Novel Extract - Tong Street Blues - chapter 38 of 'The Other Elephant' - set in London in the 1970's

He wakes up. He was dreaming of the smell of patchouli.

The day pokes fingers of sunlight between streaks on the grimy window and into his dry eyes. His head is parched from last night’s intoxication, last night’s dream. He feels like he’s slept for three weeks. Only he knows that’s wrong. It’s three weeks since the funeral, but he knows. In that time he’s hardly slept, except for last night, this morning. This morning’s dream. He was dreaming of the taste of apple, dipped in cinnamon sugar.

He sits up. He’s in his own bed. Some remaining inkling of self-preservation had made him leave Alvin’s pad, late in the night and seek his own, safer place. He pulls protesting limbs to the sink and gulps water. It oozes over his wizened tongue and down his throat in slow motion, like a stream of new rain creeping over a parched desert, with the burning ground sucking moisture from beneath as it tries to run. He was dreaming of the wetness of fucking, with her wonderful, fair skin sliding beneath his sweating body, his mind burning with the joy of it.

He remembers yesterday, before the dream, he had climbed to the top of Sandringham flats because he couldn’t bear it any more. Oblivion beckoned and he followed and he toked on Alvin’s pipe, and now he understands. It’s something else, the fulfilling blast of smack, but it’s not real, because this morning the world is still dry. He feels parched from his skin to his core, like brittle, bark-less twigs high on a beach, bleached and sand blasted. Out of the reach of the water.

He was dreaming of Sandy. Now he needs to find her.

                                                                                         

Suzy Frelinghuysen; the 31 Women number ten

7 May is Suzy Frelinghuysen’s birthday, she was born in 1911.

Suzy Frelinghuysen was an abstract painter in the USA before the country had any great tradition of abstract art.  She and her husband, George L.K.Morris, were founding members of American Abstract Artists and also of a smaller group which became known as the Park Avenue Cubists. Their influences came from Europe. Morris was also a member of Abstraction-Création-Art Non-Figuratif, a group formed by important European abstractionists including Sophie Taeuber and Jean Arp.  Suzy Frelinghuysen adapted cubist, mixed media and collage styles into her work, with an emphasis on musical and operatic motifs, because Suzy was also a singer.

Suzy Frelinghuysen in her studio

She was born Estelle Condit Frelinghuysen, in New Jersey, into a wealthy and influential family. Her grand-father, Frederick, was secretary of state to President Chester A. Arthur and Suzy was never forced to sacrifice her wealth and social status for the sake of her art. This was held against her by some from the ‘artists must starve in garrets to be considered authentic’ school of thought and the anti-patrician, anti-European attitude of critic Clement Greenberg. His disparaging opinion of her and her fellow American Cubists was expressed in a 1948 essay, “The Decline of Cubism”. Greenberg was about to ‘discover’ abstract expressionism and already felt that cubism was old hat and probably too un-American.

During her childhood, Suzy was privately tutored in art and music.  She also visited Europe a number of times, although she was not particularly aware of European cubism at the time. Originally a realist painter, she said that she really became interested in trying abstraction after her marriage to painter and sculptor, George L.K. Morris. She adopted the cubist style and her paintings were described as bringing humour and elegance to synthetic cubism.

The Secret of Minos

The eternal drone of a thousand hives of bees

orange grove and flower of prickly pear

create honey of pure, golden sweetness

more constant, unquenchable than any machine.

 

 Ano Vouves the world’s oldest olive tree

gnarls and twists succulent dark secrets

to fruition even after four thousand years.

Slender many coloured cats brood in its belly.

 

The Cretan countryside is far older than the ruins of Knossos

 

 

Hazel McKinley; the 31 Women, number nine. Her birthday is 13 April.

Hazel McKinley – 1903-1995 American painter, collector and patron 

(also painted as Hazel King-Farlow )

Born on 30^th April 1903 in New York, painter Hazel was the youngest of three daughters of Benjamin Guggenheim and Florette Seligman Guggenheim. Their wealth couldn’t buy freedom from virulent anti-Semitism, the Guggenheim sisters endured a restricted and claustrophobic childhood in the small social circle of super-wealthy New York Jewish families. Both Hazel and her sister Peggy rebelled and moved to Europe in the 1920’s. This was the start of an itinerant life for Hazel, during which she married six times. She lived mainly in England and France from the early 20’s to the 1960’s and from the 1930’s she became friends with principal members of the European avant-garde, whose work she purchased. She spent her later years back in the USA.

Hazel had begun to paint in her teens and was no dilettante. She received tuition from Rowland Suddaby, Raymond Coxon and Edna Ginesi and with them became associated with the London Group and the Euston Road School. She first exhibited her work with them during the 1930’s, under her married name Hazel King Farlow. Hazel’s earlier work from this period includes still-life, townscapes and landscapes carefully painted with a slightly plain palette, somewhat reminiscent of the Parisian artist Utrillo. Later in the thirties her paintings brightened, becoming more like those of her teacher, Suddaby. Her first solo exhibition was at the Cooling Galleries in April 1937. She sold or donated some of her work to public art galleries and her pictures are still held in the municipal collections of several English cities including Wakefield, Manchester and Leeds. 

Sonja Sekula; the 31 Women number eight, her birthday is 8 April

Sonja Sekula (1918 –1963) Swiss/American abstract expressionist painter & poet
Sonja Sekula had a significant career for eighteen years and it ought to be difficult to call her a forgotten artist. She was prolific and in her short career her work appeared in 18 solo and 36 group exhibitions, with at least another 30 since her death, mainly in Switzerland. Unfortunately she suffered from mental illness and could not maintain a consistent momentum. Betty Parsons, the New York dealer who promoted her work from 1948, dropped her in 1960.



Sonja Sekula in 1945

Sonja was relatively isolated as a person and as an artist, which was due to her mental health issues and also the fact that she was gay, both socially unacceptable at the time. Her work is classified as abstract expressionist and she showed with the New York School artists both at Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery when the movement was in its infancy and for 12 years with Betty Parsons.

Sonja worked in a surrealist manner, using automatic techniques to express her inner world, but although she became friendly with old school surrealists including Andre Breton and Max Ernst, she was really too late for Surrealism, it was past its peak. Visually some of her early work remembers Miro and Klee, but the art world was moving on.

She was young enough to move with it for a while, always maintaining her own creative identity. Her experiments in automatism began in the early 1940’s, steering her in similar directions to other abstract expressionists. She experimented constantly and after each breakdown appeared re-born, with a different stylistic vision, an inconsistency which ultimately alienated the art-buyers. Her final works are gestural, spare and Zen-like.

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.