Arnhem Land (Northern Territories) Rock Art

Imagine a myth
a modern myth
invented by me:
a beast, part
dragon and part bird...
steps from some fable
into a wasteland
where it dies.
The  landscape is
too high, too wild
for access by the modern
man - except proud
chopperman -
and this all fifty
thousand years ago.

The beast decays.
Flesh ossifies
bone petrifies
flesh to bone
and bone to rock
the rock a shelter
ancient man discovers
(how?) calls home.

He - Aborigine -
is spirit energy personified.
Covers walls and ceilings
with images of his true home -
our hidden genesis.


Imagine now
you find this shelter
and walk in. Around you
images begin to sing
each in its native tongue.
Here is no bare rock,
but all is marked with spirit forms
as if the fabled beast
before it died
was given a full body
interior tattoo. From which -
between the edges of the songs -
thoughts, feelings, inner images arise
and take control
of modern man
as easily as old.

Walk through
this archive of your spirit ancestors
for somewhere here
an image of your spirit stirs -
or maybe one your spirit made.
When you encounter it
hang it on the small hook
at the far back of your mind.
It is your satnav for the songlines
you must walk. They will
embrace the image fervently.

Now from the center of each song
a tear-out sheet. The souvenir.
Totemic ancestors asleep
beneath  a dark flat earth
burst through convulsively.
Half human and half plant,
they travelled everywhere,
created landscapes.
Mountains, rivers, waterholes
wallaby and kangaroo
eagle, ant and snake.

We do not own the land,
the artwork sings,
the land owns us.
Land gives us culture, soul, identity.
There are no boundaries, but everywhere
the spirits move, connect all life to all.

.............................................................

The image: from ABC News.

Image and poem refer to recently discovered Aboriginal Rock Art which predates by several thousand years anything known before.

Be the World's First : why don't you?

dVerse ~ Poets Pub suggests for this week a range of options involving allegory. I have chosen 

Vermeer's visual allegory, The Allegory of Painting

We've pulled the hangings to one side. Perhaps

we're spying on this quasi-studio -

to wondering what's going on inside.

The artist dare not show his face - artist

is just persona for the act? He's posed

the model as his Muse of History

complete with trumpet and a laurel crown

of  fame and victory. The artist, too,

is wearing costume from a bygone age.

What sort of studio boasts tiles like these?

What sort of studio a chandelier -

with double-headed Hapsburg Eagle there

displayed?  For what the map of Holland and

the mask? Death mask, perhaps? Or artist's face?

The unknown future face of history?

In case, dear readers, you are still in doubt:

What sort of studio contains no paints?

Here, an allegory that no one's cracked.

.........................................................................

Vermeer said the allegory had to do with the significance of painting.

Alba Madonna by Raphael

Not in the gospels,
Leonardo's bright idea:
John the Baptist,
playmate for
the infant Christ.

Raphael endorses it;
gives the two of them
a plaything cross
as augury.

Mary's finger holds
the place of older
prophecy - Isaiah's;
yet to be fulfilled.

The composition's style
again, is Leonardo's.
Not the light.
Gone, da Vinci's mystery,
this light is bright
and even. Democratic,
even. Mellow as befits
a rural idyll,
rolling hills
and everything
untroubled.

The image is from Wikipedia.

Talk to a Painting

Talk to the man you don't understand,
invite him for supper or tea -
or if it's a piece of impossible art,
chat like you would to a friend;
take it home in your head,
pillow-talk it in bed
and give it some quality time.

I'll give you a case I bumped into by chance
as I was doing my rounds:
a gallery space
and me face-to-face
with The Dance of Life by Munch.

I was puzzled at first by the masks,
the facades of people having a dance -
and said so: "The shame,
the gloom and the grief,
not enjoying the hour
of their dance by the side of the sea."

"I am no Dance of Life, my friend,"
the picture disagreed.
"My title is an irony.
I'm more your dance of angst.
I am obsessed,
as my creator was obsessed,
who painted many canvases
of his anxieties.
I am the grand summation of them all.
He wrapped them all in me: his three
iconic forms of womanhood: the virgin,
inaccessible and pure; seductress,
predator and vampire; and the mother,
stiff and suffering, yet stoical."

"And yet, you're something ghostly, ethereal,"
I said. "Not flesh and blood. How can that be?
The sea is calm, the moon
a ring of beauty with reflections in the sea.
These things should influence
the scene - not leave you cold."

Land Art - as a cottage industry

It has recently occurred to me that I haven't posted one of my Land Art photos since June 2009 (see it here!), so I'm guessing that some of my good friends out there will be having pretty serious withdrawal symptoms by this time. Not to worry, here is the latest:

As you will observe, this time I am treating you to a night shot - this is purely and simply in the interests of variety only, and has no special significance.

You might like to compare the two and note the development of my art - or maybe not. As my title indicates, though, it has occurred to me that this could become quite a lucrative cottage industry. I'm thinking along the lines of those jig-saw mats you can buy which allow you to roll up your unfinished puzzle to store it - or to take it on holiday with you, should you feel so inclined. How about that? A bit of cottage land art, roll it up in an industrial version of the mat and flog it at a car boot sale? What think you friends?

One motive behind all this is a developing passion for the work of a young artist, Ingrid Calame, rapidly coming into prominence with an art based on tracing the minutiae of imperfections, cracks, bobbles, chips, inscriptions, marks of all sorts on the ground. All sorts of ground. It struck me that it's a land art of sorts, even if not advertised as such. Here is an image of one of her works.

The Creation of Man : William Blake

And after Michelangelo
what other hand, what other eye
could bring the scene to life again,
add something to the turning point
of God creating man? Only the mystic
inner eye, the eye of Blake envisioning
how Energy brought Adam from the dust.

Winged Energy, a spent force - almost - here
beneath a golden setting sun as Earth
returns to darkness from its glory days,
scrabbles on bare hands and knees
to fashion man as best He can.
He has no instant button at his beck and call,
no key to press marked "Add Life Now!",
man does not sizzle into being at his finger's touch.

Five days God's laboured on His master plan,
framed time, eternity, earth, universe and life,
framed all that is, except for this, now on the sixth,
from what is left - the last dregs of an earthly dust -
he's making man. The evidence is clear:
God struggles, fully stretched, with this his final
task, most draining of them all. Man, still not
fully formed, still part of earth - and worse,
already in the serpent's coils, the battle all but lost.

The spirit Energy has found the clay
he needs to form the brain. Retrieving it
while opening the skull, He seems distracted,
looks elsewhere - perhaps for inspiration, or perhaps
from sheer exhaustion. Here Blake's strange Elohim creates -
I'd say, almost against the grain - in torment and in pain.

Blake was implacably opposed
to science, all its forms and revelations,
and this was way before "The Origin of Species" -
but Blake is almost there, and that despite himself.

A painted print, but paint obliterates the print.
Blake, too, has toiled to bring The First Man
from his earthly womb to life: man made,
not simply in God's image, but by God Himself
who crafted him by hand - no short cuts taken here!

Love Song

dVerse ~ Poets Pub set several prompts for this week, all of them relating to the work of Giorgio de Chirico. I chose this painting of his: "Love Song".

Anxiety is here that builds to war.
It's in the dark and melancholy streets,
it's in the very atmosphere that sinks
into the gut, the bones, the spleen, the spunk.
No one is here, it's not for humans, this.

But wait, we see the signs of man writ large,
though muddled and confused, as in a dream:
Apollo - plaster likeness, not himself -
a rubber glove, a ball, a puffing train.
What are these things to us - and what to him?

de Chirico is out to change the world.
These are the implements he'll use, laid out
as if a surgeon is about to cut
the cord that ties the world to evil thoughts -
He's working in the deepest shafts of mind.

Apollo, god of music, song and verse
is giving birth to man's creative urge.
A midwife's glove tacked to a wall to dry,
a ball awaits the long-expected child.
Art answers to the world's anxieties.

But no, I did not quite forget the train...
the artist's father worked the railway line.
A tiny train, it's going nowhere fast -
for this is not escapist art; it's here
in every now that ever was or is.

Homage to Munch's The Dance on the Shore

As masterpieces go, this by Edvard Munch - I will stick out my neck - is unbeatable. For me it is perfection. How on earth does one combine such calculated composition with such fluidity and dreaminess? The design of the picture is exactly calculated, but each object in it has been given its own unique colour. Yet nothing competes with anything else. The composition relies for its integrity on the interlocking shapes, the echoing patterns and the strong tonal qualities. As a bonus the lines of the tree and the ripples in the sea are perfect.

It is obviously related to The Dance of Life (below) which he painted the year before (1899) he began work on The Dance on the Shore

It is, though, The Dance on the Shore which remains my favourite. I had it in mind when I began doodling my not-so-dreamy digital version. There is no greater connection than that. When I refreshed my memory by going back to look at a reproduction of Munch's I was all but frightened into not posting mine, but it is good to remind oneself how difficult are the things that great masters almost persuade us are easy.

Forgotten Artists - Part 1

Two or three weeks ago Jim at The Truth About Lies was kind enough to send me a DVD which he thought might interest me and might even form the basis of a post. He was correct on both counts. The DVD was a BBC Wales production, a recording of a documentary put out on the life and work of Mildred (Elsi[e]) Eldridge. Who? Well, exactly, that was the point of it. I have always had more than a passing interest in the question of how it is that poets, artists and others who were highly regarded in their day, were even thought to be important, can come to be disregarded, neglected even, by later generations. Sometimes they bounce back, but not always. There are many reasons, of course why they fall into disfavour. Sometimes it will be that they were simply over-rated and couldn't stand the test of time. At least, that's the explanation most often given. Sometimes they just become unfashionable. But saying that begs the question of why some are then reinstated when the new fashion has passed, but others are not. Mildred Eldridge hasn't so much been neglected as completely forgotten. It is incredibly difficult to turn up any information on her. Pop Mildred Elsie Eldridge into Wikipedia and it will ask you if you meant Mildred Eddie Eldridge. Try reducing it to Mildred Eldridge and it will offer you other Eldridges, but not Mildred. The BBC Wales production relied very heavily on the memories of her son, Gwydion, and various friends and neighbours.

So who was she, this mysterious person? She was a painter and illustrator. The title of the documentary was Mrs R. S. Thomas. That's right, she was the wife of R.S.Thomas, the Welsh Priest and Poet. Try Mildred Elsie Eldridge in Google and you will be offered a few references, mostly in Welsh, to do with the BBC documentary or the odd book reference, the majority of which are books that she illustrated. Some of these illustrations were to be found on the web, but what I have been unable to find so far (with one exception - more of that later), are any usable images of any of her paintings - of which it is said she produced over one thousand. Google Mrs Thomas and you will get her husband by the page load.

Let's begin again, back at the beginning: she lived and went to school in Wimbledon, South London, was utterly miserable at school, and eventually escaped to The Wimbledon School of Art. I could find very little about her childhood and early student days (R.S. Thomas's autobiography is about him, not her), but we find her a few years later, one of the most successful students at The Royal College of Art. She is something of a work-a-holic - at least that is probably how she would be described these days - working until 9.o'clock every night. Which seems to have paid off, for when it came to her final exhibition, she was the first student to sell all of her exhibits. Move on a bit and she is a successful artist, critically, financially and socially. She has a series of one-man shows, the most notable probably being the one at London's Beaux Arts Gallery. She has travelled on a scholarship across the continent to further her studies, and you would have had to part with a small fortune to pay for one of her paintings from a London Gallery.

There was a downside. She felt she was in danger of being sucked in to the social whirl, and decided that she needed to flee the bright lights, both for that reason and to escape the clutches of an unwanted lover. Maybe it was that which was her undoing, so far as posterity is concerned. She took off for the solitude of the Welsh borders, which was where, eventually, she came to meet R.S.Thomas. He was not at that stage either a fully ordained priest or a known poet. He was just beginning to make his way. They found themselves in the same lodging house, Bryn Coed, though his account merely says, rather ambiguously and somewhat disingenuously that she was lodging fairly close by. In fact, she was teaching at the Oswestry Grammar School. It must be true to say that her world was very different from his and that her horizons were far broader than his. She dressed very much in the Bohemian style, in stark contrast to Thomas, who was from a Bourgeois family from Holyhead. R. S. and Elsi (she would henceforth be known as Elsi) Eldridge were married in Llanycil, on the shore of Bala Lake on 5 July 1940. Many years later he would write the following, recalling their life together.

We met
under a shower
of bird-notes.
Fifty years passed,
love's moment
in a world in
servitude to time.
She was young;
I kissed with my eyes
closed and opened
them on her wrinkles.
`Come,' said death,
choosing her as his
partner for
the last dance, And she,
who in life
had done everything
with a bird's grace,
opened her bill now
for the shedding
of one sigh no
heavier than a feather.

So now I have fallen into the trap. Time after time, looking up a reference to her, I would find information on, or work by, not her, but R.S.Thomas. Gwydion recalls that as a boy he used to wonder which of his parents would eventually be the more famous. People are always remarking to him, he says, on how prolific was his father, with over 2000 poems, though her 1,000 paintings must have compared very favourably. It seems to me there are two main reasons for her neglect: one I have mentioned, her self-contrived isolation from the centre of things, from other artists and critics and from the social whirl that might have kept her work before the public eye; and, not unrelated to that, the fact that her work was (and is) mainly in private hands and not in important collections or public galleries. There was one exception. A commission to paint a mural, The Dance of Life, for the staff canteen in the Gobowen Orthopaedic Hospital. It was a huge undertaking for someone who had no studio, being composed of six panels and in all a hundred and twenty feet long. Physically this would have been a daunting task at the best of times, but to make it more so, the family moved house when the work was half way through. Gwydion maintains that the mural can be compared to the Whistler panels. Alas, they are not still in situ but were taken down in 1950 to facilitate alterations to the hospital, and have been in store since then.

It has proved extremely difficult to uncover any images, even of the mural, which must be considered her major work. Gwydion maintains that the time has come for her to be given her long over-due notice and critical acclaim. For that to happen, it might not be a bad idea for those who have access to her works to make them known on the web. It seems to me that would be a good place to start.

I have been able to find only three tiny details (more accurately, one tiny detail - shown above - and two microscopic ones) from the mural and a couple of her illustrations,shown further down. They are illustrations to Walter de la Mare's Journey Round My Skull. Many commentators seem to suggest that the reason for her eclipse was R.S., that she lived in his shadow. It's true that she did, though it was from choice. Gwydion says she chose not to go her original route, and that is true. Furthermore, in many ways she facilitated Thomas's poetry - but that's another story, and not one, I would think, that impinges on our neglect of her..

I had intended this post to be a look at forgotten painters and sculptors in general, but I have found Elsi compelling enough to have devoted the whole of it to her. Maybe I will fulfil my original intention at a later date.

---

Haiku #231

Breathe easier now -
the swine 'flu pandemic is
history, my friend

Dance of Life

This belongs with, is a later stage in the sequence of, my Global Warming Digital Doodles.

---

Car computers
checking your emotions
to alert the other drivers.

Catching my Eye

One of the first things to catch my eye last week was an article in The Guardian about the signs that burglars leave for potential burglars outside your house. Chalk marks on the ground, usually. I had known of this practice before, but seeing the examples given and their meaning brought it home afresh - pun not intended. In case you missed it, here are the examples given.

Now here is the key - just in case you need to know some day!

1: A good target.
2: Occupant, nervous and afraid.
3. Nothing worth stealing.
4. This house is alarmed.
5. Vulnerable female: easily conned.
6. Too risky.
7. Wealthy owner.
8. Has already been robbed.

Further comment is, I think, superfluous.

Except... gelling with so much talk of climate change and the parlous condition of the earth, it set my mind fancifully thinking what if aliens, robbers say, the extraterrestrial equivalent of Viking raiders, were to chance upon earth, recce it and leave the fruits of their reconnaissance in orbit. What would their signs say? Here, I have managed just two suggestions:-

Any more from any more?

---

Then there was the Andy Warhol Red Portrait affair. You may have seen this, too. Andy Warhol made ten identical red self-portraits. Excuse me while I rephrase that: there are ten identical red silk-screen portraits of Andy Warhol. David Mearns, a Sussex business man has one of them. It was to have been offered to the Tate, but has now been withdrawn. There exists a New York Foundation that pronounces on the authenticity or otherwise of works by, or said to be by, Andy Warhol. It offered to authenticate the work. The offer was turned down flat by David Mearns, who has accused it of making such offers in the past with the sole intention of stamping Denied on the back so as to destroy the value of the silk screen prints. From time to time the Foundations sells works that it owns, and so has a vested interest in the scarcity value of its own works.

And so the battle was joined: is the red portrait a fake or a valuable Warhol? The case for its authenticity is its provenance. Andy Warhol gave a photograph of himself to a friend. It was an automatic image produced by a bog-standard photo-booth. The friend passed it on to an outside firm. They produced the silk screens from it - and presumably ran off the prints. The finished prints were looked at and approved by Andy Warhol... and that's the case for the defence? Yes, my lord, there the case rests. What thinkest thou, O juror?

---

Good to see a painting taking the top Turner prize. Good, too, to see that beauty is the new ugly and to know that paint is okay again. I would not wish to exclude ugly, you understand, but it takes all sorts to make a world - even a fragile, fleeting world that is tied to a moment , a situation or an environment.

Richard Wright was asked - only natural, I suppose - if he had any plans for the prize money. His reply was that, like everyone else, he has bills. Since he has covered a rather large wall with the gold leaf that is destined to painted over at the exhibition's close, I just wonder if his bills really are like every one else's.

The Blind Men and the Elephant.

It was six men of Indostan
To learning much inclined,
Who went to see the Elephant
(Though all of them were blind),
That each by observation
Might satisfy his mind

The First approached the Elephant,
And happening to fall
Against his broad and sturdy side,
At once began to bawl:
"God bless me! but the Elephant
Is very like a wall!"

The Second, feeling of the tusk,
Cried, "Ho! what have we here
So very round and smooth and sharp?
To me 'tis mighty clear
This wonder of an Elephant
Is very like a spear!"

The Third approached the animal,
And happening to take
The squirming trunk within his hands,
Thus boldly up and spake:
"I see," quoth he, "the Elephant
Is very like a snake!"

The Fourth reached out an eager hand,
And felt about the knee.
"What most this wondrous beast is like
Is mighty plain," quoth he;
" 'Tis clear enough the Elephant
Is very like a tree!"


Is art, do you think, like love: something that we recognise for what it is when we run into it, but deucedly hard to define? Or is it more like religion: we know, within limits, what it is, and what it is supposed to do, but not where it comes from - except that it has something to do with the very oldest part of our brain and its now long-forgotten, mystic past?

I ask the questions after reading an article by Richard Eyre in which he addresses these questions. Or to speak more accurately, he recently gave a speech at the opening of a new theatre at The Cheltenham Ladies College, an edited version of which was published in The Independent. Understandably, the first half of his speech - or at least, the edited version of it - was devoted to the theatre and was in large part autobiographical. But then he weighed in with: Why do we need theatre? In fact, why do we need the arts? and a little later: But what do we mean by "art"? A simple enough question, one which we perhaps should ask ourselves with some regularity. He then proceeded to outline his definition and began to carry me along with him, mentally nodding in assent at the points he was raising.

First of all, though, what it is like: passionate, complex, mysterious, thrilling; and then what it does: tells us the truth about ourselves, helps us to fit the disparate pieces of the world together, helps us to try to make form out of chaos; and then, finally, what it must and must not be: has to be ambitious, not satisfied with wanting to please, has to struggle against mediocrity, aspire to be excellent, must have form, there has to be complexity, there must be mystery, must be serious, can't be trivial,there has to be an element of pleasure, of sensual enjoyment (though, unusually, there was no actual mention of beauty), there has to be a moral sense...

Nothing there to disagree with, but as I read on, I found my mental nods turning to frowns of concern. I was reading some sort of creed, it was becoming too prescriptive. Now, I'm adding a can't of my own: for me, art cannot be prescriptive. But I still had a problem: I agreed with the individual points he was making (mostly), but not in the context in which he was making them. Not in answer to the question What is art? For me, he was answering some other question. He seemed more on the right track, though, when he began to speak of art as something that gives form to life and to the world in which we live. And then again when he credited it with the ability to give the world and its threats and bullying ways a human scale. So much in politics, technology, science and human relationships is mega these days, and seemingly beyond our emotional resources to tackle. Art can step in at that point. By its fruits shall you know it. But art is a very complex elephant indeed, with many trunks and tusks and tails etc, and it is his use of the imperative that worries me. Too many musts. If he had said art must be or do at least one of these... but the implication was that it had to be comprehensive.

And then somewhere into my thinking there floated the matter of Sir Andrew Motion and his poem An Equal Voice, written and published (in The Guardian) as a tribute to the war veterans for Armistice Day. The poem was well received until Ben Shephard, who had spent ten years collecting the reminiscences of veterans for his book A War of Nerves accused Motion of plagiarism, of having lifted 17 passages from his book and stitched them together to produce his poem.

The following were given as an example:-

First, this from A War of Nerves:
"War from behind the lines is a dizzying jumble. Revolving chairs, stuffy offices, dry as dust reports..."
"marching men with grimy faces and shining eyes..."
"bloody clothes and leggings lying outside the door of a field hospital..."
"I have been in the front line so long, seen many things..."

Then this from Andrew Motion's An Equal Voice:
"War from behind the lines is a dizzy jumble. Revolving chairs, stuffy offices, dry as dust reports..."
"marching men with sweat-stained faces and shining eyes..."
"bloody clothes and leggings outside the canvas door of a field hospital..."
"I have been away too long and seen too many things..."

Andrew Motion's reply was that "all real artists are magpies". Be that as it may, it did open up in my mind the whole question of found art and how it is reconciled with whatever definition, explicit or implicit, you have for the act of art-making and its outcomes. Of course, we could say the same for any one of scores, perhaps hundreds, of art's various genres. If, with Richard Eyre, you believe that art to be art must demonstrate a mastery of some supreme skill, then you may have to rule out found art. Unless you are prepared to argue that the ability to see a poem in, say, a passage of prose, is sufficient skill in itself.

There is, I believe, nothing to beat going back to basics at such times, and for me basics often means child art or primitive art. I don't believe I have ever met a child who was worried about what art was for. The purpose of pretty much every other man-made thing in the universe worries them - but not art. So I go back to Raymond. I do believe I have blogged about Raymond before - though I may have called him by a different name. Raymond, though, was his name.. Raymond was eight years old, or thereabouts, backward (illiterate), but bright. He was in what these days we would call the Special Needs class, but was then known as the Remedial class. I was a brand new teacher fresh out of college, the last person on the staff who should have been given that group (because the least experienced), but the only one to volunteer. By such considerations are the fates of the innocent decided. It was a Friday morning (I think!) and our first lesson was science. I had to introduce them to the latest theory about how the universe came into being - not what you're thinking, for back then it was Continuous Creation. (A pupil once asked me if I was alive in the Stone Age. More than that: I go back to before The Big Bang!) The lesson concluded and it was time to troop into the hall for assembly. There the head gave us all the Creation of the world from The Book of Genesis. Raymond was becoming distressed. Following on from assembly we had a short choosing period. Raymond asked if he could have two large sheets of drawing paper. I agreed. He taped them together, then turned them over and began to paint. He didn't have long, didn't need long. Very soon he had a fantastic landscape covering the sheets. There were mountains, rivers, a valley, trees, a sun in the sky, stars - and two moons. In the valley were two figures, a small figure pointing up at one of the moons and a large figure looming over him and with his arm stretched out towards him, palm uppermost. His distress was evaporating markedly as he worked.

Tell me about it, I said. The little man, I was told, was Adam. He was pointing at one of the moons. (The Russians had, only a day or two before, launched their first Sputnik.) Adam was saying to God: See, I put that one up there! So I asked him what God had to say to that and was told: He said, "And I just made this little spider. Now beat that!" The consensus of opinion on the staff and elsewhere was that the dialogue could not have been Raymond's own. He had probably heard it somewhere. At home, maybe. Or at church. He'd picked it up somewhere. Yes, he probably had, but in my book he had processed it and made it his own. Yes, all true artists are magpies, but it's what you do with the stolen milk bottle tops that counts - and that may depend on why you stole them in the first place.

Have I answered the question? Have I defined what is art? No, I don't believe I have - and I'm not sure that I could, not to my own satisfaction. I have simply given an example of what I believe to have been a piece of art by anyone's standard, adult or child.

Hopper's America

Edward Hopper's famous Night Hawk canvas

He felt the weight of prairie vastness in the urban space,
the loneliness such sparseness of expanse can bring,
the seep of grassland into city wariness, the way
great distance can be squeezed into a downtown street.

He saw the spaces infiltrating neighbourhoods
like wedges prising could-be friends apart, or solid hedges,
impenetrable, keeping people in. For hedge, a block
of darkened pigment: loneliness, a figure gaoled in light.

His landscape was a tableau frozen from time's stream,
a known world, stranger than we'd known, where nothing moved.
There were no doors, no corridors, no exits from the bleakness
and no absconding from his silent dream. No recoil to reality.

Always, it seemed, an unknown ghost was waiting to appear.

Art for My Sake!

Henry Darger's Me to the Moon

Back on the 3rd of April this year I posted a poem of mine looking back to an obsession I had in childhood with a make-believe world of subterranean tunnels, caves, vertical shafts and the like. I had dreams about this world. Indeed, although I can no longer be sure, I think it may have all begun as the result of a dream. The world became an essential part of my my play world, though the games that resulted were for just one player. Me. I had fantasies about this world and about it dozens of secret entrances, all cunningly concealed, each by a different device, mostly natural, such as an old tree stump covered in ivy. I drew intricate plans and maps of my world, made several large paintings and at least one model. At that time I was suffering a lot of bad health and had to spend long periods in bed. I developed ways of folding and rolling the bed sheets to model my underground tunnels and built caverns between sheet and blanket. I suppose that had my obsession lasted into adulthood the appropriate response to it would have been for me to build installations to interpret to others what was going on in my head.

Earlier this year the Haywood Gallery in London held an exhibition of installations purporting to do just that. The exhibition was called: Walking in My Mind. Ten internationally recognised artists prodused works by means of which they hoped to convey to the gallery's visitors just what it was that was taking place inside their heads.

That seemed hopelessly optimistic to me, but now there is a gallery dedicated to going well beyond that brief, but paradoxically, with a somewhat greater chance of success - or so it seems to me. The Museum of Everything, newly opened in a disused dairy close to Regents Park in London, displays works made by artists for themselves and for themselves alone. These are works that for the most part were made for the artists' eyes only, works that spring from and feed the artist's fantasies and have no other purpose. Many of them are whimisical it seems, some verging towards the dark. But I stress: the one thing they have in common is their intended privacy. There is, or was when they created their works, absolutely no intention to communicate - and is not that intention an essential element in the making of a work of art? The exhibition contains, for example, works from a vast collection that was discovered by the late artist's landlord. No one other than Darger knew of their existence prior to his death. Henry Darger has since become rather well known - given that that was not part of his game plan - for his Vivien Girls, delightful creatures, nude for the most part, who are pursued through his paintings by absolute evil on account of their intrinsic goodness.

It was in reading about this exhibition that I was reminded of my childhood indulgences. Among the 95 artists whose works are currently on display are Calvin and Ruby Black, a couple who lived in the Mojave Desert where they created their own miniature world, a wind-powered city with the endearing name of Possum Trot. (Sounds like the name of a blog, does it not?) They populated it with lovingly made wooden dolls dressed in beautifully hand-crafted clothes. The parallels with my subterranean world seemed amazingly close, though in my case the population changed a few times: originally it was inhabited by the military, a special military with a brief to save the world, later it was given over to International Rescue (yes, really, I was the first, though there were no rockets). Then a mutant strain of humanity who had been subject to a death ray that had not quite worked. None of these proved as satisfying as the army, however, so finally they recaptured it.

So what is all this nonsense in aid of, then? I have already given a clue in a question I raised earlier: Is not the intention to communicate an essential element in the making of a work of art? I have been trying to think of precedents, but I have not exactly come up with an armful. What other examples can you think of for art-making in which no thrid party is involved, just the artist and his work? Where the art work has no role in communicating something? I thought of Cave art, but we cannot be sure what that was all about. Magic has been suggested, to give the hunter greater skill and more success. But the bones in the caves were not from the same animals as depicted on the walls - in many cases. Spirits are another suggestion. The works were not meant to be viewed, not even by the artist, which is why they were painted in such inaccessible places. The important fact - the only fact that mattered - was that they should exist. Somewhere. In and for themselves. Rites of passage is another suggestion. In which case they would be expected to convey something, to communicate. But we don't know. Ikons, I thought of, but then decided that of course they communicate, not something new from the artist, something familiar via the artist, but they communicate all the same. Child art, I thought of, and then found myself argueing against myself. I began by thinking about my tunnel-world. I never did think of it as art. Not even the paintings I made of it. And then it struck me that I didn't think of any of my other paintings as art, either. Not until... and then I realised that I have no idea at what stage I first began to think of my paintings as art. We all know that the child is a fine artist. And then he stops. Why? Could it be because he begins to think of his art as art? Begins to think in terms of others, trying to say something to others, and loses the freshness of having to satisfy only himself?

So: Can you think of any other examples of private art? Non-communicative art? And is it art? Can it be? Or does art have to be at least endeavouring to communicate? If so, what objectively distinguishes the two conditions?

Nude descending to an entrance - or an exit

Nude Descending a Staircase Marcel Duchamp



Slowly the ball of her right foot descends
to press down gently on the stair below,
rolls like a marble on an endless track,
seeks out the spot - the only spot - that does not creak.
Slowly her weight transfers to it.

Slowly the left descends to add its weight,
she feels the pace of life take a new leash.
The house is full of echoes: voices, rasps and groans,
she hears the sound of someone shuffling cards.
A fortune being told? Perhaps a fortune lost.

The warm air from below seduces her, clings
like a robe to her nude form. She moves her arms
as if to draw the garment round her, but instead
looks through the window on the mezzanine. A flash
of light from moon or car illuminates the scene:

a fox runs headlong, through a field and down the hill,
then lets the forest swallow him. STEEP HILL, she reads.
Then: 1-IN-5. ENGAGE LOW GEAR. The catseyes glint,
and all but freak her out. DANGER LORRIES TURNING
screams at her. She turns, looks back to view the screen,

sees overlapping versions of herself - fifteen
she counts. They clunk a bit. Walt Disney-ish,
the way they portray movement. Spread below
an engineer's delight: what passes in these more
enlightened times for what we used to call

a life class: cat-walk, film and video
The students cheer and throw their cameras
and mobiles in the air. The right foot's off again.
The window mists and seems to move. NO PARKING looms
and TURNING NOT ALLOWED... BEWARE PLANT CROSSING. Arms

appear. Two hands. The hands sweep back and forth.
The window fails to clear - her body-heat, perhaps.
The willows - or the window cleaners - gently tap
the glass. Her boyfriend's naked form falls limply on her lap.
The window clears, the local constable peeps in.

The verities of life vie in her consciousness,
the who and where she is, how life unfolds;
expressions of her hopes and memories.
As easily she slips between them as to sleep,
like being born or fading into death.

A Transformative Moment

This is by way of being my contribution to Steven's meme A Transformative Moment, at which blog, if you care to pop over (later, of course, after you have read mine) you can catch up with the other responses. I did begin by thinking that I should break away from art and poetry and all that jazz on this occasion, be less boring and come up with something less predictably me. However, having excluded all those moments which are either too personal or too much involving others, those involving mainly close family others - those, in other words, that I am not prepared to air in public - and having considered carefully all those that remained - or as many of those that remained as I could recall - I found myself forced to the conclusion that one moment towered above all the others. A longish moment as moments go, to be sure, but whose measuring? And - would you believe - a moment to do with art. And worse than that, one on which I have blogged before, though not in these terms. All the same, wrapping up any discussion there might have been on the topic: I am boring. Q.E.D.

As a small boy I had a lot of ill health and spent a lot of time in bed. In the main I kept myself occupied by drawing and painting. Mostly this would consist of copying from books or magazines, sometimes getting members of the family to pose for me, and occasionally - though, looking back, surprisingly infrequently - drawings distilled from my various fantasies. There was some contact with art work in reproduction, though this was almost completely Victorian art.

I also made my first unsatisfying attempts to write verse. Jingles mostly. Rhyming, of course. None of it worth a grow's kneecap, except that it helped to keep me sane.

When I was well enough to do so I would wander anywhere there were plants or trees to be seen: the garden, the common, other boys' gardens. Trips to the seaside were occasions of intense delight in all the flora and fauna of beach and rock pools.

Another aspect of life that was important to me at the time was church. Perhaps because it spoke of a reality beyond the one that I was finding frustrating. At a very early age I became an altar boy - possibly, had I not had such a dreadful voice, I would have joined the choir, but that was an impossibility.


And then, at some point, I was taken to The Tate Gallery. I say "taken", though I can't remember who took me. I can't recall, either, how old I was. I am sure, though, that I was too young to have been allowed to take myself. What I do remember is seeing the Samuel Palmers, The William Blakes and the Graham Sutherlands. Obviously there were others. They were a revelation. I was, in modern parlance, gob smacked.

I don't remember all the individual works I saw, but I remember their affect upon me.

I remember the Blakes particularly because there was poetry and painting locked in each other's arms and enhancing each other. Almost neither poetry nor painting, but some new art form I had never before encountered.

I remember the Sutherlands particularly because there I was seeing clearly expressed what I had sensed fleetingly in my mooching about on common and foreshore: that the shape and texture of something like a moss-covered stone can give intimations, not only of everyday reality, but of another reality that is mysterious but is not quite mystical in the churchy sense.

I remember the Palmers particularly because they seemed to speak directly to something inside me. It was to do with a third type of reality, an inner one.

I do believe now that the experience was the first step on a what would be a long road to Wallace Stevens's position: to thinking that in many ways and for many people - including at the moment myself - poetry has replaced formal religion.

The images below, in order, are of paintings by Samuel Palmer, Graham Sutherland and William Blake.

Copy that, copycat! Lascaux and all that.

This is another post for which I have to thank something seen in the media. Tom Lubbock has a regular column in The Independent titled Great Works. Last Friday he used it to discuss The Lascaux Cave Paintings, or rather, the Lascaux Paintings and some interesting points relating to the copying of art works. Or rather Lascaux ll and some interesting points relating to the copying of art works.

Let me explain. It is well enough known that these amazing cave paintings were created around 17.000 BC, that they were discovered by three teenagers in 1940 and found to contain over 1,500 separate images. It is also generally known that in the 50's they were found to be suffering rot damage as a result of the continual passage of visitors. In 1963 they were closed to the public. In the eighties two nearby caverns were opened in which had been created actual-size, three-dimensional replicas of the two most important caverns. These were as near perfect as human skill could make them - for they were not copied technologically, not photographically, but painted on to the bare rock surface as the originals had been and using the same materials and techniques. Since then, these are what the visiting public have seen - Lascaux ll, as they are known.

At first, the plan appeared to have worked; the paintings began to recover. But it did not last. They are now deteriorating so rapidly that it is no longer a question of who can be allowed in to see them, Before long there will be nothing to see, they will have ceased to exist. I had not realised that the situation had become that bad.

It is this circumstance that has led Lubbock to a discussion of the issues which I have found so fascinating. He refers to Walter Benjamin's contention that there are two forms of copying: one in which the copies exist only to be viewed - photography and the cinema, for example. That is their raison d'être: to be looked at, for whatever purpose - pleasure, information etc. Not so with the Lascaux paintings. They come into his second category of ritualistic images in which their very existence is all that matters. Of course, what exactly the Lascaux paintings were for has been the subject of speculation since the forties and cannot be finally resolved But the suggestion that seems to have become the current favourite (and seems to me most likely) is that this most fantastic of all installations was not primarily intended to be seen at all. That was not its raison d'être. It probably was visited, might even have been used in rites, including those of passage (as some suggest), but was intended first and foremost for the spirits. Its chief purpose was simply and solely to exist.

But now we are reaching the point where it may no longer exist in any meaningful way, and the interesting question which Lubbock has raised is whether, in the non-existence of Lascaux I (if I can so term it) we would be better or worse off having Lascaux II. Would it be preferable to have only Lascaux II or to have nothing? There is a sizeable body of purists (my term) who think it would be preferable to have neither. I have never been a purist and my instinct was mentally to vote accordingly, but then I thought again... and thought I saw what they were driving at. Lascaux II is not an exact copy. It couldn't be. As I have pointed out, it is not a reproduction from a flat surface to a flat surface.. One of the special wonders of the original (Lascaux I)paintings is the way in which those early artists utilised individual rock formations, turning them into features of the creature to be represented or using them to emphasise such features. Magical touches like that cannot be copied, if only because each rock form is unique.

So the question remains: when (sadly, not "if") we are left with no Lascaux I, will we then be better off having or not having Lascaux II? Here is a parallel (or parable, should you prefer) that occurs to me. A manuscript is unearthed of a previously unknown long poem. It is obviously a work of major importance and (quite obviously) the only copy extant. But intense research shows it to be a translation. The only copy of the original in the original tongue, scholars learn, was lost. It is the translation or nothing that the world has been bequeathed. You are ahead of me, I know: Is the world worse or better off for having this translation? Or maybe neither better nor worse off, for what it has is not the original poem but something else?

Lubbock takes this absorbing conundrum one step further by pointing out that ever since the day that it was finished - and possibly before that - Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper has been deteriorating and threatening to finally disintegrate in a shower of scurf-like fragments. Nothing more can be done to stabilise or in any way save it. Should they create a Last Supper II?

Inspiration

The Weaver of Grass has issued a challenge for this week to anyone interested - a meme: a post on those people who have been the greatest sources of inspiration. As most of you will know, my main interests are painting (and the visual arts in general) and poetry. The question therefore resolves itself into: who, in these two areas particularly, has most inspired me.

I think it might help if I said straight away that I have never been inspired to paint a particular picture by another painter. Similarly, no poet has ever provided the inspiration for a particular poem. I have occasionally been inspired by a painting to write a poem - and less often by a poem to paint a picture, but apart from a couple of exceptions (the second of which I will get to later) that has been the whole extent of it.

The first exception has to do with child art. At various times during my teaching career I was inspired by a young child's painting to put brush to canvas, nearly always with predictably frustrating results. Never did I get within a million miles of what the child's painting had inspired me to attempt. Whoever first discovers what it is that the child artist loses as s/he matures and then first discovers how it may be preserved will be responsible for enriching the world immeasurably.

Of course, poets and painters whom I admire have helped me along the way, though I do not think I would go as far as to call it influence, let alone inspiration. I will give you an example and you can judge for yourself. One of my heroes from the world of poetry is Seamus Heaney. Some years ago I was inspired to write some poems about my father who had just died. He had been a golf club-maker by profession, beginning in the days when they were made by hand. He could take a block of wood and shave it away to be left with, not just a club head, but a particular club head for a particular professional, capable of lifting the ball into a desired angle of flight. Later, when machines took over, he made the prototype for the machines to copy. He was also much in demand among professional golfers whenever they would require repairs or modifications to be made.

During the drafting of the poems I recalled some of Seamus Heaney's early poems. Digging was one. In it he spoke of his father's use of the spade as if it had been the tool of a craftsman, which of course it had been. He contrasts this with his own determination to be, not a farmer, but a writer. It ends:

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it.

Another such poem was Follower. in it he compared the way as a child he had followed his father at his ploughing, admiring his skill with the horses and his eye for a straight furrow. The poem went on to compare that with his own awkwardness (I stumbled in his hobnailed wake an d how later, in his father's old age, it is he, the father, who keeps stumbling / behind me, and will not go away. There were other works by Heaney that sprang to mind: poems conveying the characters of various craftsmen and the flavours of their crafts or describing their skills. I did not consciously use these, but, as I say, I remembered them and they helped. Certainly I would not claim to have been inspired by any of them. The inspiration came from my father.

Taking another slant, there are a few poems I would dearly loved to have written. (That might make an interesting meme: which works do you wish you had written - or painted or composed or whatever.) The one above all that I would dearly love to claim for myself is Hugh MacDiarmid's fabulous long meditation, On a Raised Beach. Never could it be said though that it had inspired me - or ever would. Quite the reverse, in fact. Let me put it this way: if I had lain on that inland beach as MacDiarmid did and had I been inspired as he was to write a meditative poem about it, my knowledge of his poem would have killed stone dead (pun not intended) any inspiration that the experience might have produced. His poem is so out beyond and far above anything I might contemplate attempting that the thought of doing so would never occur.

And now to my second exception (the one I said I would come to):- As a lad of eleven or twelve or thereabouts i had a passionate interest in cycling. Touring to begin with, the cycle speedway: stripped-down bike, saddle low over the rear wheel, handlebars up-turned like backward-facing horns, one foot on the cinder track, slewing round makeshift tracks on bomb sites and the like. Then came time-trialling, and finally the beginnings (in this country) of what we then called massed-start racing, mainly on disused airfields and private estates. Somewhen about that time I discovered Masefield, I can't remember how or where, maybe at school, maybe not. Specifically, I discovered Reynard the Fox, a long, rather Chaucerian (as I remember it) poem about a fox hunt, told from the point of view of the fox. I think I can truthfully say that it inspired me to write ... but what I wrote, Oh dear, it was a dreadful parody purporting to tell the story of a massed-start cycle race. The really dreadful thing about it is that I can still remember whole sections of it. It was that bad, it was unforgettable. Worse yet, it was published. Only in the club magazine, nothing national, but for that to have been my first published work...

Here, in an act bordering on total abasement, are the opening lines:-

Don Boyd had broken from the pack
of milling wheelers all intent
on doing their best to bring him back,
now spurred by his clubmates' frantic cries
he thrust with his aching, unwilling thighs...

See what I mean! Not wishing to turn embarrassment into humiliation, I will leave it there. Inspiration means different things to different people. To me it simply means having been given a workable idea. I think I was given a workable idea, even though I didn't get the idea to work. Can you be inspired to write a dud? I think you can. I think I was.

But there is a higher form of inspiration, I would suggest: there is the artist or the work of art that inspires you, not to produce a particular painting, poem, piece of music, whatever, but to go that road, to take up that art-form and to follow where it leads. Unbelievably, perhaps, the poem that did that for me was Plato's Dialogue The Republic which I had, also around the age of eleven or twelve in E. V. Rieu's translation (Penguin edition). I was totally thrilled by it and I attribute my passion for poetry to... well, I don't know, should it be Plato or Rieu?

Meanwhile I was incubating a passion for art, without really being aware of it. A good deal of bad health meant that I was often confined to bed for longish spells. Drawing was a life-line. But then I went - probably was taken, but if so I can't remember by whom - to the Tate Gallery. There I was introduced to William Blake (his Beatrice is shown above), Samuel Palmer (the first image below is of his In a Shoreham Garden), Graham Sutherland (a typical image is shown below right), Henry Moore (his war drawings of people sheltering on the London Underground - penultimate image) and John Piper (final image). I suppose the big three were Palmer, Sutherland and Piper. They have never lost their magic. They took me to art school and on to college, confirming me in my desire to teach art - which I never did, but that's another story.

Mirror, mirror on the wall...

Okay, I know it's for the birds, that it doesn't mean a tinker's cuss, but at the end I got drawn into it despite myself. Back on the 8th June The Times got to the end of its long-running poll to find out who, by popular consent, is or was the greatest artist of The Twentieth Century - and not as I originally typed, of all time. Even so, a bit like trying to establish which is the greatest fruit or vegetable. I treated it with all the disdain it deserved for the whole 16 weeks that it took to run its course. But then, when all the 1.4 million votes had been counted and the final results were known, I caved in. (What is it about our natures that succumbs to the competitive element despite our best endeavours, even where it is patently inappropriate?) Nothing should have surprised me about the competition (sorry, poll!)of course - with the possible exception of Picasso not coming first - for with so many of all shades of outlook casting their votes there was bound to be a great mix and levelling. And there was - and Picasso did come first! And Paul Cézanne came second. Almost as much a foregone conclusion as the first place, I thought. No surprises so far. But then:-

• Third place went to Gustav Klimt, master of the Art Nouveau and supposedly with major share holdings in manufacturers of gold leaf. How could the good burgers of Britain who voted in such numbers for Cezanne and Monet (fourth) have voted for Klimt. The answer is, of course, they didn't. It was another lot.




• Marcel Duchamp slipped into fifth place between Monet and Henri Matisse (sixth): same explanation as above? I don't think so, no. Duchamp has his place for good and cogent reasons. Even so I was surprised to see him achieveing it.



• Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, Willem de Kooning and Piet Mondrian, all squeezed in (7th to 10th) before Paul Gauguin , number eleven. Yup, didn't altogether disapprove of that, but still slightly surprised.



• Mark Rothko at 28 just pipped Edward Hopper.



• Lucien Freud at 30 (tagged "Britain's Greatest Living Artist"?) was 4 places ahead of David Hockney.



• Good to see a photographer (Cartier-Bresson) in at 35, though surely if he'd been a painter he would have been higher?



• Henry Moore at 49 demonstrated just how far he has slipped out of fashion.



• Ditto Tracey Emin at at 52 and Damien Hurst at 53.



• Marc Chagall at 71 was disappointing.

Full results with information about the top 200 artists can be found here

(The paintings are, in order, by: Monet, Hockney, de Kooning and Hopper.)

Land Art

From the third of Jume to the sixth of September this year Tate Britain is to host an exhibition of the work of Richard Long. A year or more ago I posted a piece on Environmental Art, mainly, I suppose, extolling the work of Andy Goldsworthy, an artist whose work I greatly admired. Towards the end of the post I mentioned, almost in passing, the work of Richard Long. Although at that time I was getting less than a quarter of the number of visits that I now receive, I am still getting the occasional email about that post, many of them referring to Richard Long. As a result of the interest shown and what I have learnt since then, a visit to the upcoming exhibition at Tate Britain has become a must.

Artists have always tried to record nature. From the earliest cave paintings, and before them in sculptures, artists were representing it to themselves and to others. We might think also of standing stones, cairns and the figures cut into the landscape for various - often unknown - purposes. The White Horses on the English Downs, for example. And from the earliest beginnings (probably) artists have attempted to interact with nature, maybe to add a new element to what they saw or to rearrange, adapt or modify it in some way. And so it is that still today we have these two forms represented in what has come to be termed Environmental Art or Land Art, even (as I like to think of the best of them) markscapes. Richard Long and Andy Goldsworthy belong to the first division (in both senses), while artists such as Christo and Jeanne-Claude are noted for wrapping landscapes in plastic sheeting. Others have modified the landscape on larger and more permanent scales, bringing in earth-moving machines to rearrange what nature made. The contributions of Long and Goldsworthy, look natural. They are co-operating visibly with nature. Christo and Jeanne-Claude (and even less, some others) could not be said to be doing that. What Christo and Jeanne-Claude add does not belong to nature in form, composition or appearance. They maintain that by doing it they are helping us to see our environment, and that may well be, but they are not co-operating with nature to the degree that Long and Goldsworthy are.

This is what I wrote about them a year ago. I think it worth repeating. Christo and Jeanne-Claude achieved fame, and some notoriety, way back, wrapping objects and people, before moving on to larger stuff like islands and sea shores wrapped in polypropylene. Their latest project, not to be realized before 2011, is to suspend translucent panels of fabric, horizontally, over the Arkansas River in the State of Colorado. The panels will be seen as shimmering screens waving high above the water level and, when seen from below, will have "projected" on them, the silhouetted forms of clouds, mountains and vegetation.

Typically, their projects take decades to come to fruition, most of which time is consumed by the need to survey perhaps dozens of potential sites to find the perfect one, to complete all the paperwork, obtain all the permits, reassure the locals at public meetings, modify the plans to meet any objections and/or the requirements of local use and health and safety issues. Indeed, most projects never see the light of day, and those that do, Christo and Jeanne-Claude insist, are dismantled after a fortnight.

When it was put to Christo that it must be very difficult, thinking of the concepts for their projects, he disagreed: "Any fool can get a good idea," he said, "the difficult part is doing it".

Art such as Christo's and Jeanne-Claude's tends to grab the limelight and so has become what most folk now think of as Environmental Art. It is Site Specific art. It may be different in kind from Godsworthy''s art or Long's, but it deserves to have a lot going for it. However, it has had some significant failures. Christo, for example, once wrapped the coast of Little Bay, near Sydney, Australia, as a result of which a seal and some penguins became trapped. The fabric had to be cut to allow them to escape; an incident which caused the creatures concerned no little trauma and set in train a great deal of rethinking on the issues raised by that particular form of environmental art.


Somewhere between these two groups, I think, comes the work of an artist like Antony Gormley with his terracotta figures (shades of the terracotta army?) and his figures in the sea. These last are not just natural-looking, but eerily so. The fact is that they do not belong to a landscape in the way that a tree or a rock belongs to it, but have more claim to ownership of a landscape than sheets of fabric.


Richard Long


In 1967 Richard Long took the first steps - literally - towards a new form of art. Or at least, so he would claim. He took himself off into the country, found a convenient field, and walked in a straight line, backwards and forwards along it. By the time he had finished he had pressed down the grasses to such an extent that walked a line into the landscape. He had left a mark upon it. It was the beginning of his walking as art, as mark-making. He does not consider his walks as being in themselves conceptual, but they realise a particular idea, often the relationships existing between time, geography, distance and measurement. He regards these walks (works) as essentially ephemeral and so records them in some way. In one of three ways, to be precise: by means of maps, in photographs or in textual form. He has said that his work lies between two borders, that at which monuments begin and that of leaving only footprints.

Walking figures almost as much in his routine as art. For example he once covered 150 miles in five days, travelling only 10 miles the first day and increasing the distance by 10 iles each day until on the fifth he had 50 miles to do. These walks most often result in texts, typical of which is something like this:

DRY WALK

113 WALKING MILES
BETWEEN ONE SHOWER OF RAIN AND THE NEXT



AVON ENGLAND 1989

Andy Goldsworthy

Andy Goldsworthy has explained his art more lucidly than I ever could, so maybe he should speak for himself:

"I enjoy the freedom of just using my hands and "found" tools--a sharp stone, the quill of a feather, thorns. I take the opportunities each day offers: if it is snowing, I work with snow, at leaf-fall it will be with leaves; a blown-over tree becomes a source of twigs and branches. I stop at a place or pick up a material because I feel that there is something to be discovered. Here is where I can learn. "


"Looking, touching, material, place and form are all inseparable from the resulting work. It is difficult to say where one stops and another begins. The energy and space around a material are as important as the energy and space within. The weather--rain, sun, snow, hail, mist, calm--is that external space made visible. When I touch a rock, I am touching and working the space around it. It is not independent of its surroundings, and the way it sits tells how it came to be there."


"I want to get under the surface. When I work with leaf, rock or stick, it is not just that material in itself, it is an opening into the processes of life within and around it. When I leave it, these processes continue."

"Movement, change, light, growth and decay are the lifeblood of nature, the energies that I try to tap through my work. I need the shock of touch, the resistance of place, materials and weather, the earth as my source. Nature is in a state of change and that change is the key to understanding. I want my art to be sensitive and alert to changes in material, season and weather. Each work grows, stays, decays. Process and decay are implicit. Transience in my work reflects what I find in nature."

"The underlying tension of a lot of my art is to try and look through the surface appearance of things. Inevitably, one way of getting beneath the surface is to introduce a hole, a window into what lies below."

The image above is of his Ice Spiral