A name to conjure with!

 

I like to think that I have a passing knowledge of the history of art – at least the generally white, male, euro-centric version that I have studied.  But the one thing about knowing a little of a subject is that knowledge gives you more and more opportunities to discover just how slight that knowledge actually is.

     I do acknowledge that my interests lie in the rough timeline of Giotto to Guston – not a good example of a modern contemporary artist to go with the C.13^th Master, as I don't like the work of Guston, and also he died a quarter of a century ago.  But you get the idea, I am generally in the realm of Modern-ish art, where allowing for the vagaries of how artists cope with perspective, their painted characters stand on their feet and not tiptoe and there is something recognizable about the way that they have painted the world.

     As I have also studied Modern, Modern Art, I have also had to come to terms with wildly un-representational art and all the strange and wonderful ways in which artists have interpreted the world around them.

     But, in spite of having studied with the Open University where such things as feminism are de rigeur, my knowledge of women artists pre C.20^th is still a little lacking.  And that lack of knowledge goes for female living artists too. I mean, I can rattle off a list of woman working in the plastic arts today, but it is nothing like as extensive as the list I can draw up of male artists.

     So, it was with something of a peaked interest with which I responded to the information sent to me by MNAC that there would be a lecture and view of the new exhibition of the work of Suzanne Valadon.  [Museu National d’Art de Catalunya.  Suzanne Valadon: a Modern Epic.  19^th April to 1^st September 2014]

 

 

A little light research later and I was ashamed that previously I could do little more than bring to mind a couple of paintings by her.  There is so much more!

     Her dates (1865-1938) meant that she was 35 years old at the turn of the century, and by that time she had made the transition from poverty, via hard poorly paid jobs, through being a circus performer to being the model for a group of artists including Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec, Berthe Morisot, Puvis de Chavanne, Steinlen and Degas!  Quite the roll call of talent.

     An accident put paid to her career in the circus and so she developed a talent for art that she seems to have had from an early age, and managed to make a name for herself in the cut throat world of the turn of the century centre of the art world in Paris.

     Her first marriage ended after she fell in love with one of her son’s friends and she married André Utter although he was more than twenty years her junior.  Her painting of the nude Utter casting a net, shows him in three different (though decorous) poses and is remarkable in presenting a female gaze, unashamedly presenting the naked male as an object of sexual desire.

     To be fair many of her nudes are of women, but her odalisques and Eves are a more modern take on nudity and the presentation of the female body than the male generation of artists around her were producing.

     I am writing this before the exhibition, and I will write more when I have seen the more than 100 works that this exhibition boasts.

     I only hope that they have a catalogue in English, as neither my French (lots of loans from French Museums) or Spanish or Catalan can cope with academic art-speak!

     I live in hope!

New book. New readers?

I have never let the obvious subject matter, stand in the way of my writing something.  I am a great believer in the thought that, if you are sincere in wanting to write then something (anything) will suggest itself as a subject worthy of words.

     This time, for this entry, I do actually have something to say.  (And as someone who cares about writing, I couldn’t help notice that I have overused the word “something” in the last couple of sentences.  Noticed?  Yes.  Going to do something (ha!) about it?  No.

     So, to The Matter of Import!  I have written (another) book.  The last effort was a ‘chapbook’, which is more of a glorified pamphlet, but my latest effusion is a real book.  You can tell it’s a real book because it has a spine, and it is wide enough for the logo of Praetorius Books to be printed thereupon.

     Called, “Caught in the Conceit” the book is the latest in the series of books and chapbooks that I have produced during Holy Week over the last ten years.

     I started writing the poems because (ten years ago) I hadn’t realised that the Sunday on which I was having my post-swim cup of tea was actually Palm Sunday.  There was nothing to differentiate it for any other Sunday.  No sense of special, no sense that this was the Sunday before Holy Week, leading up to the most important celebration in the Christian Church of Easter Sunday.  It was the sense of ordinariness, the complete lack of otherness, that struck me.  How far, I seemed to ask myself, had we travelled/progressed/declined so that what was once an important part of the year (let alone the Church Year) was so casually ignored.

     The first poem in the first edition of Poems in Holy Week (“Clocks of Dust”) did reference the lack of appreciation of the significance of the day, but always at the back of my mind was the thought that this was not just about Christianity but was rather about how attitudes to what was once thought of as an essential and defining part of the year had declined into ‘just part of the weekend’.

     Things change.  Even institutions and concepts that have seemed to be set in stone (thinking about it, that could be literally true) are coming loose or crumbling.  The only certainties we are left with are “Death and Taxes”!

     As an atheist I did not feel myself to be bound to an overtly Christian theme, even though the poems were written in what used to be an overtly Christian time of the year.  The subject matter ranged far and wide, but that was not a deliberate rejection on my part.  I might be atheist but, as I have said too often to people who don’t really care, but I am an Anglican atheist! 

     As someone who was brought up (by my mother) as a Christian and (by my father) as a Humanist, and as someone who regularly went to church for the best part of thirty years of his life, I am imbued with the ‘trapping’ of the Church: its liturgy, its ceremonies, its architecture, its music, its art, its theology, and most importantly, its words.  I have no intention of repudiating such elements that have played their part in making me the person I am today and I regard myself as interested but uninvolved in religion.

     The writing of those first eight (sometimes more) poems (I take Holy Week to extend from Palm Sunday to Easter Day) gave me real satisfaction, and I resolved to repeat the process the following year.  Which I did, and then carried on.  For example, as well as the poems that I have written for each day this year during Holy Week, I have also written a handful of haiku to accompany each day as well.  Each volume is slightly different from the one that went before.

     For the Anniversary Edition of Poems in Holy Week 2024, I decided to add a section which looked back on the almost 100 poems that I had written over the years, and to make a personal selection of poems and prose from the various introductions to the chapbooks I had written.

     So, that is what “Caught in the Conceit” is, this year’s poems and a selection from the last decade.

     The volume is illustrated in a variety of ways, ranging from the garabatos (that I regard as a form of graphic meditation) to use of AI to give some sort of visual form to my wordy instructions in the programs that I have used.  There are also treated photographs and a touch of graphic design!

     At the moment the book is with the printer, and I am enjoying that indefinable moment of something like lazy satisfaction, between the work having been completed and holding the finished volume in my hands.  Then the real work starts of getting information out about the book and getting people to buy it!

     It is possible to leave a message on this blog if you want to reserve a copy of Caught in the Conceit.  There are a limited number of copies, and they are available only from the author, myself.

     Book details: Full colour cover, 172 pages, including this year’s Poems in Holy Week, together with selection of poems from past editions, short prose and poetry extracts, garabatos, photographs, illustrations, and a brief introductory essay.  Each copy of Caught in the Conceit comes with its own unique bookmark!

     I should have the books printed and in my hands in the next week or so and then I will look forward to the next stage in the books development when eyes other than my own read through and pass judgement!

 

As a sort of freebie to encourage good thoughts about Caught in the Conceit, the following QR Code will take you to a copy of my last chapbook, "A sight too much?"  Use your mobile phone to scan and you should be taken to a site where you can download the file and read my last series of poems.

Enjoy!

Scan me!