I’m following Kurt Vonnegut’s advice, as per my previous post, and writing a poem. Here it is:
Classroom Crush
She’s a beauty And no mistake Long brown hair A fine filly With a luxuriant mane Just enough jewellery To suggest sophisticated decadence Sat with her peach of a derrière On the edge of her desk.
A green velvet jacket A colourful batik silk scarf Enchanting hazel eyes A voice that’s refined Commanding obedience Oh so willingly given Long elegant fingers Rest on a copy Of Sirens of Titan.
Oh, Mrs Martin Your Mona Lisa smile Always baffled and beguiled I wonder how many Boys hearts you quickened Or maybe broke? Sat in the ranks Of hideous brown plastic chairs I secretly loved you.
I have to thank a secondary school English teacher (Mrs Martin?), for introducing me to Kurt Vonnegut. Truth be told it was her sex appeal – a bright and beautiful young woman, with a fascinating looking book – as much as the literary appeal that first took me. Ah, Mrs Martin, where are you now?
The edition Mrs Martin had.
Well, today, on FB, he was quoted by one of those weirdly intrusive ‘you might like this’ meme-things. I reproduce the quote below, keeping the bit about homosexuality that they omitted:
‘If you want to really hurt you parents, and you don’t have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I’m not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.’
According to online sources this quote comes from Man Without A Country. I must get/read that!
Mention of Caravaggio in a recent post set me to poring over a couple of art books we have on this incredible artist. I recently mentioned in another post having sketched a pencil version of The Conversion of St Paul years ago. But I’d like to try and paint it, as well.
But whilst perusing Gilles Lambert’s Taschen 25th title on Caravaggio just now, it was Saint Matthew and The Angel that really clocked me one upside the head. What an incredible composition! Flat and empty to the point of being almost frieze like. Yet rich with light, shade, colour and volume.
The rendering has the strength of sculpture. And yet is richly vibrantly colourfully alive. Caravaggio’s eye and aesthetic sensibility imbue his art with an intensity that I can only reach for poetically: chestnuts, leather, velvet, red wine, red meat, incense, lace or muslin, the scent of candle wax and smoke.
Incredibly dramatic!
In both St Matt and The Conversion the pictorial space, whilst rendered with surreal photo-realist clarity, remains so shallow as to be effectively flat. I love that! It’s simultaneously modern, and timeless. It lives in the present.
As many have said, including my hero, Picasso, the best art of any era is most potently alive in whatever ‘present’ the viewer sees it. Great art loosens the shackles of short-lived fads, or era-specific parochialism/opacity, and rises above time!
Details of Victorious Cupid, 1602.
Some of Caravaggio’s stuff looks, to my eyes, very blatantly homo-erotic. Check St Paul’s torso in the painter’s two versions of The Conversion. When the subjects are young male nudes of a childlike appearance, that can sit rather awkwardly with current social mores, and indeed laws.
Victorious Cupid is a bit icky, to me. I call it Cupid Scratching His Arse! But it’s still an amazing artwork. And just look at the detail in the lower part of the painting. The musical instruments, armour, and textiles, are like a somber symphony in paint!
Anyway, it’s great to be nourished by fabulous art. I am very grateful for the luxury of being able to indulge in such a hedonistic yet refined pursuit!
When I found these two art works recently, whilst putting yet more stuff into our attic, I brought them down, to have a fresh look at ‘em. And I’m pleased with how they look.
The pencil drawing was my first look at reproducing Dirck van Baburen’s The Procuress. I actually chose to leave the Procuress herself out of the picture, which also changed the overall format of the piece (from off square to a portrait type rectangle). Instead we have just the young dandy and his lute-plucking lady.
A terrific book! And the source of this project.
I found van Baburen’s The Procuress in this rather lovely book. It’s an old’un, but a good’un! My mum had a copy back when’s he did her degree. I think I’ve posted about this book here before? But I’ve not found that post, so can’t link to it yet!
16-18th, April, 2014.
Here they are individually, for a bit of a closer look. The pencil drawing is finished. But the oil stalled before completion. So I need to finish that off.
These two pieces are both for sale, should anyone want either. The pencil drawing for £89, and the oil painting for £239. That’s unframed. I can frame them as well, if required. Or a buyer could do it themselves.
Woman Holding Scales, Vermeer, 1664.
I’m planning to do more in this line, as I enjoy it, and it teaches me a lot. I have a few favourite paintings I’ve long wanted to reproduce, such as Vermeer’s Woman Holding Balance, and Caravaggio’s very theatrical St Paul.
Caravaggio’s dramatic vision of St Paul.Together again. Indoors this time.
The first three pics of my efforts, further up this post, were taken outside in the sunshine. These last were shot indoors. But all the pics in this (and almost all my blog posts) are taken on my iPhone. So, hardly pro/ideal! But hopefully they get the idea across?
I posted about this dude and his passion for Picasso quite a while ago (read that here if interested). And I find myself wanting to post about this pairing again.
Here they are together.
As per my previous post, I have three of the four ‘whoppers’ i Fabre published. And I really want to get hold of any more there might be. I’m aware of just one more, as things stand. Which, alas, seems both rarer, and consequently more expensive.
This is one version of the book I don’t yet have.
I’ve learned, thanks to my search for the cheapest way to buy this book, that it can be bought brand new, for €150! From Poligrafa, the Spanish publishers responsible for all these fabulous books. And in English (or Catalan!), as well as Spanish.
Here’s another.
Second-hand editions of this title are all more expensive. But sadly anything at all, let alone say £20-30 (roughly what I paid for the third volume in this series), is way too expensive for me right now.
I exchanged some emails with a chap called Carlos at Poligrafa today, thereby learning of the newer/cheaper buying option. But thanks to me not speaking Spanish, or quite following all his English, I’m none the wiser as to whether any more posthumous (to i Fabre’s passing, that is) volumes are in the pipeline.
Looking exceedingly cool!Nice wheels, Josep! What a dude.
Today I’m mostly confined to bed. By my own decree. Teresa’s at work. And I am on Easter break. Although it may be a bigger hiatus? That’s partly why I’m in bed!
I woke when Teresa got up, at 5.30am (mad!). But most of the time between about 9am and 3pm I’ve been in a 50/50 mix of resting/dozing, and outright sleeping. Snooker, with Kieran Wilson thrashing Ali Carter, on the Tour Championship, is helping on all fronts with rest and sleep!
An ornery mule, with an artist’s soul.
But around 2pm, after a second long chat with the alphabet soup brigade (the bouillabaisse of acronyms for mental-health organisations), I felt I needed an injection of culture and inspiration. So I hoyked a few art books off the shelves.
Angst meets beauty, in mixed media on canvas.
Having resumed a long derelict interest in making art, I thought I’d also resume the act of feeding on the soul food that art can be. Hence getting these tomes offa the shelves. Turner and The Sea, Guston, and de Kooning. Endless hours of fun and nourishment!
Not so eyebrow, n’est ce pas!?
And to keep my furrowed brows at the correct elevation, something a bit ‘Felix’ lighter!
No-brow? Love the Tintin style cover!
And of course, Viz. Thanks to the Viz Team I nearly died laughing last night.
‘Honest politics and Tory politics are contradictions in terms. Lying is a necessary part of a Tory’s political equipment, for it is essential for him to conceal his political intentions from the people. This is partly the reason for his success in keeping power.’
The founder of the NHS, and a chief builder of the post WW11 Welfare State, Nye Bevan, in 1944.
All these years later, after a period in which over 75% of the time has seen Tories in government (add New Labour’s Tory-Lite era, and it’s been an era of near as dammit total right wing dominance!), his words seem more apt than ever.
I’ve described myself to some folk, over the years, as a misanthrope. I’ve always done so out of a vague notion of what that means. So I decided to look it up today.
I find that the Wikipedia entry on Misanthropy resonates with me in many, albeit not all, particulars.
One typically assumes that most folk would view misanthropy with scorn and disdain, as it’s not an obviously positive or helpful outlook. And that’s the kind of view of the outlook or philosophy portrayed by the Brueghel painting above.
One of the chief areas in which I might not be a misanthrope is in relation to sex; apparently many misanthropes are antinatalist. Well, I can see that humanity is somewhat overstocked, which appears to adversely effecting the planet and everything in it (inc. ironically, humanity itself!).
But like nice wine, sex – whether for reproduction or just plain fun – is one of our few solaces. So I’m all for lots of it, whether it produces offspring or not. Though I feel compelled to confess that the misanthrope in me does wish that there were a lot less humans on the planet.
And now, having read most of the Wikipedia entry on Misanthropy? I actually feel more not less inclined to self identify in that manner.
PS – The inscription at the bottom of Brueghel’s painting reads (acc. to Wikipedia):
Om dat de werelt is soe ongetru, Daer om gha ic in den ru
‘Because the world is perfidious, I am going into mourning’
Brueghel’s painting suggests this makes the misanthrope a fool. He’s having his purse pinched by a figure representing vanity, and is blindly walking into some ‘caltrops’ (little spiky things humans invented, with which to hurt each other, lame horses with, etc. *). Meanwhile a shepherd in the background contrasts with the misanthrope by humbly going about his business.
It’s funny how long some things take to happen. I’ve been listening to Sting sing the line ‘James Brown on the TAMI show’ since my early or mid-teens, and I’ve been seriously into James Brown himself, or more accurately his musical legacy, for three decades or more.
And yet only now have I actually tried to check out exactly what is ‘James Brown on the TAMI show’? And, thanks to YouTube and the interweb, I finally found out.
I’m only in to the second tune at the time of posting this. And whilst I love JB and his Famous Flames, the squealing ‘Beatle-mania’ type audience response is messin’ with my noggin!
A friend on Facebook just shared this. How great are squirrels? Just watch to learn. A fun and uplifting video.
We have squirrels. We also have a walnut tree, actually in a neighbour’s garden. But overhanging ours. When we moved in here, I wondered, for a while, how and why we were continually being carpet-bombed with empty walnut shells.
Reflecting rather poorly on my Sherlockian powers of deduction, it wasn’t until I was literally sat ‘neath the trees at the back end of the garden, that I twigged. I could hear debris falling around me and I could hear an odd ‘scrit-scrit-scrit-scrit’ sound.
I looked up, and cool as a cucumber, there was a rather ballsy (very literally) squirrel, leisurely enjoying chomping away on his walnuts. I don’t know how many squirrels we have living nearby. The most I see is a couple chasing each other.
As this video demonstrates, it can be quite rewarding to pay more attention to these fabulous little furry critters.
