Mystical Contrasts

A couple of weeks ago I heard Hildagard Von Bingen's haunting 11th century chants performed alongside music by the 20th century Russian composer Galina Ustvolskaya. The contrasts in texture and tone between the human voice and the various solo instruments, which included a piano, tuba, cello, clarinet, flute and violin couldn't have been greater and yet Het Collectief and the singers of Psallentes wove a seamless fabric of sound that was riveting from beginning to end with an electrifying inner intensity made even greater by the intimate nature of the performance with the audience seated in unnumbered seats around the stage in front of the musicians.

Have been reading the revelations of another medieval mystic, Julian of Norwich, whose 'showings' with their vivid visualizations of the suffering Christ and simple, powerful images of the loving and forgiving Divine Motherhood of God remind us that the medieval world and mind was intensely tactile and visual, suffused with allegorical interpretations of ordinary things which could ( and can?) unlock deep and startling insights into the extraordinary.

  "Our Savior is our true Mother in whom we are endlessly born and out of whom we shall never come.” 

“And in this he showed me a little thing, the quantity of a hazel nut, lying in the palm of my hand, as it seemed. And it was as round as any ball. I looked upon it with the eye of my understanding, and thought, ‘What may this be?’ And it was answered generally thus, ‘It is all that is made.’ I marveled how it might last, for I thought it might suddenly have fallen to nothing for littleness. And I was answered in my understanding: It lasts and ever shall, for God loves it. And so have all things their beginning by the love of God."

In the house the ground floor is gradually coming to completion with the tiles which I made in Malta over 20 years ago  finally set in place in the fireplace and the contrast between various sorts of ever changing natural and artificial light, as the spring comes and the days lengthen, beginning to define the evolving nooks and crannies.  In the house during the 'crocus vacanzie' I modeled a lime plaster niche in the hall which creates an opportunity for traditional candle light and atmospheric shadows in this small dark corner and  elsewhere in the hall P. had the bright idea of inserting a thin strip of led light into the thickness of the plate and plasterboard ceiling in the hall skylight.  The first layer of lime paint in a neutral natural colour is being applied and this also helps to absorb and diffuse light in a different way.

  

 I also managed to find some brass handles and key holes for the doors at the Place Jeu du Balle market in Brussels.

The Art of Simplicity

My aim is to take familiar things and make

Poetry of them, and do it in such a way

That it looks as if it was easy as could be 

For anybody to do it (although he'd sweat 

And strain and work his head off, all in vain)

Such is the power of judgement, of knowing what

It means to put the elements together

In just the right way; such is the power of making 

A perfectly wonderful thing out of nothing much.

Horace. Epistle to Pisos ( The Art of Poetry) 

Translated by David Ferry

Janus

before

after

It is appropriate in the month of January to talk about doors. The name January is derived from Janus, the Roman god of beginnings, gates, transitions, time, doorways, passages, and endings. The transition from 2016 to 2017 has seen a number of doors, (and walls and floors) finally settled into place in the house. Apart from new doors I have managed to reuse some old solid oak paneled doors with nicely doweled mortise and tenon joints found in a local salvage yard. We have still to place the oak moldings on the wall around the frames now that the lime plaster is leveled and dry.

Apart from doors P brought an old fruit-wood drum table with turned legs on castors to see if it could be used rather than thrown away. I started yesterday to sand and clean the painted top and fill the worm holes with wax filler. When all four legs are screwed on and it is fully cleaned, filled and polished it will be a useful small table in the living room. For me the damage of the worm holes are signs of age and survival and they add to its beauty and meaning. Eventually I will place a cherry wood burr bowl and on it with some fresh fruit or a simple vase of flowers.

Before the Christmas break I heard Vox Luminis at the Brugge concertgebouw in a performance of Schütz' Weihnachtshistorie from 1664. Next Saturday 21st will see me there again for Vox Luminis & Masques, Bach’s family tree.

Thomas Tallis Window, Church of St Alfege,  Greenwich. 

I have been reading the late Anne Cuneo's book 'Tregian's Ground. The Life and Sometime Secret Adventures of Francis Tregian, Gentleman and Musician'.  Set in the 16th and 17th Century during a period of religious and political turmoil and often violent conflict,  it reconstructs in an imaginative novel the real life of the Elizabethan Cornish Catholic 'recusant' and talented musician Thomas Tregian, and his travels and exile across Renaissance Europe. Learning the language in France, Italy and Holland, he forges both his identity and a philosophy of tolerance based around his experience of music and love, friendships and loyalties that reach across national and religious divides, encountering like minds in great men of the age from Thomas Tallis, William Byrd and Thomas Morley to Shakespeare and Montiverdi and the essays of Michel de Montagne. During Christmas break, whilst staying with my cousin in London I visited St. Alfege's church in Greenwich, where Tallis once worked and is buried. The specifics of time and place make the still tangible vibrations of this polyphonic choral music in the breath of contemporary performers across time all the more extraordinary. 

The love of 'old music' and 'old wood' began when I was eleven years old singing polyphonic latin motets first as an alto then as a tenor in the Schola Cantorum perched in these now abandoned and decaying stalls. 

 

''I count religion but childish toy 

and hold there is no sin but ignorance"

Spoken by 'Machevill' in the prologue to 'The Jew of Malta' by Christopher Marlowe.

In the 16th and 17th centuries, the ability to walk a tightrope, balancing loyalties between church and state, in a world of spies, propaganda and counter propaganda, where you could be put to death for treason or heresy by religious of political extremists on both sides of the coin made the practice of 'duplicity' or being 'Janus faced' a survival tactic. How much has really changed ? 

1480 and 1984

Saw the Bruges triptich of 'The Last Judgement' today, one of two versions attributed to Hieronymous Bosch (the other is in Vienna). The newly restored painting in oil on oak panels is currently on display at Arentshuis Museum. The transition from heaven to hell via the middle panel over which Christ sits in judgement flanked by trumpeting angels seems to be as much about a change in weather and atmosphere as a judgment between good and evil.  From left to right there is a transition from pale blue sky through grey clouds to a darker and more noxious red and black smoke filled hell of cities burning on the horizon. In the middle and foreground is a watery grey and brown terrain in which half human/half animal creatures cavort and play or submit to extraordinarily ingenious tortures. Both the anonymous naked and the more identifiable clothed people, including bishops, friars and nuns, inhabit a sinful world in which the ordinary paraphernalia of everyday life like a knife, a funnel, a slipper, etc., are transformed into a rooftop, a sailing ship and other whimsical contraptions. 

Hieronymous Bosch, Last Judgement, 1480 or later, oil on panel, Groeninge Museum, Bruges. 

If Bosch's atmospheric sky is an expression of the opposition between good and evil and heaven and hell then it might fit the thesis of Alexandra Harris' book 'Weatherland' which charts our inner and outer physical and emotional weather through art and literature under 'English' skies. Reading it I couldn't help thinking that the weather, rather like the art and literature, has a tendency to cross national borders, a fact born out by the influence of Claude on Turner or Dutch landscape artists like Van Ruisdael on Constable.  Perhaps English skies are in fact more European than some would care to admit and the weather a more connected global phenomenon that we sometimes make it in our local and perhaps parochial way. 

The politics of the 15th and 16th century Netherlands were certainly as confusing and conflicted as our present day media driven 'post truth' politics and the world as uncertain, unstable, disillusioning and apocalyptic as Bosch's ordered vision of disorder suggests. Its hard not to be cynical about the motives behind the lust for power, material gain and pleasure when they are pursued by pious hypocrites but then who is not deluded by the same kind of folly in one form or another?  In 'Figures of Speech. Picturing Proverbs in Renaissance Netherlands' Walter S Gibson analyses the meaning of another painting by Bosch, his 'Haywain'. 

'Bosch thus employed hay as the most fitting symbol of the intrinsic worthlessness of all temporal possessions, honors, and pleasures, especially when measured against the spiritual "goods" that the blessed souls will enjoy after death.'

Hieronymous Bosch, Haywain, oil on panel, Madrid, Museo del Prado.

 '... The haywain shows how the transitory goods and honors of this world are greedily sought after by rich and poor alike, and not only laypeople but those in religious orders as well...... In the immediate foreground of the haywain Bosch.. shows us  various species of avarice. This the man wearing a tall hat and accompanied by a child at the lower left may well be a false beggar, one who does not need to beg. Nearby another man has set up a table with jars, charts,and other paraphernalia of the itinerant quack, his hay stuffed purse testifying all too clearly his success with the gullible.'

 George Orwell's book '1984' and the current adaptation for the stage which we saw at the London Playhouse Theatre last month presents a vision of a particularly modern kind of totalitarian hell, one in which Newspeak has corrupted and devalued language, 'Big Brother' is always watching you and 'thought police' are everywhere, especially through the 'telescreen' and anyone guilty of thought crime ends up being tortured in room 101 and all trace of them eliminated by The Ministry of 'Truth'. 

Coming out of the Playhouse Theatre with the art trip students a few weeks ago the play seemed as relevant to the present times as the book was when it was when it was first published in 1949.  We might say the same about Bosch.

Interiorities

Laying a floor is a bit like making a Victoria sponge - you need to mix a lot of ingredients first, place them them down in layers and wait for them to set before you can put the icing on top. Finally last weekend the blue stone tiles were laid into place and all I need to do now is fix the stone skirting tiles and do a beeswax polish to bring out the colour -but that can wait for the moment when all the windows are sanded and painted. The pictures below show both before and after with summer excavations and the autumn capping of the finished work.

The cold November nights are dark early and at the weekend with a fire in the wood stove and candles lit inside and out the gathering darkness and enfolding silence is an almost dramatic event. 

This sense of interiority that comes from being present inside a small room illuminated by natural light and in this case inner visionary light is certainly implicit in Robert Campin's small painting of the Annunciation.  Everything in the room is ordinary, quotidian, the tiled floor, the door to another room or hallway, the wooden beamed ceiling, the stone fireplace, the plain lime plastered walls, and the shuttered windows. There is calm, seclusion and receptivity in the relaxed and reading Virgin whose hand gestures inward to her heart and who modestly looks down as the angel, the only obviously supernatural presence, greets her. Here all the simple objects that furnish a room are loaded with significance if we know how to read them and like clues in a mystery point to a birth and a death in the past, present and future, both inside and outside of time. 

'To see the world in a grain of sand 

And heaven in a wild flower 

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand 

And eternity in an hour..'

'Auguries of Innocence' by William Blake

The Annunciation (Brussel version), by Robert Campin 1420–1440. Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium.
 

At Tate Modern Bhurpen Khakar's 'Yayati' offers another (deliberately and confusingly erotically ambiguous?) angelic visitation - this time one in which Puri, one of Yayati's sons, offers his youth in exchange for his father's old age. A sacred and profane image from the Mahabharata as lurid as the drunkeness of Noah in the Old Testament.

At times the paintings in the exhibition 'You Can't Please All'  remind one of David Hockney's early faux naif pop art paintings, R. B Kitaj's collage like paintings of literary and historical figures grafted on to distorted landscapes or the poems of C. P. Cavafy with their evocation of desire and memory and almost painful honesty about human encounters. These hybrid paintings fuse India in their colour and evocation of traditional and popular paintings and European religious art of early Italian Renaissance. 

Yayati returns the youth he has taken from his son Puri and returns to old age having come to a realization after years of indulgence in sense pleasures that....

....not all the food, wealth and women of the world can appease the lust of a single man of uncontrolled senses. Craving for sense-pleasures is not removed but aggravated by indulgence even as ghee poured into fire increases it....One who aspires to peace and happiness should instantly renounce craving and seek instead that which neither grows old, nor ceases - no matter how old the body may become." 

http://www.mahabharataonline.com/stories/mahabharata_story.php?id=13 

  

Three Poems by Shih-Shu

Study the way and never grow old
Distrust emotions; truth will emerge
Sweep away your worries
Set even your body aside 

Autumn drives off the yellow leaves
Yet spring renews every green bud
Quietly contemplate the pattern of things
Nothing here to make us sad


emptiness is a long story
that swallows up heaven and earth
a splash of ink turns into two dragons
stray clouds become an azure dog

lurking in my bowl: mountains,
wheeling through my breast: a sun, a moon
a fierce wind shreds the ancient mists
grasses and trees bow before its snap and snarl


The human body is a little universe
Its chill tears, so much wind-blown sleet
Beneath our skins, mountains bulge, brooks flow
Within our chests lurk lost cities, hidden tribes

wisdom quarters itself in our tiny hearts
Liver and gall peer out, scrutinize a thousand miles
Follow the path back to its source, else be
A house vacant save for swallows in the eaves

                                                                                                          
Shih-Shu – late 17th- early 18th cen.
Translated  by James H. Sandford

Taken from 'The Clouds Should Know me By Now, Buddhist Poet Monks of China.
 Edited by Red Pine and Mike O' Connor  

Floors, photos, realism and Fred Bell.

These last few weeks have seen the large doors placed and the clay balls, breathable membrane and lime-slab laid in the living room ready to set the blue stone tiles into sand and lime. Slowly surfaces that were stripped, cleaned and patched and consolidated are getting their final layer of plaster or tiles before being painted or polished. Speed is not the thing here but falling in with the optimal natural pace and condition for each job and responding to the opportunities that arise at each moment in the course of planning the evolution of the phases of completion - the journey is after all the destination in this renovation.

Learning Dutch is the same. Six hours a week of formal evening classes and lots of informal practice and  'de woorden beginnen samen te hangen als losse kralen aan een draad'  This website below 'Dutch word of the day' gives some context behind words.

http://www.dwotd.nl/ 

The sound of horse chestnuts hitting the kitchen roof and bouncing into the courtyard startles me into awareness of the present moment with regularity. One imagines the tree has a sense of humour and is both intelligent and watchful. The house and its contents are animate in every sense and one becomes alert to various states of mind, visual and material qualities of things in moments of solitude with a kind of heightened alertness.

The visit to  Musee d’ Ixelles for PHOTO-REALISM. 50 Years of Hyper-realistic Painting with students started me thinking just what the differences are between past and present exerience and understanding of this term.  The students spent the morning looking at the mostly American oil paintings in relation to 6 examples they were given of ‘realist’ oil painting from the last 600 years from Jan van Eyck to Michael Borremans with the aim of exploring to what extent the term ‘realist’ could be applied to the works in the exhibition compared to these other works from different social, historical and cultural contexts.

      The 60s 70s, when the earliest photo-realist painting were made, is the period of post-war popular consumer-culture and the counter cultural movements that questioned the ‘American Dream’. Were these paintings celebrations of iconic Americana like the diner, art deco architecture, classic bikes and cars with their fetishistic shiny reflective surfaces or was there a deeper and more ironic social critique at work in the obsessive and meticulous attention to detail in the bland and the banal surface reality of everyday life in a materialist world, without any spiritual dimension?  Were these painting in essence full with a kind of emptiness ?

The oil painting technique might be the same in Giovanni Battista Moroni's 'Portrait of a twenty nine year old man' from 1567 and Micheal Borromans 'Lakei' from 2010 but the sensibility of the painter towards the subject, the sharp psychological insight and the almost seductive confrontation of eye contact between the viewer and the viewed, the ability coordinate hand and eye to draw and paint in natural light from direct observation and the sharp quality of line are quite different in the Moroni to the fluid photographic surface and surreal subversion of the subject's averted gaze in the Borromans.

The photography of Horst Einfinger in the exhibition ' A Matter or Light' at the Galerie Pinsart in the  Genthof which I saw on autolose Zondag a few weeks ago revealed that the dialogue between photography and painting flows both ways. Horst's minimalist abstractions of architectural space create a kind of poetry of light and shadows that was also a homage to painters like Rothko. 

Illumination.  Horst Einfinger (Exit Magazine) 

www.pinsart.be

'Things my mum and Morandi left behind'  Frederick Bell, 'Recollection' 2014 Ruimte Morguen, Antwerp

                                                   

Frederick Bell

Looking at Looking

(An exhibition sequel to, ‘Some Corner of a Foreign Field….’ ) 

The Greene Gallery, St John’s International School, Waterloo.

Opening/Vernissage 18hr-20hr October 7^th 2016

Exhibition closes 26^th October

 

        This exhibition revisits an earlier one that Frederick Bell made specifically for the gallery at St. John's in 1995 entitled  'Some Corner of Foreign Field', a fragment quoted from Rupert Brooke's famous poem, 'The Soldier' which in 1914, during the First World War, evoked a patriotic sense of English identity.

St. John's and its gallery with it proximity to the earlier Battle of Waterloo fought in 1815 formed a significant site-specific context for Fred's exhibition which explored the way tourists to what is otherwise an unremarkable field in Belgium today were (as they indeed still are) conditioned by, carried with them and projected onto this place, consciously or unconsciously, significant images of the conflict and icons of national identity, culled from romantic or heroic paintings of the Battle featuring Napoleon and Wellington seen in historical collections like The Louvre.

The central concern of Fred's work, then and now, has been, as the title of this current exhibition suggests, to explore the nature of looking itself and to understand how personal, social, historical and cultural contexts both condition and 'frame' the way we choose, consciously or otherwise, to see the world and construct meanings around it and to examine and question these conventional and conditional realities by engaging the viewer in a visual dialogue with the work, its creative processes and the nature of perception itself.

Steve Scott, a PHD student at the Royal College of Art once asked Fred, "would you consider that any of the pieces of work you have done are ever finished" In discussions with Fred about his art it is clear that he sees his work as engaging both himself as the artist and the viewer in an ongoing process of making and remaking and of looking and introspection in which the individual pieces of work and the whole exhibition and its context are balanced and share equal value and importance for finding and connecting meanings.  Fred has said, " everything I do includes the history of itself and myself". This remake or sequel to the first exhibition can be better understood by considering that in the intervening years Fred's work has, in his own words, 'changed, becoming more open and flexible'.

Oscar Wilde once famously said in the context of his book ' A Picture of Dorian Grey,

'It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors"

It is a great pleasure and privilege to be able to invite Fred, who as been a personal friend for as many years, to make this exhibition and to collaborate with him and our current students once again in the context of the school, this gallery and our visiting artists programme and to invite our International, Belgian and local community to engage with us in exploring the nature of looking itself through the unique and special opportunity this exhibition offers us like a mirror in which to explore our own reflected minds in the inner and outer contexts that condition the perceptual realities we construct.