A black and white photo of Still life with self-portrait from 1962. That's a Babycham bottle on the right, which I thought was quite daring at the time. I just realised this is in the photo I posted in November last year. As I said then, whereabouts unknown.
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I lived at the Abbey Art Centre in New Barnet, Hertfordshire in the late 1960s and early 70s, first in a room in the main house ('Remember, no flibbertigibbets,' Ms. Ohly, the landlady, had told me), then a succession of studios in the garden. The communal meals featured in the video had disappeared, but there was still a certain community spirit. Mike Figgis was one resident, at that time involved with the People Show group, and Lotte Reinegger, the animated film pioneer was another. The place hadn't changed much since the early fifties, and I'm pretty sure the abstract painter in the video is working in my first 'garden' studio. If the video doesn't show up on this page, click here to view it. Vladimir Nabokov:
"The seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder blades. That little shiver behind is quite certainly the highest form of emotion that humanity has attained when evolving pure art and pure science. Let us worship the spine and its tingle." Here's a Matisse that does it for me (despite the cracks): From an article in the New York Times (October 30, 2017) about the literary critic Franco Moretti and his "distant reading" - the computer-assisted crunching of thousands of texts at a time:
... even modest-seeming results — like the finding that from 1785 to 1900 the language of the British novel steadily shifted away from words relating to moral judgment to words associated with concrete description — unsettle established ideas of literary history. Ted Underwood, a professor at the University of Illinois who also uses computational analysis, commented: “We tend to see literary history as a story of movements, periods, sudden revolutions,” Mr. Underwood said. “There are also these really broad, slow, massive changes that we haven’t described before.” Another way to think about the history of visual art, too. While preparing for a talk ('Paris, City of Art') later this month, I was looking for images of late 19th century Montmartre and came across a particularly interesting photograph of the Maquis, the area around the Butte de Montmartre. Apparently it was taken between 1887 and 1889, and shows a hillside covered in what look like allotments with huts of various sizes. This semi-rural area, whether vegetable gardens or shanty town, would be obliterated by rapid urban development in just a few years. The composition of the photograph (in fact, cropped from a wider view, I discovered later) was arresting - the bend in the track, the huts stacked cubist-style on the hill, and at the top, a mill (the Moulin de Galette in its original location), and a long barn-like structure. But the allotments themselves also fascinated me, looking so similar to the ones just a short walk from my house in Japan, and knowing that the Maquis would soon disappear gives the ramshackle scene an extra poignancy. I also found a number of van Gogh paintings of Montmartre, including some of the Maquis. I realized that one in his darker manner, dated 1886, depicted virtually the same view as the photograph. Areas of untended land and the absence of some structures clearly show that the painting was made before the photograph was taken, but the features common to both are virtually identical. Perhaps unreasonably, I was surprised to see how accurately van Gogh had portrayed the scene, and how he had shown those humble shacks such respect. I think I was 16 when I painted this. I was already influenced by Cézanne, and the blocky style was my naive interpretation of his style. Even from this image, carefully Photoshopped from an old snap, it's pretty obvious that I had no idea of what he was really on about, but I think it has a certain presence. The painting (oil on hardboard) was about six feet high and for years was stored at the back of my parents' garage and went to the tip when my father died. An extract from Oliver Sack's 'The River of Consciousness', quoted in a New York Times article today:
"It is often felt that Darwin, more than anyone, banished “meaning” from the world — in the sense of any overall divine meaning or purpose.…. [And yet] evolutionary theory provided, for many of us, a sense of deep meaning and satisfaction that belief in a divine plan had never achieved. The world that presented itself to us became a transparent surface, through which one could see the whole history of life. The idea that it could have worked out differently, that dinosaurs might still be roaming the earth or that human beings might never have evolved, was a dizzying one. It made life seem all the more precious and a wonderful, ongoing adventure." Exactly. I've just started reading Colin Wilson's 'The Outsider'. Most people my age read it in their twenties, but better late than never. A couple of things that caught my eye:
"Freedom posits free-will; that is self-evident. But Will can only operate when there is first a motive. No motive, no willing. But motive is a matter of belief; you would not want to do anything unless you believed it possible and meaningful. And belief must be belief in the existence of something; that is to say, it concerns what is real. So ultimately, freedom depends upon the real. The Outsider’s sense of unreality cuts off his freedom at the root. It is as impossible to exercise freedom in an unreal world as it is to jump while you are falling." "… Hemingway’s early work ... is a long meditation on human vulnerability. And meditation on human vulnerability always leads to ‘religious thinking’, to Hemingway’s ‘He must find things he cannot lose’; to a development of an ethic of renunciation and discipline. It leads to a realisation that man is not a constant, unchanging being: he is one person one day, another person the next. He forgets easily, lives in the moment, seldom exert’s will-power, and even when he does, gives up the effort after a short time, or forgets his original aim and turns to something else. No wonder that poets feel such despair when they seem to catch a glimpse of some intenser state of consciousness, and know with absolute certainty that nothing they can do can hold it fast." Some shots from a trip to Provence In 2010, with paintings by Cézanne and van Gogh.
John Keats defined Negative Capability as "when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason." I'll go along with that. |