that old impasse,
He watched waymark the ways for him to pass
To take his line on walks to metaphor.
All those unfolding qualities of squid
And frond, brought forth, along with melodies
In counterpoint, by time, he caught in space,
Fanned-out or stacked as motifs in a grid
Of sea-dark tints, and unfurled by degrees
Through shape and shade to spirit's earthly face.

What You See Is Not What You've Got

1

Perception was a subject they knew well,
those for whom the term “Impressionists”
was meant as denigration, those who took 
to heart what we know vaguely, but forget:
the way a line between a white cloud and the sky
does not exist; how nothing that we see exists,
how lines - the finest line you could conceive - consists
of an infinity of lines that interweave and dance
in ways we could not know; the way the world 
is never with us, even in our finest hours;
or how a light wave of a certain wavelength lights,
not structures that are seen, but those within, 
that see; the way grey (possibly) and straggly 
forms of nature blossom in the mind
as under glass, or they 
are moulded by deft dendrite fingers 
on familiar armatures.

2

Imagine one content to catch
the fleeting moment, see him sat
before a fairground booth called 
"Great Conundrum Hall", 
It is a place of skewed perspectives, 
angles craftily awry. Here visitors 
grow tall, diminish, by simply walking round the room,
he sees them shrink by coming close 
or move away to gain great height. 
What does he think, what does he feel?
Amusement? No. Dumbfoundedness? Not so. He knows
how surface is the only substance. But suppose
his wife or lover should appear and walk the boards instead,
what then? This is a changed scenario: he sees
the room distort, the figure steady and unchanged.
The structure's scale is altered as she moves
because he knows how that which holds
our love is solid; all the rest is flux and flow.

An Intellectual Terrorist

A few days back The Guardian carried a deliciously daliesque account of the efforts of a Michael Rieders to track down some Dali D.N.A. He was sent by would-be little helpers - and, no doubt, would-be little publicity seekers - a moustache, toilet seat, hat and glasses, plus other equally unlikely objects. Eventually, he settled for a pair of nasal tubes which had been used to feed Dali during a stay in hospital following a fire in which he had been badly burned. Rieders wanted the D.N.A. in order to "get nearer to" the object of his study, hopefully to obtain clues relating to his genius and to authenticate some works whose attribution was suspect.

This post is not concerned with the the hunt for, or use made of, his D.N.A. The article simply made me stop and think for a moment about the artist, and to wonder if it wasn't time that I tried to sort out my feelings towards him and his art, for they are as mixed and illogical as any of his paintings - though by no means as detailed and exact. (It goes without saying that I shall not achieve that exalted purpose within the confines of this humble post, but perhaps I can make a start - and then maybe keep you posted!) So how, I wonder, should we appraise a work such as"The Great Masturbator" or a collection of fluid timepieces?The Persistence of Memory In what terms? Answers on a postcard please.


Illogical? Is that what I meant? Yes, I think it is, but to describe a person's reaction to a Dali painting in such terms raises an interesting point. Surely, if anyone is to free us from the tyranny of always being rational, it should be the artist. Not every artist, of course, but certainly one of Dali's ilk. Yet what happens? The moment such a work is offered for appraisal, we (critics, of course, but not just critics) try to squeeze it into one of our rational straitjackets as though we are dealing with a dangerous lunatic.


The background to the Dali oeuvre is known well enough. Indeed, I suspect that the man, his life and his milieu have all been studied and analyzed more assiduously than his works, and not just by the academics. Perhaps that is the problem: Dali the man gets between us and Dali the artist. (He has been given a thorough going-over from time to time by the Freudians, of course, but then who hasn't - and he was one of them, after all.)

Perhaps it is time to state my position, so far as I have one. I am what the churches used to call (and still do, for all I know) a seeker. I find that for me poems and novels, for example, improve with (I could almost say need) a spot or two of surrealism, magic realism, or some non-rational element in the same way that a dish is improved by the addition of a pinch of salt, a few herbs or whatever. Life, I find, has its non-rational aspects, its surreal moments, its touch of magic, so why not art? It's when I find my feet leaving the ground and I am left completely without reference points in the known world that the difficulties arise. Okay, not a very thought-out position, but I owned up to that early on.


Surrealism began as something between a movement and a fashion, but in literature. So it was a poet, a French poet as it happened, André Breton, who defined the role of surrealism as being to express “the the function of thought dictated in the absence of all control exerted by reason, and outside all aesthetic or moral preoccupations...” Surrealism, he said, “is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of association...”. Those forms, he maintained, had been neglected by us in the past. Well, perhaps, though surely we have all at times been aware of something in the inner life that was nattering away about being superior to the dictates of reason and the intellect, was in fact bypassing them. And if that is so, how can we appraise that something using the very tools that it claims are inferior to it? Perhaps the only possible response is a purely subjective one? “I like it.” “It does something for me.” “It leaves me cold.” etc.

Early on in his career Dali tried academism (I think we may say that it survives in the detail and exactness of his mature work), Impressionism, Futurism and Cubism. The final direction of his work seems to have been fixed by reading Freud. His first experiments with surrealism included a script for the film “Un Chien Audalou”, but the principles that he used there (with reasonable success) to create threat and shock, when applied to his paintings, produced only mirth.

The principles behind his image-making became known as “The Paranoiac-Critical Method”. It was a method in which the artist would fool himself into believing that he was insane. (Dali claimed to have gone beyond this point and to have made himself actually insane. “I don't take drugs. I am drugs,” he once famously said.) He believed that schitzophrenics are able to see things that are hidden from the sane among us, and so he created a method of creating their "superior" states of mind in himself. He called this the “systematic objectification of delirious associations and interpretations”. It produced for him, among other mind-boggling experiences, the metamorphoses of form in which solid objects melt, giving us, for example, the celebrated liquid clocks. It also produced the transposing of figure and ground by which latent forms would manifest themselves as clearly as those resulting from nothing more than normal sensory perception.

According to Dali, individuals going about their ordinary, everyday activity of interpreting the world around them in terms of ordinary sense data, could as easily be confined as the mentally ill, and on the same basis as them: for their refusal or inability to reflect upon, and critically examine, the obsessive ideas behind their own interpretations of the world. For Dali, criticism was itself a creative act - and as such, totally irrational; sensory perception was merely the assigning of meaning to sensory data in which a whole range of meanings might attach themselves to the same image. It was this phenomenon that was responsible for the famous double image, which was not to be understood as two images, but as two meanings ascribed to the same image. At its simplest it can be seen in the two white faces which, as you look at them, become two black candlesticks. By an act of will the viewer may see either the white areas as figure and the black as ground, or vice versa. In the one instance he will to see the image as representing two white faces, in the other it will reveal two black candlesticks. The next step is to see both candlesticks and faces, not alternately but simultaneously, and to hold both “meanings” in mind in such a way that they begin to influence each other, the increasingly modified “meanings” going for ever to and fro between them like the reflections between two facing mirrors, accumulating more data - and therefore more meanings - with each pass..

Dali's one goal in all this, pursued with a religious fanaticism, was the complete undermining of normal reality. In fact, to totally discredit it. He was, to coin a term for him, an intellectual terrorist, a suicide bomber blasting nitrous oxide through the hallowed halls of art.

The Man from the Night

"What kind of thought,"
I asked the man who came from the night,
"prepares a man for death?"
His hands were manacled
and from his collar hung a leash.

"The empty gurgles of the last
blood through the veins,
an ice-edged gasp, the lung's
last fling, a wordless trick
such as a domme might turn

"or pull, a page thrown to the wind,
a video of sea and sky, a childhood
dolphin ride (yet still the sense
of being tied) these narratives
are preparation of a sort," he said,

"but are sensation-driven. Logic
brought no man into this world,
or eased his passage here or later,
and will bring no comfort to him then.
We seek a thought sublime,

"subliminal, though incompletely beautiful,
as is the sea. One source there is:
one comforter, one hand upon my leash,
one Queen of Night and Bitch of the park bench,
one Mistress of the deep within." "And with

"that thought you are prepared to die?" I asked.
"It breaks upon me like a wave,"
he said, "a fist through glass,
a scarred back, shards of song,
thoughts fashioned dolphin-wise;

"or child-like images arise
with feelings such as floaters in the eye
or dark clouds on a summer's day
may bring - rogue instincts
out of sinc with mine.

"The sea swell lifts
and carries me, its kindly reach
takes hold upon the leash, the beach
receives me like a bird
(no vermin in its plumes),

"assures me I am rock
on which the world will shatter -
and rock, the chosen rock,
the sea will grind to sand...
So no, not die with thoughts of her,

"but rather knowing how a change
in us wrings echoes from the sea,
how portals open, myths are born -
vignettes perhaps - among which
my last swim with dolphins,

"seaward to their graves. The leash
lies limply on the waves,
but she does still what she does best:
she keeps my frothy, whipped emotions
strictly locked away."

Every Picture Tells a Story

One of the more enjoyable aspects of growing old is the "I remember that!" moment. Occasionally, though, it brings with it a downside, a sense of unbelief, sometimes even guilt, that you could ever have forgotten... I have enjoyed two such moments recently, one of which did indeed bring in its train a tinge of guilt. It was occasioned by reading the obituary (a less enjoyable aspect of growing old: figures from your past become history) of the painter Martin Bloch. I guess I would have to admit that as major artists go, he was probably a minor one, but his work was no less enjoyable, "important" even, for that. If he was major it was as a lyrical colourist. There have been few better than him, I think. His canvases were, to my mind, all a painting should be: a lucid expression of an original take upon the world. He should not be forgotten, which makes me sad that I did indeed forget him - though I have been in good company all these years. Perjaps I will post more on him in the future, in the meantimea few images of his work (on display at The Sainsbury Centre, Norwich) can be seen at http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ArtistWorks?cgroupid=999999961&artistid=769&page=1

This subject for this post was brought to mind by the current fashion for all things Chinese. The Times has been running a "Brainteaser" feature in which readers are invited to use their intuition to match words with Chinese picturegrams. It reminded me of the excitement I once felt upon encountering Ezra Pound's theories of poetics. As I subsequently discovered, the inspiration for them came from a total misunderstanding of the nature of Chinese characters, but that did nothing to dampen down my enthusiasm, either for Pound's theories or his poems.

I came to his work via the now famous poem "In a Station at the Metro" in which commuters emerging from the Paris subway take on the aspect of wet petals.

  
The apparition              of these faces               in the crowd
Petals                 on a wet, black                 bough.

It is now, to use an overworked word, iconic, but back then the compression, the rejection of conjunctions, the unorthodox spacing, were all new to me. Everything, in fact, was there in embyo, just waiting for its coming of age and its call-up for The Cantos.
So what was this "misunderstanding" that led to something that would prove ground-breaking?

When Fenellosa died, his widow asked Pound to edit her late husband's notebook. Pound found there a series of classical Chinese poems with Fenellosa's notes in English written beneath them. (Intriguingly, they were spaced rather as Pound would later space the lines of his poems, as he spaced those in the poem given above.) Fenellosa had fallen prey to the basic misunderstanding that Pound would inherit and accept completely: the belief that all Chinese characters were ideograms, compressed visual metaphors that had developed over long years of increasing abstraction. That being so, Fenellosa had reasoned, they could be directly transcribed into English, without reference to their original language. Pound accepted this, too, as gospel, and saw this "sign language" as a model for a new kind of poetry in which he would juxtapose, not just visual images, but almost anything else: narratives, prose on occasion, facts of all sorts, his theories of finance and usury. It led to the Imagist movement and to The Cantos.

So what do I recall of that far off time? (I am speaking once more of my art school days - see my "It's How He Sees It" post.)
I recall that we (some of us) actually read the cantos - though not in their entirety, I think!
We embraced his imagist theories, and thought that all poetry should be "Imagist", though what we meant by that varied.
We knew that Pound had edited Eliot's Waste Land, had given it its form and that it had been dedicated to him - and we applauded that and thought The Waste Land, like Cathay and Tha Cantos, were a breath of fresh air in what was a very stuffy environment, but we tended to read Pound, not Eliot.
And I recall that we (most of us) felt that The Cantos didn't quite work, but that it didn't matter, for their importance transcended their quality - which I think was correct.
Even knowing that Pound was a tireless promoter of Eliots cause, didn't persuade us to read Eliot - so far as I can recall - from what was over fifty years back!
I have scoured the Internet for a glimpse of Pound's exposition of his imagist theories, but have found nothing. Some bits about him, but none by him. If any kind person reading this should know something I don't know, I would be very grateful to be enlightened.

Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon - and mine.

A Wikipedia Image




Picasso's "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" is one hundred years old this year.

Some facts:

The painting measures 8 feet by 8 feet.
Picasso worked on it for over a year.
He produced over 400 sketches for it.
The composition originally included two men, a sailor and a medical student.
The "Avignon" in the title is not the town, but a street in Barcelona's red light district.

---

So, these young ladies are prostitutes, and from them, many would maintain, sprang the whole of what we now call modern art. They caused shock and horror on their debut and still are often greeted with incomprehension. I, like most, have had my difficulties with them, not least of which, the question of why each was conceived and rendered in differently. For example, to the figure on the extreme left paint has been applied more thickly than is the case with the others. Her head is more classical in conception than are theirs. In the center are two figures influenced - or taken directly - from Iberian sculptures. One wears a mask taken from African art, while the two central, standing figures have been graced with a few curves which have been denied to the others, for whom sharp, splintery, geometric forms are the order of the day. They all seem to be in no sort of relationship with each other, like five figures imported from five other paintings, and all stare out of the picture frame as if at the viewer. They share a common colour scheme. These three facts are about all they have in common.
This multiplicity of styles within one painting was, and is, a stumbling block for many critics. What was Picasso driving at? It is of no help to point to what others have found in the work, or to emphasise the influence it has had on Modernism. (See January's post "It's how he Sees It".)
Neither of the two standard responses seem to me to be wholly convincing. The first of these says that during the time Picasso took to complete the work he, being the artist he was, took up and then discarded several styles, and that our five chicks who were all laid (shall I say) at different times, were depicted accordingly. Like Salisbury Cathedral, I guess, thoughoils, unlike architecture, allows the artist to go back over earlier work in the light of new insights. The other response is to say that he was trying to make us look, to make us see. The extended effort that he put into the painting is clear evidence, I think, that he didn't see this as one more painting, but as something special. Ground-breaking, even. It has been said that if Picasso had died before 1907 he would have been an interesting minor painter. After this he was a colossus.
My own view is that this is Picasso pushing at the boundaries. Having five young women to work on, gave him the opportunity to push against five different boundaries. It is him saying (discovering) "So, if I push Cezanne to the ultimate, this is where I get to, whereas African Art pushed as far as it will go, will land me here," or "This is journey's end so far as Iberian sculptiure is concerned," and so on. It is the new Martin Luther nailing his theses to the cathedral door: "Copying is out. Copying is not reality." No longer is it the case that you look at something and then try to reproduce it, you look - or not, as the case may be - and think about purposefully changing it. He is rethinking the grammar, the syntax of painting, and he is discovering, for himsel but also for those who would follow, potential ways to paint - in this case, women. It is, if you like, his sampler. And the reason it took so long and so many studies is because he had to figure out how to blend five differing styles into one cohesive painting.

---

I have taken the liberty of adding for good measure my own depiction of Les Demoiselles, shown in happier days, relaxing on an away day to the beach. I did attempt to portray each of the young ladies in a completely different style. (It was actually quite tricky, and I did not persist.) Oh, and I have reinstated one of the young men - the medical student, as it happens. The sailor proved to be a bit of a misfit, and Picasso was quite right to leave him out.

It May Not Say What It Says

After posting "It's How He Sees It" last month, I was surprised and delighted to receive an email sent by a friend from college days. The email - and another which followed soon after - developed an aspect of literary theory that I had touched on: the possibility that a work might possess content, even contradictory content, which the author did not knowingly include and of which he had no conscious knowledge. I was grateful to him referring me to an essay by Pierre Macherey, "The Text Says What It Does Not Say", which I have now read in lengthy extracts - and may even invest in the full text at some future point. For anyone who is interested in the subject (deconstruction of texts) I can recommend as an introduction a Literary Studies piece intended for Third Year Undergraduates. You will find it at
http://www2.plymouth.ac.uk/gateway_to_study/essaywriting/litera-2.htm (or click on the title of this post).
Thinking on these things - and the idea, outlined in the Lit Studies piece, that the "meaning" of a literary work resides in its incompleteness, its "gaps and silences" - I was reminded of the question attributed to Basho, the seventeenth century master of the Haiku: "Is there any good in saying everything?" An illustration I have seen given with the quotation, comes from the modern art of photography: "The poet makes the exposure, leaving the reader to develop it." I leave you to develop that thought, but as I do so I also leave you with (for what it may be worth!) my own light-hearted contribution to the debate.

The Poet

Quietly in his living room,
he'd write his poems
like a dead man
filling in the details
of dead people on a form.

And yet the poems laughed and sang;
his words would play the fool,
wear tatty jeans and swap their clothes
like children out of school.

Morose and unaware of how
they skittered round the room,
escaping from the forms he thought
secure as Alcatras,
he'd fit each word into its frame -
”Forms are,” he said, “the only way
to give words gravitas.”

He was a saintly Christian man
whose instincts were to bless,
how could he know his words would run
and be promiscuous?

"Experimental!" critics cried,
"The form, the form is all!
It's here and there and everywhere -
in one form or another.”

The people heard the words at play,
they heard them in the street,
"How perfectly absurd," they said,
to be so indiscreet!"

But when at last the word was out,
their thoughts, once cold, grew warm:
"How sad," they said,
"the poet's dead -
died filling in a form!"

Two Centenaries

Think of a poet. Can you recall the details of your first experience of a poem by him or her? I ask because it just so happens that this year is the double centenary of two poets, W.H. Auden and Louis MacNeice, and it also happens that my first encounter with the poetry of each was memorable. I suspect that is somewhat unusual.

Auden

Auden, I met on the night mail crossing the border. I was young enough to be completely bowled over by the rhythm of it, and though I didn't realise it at the time, also by what was in fact my first dose of Benjamin Britten - but that's another story. I can still recite chunks of it from the memory. On that occasion I couldn't get them out of my head, particularly:

"This is the Night Mail crossing the border,
Bringing the cheque and the postal order,
Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,
The shop at the corner and the girl next door."

(full text at: http://www.newearth.demon.co.uk/poems/lyric206.htm )

It was a documentary, a classic film of the Postal Special's night run from London to Scotland. No, not A documentary, it was THE documentary of its day. Auden spoke for his generation and to the man on the tram on his way to work. The same man today, I suppose, will know of Auden, if at all, from "Twelve Songs" from his "Funeral Blues" featured in the film "Three Weddings and a Funeral". I rather think that most people, reminded of it, would say they loved it, but haven't heard it since.

He spoke to his generation, but his work could also be highly intellectual and/or laced with private jokes. He tackled the romantic entanglements of his fellow man, along with the big problems of the day. I find one of his most moving works to be "In Memory of W.B.Yeats". (Full text at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15544 )

Often overlooked is Auden's revival of verse drama. He wrote several libretti for opera and several successful verse plays and he was before his time in believing that there should be no distinction between cast and audience, all should be involved. He co-scripted with Isherwood and Benjamin Britten, though this last partnership did not achieve the success it promised.

Louis MacNeice

"Bagpipe Music" was my first encounter with Louis MacNeice. Like "Night Mail", though for vastly different reasons, it wouldn't leave me; words were going round in my head, particularly the couplet:

"It's no go the Yogi-Man, it's no go Blavatsky,
All we want is a bank balance and a bit of skirt in a taxi."

(Full text at: http://www.artofeurope.com/macneice/mac6.htm)

Was I lucky or unlucky in my introduction? Both, I think. I felt at the time that he was probably not one to be taken too seriously, that what I had heard sounded too much like a cross between a nonsense rhyme and material for a stand-up commedian.