Leonora Carrington. The 31 Women Project, Number Seven - 6 April is her Birthday

Leonora Carrington was a rebel of the most superior and committed type. Born in England in 1917, into a wealthy family, she would not submit to the restrictive propriety that was expected of upper-middle class girls in those days. She needed to be creative and was totally out of place in a conventional family, the one thing she could share with them was a love of horse riding. The horse became symbolic of her freedom in many of her paintings.  As a child, only her Irish grandmother’s fables allowed her imagination free reign. She drew on the walls until her mother, an amateur painter, gave her paper and paints. She wrote in mirror writing and with either hand, which freaked the nuns out at her convent school. She started smoking aged nine and later, when sent to a posh finishing school, she ran away.

She eventually persuaded her reluctant father to let her study art in London, his price was to force her to ‘come out’ as a debutante in 1935. Leonora was unimpressed at meeting the king and hated the frock she had to wear for her coming out ball. The occasion prompted her to write a story in which her place was taken by a smelly hyena, who had just eaten Leonora’s maid and wore the maid’s face to attend the ball. Everybody was too ‘polite’ to comment, until the hyena ate the face and escaped through an open window.

Leonora studied at Chlesea Art School and then under painter Amedee Ozenfant, who had set up a small school. She said that Ozenfant was the first person to not denigrate her need to be an artist and he taught her rigour in her work. Eventually she ran away to be an artist in Paris and lived with surrealist painter Max Ernst. Beginning her artistic life as a surrealist, she was able to release her prolific imagination and with it she ran much further than most of her fellow surrealists, whose work is often mundane by comparison. Some of her early paintings and stories were full of her anger towards her father and the English establishment.

During this period, Leonora formed strong friendships with the other surrealist women including Eileen Agar, Nush Eulard, Leonor Fini, Jacqueline Lamba, Lee Miller, Meret Oppenheim and Dora Maar. These women are now considered a surrealist group in their own right, apart from the men, though in her rebellious fashion Carrington declared, “I was never a Surrealist, I was just with Max”.

The 31 Women Number six ,Valentine Hugo, March 26 is her birthday

Valentine Hugo  26 March 1897-1968                                 

Valentine Hugo was a French artist, theatre and costume designer, author, illustrator and radio broadcaster. She is still sometimes remembered in France and is not as forgotten elsewhere as some of the other 31 women, though where Valentine is mentioned she is usually tagged on at the end of a list of surrealist artists, all men. She painted portraits of a number of them; her best known painting is probably her 1934 portrait of Picasso, staring with dark intensity from between the horns of a symbolic bull.

She was born Valentine Marie Augustine Gross in the seaside town of Boulogne and died 1968 in Paris. Her mother was Zèlie Dèmelin Gross and father Auguste Gross, who was a musician and as a child Valentine developed a love for music and theatre as well as art. She studied art and her first claim to fame was in 1913 when an exhibition of her ballet drawings adorned the foyer of the of the Champs-Elysèes Theatre on the opening night of The Rite of Spring, Stravinsky’s hugely controversial ballet.

The 31 Women number Five, Eyre de Lanux. March 20 is her birthday.

Eyre de Lanux 1894-1996 - American artist, interior & furniture designer, illustrator, journalist, poet, author & art collector 

Eyre de Lanux by Carl Van Vechten

Eyre de Lanux was an artist who dropped the use of her first name, Elizabeth, in the 1920s, as it was obvious to her at the time that women artists did not get the same recognition as men. It was not so much a feminist gesture as a calculated professional decision, she knew her work would be taken more seriously if it was not generically viewed as ‘women’s work’.

Eyre de Lanux had attended the Art Students League in New York City from 1912-1915. She seemed destined for the comfortable, metropolitan life of a wealthy amateur painter and frequenter of New York salons, but it was wartime and she was a modern woman so she found herself a job, working for the Foreign Press Bureau.  She was in some ways a twentieth century renaissance woman, with diverse talents including writing, illustration and fashion as well as painting and design. She first exhibited her painting and drawing  in 1917, but by the late 1920’s she was better known as a designer of soft furnishings and one-off pieces of high quality modernist furniture, some created  in close collaboration with English designer Evelyn Wyld, with whom she set up a workshop.

The 31 Women Number Four, Julia Thecla, artist, designer, curator,– today is her birthday

February28,1896 - June 29, 1973  American painter, theatre & ballet designer, performance artist, curator.

 

 Julia Connell Thecla was born in Delavan, Illinois and moved to Chicago in around 1920. She was a working artist from around 1920 to 1966, but she was not recognised outside Chicago and she was almost forgotten even before her death. Little is known about her family, she largely severed ties with them.


Julia attended classes at the Art Institute of Chicago, while supporting herself as a commercial artist, copyist and art restorer. These and other subsidiary activities sustained her over many years, she never earned much from her paintings. Even after her arrival in Chicago it was eleven years before she could exhibit. Her first exhibition was the Art Institute’s International Watercolour Exhibition in 1931, when Thecla was already 35. She contributed work to the Art Institute’s various annual shows until  her death.

Though she is sometimes described as a surrealist, Julia Thecla’s enigmatic and deeply personal pictures are out on the periphery of the surrealist movement. Much of her work is symbolist or just quirkily representational, rather than really surrealist. She was deeply involved in the artistic community and aware of surrealism and its connotations but, like many women artists, she took only what she liked out of it. Her first truly Surrealist pictures began to emerge in the late 1930’s with works such as Dreamer and Nudes 1937 which depicting a costumed woman, her eyes closed, holding four ropes which are stretched taut and disappear into the sea. Attached to the other ends of the ropes are a line of nudes.

Olga Moscow, artist, dies at 100

Painter, ballet dancer and teacher Olga Moscow, died on 24th February. Also known as Olga Lovell Harding, her married name was Olga Houghton-Evans, she was born on 4th November 1912.

The City, by Olga Moscow

Buffie Johnson, the 31 Women Number Three; her Birthday is 20 February.

Buffie Johnson was born on the 20^th February 1912 in New York City.

In the 1950's she was commissioned to paint what was then the world's largest mural, which adorned the interior of the Astor Theatre in Times Square, but today she is undeservedly neglected. When she is mentioned, Buffie Johnson is grouped with the New York School of abstract expressionists, but as with many women artists this only tells a fraction of her story. She was a close friend of Mark Rothko, who can also only loosely be described as an abstract expressionist. The work of both these artists moves well beyond experimentation with abstraction and paint surfaces, and explores the deepest dimensions of the spiritual. Buffie Johnson was a spiritual artist from her childhood and her method of artistic exploration varied throughout her life, she cannot be defined by association with one school.



Buffie Johnson with one of her Numbering Series
canvases (photo from the Brooklyn Museum)

Born in 1912 into a well to do New York City family, Buffie Johnson was one of twins, her sister died at birth. She claimed many years later that a vision of this lost sister had appeared to her in San Francisco. Her parents separated when she was very small and despite a privileged standard of living her childhood was unsettled. She was shunted between her divorced parents, her grand mother and several aunts, then sent to a convent school which she hated. For some time she lived with her mother’s sister, Minnie Griffin and Minnie’s husband Percy, a New York architect.


Seventy years later Buffie still vividly remembered the view from her room in the Griffin's home, of the ships masts and funnels on East River and the illuminated signs in the city. Like all of the 31 Women artists, she drew and painted from early in her childhood. Her uncle Percy encouraged her artistic talent and aged eight, Buffie began painting a series of pictures of the spirits who she felt must exist in animals, the moon and stars and natural forces such as the wind. This interest in the spiritual and transcendental aspects of the natural world was to infuse her art for the whole of her career.

Writing exercises - one

Writing exercises - one

Originally began this blog because I was doing so little writing. So. Writing exercise from an old copy of Mslexia magazine…

choose four ordinary objects-

I chose the following:-

Cheque book                     light bulb             framed photo of a child                 old floppy disc

Without naming it, write a purely physical description of one…

I wrote:

There are lots of these. They are square, plastic and brightly coloured. This one is green. It has no label, no indication of what lies inside. You can slide the metal plate on the top to one side, revealing a dark, shiny surface, which reflects some light and gives no clues, then a tiny spring exerts just enough force to push the metal cover back into place. So you’re still left ignorant.

The trouble with choosing four objects is that I automatically select four that resound with dramatic potential. These are not mundane things! But then what is mundane? A trowel? It can plant seeds that burst into miraculous life. A carpet? Whose feet have walked on that? A dustbin – containing who knows what secrets! Mundane? Nothing is really mundane.

So…

A floppy disc is something that I used to be dependent on – much of my life’s work still resides within a couple of boxes of these, even though some of the work has later revisions and anyway  they have been technologically superseded . Mundane? Not for me.

A light bulb, mundane? These simple inventions have revolutionised people’s lives! No need for smoky torches and braziers, dangerous and, unless you can afford hundreds, ineffectual candles. Ever tried reading by the light of one candle? Even a dead light bulb is redolent with the scenes it might have illuminated!

Framed photo of a child – mundane? Obviously not. Even better if you don’t know the child, from a fiction writer’s point of view anyway.

Chequebook. Mundane? A new one has such potential, it doesn’t have to only be used to pay the water bill! It could be used to buy a holiday in the Namib desert.., or a magic lamp. A used chequebook tells a story in the stubs.

OK, I don’t believe in mundane and this is obviously one of the aims of this exercise, writing a purely physical description is very hard, it leaves so much out; no emotions, value judgements, intimations…etc.  This may be the best thing that my time at Leeds Uni taught me. If you are a writer, there is always something to write about. I am a writer. Any writing is better than not writing and feeling sorry for myself.