No art in writing

From books on modern art comes the realisation that artists have pushed the boundaries of visual art into new, challenging yet accepted formats. In contrast, writing has been stagnant for centuries with the few innovations sidelined.

It is an enfeebling mistake for me to buy a book on modern art. This time the book was A Brush with the Real – Figurative Painting Today, published this year. In these featured works the images have recognisable components that for the most part are in some understood representational form.

Review: Modigliani: Colour Library

Modigliani: Colour Library by Douglas Hall
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The artist emerges from examination of the artworks

A duality of writing style gives this study of Modigliani a delightful chiaroscuro. Whereas the biography of the artist is tightly constrained to the available information, texts accompanying the artwork plates are indulgent with interpretation and opinion.

After apologies for the lack of facts about the early life of Modigliani, the chronology of the artist is delivered with an appealing tone of slight distain towards those biographers who embellish the artist’s life. Phrases like “as his legend has it” highlight guesswork. Consequently and correctly, one learns of Modigliani’s creative side – the pulling in different directions due to health and circumstances – but not much of the artist as a person. There is little in the biography of Modigliani’s emotional character nor his interrelation with others. Especially with the gifted student, artist’s model and tragic lover Jeanne Hébuterne. This is commendable honesty.

A strong sense of Modigliani’s search for his style of artistic expression comes from the freer interpretations associated with each artwork. This stretches to surmising the artist’s attitude towards the subjects of the portrait paintings. Reference is made to the absence of recorded philosophising by Modigliani about his art, and him not fitting recognised styles of the period. Here also is distain for those who pigeonhole Modigliani’s works, adding modifier phrases such as “what has been called, very loosely indeed, his ‘cubist’ style”. This is not divisive commentary but adds a charming lightness for the casual reader.

This is an art book worth reading as well as looking at.

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A broader canvas than the painting

notes on: Paintings that Changed the World – Reichold, Graf

What elevates this book above other art compendia is the fascinating text accompanying the 90 paintings. Each discussion illustrates its painting through expansion of the context or content of the artwork.

For example, Jan van Eyck’s The Arnolfini Marriage has paragraphs on the excesses of marriage festivities in the Middle Ages (not marriage excesses of the middle-aged). Saint George and the Dragon prompts a lamentation on the bad press given to those beasts except in the Far East and here by Paolo Uccello. It observes, “Kept on a short lead by the princess, the fearsome beast is made a pitiful, almost amusing spectacle” (the dragon not George).

The commentary is written with playful, wry humour. Right from the first self-destruct sentence, “Of course, no painting really changed the world.”

Every artwork of this varied selection is given a full colour page. North European painters are understandably favoured but art establishment prejudice emerges through only one female being featured, Frida Kahlo.

This book is not an art reference work. It is a celebration in image and word of the paintings and the worlds in which they were created.

Le Bresle dans le modèle de Claude Monet

While Luvlady was doing something personally auroral in our Hotel de Calais bedroom – that was auroral not aural – I snapped the small Bresle river from the window. Some hours later the Bresle had turned into a lake. Snap!

Monet – Haystack. End of Summer, morning (1891)

I remembered Claude Monet while in Normandy had painted haystacks under different lighting conditions. We weren’t staying through the seasons but we were in Le Tréport on the eastern edge of Normandy, and I had a camera, and I had occasions at the window. Snap, snap, snap.

My collection turned out not so much a capturing of colour as a study in sepia. It was also a reminder how water can transform. I made a video of the images as a slideshow. On the TV it is a relaxing preference to most of the programmes. I should have done a Warhol and parked a video camera through the window for a 72 hours movie of the tidal river.

Monet was exploring colours in painting his haystacks. I ended up exploring image editing and slideshow programs. Luvlady thinks I should have been doing something personally authorial. She got that right.

Postscript on posting this

When Monet painted, his canvas accepted every pigment he chose to use. When I posted this, I learned this blog host accepted everything – except video. No video! Unless one pays the buy-your-own-cinema annual levy. No video likens to Monet being allowed to use brushes but not a palette knife.

I wanted the Bresle images to dissolve from the one to the next so the blog site’s Gallery option with manual progression was a non-starter. The site’s own slideshow insists on including every image associated with the post and I didn’t want haystacks and montage in my river. Impasse. I would be delighted if anyone can correct me on the above points.

Meanwhile, I eschewed the woc-whinge and uploaded the slideshow video to my website. If you want to have a look (don’t raise your expectations from the lengthy build-up, it is more in the concept than the execution) please click here to open in a new window.

Four friends, Frida and Fuentes

I am on a bus from Slough heading for High Wycombe where I will catch another bus to Aylesbury for lunch. I am meeting three school chums who, over 50 years later, are now long-standing friends. HMGov’s concessionary pass has made the omnibus our designated mode of travel.

Frida Kahlo – the artist is the artwork

For the journey I have brought another children’s book from the Artists in their World series. (See Georgia on my mind.) This one is about the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo. Much in the book I already know: her politics, her self-portraits, polio and the bus crash, twice married to Diego Rivera, their sojourn in the States, La Casa Azul.

Hitherto, I have sensed much of Frida Kahlo is in her paintings but it is a photograph in the book that holds my eyes and launches my thoughts. It is at her only solo exhibition in Mexico (Galeria Arte Contemporaneo, Mexico City, 1953). The seriously ill artist has been brought there and remains confined to her ornate four-poster bed. She is the centre of attention. The artist is the exhibit. The artist is the artwork.

To what extent can the artist be their work? There have been excreta, blood and skin artworks but these are more Shock Art than Artist Art. Living statues, performance art, living sculptures have at their core presentation over identity. What is the ultimate artwork for the artist? Damien Hirst preserving himself in a tank of formaldehyde? Tracey Emin making My Bedroom a 24/7 reality exhibit as in The Truman Show?

Would I make public my Journal even though it is selectively edited before composition and shies from raw visceral exposure? Those libellous, abhorrent, immoral and criminal components within me. The bus, at least, has reached where it’s going to. Time for lunch.

Carlos Fuentes – the written is the reality

On the journey I have brought another book, short stories by the Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes. I should have had nachos for lunch given these two books. I aim to return the Fuentes book to High Wycombe library, as I’ll be close to it when changing buses and not near another Bucks CC library for days.

Disembarking at the bus station from the Aylesbury bus I ignore the 16:30 Slough bus that is on the point of leaving because I have lugged the bulky Carlos Fuentes book all day and am determined to return it. I stroll the 150 metres to High Wycombe library. It is closed. At 16:35? What! A main library is closed on a Monday. How out-in-the-sticks is that?

I stride back to the bus station to learn the next bus to Slough is not until 17:05. I walk back to the library planning to keep walking along London Road until I reach a bus stop just before the expected arrival time there. I reckoned to catch the 17:05 in Loudwater.

At the end of the pedestrian area of the High Street a bus is stuck trying to emerge into the traffic. Blow me if it isn’t the one I’d ignored in the bus station – check my watch – 16 minutes ago. I jog past it to the stop with Carlos bouncing in my knapsack against my spine.

The bus is crowded but I spot an aisle seat next to a slender pale woman. I am aware of her staring at me but I sit down anyway. “Weren’t you at the bus station?” she asks. I am flattered and fearful at the same time. “I was just wondering why you didn’t get on this bus there.”

I explain. She delves in her bag and with a smile shows me her work ID card. I read Bucks CC Library Service, Connie Hull. “The library is open on Sundays from 11 to 5,” she offers, undermining my closed-on-Mondays rant. “It is only open to staff on Mondays.” Connie volunteers to return my book for me the next day and I hand over my burden. She handles it as if a treasure, flicking through inquisitively and begins to read a story.

Exactly four weeks and a day later, a Tuesday, I am in High Wycombe library paying the overdue fine plus the charge for the lost Carlos Fuentes book. The assistant tells me Connie Hull did work in the library, that she was obsessionally devoted to it. She was killed in a bus accident three years ago.

I look at the form I’ve signed for the lost book: Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins by Carlos Fuentes. I replay the opening story through my mind, Constancia, a woman of life extended through another. Somewhere on this journey back from lunch with four friends in Aylesbury I have been diverted into magical realism.

Breakfast with Georgia on my mind

Up at 05:20 this morning jolted awake by ache in right shoulder. So I’m hungry in Maidenhead at noon. So hungry I’m not able to think beyond the next bullet point on my trip list, a vital scrap of paper. A full breakfast is appealing but nothing to read as I’d already retuned the abandoned Art Crazy Nation by Matthew Collins (first task on the trip list). Flash visit to the children’s library (not in the Mackintosh sense) then hunt for a nearby eatery.

The Bear (Wetherspoon) is dark inside. Great for watching the televisions and for not seeing what is on one’s plate; lousy for reading even a children’s illustrated book. Settled in ‘O Yes’ on the corner of St Ives Road with my full English breakfast (double toast for some reason), tea and my book on Georgia O’Keefe in the Artists in their World series.

Georgia O’Keeffe – Red Canna (1923)

She is an artist whose work has been in my peripheral radar over the years, and after two eggs, bacon, beans etcetera I have a snapshot in my head of the artist and her canon of work. That’s why I adore children’s non-fiction – for giving an overview in an engaging way. I also adore unforeseen outcomes.

There was more than biography from Georgia O’Keefe. Her dedication to her art was a jolt to me that the process of writing is more important than the product. The product has been paramount for me in these past weeks. And product promotion! Good to get that reminder from Georgia of what is really essential. I also responded to the concept of her ‘Specials’, works done for herself to explore the medium. It’s been too long since I did that form of writing.

An hour later I returned to the library the fully read book and took my full belly to the supermarket.