Still Life, With Waders - my poem for National Poetry Day

It was National Poetry Day on the second of October, this year's theme was - Remember.

This poem was conceived a long time ago, as part of a much longer thing I tried writing in memory of my father. As the longer thing still isn't even remotely satisfactory, I've re-worked this bit into a very short poem. I think it works.

Still Life, With Waders

I remember he was a twitcher

before there was twitching.

 
But not just a list of sightings

ticked off like train numbers.

Love seeps from his lists of Lapwing,

Linnet, Greylag, Goosander and

the great, Great Bustard.

 

After life, comes life.

There are still sunset waders

near the shore

up to their Redshanks

in  a skin of light.

'The Quarry' by Iain Banks - book review

Not Iain Banks most exciting book, though I found it very readable, with interesting characters and some great dialogue. In a way it's the author's full circle, returning to a rather claustrophobic world inhabited by a first person narrator who is a teenager, as in Banks first novel, the Wasp Factory. The Quarry however is far less gruesome than the Wasp Factory, though it deals with cancer and the ultimate death of the teenage boy's father.

The Quarry won't necessarily be an especially easy read for some people, cancer is a tragic issue in many peoples' lives. As Iain Banks was himself dying of cancer when it was published, this makes the story sadder still. However he insisted that was purely coincidence. I wonder...

I'm very sad that one of my favourite authors will never write another book, but at least there are a couple of his which I haven't read yet - and I've still to get through all of his very dense 'Culture' novels written in his other guise as SF maestro Iain M. Banks. This man had an imagination the size of the universe!

For loads of information on Iain Banks (with or without the M) his website is - http://www.iain-banks.net/

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Louise Nevelson, the 31 Women number 31, her birthday is 23 September 1889

Number 31 and I've saved the best until last, well in my opinion anyhow. But I need to admit that I've also left Louise Nevelson until the end because I've found her the hardest to write about. I have several excuses...

Louise Nevelson by Richard Avedon

Nevelson was the first of the 31 Women I knew about, as I came across some of her smaller work in an exhibition when I was a teenager. I was mesmerised and captivated by several of her wooden box sculptures, filled with pieces of wooden artefacts some recognisable and some mysterious and obscure. When I eventually saw one of her huge walls I was truly intimidated by her colossal talent. Reading about her life, her struggle for recognition, her ferocious determination to be unique, I have continued to be intimidated; I would absolutely hate to say anything she would dislike!

This post is not complete, obviously. I've already written a lot about Louise Nevelson and my writing's not good enough to post. I'm currently reading 'Dawns and Dusks' which is as close as she came to writing an autobiography, she didn't really trust the written word, putting this down to her disrupted early childhood when she had to cope with three languages Russian, Yiddish and English. This marvellous book contains her words, recorded and transcribed by her friend Diana MacKown, so if I can't write about her art after reading what she herself said about it, there's no hope for me!

My other excuse is that aiming to post actually on Ms Nevelson's birthday is possibly a forlorn hope as she wasn't entirely clear about when she was born, although I'm sure she'd despise my lack of punctuality.

Louise Nevelson described her working process as composing. From Dawns and Dusks I've so far found two great quotes which help to reveal her creative motivation -

"I always wanted to show the world that art is everywhere, except that it has to pass through a creative mind." That creative mind, obviously, was her own.

She proudly regarded herself as a scavenger -

"You're taking a discarded, beat-up piece that was no use to anyone and you place it in a position where it goes to beautiful places... These pieces of old wood have a history and a drama that to me is  like taking someone who has been in the gutter for years, neglected and overlooked. And someone comes along who sees how to take these beings and transform them into total being."

This recycling of existing things, which have had a purpose before the artist came along, is something done by many artists in both 20th and 21st centuries. It began with the Dadas such as Duchamp and Baroness, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven and continues today with almost everyone. My current favourite is sculptor and installation artist Cornelia Parker, but no-one has yet taken it to the sublime heights achieved by Louise Nevelson.

Book Review - Headlong by Michael Frayn

I've just finished reading this very entertaining novel - shortlisted for the 1999 Booker Prize  - ok so I'm not reading this year's shortlist!

Anyway, Headlong is an interesting novel, funny almost farcical action contrasted with erudite and convincingly accurate looking research on the Dutch painter Breughel, his paintings and his times. I assume the research is factual, why make it up? The stories around Breughel were fascinating and kept me reading the book; he's one of my favourite painters and I originally picked up the book because of the Breughel scene on the cover.

The infuriating protagonist in the novel part of Frayn's book is a would-be art historian who believes he has found a previously unknown painting by Breughel which, if genuine, is worth millions, but it belongs to his ignorant and bombastic neighbour. He devises an increasingly convoluted scheme to get hold of the picture, but even his name, Martin Clay is soft and amorphous, you know the project is somehow doomed! The action proceeds at pell-mell pace towards tragedy - although nobody dies - except Icarus.

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Esphyr Slobodkina - the 31 Women number 30. Her birthday is 22 September

Russian/American painter, sculptor, designer, illustrator and author
22 September 1908 to  22 July 2002

In the late 1930’s New York artistic circles, a great contest between Abstraction and Surrealism erupted, in the art establishment at least, though this had been running in Europe for more than ten years as a debate amongst friends. The American public were bemused by both movements. Esphyr Slobodkina was apparently an artist with a foot in both camps. Her left foot was rooted firmly in the camp of abstraction, she was a founding member of the American Abstract Artists, a group which began in 1937, and her superbly composed, hard-edged abstract paintings on modern materials (she painted on plywood and masonite, hardly ever used canvas after joining the AAA) epitomise the Modernist, non-objective aims of the group. However one glance at her marvellous found-object sculptures seems to show that her right foot has hopped into the camp of the Surrealists. Many of the artists at the time, from Duchamp, Tanguy and Kay Sage through to Dorothea Tanning, Buffie Johnson and Jean Helion enjoyed both camps, but Slobodkina’s sculptures are more abstract than they might at first appear. Their forms are highly designed, their creation may have been influenced by the Constructivist ideas which followed her out of her native Russia - only her toe was dipped delicately into surrealism.

Esphyr Slobodkina was born in Chelyabinsk, in the Urals, Siberia, the youngest child in a well-to-do Jewish family. Solomon Aronovich Slobodkin, her father, was manager of the MAZUT oil corporation and when his youngest daughter was seven, Solomon’s work took the family from the windswept plains east of the Ural Mountains to the more sophisticated provincial capital of Ufa. Their life in Ufa was comfortable, though Esphyr’s childhood was plagued by illness. Her earliest creative activities were creating cut-out dolls and doilies and, when allowed outdoors, making personal adornments from leaves, acorns and flowers, an inspired extension of the childish art of the daisy-chain.

Leonor Fini, the 31 Women Number Twenty Nine. Her Birthday is 30th August.

Leonor Fini, Argentinian/Italian. Born 30 Aug 1907 in Buenos Ares, died 18 January 1996 in Paris. 
Painter, novelist, illustrator, costume, film and theatre designer.

Leonor Fini is yet another extraordinary artist who has been largely forgotten by the wider art world because she was a woman. In her lifetime her superbly outrageous dress sense and scandalous lifestyle kept the press confused and fascinated; although Leonor the celebrity was one of the most photographed women of the day, there was less interested in her art, outside the galleries and collectors.

Within the Surrealists she was also affected by sexism from the male artists, Dali typified the attitude when he said of her work, "Better than most perhaps. But creativity is in the balls." Fini's art became less acceptable amongst the art-critical elite during the 1950's and 60's as she had no interest in moveing into vast abstractions. She has gradually been downgraded and underrated ever since, becoming merely regarded as a 'niche' artist, while the male surrealists - particularly Dali - continued to be valued.
 
Eleonora Fini's nationality is confused; from Argentina she moved to Austria, then Italy, and spent much of her productive career in France.  Born in Buenos Aries, she had a disturbed early childhood; she was spirited way from her tyrannical father, Herminio Fini, at the early age of 4 and taken by Malvina, her mother to Europe.  Malvina Braun Dubich was of Serbian, German and Venetian extraction but her family home was Trieste, then an important Austrian seaport. The city was passed to Italy as a result of the treaty of Versailles after World War I.  Herminio refused to divorce his wife, he never gave up demands for the return of his daughter and tried to have Leonor kidnapped.  Malvina only managed to secure a divorce in 1919.

Vieira da Silva; the 31 Women number Twenty-Eight, her birthday is 13 June.

born 13 June 1908 in Lisbon, Portugal, died 6 March 1992                                  

Vieira da Silva working on stained glass, C1966

Portuguese/French painter, abstraction, mosaic, murals, tapestry, stained glass 

Maria Elena Vieira da Silva is an unfamiliar name to many in the English speaking art world but this lack of recognition is completely undeserved. She was Portuguese by birth, though her career is mainly identified with the School of Paris and her work is highly regarded throughout Europe, especially in France and Portugal and also in Brazil. She has had a large number of exhibitions both in Europe and Latin America. In a sixty year painting career she exhibited almost every year, beginning in a joint exhibition with Hungarian painter Arpad Szenes, in Lisbon in 1929 and with her first solo exhibition in Paris in 1933.

 

Szenes became her husband in 1930 and was possibly the only example in the twentieth century of a male artist suborning his own talent in favour of his wife’s. Although they exhibited together, he promoted her work ahead of his own, effectively acting as her manager. She was naturally shy and reclusive and he protected her from day to day worries, whilst introducing her work to the outside world. Most importantly, he was able to dispel much of the self doubt that often struck her down; she was constantly concerned that her increasingly abstract interpretations of time and place were becoming de-humanised and hence devalued, though their creation actually involved a huge emotional commitment from the artist.