Self Portraits 2June 6th, 2010
Lucien Freud, 1981
Francis Bacon, 1969
David Siqueiros, 1969
George Tooker, 1947
Felix Nussbaum, 1942
Christian Schad, 1927
Curt Querner, 1938
Victor Brauner, 1931
Otto Muller, 1922
Petrov Vodkin, 1918
Categories: art | Tags: art, imagination, madness, painting | No Comments
EnmeshedSeptember 26th, 2009
Dorothea Tanning and Max Ernst
Max Ernst
Dorothea Tanning
‘Art has always been the raft onto which we climb to save our sanity. I don’t see a different purpose for it now.’
Dorothea Tanning
Max Ernst
“My wanderings, my restlessness, my impatience, my doubts, my beliefs, my hallucinations, my rages, my revolts, my refusal to submit to any discipline, even those of my own invention… none of these have succeeded in creating a climate conducive to a calm, serene body of work.”
Max Ernst
Max Ernst
Dorothea Tanning
Max Ernst
Tanning and Ernst
Max Ernst
Dorothea Tanning
Dorothea Tanning
Categories: Pictures, art, general | Tags: desire, love, madness, painting, prints | 1 Comment
The Bloodied ManuscriptAugust 10th, 2009
‘But at my age, a snootful of English Lit. made me savagely demanding in my insistence that the written word exemplify only the highest seriousness and truth, I treated these forlorn offspring of a thousand strangers’ lonely and fragile desire with the magisterial , abstract loathing of an ape plucking vermin from his pelt. I was adamant, cutting, remorseless, insufferable…..I levelled the scorn on that could only be mustered by one who had just finished reading Seven Types of Ambiguity upon these sad outpourings piled high on my desk, all of them so freighted with hope and clubfooted syntax. I was required to write a reasonably full description of each submission, no matter how bad the book. At first it was a lark and I honestly enjoyed the bitchery and vengeance I was able to wreak upon these manuscripts….Oh clever, supercilious young man! How I gloated and chuckled as I eviscerated these helpless, underprivileged, sub-literary lambkins.’
William Styron, Sophie’s Choice
Offering one’s manuscript to peers for review is an act of trust - usually rewarded with helpful feedback and insight. It’s impossible to develop as a writer without these. But submitting your manuscript to agents and publishers is a different process altogether. One wreathed in hopes and fears and a small measure of crazy bravery. One always hopes never to strike a reader like Styron’s young man.
There is no need to draw blood when offering a critique of people’s manuscripts. Head kicking for the hell of it may be ‘a lark’ at the time, but it personalises the whole process and simply works to close off all creative possibilities – for both reviewer and writer. Tears and humiliation calcify into a negative, reactionary fear. And where there is fear there is no risk and thus no art. Quite often all that needs to be said is nothing. No matter what you are thinking. Unless there is implicit trust and respect between you and the reviewer - then it is disrespectful to give anything but honesty.
I found myself mulling over these issues and processes when I attended an art exhibition today. Hopes high and a spring in my step, I walked in, scanned the walls and my shoulders slumped. I shuffled around dutifully looking at everything, trying to be generous but found myself saying to the artist, (in my head, of course) ‘Why did you persist with this slender idea? Why did you put all this work in for something so obviously mediocre?’ Of course the artists would have learned a hell of a lot by finishing and exhibiting. But it wasn’t a student show and I didn’t want to see half cooked artwork.
With my old hat of visual art lecturer jammed back on my head I immediately felt an overwhelming weariness. Giving critical assessment of student work is a very delicate procedure, emotionally draining for both. Invariably you walk in to the student gallery, look around the walls and pick three or four with something interesting happening and the rest, well, you do what your position requires of you. This recognition of the indefinable is done with an eye developed over a period of time - time spent looking and looking and thinking and more looking.
Criticism hurts, let’s be clear about that, and hurts even more if you have over identified with your work. To not take criticism personally is very tough, particularly when you are a young student. But that is part of the purpose of critique sessions – to toughen those tender souls for the real world. The students question your judgement, they bitch and whine, they say what would you know, and it’s just personal taste and your paintings are crap anyway so who are you to speak. I remember being in a straggle of art students in a large gallery viewing the paintings of our senior lecturer. We were as supercilious and dismissive as Styron’s character. All who were there felt justified in ignoring this lecturer’s criticism of our own work now we’d seen his.
This last point is an important one, one that we arrogant and tiresome students misunderstood completely - you don’t have to practice an art form to develop a critical response to it.
Agents and publishers work on the same gut feel, or instinct, born of long experience and wide exposure to manuscripts. They get it wrong sometimes. But within the criteria they have to satisfy they get it right too. With floods of manuscripts pouring in every day it is impossible to read all to the end. So they start with the synopsis, first paragraph, the first page and toss it aside if they can tell it doesn’t have legs. And how can they tell? They can tell because they have developed, through years of experience, an eye for the markers that signify something good, something worth investigating.
It’s not a personal vendetta; it’s not a random short straw procedure. Yes, it is partly subjective; all responses to creative work must be to an extent. The submitting author must accept that and research very carefully the person to whom they are submitting, who they publish or represent and what their interests are. An agent can’t sell something they find clever but dull, and a publisher can’t convince marketing to go with a manuscript they have no belief in.
Hard as they are to fathom sometimes, these agent/publisher responses are not random – they don’t make paper crowns of dead query letters, place the manuscripts on office chairs and dance around playing musical manuscripts, bottles of cognac in hand, laughing uproariously at the aspirations of writers. Or perhaps only occasionally.
As writers, whether we like it or not, or agree or not, most of the time we have to accept the expertise of the commercial publishing world - and keep reminding ourselves of the word ‘commercial’. If this is not the parameter within which we want to work then we must look elsewhere.
The book and publishing industry adapts to meet whatever challenges the contemporary socio-economic climate throws at it, as do all industries. Some survive some don’t. I can’t comment on the publishing industry and be taken seriously, but a very good place to start looking at alternatives, if ‘commercial’ is not the place for you is - http://agnieszkasshoes.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default
Categories: art, on writing | Tags: art, creativity, painting, publishing, writing | 2 Comments
The Exquisite Necessity of The UnknownAugust 1st, 2009
Tantrum, Maureen Chlorine
There is something we all do in order to have functioning relationships with other human beings - unless you are four or under - and that is compromise.
Inability to compromise generally means a lot of time on your own. Too much compromise and you are forever being mistaken for a doormat. Get the balance right and it’s a win/win all round. A relationship with a manuscript or artwork in progress is like any other relationship. You have a period of infatuation, when this creation is going to be the most brilliant, most shimmeringly fabulous fragment of truth and beauty. You imagine the story, the forms, the paint surface, the characters – all so vivid and so pure and so perfect.
And then you start. The rosy veils of illusion fall from your eyes and the difficulties start. You can’t get the shade of paint you want, or the steel you had your heart set on is too expensive or you can’t get the jigummy thing screwed into the doodad thing the way you pictured it. Your hands are not strong enough or the staple gun malfunctions or the colour looks bloody awful in outside light, or you cannot overcome your blind terror of the demon screams emitted by the round saw in the workshop. I’ve imagined that serrated blade wedging in my chest more times than I care to remember.
Or you start to write and you get to ten thousand words and you realise it’s not such a brilliant idea after all. In fact it’s banal and cringe inducing and that character is a utterly repellant. And what’s more, the brilliant title you came up with before you even started is trite and sounds like a Hollywood blockbuster title and it’s all a disaster and who did you think you were kidding because it’s not going to work.
Do you give up? Do you slash the painting, smash the sculpture, delete every word and wipe every aspiration to write or paint from your memory banks?
No. You don’t.
You dry your eyes, blow your nose, get off the floor and tell yourself ‘in the process of ‘becoming’ everything changes.’ Relationships, paintings, books.
If you are a sculptor the very materiality of what you are working with will dictate, to some extent, which way you should go now. You could not have known that the properties inherent in that slab of wood are antagonistic to your concept. You must compromise and follow the wood. You must accept that what is in your head is not what the final piece will be. The final piece is the detritus of a decision making process strewn with compromise. The relationship between you and the created object or text demands it - if you are to go the distance.
When I make an object now – and I had a quilt frenzy a couple of years ago - I could not raise a jot of interest if I knew what the end result would be. If I had the colour and pattern organised first then making the quilt would be a boring formal exercise in sewing rather than an organic exploration of colour with unexpected results. My favourite artist Anselm Keifer says he needs to be shocked when he goes into his studio to work. I understand what he is saying. Colour is a little less shocking than Keifer’s huge melancholy artworks, but a hundred shades of green can still deliver breathtaking surprises when mixed with seventy one shades of purple.
I can’t know what the finished quilt will look like. I can’t know the ending when I start a book – or I lose interest in writing it. I’ve been told to construct a plot map before starting – one where every chapter and scene is jotted down and written up later. That’s not for me. I know about two scenes ahead what is happening and have a hazy idea of the rest. I have to work that way or I lose all motivation.
I also work that way because I know, sure as the phone will ring when I’m in the shower, that I will have to compromise somewhere along the way. Not because I haven’t thought it through, but because as the characters develop they reveal themselves and I suddenly realise there is no way they would shoot that policeman, or cheat on their husband. Have to go back and change that. Didn’t want to. Wanted the policeman to die – but I have to compromise for the sake of the whole story.
So you build your relationship with your creation, seeking greater depth, and developing a greater commitment to seeing it through. Compromise does not mean the end of perfectionism. It means you are flexible and bend with the process and stand back regularly and cultivate a detached critical response (commonly known as a spell in the bottom drawer) and you learn, through experience, when it is best to let go or if compromise can take it in another more exciting direction. If there is no compromise there is no unknown and without the unknown - to me - there is no point.
Anselm Keifer
Categories: on writing | Tags: art, creativity, painting, writing | 5 Comments
Reading the paintingsApril 8th, 2009
John William Waterhouse
“Slowly, she began to engage with the pictures, recognizing the imagery from Classical myths, and the paintings of English painter, John William Waterhouse. In lavish, decorative drapery, his figures portrayed the stories of Orpheus, Circe and Ulysses. And there was poor old Ophelia, holding a dressful of flowers, her eyes pink from crying, ready to hurl herself into the stream, to get away from all the awful men in her life.
She didn’t hear William come back from the bedroom, and had no idea how long he had stood at the doorway watching her, as she sang to herself, while turning pages.”
Circe, John William Waterhouse
“Startled, she rolled over and sat up, then slumped back down as she noted his unsmiling face. She returned to the book, examining a picture of Circe in her red dress. The drapery and jeweled belt fascinated her, if only one could dress like that these days.
‘Good sleep?’ she asked, without looking at him, but she could feel him looking at her.
‘Can I join you?’
She turned her head and looked in astonishment, and he smiled at her. His shirt was rumpled and his hair all messy. She swallowed as she took in his deliciously sleepy appearance. Of course he could join her on the floor, any time he cared to. But she resisted making a quip about them and floors
‘I like looking at pictures.’
She gestured with her arm, ‘My floor is your floor.’
Their shoulders touched as she turned the page.
‘I love this one,’ she said. ‘I used to have a poster of it in my bedroom as a teenager. Hylas and the nymphs.’
‘Why did you like it?’
‘Is that a trick question from an ex academic? Because I can only give you my untrained, tainted by culture, immediate response.’
She stared at him warily. His face was so close, she could see the pores in his skin, smell his sleepy scent. Too close, making her uneasy, he’d push her away in a minute.
‘I don’t mind, I’m not an academic any more. I don’t care whether it’s correct to like, or dislike, something.’
‘I like it because it’s pretty.’ She gasped in mock horror and clamped her hand over her mouth. ‘Don’t tell anyone I said that.’
‘I’ll keep it a secret until I die.’
‘Look at their sweet faces,’ she said, ‘And their pale skin. They had nothing better to do than place flowers in their hair and swim among the water lilies. What a life.’
‘And that appeals to you?’
‘As a teenager, I suppose anything that reeks of indolence is appealing. But no, it was the aesthetic, all these Edwardian paintings attracted me; I used to trail around antique markets with my girlfriends on a Saturday, buying old dresses and bags. We’d read poetry in the afternoon and imagine our lives to be infinitely tragic. I had nothing more tragic in those days than Sports Day, or having to walk home from my friend’s house, instead of getting a lift.’
William rolled onto his side, hand propping up his head, watching her as she turned the pages.
‘Now I feel like her, the Lady of Shallot,’ she said, pointing at the woman about to hurl herself to her death. ‘Now I understand.’
‘She killed herself for unrequited love.’
‘Yes, for the knight, Lancelot.’
‘You’re a Romantic, Lily.’
‘And you William? Who are you?’”
John William Waterhouse
“He flicked through the pages, stopped briefly at Ulysses, struggling with the siren song, but went back to Hylas and his innocent nymphs.
‘They pulled him in, you know. The nymphs pulled him in and he drowned. That picture represents male fear.’
‘Let’s not go there,‘ she smiled. ‘I don’t want you to be horrible to me again.’
‘He drowned in a sensual world of big eyes and white skin.’
‘But he wants to do it, you can tell,’ she murmured, glancing at him and looking back at the picture. ‘He wants to hurl himself in and get amongst all that girl flesh.’
William stood up. ‘It’s a big seller that poster, all of his paintings are,’ he said, ‘They make it all seem so simple.’
‘Myths are, aren’t they?’
‘What?’
‘Simple.’
‘I don’t think so. Anyway, enough of this.’”
Extract from The Book of Love by Phillipa Fioretti, to be published by Hachette Australia in April 2010
John William Waterhouse
Categories: Pictures, The Book of Love, art, culture | Tags: books, Lily, myths, painting, reading, vintage clothes, William | No Comments
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