Dwellings. Wood and Stone, Mountain and Tree.....

The triangular 'roof' of the mountain, the apex of which seems to be the focus of its 'breathing',  like the point of the nose in Anapanasati meditation. The circulation of air and water condenses and evaporates in clouds, freezes in snow and ice and then melts into streams and waterfalls flowing into rivers that empty into the lakes..........

Walking in the Italian Alps and the English Lakes over the summer we naturally encountered many mountains and trees as well as islands and lakes whose triangular and circular geometry seemed to  align with the 'squared circle' or fourfold cycle of the seasons and the endless motion of elements, earth, air, wind, and fire constantly changing everything in time and space.

                  

                         The little world of the Isola di San Giulio whose single road silently encircles its monastery 

                              like a small world or cosmos isolated and framed by the surrounding water of the lake.

                                       

                                                 Rings of smooth polished coloured pebbles created on the beach
                                       in Evia in Greece a few years ago 

New tree emerging from the dead ring of an old stump along the River Kent at Levens 

In addition to Gaston Bachelard's 'Poetics of Space' I have been reading Francis Pryor's book 'Seahenge' with its fascinating descriptions of his career in archeology and his insights into the civilisation of Neolithic Britain prior to the Roman conquest. 

I am struck by his connection between the shape of the round house with its circle of post holes to support the roof structure, the passage entrance, the door lintels and central square hearth and the shape of the stone circles or henges which are found throughout Britain and Europe. 

He has suggested that the shape of the stone circles is derived from the form of abandoned roundhouses whose remaining structures in decay became monumentalised in stone in part as an act of reverence to the ancestors who formally dwelled there. The houses of the dead therefore resembled the form of the houses of the living and the shape of the cosmos that could be observed all around them. There is a significant resemblance between for instance the Neolithic houses of Skara Brae and Maeshowe chambered cairn or tomb

Neolithic round house post holes plan and reconstruction 

Swinside Stone Circle,  Lake District. 

He says this,

'A circle is a simple, satisfying, all-encompassing shape that is straightforward to lay out on the ground'. 

He goes on to quote Professor Richard Bradley who says in his book 'The significance of Monuments: On shaping of Human Experience in Neolithic and Bronze Age Europe' 

'The idea of a circular or spherical cosmos....can carry an enormous weight of symbolism, it may originate in the experience of an individual inhabiting an increasingly open landscape. He or she is at the centre of the world which recedes towards the horizon, where the land meets the sky ... whatever their ultimate meaning, circular constructions reflect perception of space that extends outwards from the individual and upwards to the sky. The main fixed points on the land may be natural features like hills, while those in the sky are the sun and the moon, whose positions can be seen to change in relation to such landmarks. This may be why circular constructions are often subdivided according to the cardinal points of the compass, or why they often stand for a cycle in the human or natural worlds.'

Houses can clearly stand in symbolic relation to the cosmos as Paul Oliver suggests in his book 'Dwellings' citing examples like the Mongolian Yurt, The Navajo Hogan and the Tukanoan 'malocca' or community houses, saying,

'Through the myths and legends, ritual lore, epic songs and religious customs of a society, its values may be transmitted, communicated, repeated and learned. As the roof under which so much of this is acted and re-enacted in the daily, yearly and life cycles, the dwelling readily becomes the symbolic model of the greater universe of time and space in which they seem to exist'

The house in addition to representing the cosmos might also represent the body. 

In his book 'English Houses 1300-1800 Vernacular Architecture, Social Life', Matthew Johnson adapts an illustration from Robert Blair St. George's book, 'Conversing by Signs: Poetics of Implication in Colonial New England Culture', which represents the house as a structure whose 'anatomy' corresponds to that of the human body, the rafters and beams corresponding to the bones, the heart to the hearth, the eyes to the windows, the chimney to the breast and so on........

From a Buddhist point of view, like the residents of a house, 'we' only temporarily occupy the ever changing aggregates we cling to as a permanent 'self ' (form, feelings, perceptions, mental formations and consciousness) 

As I begin the process of restoring an old house that was here long before I came along and will remain long after I am gone, it seems that the work of stripping back, repairing, salvaging and recycling the solid fabric of the building is really ultimately about framing the inner and outer worlds which are experienced through the body/mind and senses - light, colour, time and space - all the intangibles.......

The path to dwelling in well being here and now may be eight-fold and the ultimate refuge threefold.

13th century Kadampa Stupa 

Brush and Ink on paper 

Fruit and Flesh

In Milan over the summer I was able to visit the Pinacoteca di Brera and the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana. Two paintings, one in each gallery, held my attention long enough for some thoughtful contemplation. 

Caravaggio's 'Canestra di Frutta' of 1599 and Giovanni Bellini's 'Pieta' of 1460 are both paintings that seem to be negotiating the boundaries between, desire and loss, growth and decay, the living and dead, and the relationship between 'animate' and 'inanimate forms'. 

The mutability of 'flesh' suggested by the worm holes in the apple in one painting and the wounds on the body in the other point to the inevitability of death tempered by the possibility of renewal, rebirth or resurrection in either organic or theological terms, depending on your point of view or beliefs. 

The tenderness and emotion of the faces and hands in Bellini's painting draws the viewer psychologically into the human drama unfolding before them just as the trompe l' oeil ledge in the foreground that support the hand of the dead Christ draws the viewer visually into the illusion of space opening inside the window of the picture frame and to the solid forms of the figures defined by the chiaroscuro modelling of light and shadow and to the landscape receding into the distance 

 Caravaggio's  view of the basket of fruit, painted with such a precise and apparently objective realism in all its carefully modelled solidity is starkly contrasted with the uncompromising flat background and  total lack of foreshortening in the ledge, which is positioned at exactly eye level, unlike the same illusionistic device in Bellini's Pieta which even has a shadow from the hand receding across its surface.

Just as the fruit appears to have been captured at the moment when ripeness turns to decay, thus emphasising time and transience even while appearing to arrest it, the painting itself seems to have defied change and is as fresh and powerfully effective an image as when it was painted over 400 years ago - although this illusion is itself subject to decay. 

Art and Migration at the Egmont Palace

Thinking about swallows in my previous post I was intrigued to see a small but powerful exhibition in the perhaps ironically or incongruously elegant and sumptuous grand staircase of Egmont Palace today on my way back from a shopping trip. Exploring the themes of Art and Migration it was called 'Textile-Ile' and was based around four 17th century Brussels tapestries which hang in this space and which represent the four continents, Africa, Asia, Europe and America

The contemporary work included three sculptures; Belgian artist Belinde De Bruychere, whose 'Spreken' 1999 was made with wax and fabrics, Pascael Marthine Tayo's- 'Colonial Erection' in the courtyard and Ghanayan artist El Anatsu's 'Hesitant Rivers', an exquisite woven 'fabric' made from discarded materials.  

There were two video installations: Jean Factory by Turkish artists Ali Kazma which its syncopated  rhythmic movements of interaction between humans and machines on a production line recalled for me the dehumanising conveyer belt sequence in Charlie Chaplin's 'Modern Times' from 1936  but with non of the humour and slap stick - just a lyrical stark realism.

Hans Op De Beeck's 'Dance' was a powerful and moving choreography featuring a large group of people acting out a series of dance like ordinary and archetypal gestures that evoked the patterns on textiles and the movement of crowds through airport migration controls but also suggested darker and more disturbing memories of possible death camps reminiscent of Christian Boltanski's photography and installation. Beautifully filmed and choreographed, almost like an Anne Theresa de Keersmaeker, with an equally haunting sound track, this video was the emotionally charged highlight for me of an unexpected encounter during a routine shopping trip to Brussels. 

Genius Loci and the roundness of things.....

A and I are just back from Italy and exploring around Lago Maggiore. Where we stayed in Mergozzo next to the Lake, there is an ancient Elm tree that has occupied a central location in the village square and at the heart of the community for over five hundred years. 

In Macugnana, just below the Monte Rosa Massif, we discovered an old lime tree that was already a hundred years old when the 13th century church, with a grave yard filled with the much more recently interred, was built next to it. Both trees seemed to represent for the human communities that have grown up around them, like children around a benign grandparent,  a sense of place, of being rooted between sky and earth in time and space across the cycles of seasonal growth and decay, birth and death.    

For My 50th birthday I received from my brother 'The New Sylva. A discourse of Forest and Orchard Trees for the Twenty-First Century' by Gabriel Hemery and illustrated with Sarah Simblet's wonderfully expressive and precise pen and ink line drawings, some of which we saw last August, in the art and anatomy workshop at the Ruskin. 

View of an oak tree from the terrace of the Inn at Whitewell, Lancashire.

Have been re-reading 'The Poetics of Space' by Gaston Bachelard (Beacon Press 1994) and was struck by the following on page 239 in the final chapter, 'the phenomenology of roundness, were he quotes Rilke. 

    In Rilke's poemes francais, this is how the walnut tree lives and commands attention. Here, again around the lone tree, which is the centre of the world, the dome of the sky becomes round, in accordance with the rule of cosmic poetry. On p. 169 of this collection we read: 

Abre toujours au milieu

De tout ce qui  L'entoure

Abre qui savoure

La voute des cieux

( Tree always in the centre

Of all that surrounds it

Tree feasting upon 

Heaven's  great dome) 

Needless to say, all the poet sees is a tree in a meadow; he is not thinking of a legendary Yggdrasill that would command the entire cosmos, uniting heaven and earth, within itself. But the imagination of round being follows its own law: since as the poet says, the walnut tree is "proudly rounded", it can feast upon " heaven's great dome." The world is round around the round being. 

The swallows or hirondelles, who return each year to their nests in Mergozzo, gave wonderful daily performances of syncopated rhythmic diving and swooping over the lake. 

City, Body and Cosmos.

Visited Bruges today with the bicycle - the best way to get around - to look at various properties and explore the quieter corners of this city whose organic circularity and winding streets and canals resemble a veined cell or leaf structure and recall for me the concentric circles and squares of a Tibetan mandala or the rings of a tree. Time and space kaleidoscope self consciously in layers of superimposed histories packaged for present day consumption but despite this it is still possible to trace meaningful patterns in the city's form. 

In his book 'City and Cosmos' The Medieval World in Urban Form, Keith D Lilly argues that the city's geometry embodied a cosmological significance. 

'The cosmological symbolism of the compass was thus widely understood in the Latin West in the Middle Ages and surely gave earthly users a sense of its symbolic significance and meaning to their own design work.  Like the measurer's tools - the quadrant and astrolabe- the geometer's compass imitated a macrocosmic geometry, reproducing on earth what is in heaven.'

"Brugae Flandrorum Urbs" Marcus Gerards. 1562.

He unfolds various layers of meaning in the Procession of the Holy Blood, which has taken place annually in Bruges since the middle ages, explaining how both the urban and social structure of the city, the earthly city mirroring and heavenly city, are united into a single body by the blood of Christ as it flows between key points through the streets symbolically in procession. 

'There is therefore a social and spatial parallelism in the ordering of city and cosmos as traced out by the geography of the Bruges procession. The procession began at the city's spiritual and symbolic centre, its 'axis mundi', the place the city's ruling 'head' resided. Then with its movement from centre to edge, from inside to outside the city and in encompassing its perimeter, the procession traced out the moral topography of the cosmic body, with its purer inner core contrasting with its outer margins, the place of the lower orders. hence through its shared forms and hierarchical ordering, unifying the city's body yet reinforcing its divine order in the social hierarchy, the procession of the Holy Blood drew onto the city a 'map' of the cosmos.'  

Within the maze or labyrinth of the city's streets there are still many odd corners of distilled silence and enclosed space whose interiority contrasts with the outward display and pageant of the more public and crowded places. The chapel of the English Convent in Carmelietenstraat has an arched apsidal structure below its unique dome, that encloses a smaller domed marble altar which has itself an arched niche, which encloses a statue of the virgin (the vessel which encloses, frames and reveals Christ ?) echoing the larger dome and niche that frames it, like a series of ever diminishing Russian dolls each one enclosed inside another.  

I was lucky enough to have Sr. Frances as a guide. 

Reflecting Space: Mathieu Weemael's contemplative paintings and pastels

Visited Mathieu Weemaels today to plan the visiting artist's show for next October in The Greene Gallery at St John's.   

http://www.mathieuweemaels.be/

We had an interesting discussion exploring themes whilst selecting works for the show.

  

The recurring mirror motif provides the illusion of an extension of space forwards into the depth of the painting while simultaneously seeming to reflect back into the apparent space of the viewer. At the same time the rectangular frame of the mirror and its flat surface is a metaphor for painting itself as an illusion of reality. In these reflections on interior and exterior space the artist and the viewer negotiate  open and closed forms. The rounded tea bowls, bottles, jars and strewn flowers on tables or chairs and the light from an open window or door, all suggest or imply the human presence.  The balance of complementary colours and carefully calibrated muted chromatic greys and browns frame the occasional sparks of intense colour which focus the eye in the dream like soft contemplative silence of the abstracted geometry of these related forms in space.  Single tea bowls, suggesting the intimacy of cupped hands, progress to more complex compositions in which the relationship between various elements and motifs, suggesting a metaphysics of time and space, are explored in series. In the larger paintings the great dome of the infinite blue sky seen through the branches of the tree canopy seems to be the very antithesis of the small white bowls whose finite form is defined by the same emptiness. 

Form is emptiness; emptiness is form. Emptiness is not other than form; form is not other than emptiness. I the same way, feeling, discrimination, compositional factors, and consciousness are empty. Sariputra, in that way all phenomena are empty, without characteristic, unproduced, unceased, stainless, not stainless, undiminished, unfilled.  

'The Heart Sutra Explained. Indian and Tibetan Commentaries'  Donald S Lopez. State University of New York Press. 1988

Going round in circles

I make a round trip between Brussels and Waterloo every weekday during term-time by bicycle and train and so have plenty of time to reflect on the nature of round trips and cyclical comings and goings when I am sitting on the station platform

View of Gare Du Nord from platform 12

Travelling back to the North of England always involves travelling back to a remembered chidhood but from an new older perspective, back to the future, like the salmon that swim up the River Lune passing Sunderland Point on the way, the semi-isolated tidal community where ancient haaf netting, which dates back to the Vikings, is still practised by the locals to catch the fish as they head upstream. In the early 18th century, as the port for Lancaster, it was also a staging post in the transatlantic slave trade, making the round trip between the West Indies and North America, as the grave of a black cabin boy who died in 1736 after arriving on shore testifies to.

But still he sleeps _ till the awakening Sounds   Of the Archangel's Trump new Life impart Then the Great Judge his Approbation founds   Not on Man's Color but his_Worth of Heart James Watſon Scr.               H.Bell del. 1796

I feel no conflict between a European and/or British identity any more than I feel a conflict between a Lancastrian and/or English identity all of which are relative states arising dependent on causes and conditions. Setting up a conflict between this duality is engaging in a false dichotomy. Are the swallows that winter in Africa and return in summer to breeding grounds in the British Isles, 'African' or 'British'?  Is expecting someone or something to be one or the other 'identity' part of the problem, as Amin Malouf, the Lebanese born Christian who writes in French but whose native language is Arabic, says in his book 'Les Identites Meurtrieres' (deadly identities)?

A map from the BBC showing the route 

taken by tracked Swallows in 2009.

Source: www.bbc.co.uk

I don't see my identity as much different to that of 'H20' in the water cycle involving evaporation, condensation and precipitation moving between vapour, solid and liquid forms as the ice and snow that freezes on the mountain tops melts into stream, rivers, waterfalls and lakes and returns to the sea passing through many other conditioned phenomena on the way, including people. The names we attach to these various states of constant flux, 'Helvellyn', 'Aira Force', 'Lake Windermere', are just that, names or signs, useful conventions not permanent 'essences' or ultimate realities 

When I cycle I am a cyclist, when I walk, a pedestrian and when I drive a car, a motorist.......

Looking forward to seeing the new Mike Leigh film about J.M.W. Turner (a British, French German co-production) which premiered at the Cannes film festival in May.

http://www.festival-cannes.com/en/mediaPlayer/13663.html

 The politics of identity, whilst being a matter of life and death for many in certain contexts, seem no more solid and lasting than the mirage of 'tinted steam, so evanescent and airy'  (Constable's description of Turner's paint technique) that dissolves in sunlight like the pale water-colours in Turner's sketchbooks of Venice, no more substantial than a perfume, a fleeting mirrored reflection of the ever-changing effects of light and colour both on the eye and in the emotions.

Light and Colour (Goethe's Theory) – The Morning after the Deluge – Moses Writing the Book of Genesis 1843
Joseph Mallord William Turner

Turner conjures a vision of the human condition, powerless before the beauty and horror of the visual world and creative and destructive power of nature, in which earth and air, fire and water seem to be in costant flux, evaporating, coagulating and shifting between solid and liquid states like the paint itself.

His elemental and dream like evocations of ever changing atmospheres are similar to the classical Chinese lanscape painter's preoccupation with the 'respiration' of mountains, clouds and man himself. This resonates with the first of the four meditations in the Satipatthana Sutta, on the body or 'Kayanupassana'  which starts with Anapannasati or mindfulness of breathing and proceeds through the postures, bodily functions and 32 parts of the body to mindfulness of the four great elements, their arising and cessation both inside and outside the body.

"Furthermore...just as a skilled butcher or his apprentice, having killed a cow,

would sit at a crossroads cutting it up into pieces, the monk contemplates this

very body — however it stands, however it is disposed — in terms of

properties: 'In this body there is the earth property, the liquid property, the fire

property, & the wind property.'

Joseph Mallord William Turner, the son of a London barber and wigmaker, who retained a cockney accent all his life, is widely regarded as a British national treasure and the 'best loved' and greatest native artistic genius at a key moment when a distinctive  modern British identity was being forged in the late 18th and early 19th century.

Nurtured by the Royal Academy, founded in 1768 and based on traditional continental art forms derived ultimately from classical antiquity and the Renaissance, he articulates a romantic vision of Europe bathed in the golden light of a faded classical past influenced by the landscape tradition of Poussin and Claude Lorraine in an elemental maelstrom of light and colour with an innovative use of water-colour and oil paint.

                                Campo Vacino ( 'cow pasture' of the unexcavated Roman Forum) 1839

Like Goethe, whose colour theory significantly influenced him, Turner travelled widely in Europe including  Belgium, Germany, France, Switzerland and Italy. This greatest of British artists seems to have transcended boundaries and derived his inspiration and influence from beyond and outside the limited national traditions of his day even as he was nurtured by and re-defined them.  Byron's alter ego, the hero of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, inspired another of Turner' great paintings of Italy, as well as a generation of wealthy world weary exiles, both real and imaginary, who made the pilgrimage to Italy on The Grand Tour.  Turner was not above alluding to the darker side of the century, presaging the changes brought about by the industrial revolution and expressing moral outrage at the transatlantic slave trade in painting like 'The Slave Ship' of 1840.

Back in Preston last week I was able to finalize the sabbatical project this year by bringing closure to three modules of the MA in Fine Art Studio Practice and see the BA Fine Art degree show at Uclan.  I was interested to discuss and see the catalogue of 'Rheinwarts' with Pete Clark who made a series of works with George Gartz in 2007 when they traced Turner's  journey along the Rhine in the footsteps of Lord Byron.

http://www.peteclarke.org.uk/index.htm

All of these journeys appear to be about being someone, going somewhere, in search of something. Director Tsai Ming-liang's 'A Monk From The Tang Dynasty' was a piece of minimalist theatre, which we saw on the 4th of May, which seemed more concerned with being nobody, going nowhere, in a journey where nothing is gained and nothing is lost.

Xuanzang was the 7th century monk who travelled from China to India on a pilgrimage to the great Buddhist sites of the Middle Land returning 17 years later loaded with Buddha Rupas and Suttas, a journey which Sally Hovey Wiggins describes in greater detail in her accessible book 'Xuanzang A Buddhist Pilgrim on the Silk Route'

Performed in the semi derelict 'wabi sabi' setting of the Cinema Marivaux in Brussels, as part of the www.kuntenfestivaldesarts.be, the performance was as much a meditation as a spectacle, and demanding for the viewer who had to watch patiently as the actor playing Xuanzang slowly unfolded various actions and gestures representing mindfulness of the body, including processes of breathing, sleeping, walking, and eating.

Peter's picture of the Cinema Marivaux

The most remarkable part of the performance was when another actor slowly covering the large sheet of white paper which formed the ground of the 'stage' by drawing in charcoal around the sleeping figure of the robed monk revealing his shape as an empty space when he finally awoke and stood up, reminding me of how Andy Goldsworthy has done similar things with his own body's 'shadow' and rain.

Like the ruins of the Roman Forum, the ruins of the university of Nalanda, which was already seven centuries old when Xuanzang stayed there as the honoured guest of his master the Ven. Silabhadra in the 7th century, are just as evocative now.

Photo of Nalanda from the trip last December

The exhibition 'The Fugitive Image' in May which included a selection of old and new work also marks the end of a cycle in this particular journey with the set of ten new paintings in this series framed and displayed against the very complementary wall colour of Kaoru's luminous space and the chance to share and discuss ideas with visitors over the course of the weekend and see how they responded to the work. 

Wabi, the Japanese aesthetic of transience and imperfection, is derived from Buddhist teachings of the three marks of existence, dukkha, unsatifactoriness or suffering, annica, impermanence and anatta, emptiness or absence of self-nature. In 'Wind in the Pines. Classic Writings of the Way of Tea as a Buddhist Path', compiled and edited by Dennis Hirota, he quotes Kenko ( 1283-1350) in his 'Essays in Idleness' writing,     

Someone once said, "It is distressing (wabishiki) the way coverings of thin-woven silk (affixed to the outer ends of scrolls) become worn so quickly". Ton'a replied, " It is after the silk has frayed at the top and bottom edges and the deteriorated roller has lost its mother of pearl inlay that it acquires elegance."

He goes onto say, 

The word wabishiki has an unmistakable negative connotation here, but to the person of taste the condition of decline it intimates possesses aesthetic value. In the appreciation Kenko expresses for elegance burnished by the passage of time, there is a strong kinship with tea, which cherishes the patina that utensils gradually acquire through long and caring use. Kenko continues, " In all things whatever, completeness in every detail is undesirable; that which is just left in an unfinished state holds interest.