Getting Plastered in Bruges...

Spent February break plastering the kitchen and was grateful for A's help to get eight more bags of lime when it looked like I would run out of supplies and to varnish the new windows. Each morning started with lighting the wood stove, making strong coffee and mixing the first of several buckets of lime plaster. First I worked on the wood fibre boards over the isolation that P placed around the windows and then on the prepared Ytong blocks. This large back wall felt like preparing a giant surface for a minimalist painting. I am not tempted at all to paint a 'fresco' or fill this empty space with anything.  Unlike on the old masonry walls this is a more a decorative final layer rather than the three coats of functional plaster that need to 'breath' in the older part of the house.

The daily 'sound-scapes' that become apparent in the emptiness of relative silence are as important for the sense of time and place as the windows, doors and other openings that filter the changing light and colours at different times of day and night and frame the views that connect inside and outside in dialogue with the body and mind when it is aware of and alert to these subtle changes. 

The sound of the falcon screeching in the tower, the cooing of wood pigeons in the branches of the beech and chestnut tree, the voices from the road, the rattle of tourist's wheeling cases and the rumble of car tyres on cobbles and of course the bells that dolefully toll the hours or the tinkling of chiming carillons are all part of the music. 

Taking time to look up at the stars on a clear night from the terrace I recognised Ursa Minor, Orion  and the Pleiades. 

Bouts of plastering were punctuated by cups of coffee accompanied by cloud gazing and relishing the changes of light in the branches when the grey veil of rain lifted either from the terrace or through the skylights and windows. 

The newly restored 'organic' south transept window of Sint Salvator's and the spreading branches of the beech tree in the garden of the Hof van Pittem with it's first spring buds just beginning to appear. 

Retrieved my painting from the bookshop where they have been on display for a few months and found they look just as good placed against the newly plastered kitchen wall as they do adjacent to shelves of books. 

Have discovered a correlation between the processes and concerns in the house and in the paintings.  There is a preoccupation with materials, colours and surfaces in which windows, partially framed views and small contained spaces, fragmentary remains and traces on walls and in built, layered and painted surfaces act as 'mirrors of time' in which the boundaries between animate and inanimate, living and dead, are not so clearly defined but part of a circle of continuity in which things arise and cease dependent on causes and conditions.  

The newly restored apse of the Onze Lieve Vrouwekirk was open so I went in to take at the colours and materials, the beautiful articulation of light and space and the marvelous brick vault. They have kept fragments of medieval painting which are part of the fabric and layers of the building's history.

Took time out to see '45 years' with Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtney at the Lumiere Cinema on Thursday evening. A house, a couple and a haunting from the past, in which a photograph in the attic and the ice of a Swiss glacier have frozen time, and preserved both a face and body, rekindling the sense of desire and loss like the pain of an old wound or the smouldering embers of an old fire. The actors faces and gestures reflected like mirrors the public and private memories and emotions evolving in the unremarkable ordinariness of an unfolding week in the life of this retired couple in a small Norfolk town. The interlocking of interior and exterior worlds and the cinematic illusion of reality is complete with acting that is almost invisible.   

http://www.lumierecinema.be/ 

Tidied up the terrace and stacked more bricks ready for the hall floor which is the next job. Since these bricks are pre-industrial and hand made they often bear the imprint of the brick-makers fingers baked into the clay and each time I find one its almost like discovering a human fossil. I keep finding analogies between cooking and building. Both involve creativity in identifying, preparing and mixing various ingredients.  Bricks are just like bisquits in that they are made from shaped dough baked in an oven, except of course you can't eat them and they can be recycled after a couple of hundred years to rebuild a wall or make a floor. 

The cinema, galleries and museums, libraries and bookshops, shops, market, churches, public squares courtyards and gardens, and the concertgebouw are all within a 5 minute walk. There is no need to use public transport or drive as everything can be reached on foot. This human scale is perhaps the optimal size for urban community living rather than rural isolation and offers perhaps a blueprint from the past for the future of sustainable cities supported by local permaculture.  I would certainly like to experiment with my own small terrace by growing vegetables, salads and herbs etc. in meter square boxes in the shelter of a small 'hortus conclusus' around which the house folds in an L shape. I will certainly place a rainwater collection tank and would like if possible eventually to place some solar panels on the kitchen roof which cannot be seen from the road outside.  There is much potential in a small space where infinite worlds can unfold just as they do in the early Flemish paintings.  

R and I went a couple of weeks ago to see Julien Libeer, Lorenzo Gatto and Hrachya Avanesyan and Sevek Avanesya in a last minute concert  replacing Maria Joao Pires who had to cancel through illness with Beethoven sonata for Violin and Piano in A, opus 12/2, Maurice Ravel's 'Le tombeau de Couperin' and Arno Babajanyan 'Klaviertrio in fis'  They received a standing ovation. The next concerts to book are in March with Rinaldo Alessandrini - 'Van Frescobaldi naar Bach' on the 18th and Concerto Italiano with Scarlatti and Caino on the 19th. 

http://www.concertgebouw.be/en/

Sweetness and light - art, sugar and slavery.

Marianne Behaeghel's joint exhibition 'Sugar' ended the week at St. John's on a sweet note and the gallery was elegantly graced by both edible cakes made by parents and paintings and drawings of the same made by students in sweet and delicate pastel tints.  

Given the problems of tooth decay, obesity and heart disease anyone would imagine that having a ‘sweet tooth’ was kind of addictive enslavement to sugary desires but a darker kind of enslavement is bound up with the history of sugar and this was also gently alluded to in the photography by Arnaud Pitz. 

The ‘black gold’ of the contemporary world is almost certainly oil but in the 18th century for a period ‘white gold’ was the sugar produced by slaves transported from Africa through the port of Liverpool in the ‘middle passage’ to work in the plantations of America and the Caribbean.  This triangle involved the cruel exploitation of the labour of enslaved people used to manufacture the commodities of global trade and capital in the context of colonialism and the industrial revolution, feeding an insatiable desire for this new ‘sweetness’  in the emerging markets of the newly prosperous nations,  in addition to other commodities like cotton, tobacco and rum which found their way back across the Atlantic to Liverpool and other cities. 

Tate and Lyle developed their sugar refining industry in Liverpool and elsewhere on the back of this trade and eventually in 1889 Henry Tate used the enormous wealth accumulated to endow a major national museum, an institution very much at the heart of British art and culture, the Tate Gallery, which has since been followed by series of museums including The Tate Gallery in Liverpool built in 1980s in the renovated site of Jessie Hartley’s Albert dock and warehouses. Ironically in the same site you can find the International Slavery Museum, the only national museum in the world dedicated to the history of the transatlantic slave trade and its legacy. Like Able Magwhich in Dicken’s ‘Great Expectations', the uncouth criminal turned self-made man in Australia, who uses his new wealth to transform Pip, who helped him in the marshes when he was a fugitive, into a gentleman, money like sugar was being refined and made respectable by being turned into high art and culture and given as a ‘gift’ to a grateful nation.

The blood horses of them colonists might fling up the dust over me as I was walking; what do I say? I says to myself, 'I'm making a better gentleman nor ever you'll be!' When one of 'em says to another, 'He was a convict, a few year ago, and is a ignorant common fellow now, for all he's lucky,' what do I say? I says to myself, 'If I ain't a gentleman, nor yet ain't got no learning, I'm the owner of such. All on you owns stock and land; which on you owns a brought-up London gentleman?' This way I kep myself a-going. And this way I held steady afore my mind that I would for certain come one day and see my boy, and make myself known to him, on his own ground."

Magwhich in GREAT EXPECTATIONS by Charles Dickens (1860-61)

http://www.albertdock.com/attractions/international-slavery-museum/ 

http://www.tate.org.uk/about/who-we-are/history-of-tate

Making Connections at The Groeninge

Still-life with Snail Shells and Feather.

 On Saturday working in the house on various walls and floors to either build or consolidate and work up the various surfaces of wood, lime, ceramic tiles and paint seems like a process of creating a harder and relatively more permanent outer shell around a softer and more transient body, and like a snail or seashell, inhabiting it for a while before this aggregate of form, feeling, perception, volition and consciousness which is called 'I' dissolves and gives way to others that will occupy its place inside the abandoned 'shell', rather like a succession of hermit crabs. 

On Sunday morning after breakfast I visited the Groeninge Museum. Edmund van Hove was 62 years old when he died the year before the outbreak of the first world war which was to have such a devastating impact in Flanders. Born in 1851 he was 28 when he painted this self portrait which features in a small exhibition 'Mythische Primitieven' about the romantic rediscovery of early Flemish painters in Bruges, especially Hans Memling and Jan van Eyck, as part of the 19th century Gothic revival.

Edmund van Hove. Self-Portrait 1879

'The Saint Virgin Inspiring the Arts'

In the exhibition was another painting by Van Hove, a rather sickly sentimental pastel toned homage to the Mary as 'The Saint Virgin Inspiring the Arts' The figure of Mary with the Christ Child is seated on a raised throne in the middle of the painting like Van Eyck's famous 'Virgin and Child with Canon van der Paele' and countless other 'sacra conversazione' compositions. In this pyramidal arrangement she appears to be receiving in the foreground the female personifications of architecture, sculpture, painting and music, identifiable from their iconographic attributes. In the background beyond the room we see portraits of famous artists from the past including the poet Dante, and the artists Raphael and Michelangelo, amongst others, and behind them in the far distance views of Rome and Bruges. Although there was clearly a tradition of Mary inspiring artists, (I am thinking of Rogier Van de Weyden's painting of St Luke making a portrait of the Virgin Mary in the same museum), Van Hove's painting feels very much like a reworking of a theme that would perhaps have been be more usually presented, in a less Catholic context, with a classical Greaco-Roman mythological and iconographic scheme.

Reconstruction of the west pediment of the Parthenon according to drawing by K. Schwerzek.

Athena Parthenos was both a virgin and warrior, for instance, and apart from being the patroness of the city named after her, was also the goddess of wisdom, courage, justice, civilization, inspiration and arts and crafts.

This frieze on the facade of the Greek temple like Royal Exchange in London shows the central crowned figure of 'commerce', like a goddess, surrounded by the city officials and various traders of different nationalities, religions and cultures from around the globe. The appropriation of already appropriated forms.

 

http://www.vanderkrogt.net/statues/object.php?webpage=ST&record=gblo163

The Virgin and Child with Canon van der Paele

Seated in front of Van Eyck's great painting of the Virgin and Child with Canon van der Paele it seemed to me that this illusionistic 'tour de force' was and is as much about the nature of artistic creativity as human fertility and divine inspiration. Just as in St. John's Gospel, 'the word is made flesh' 'et verbum caro factum est' through the incarnation, so the artist also creates a visually coherent world of convincing space and form from light and colour in the material of pigment and oil and the 'miracle' of human artistry, paying homage meanwhile to a world of parallel arts and crafts which include architecture, stone carving, ceramics, glass, metalwork and jewelry was well as sumptuous textiles, particularly silk and gold embroidered damasks that appear to reflect a shimmering light more convincingly than real gold - which  Van Eyck never actually used in his paintings.  

'Making Connections' featured the extraordinary sequences of small oil paintings of  Robert Devriendt whose obsessive detail and vibrant and sometimes lurid colour had a hyper-realism that harked back to the early Flemish masters like Memling and Van Eyck who were the first to exploit this medium's full potential for realism. Devriendt's small paintings looks like film stills from a contemporary detective TV series in which sexual politics, involving games of power and money, lead to exploitation, violence and revenge. In this morally ambivalent world of melodrama and ironic humour with its cinematic feel and sense of suspense that reminded me of Edward Hopper, the sensual and static quality of oil paint on canvas holds us in a meditative freeze frame instance that lasts long enough for us to see the perhaps deeper themes of nature reclaiming lives played out with stilettos and kalashnikovs in luxury vehicles, underground car parks, designer villas, and remote woods where unsolved crimes are committed and unfulfilled desires are quenched in sudden violent deaths and consumed by fire and earth. There is just enough missing from the implied narrative to suggest different possible interpretations for the viewer whose imagination can fill in various possible scenarios and outcomes into the missing links depending on what they bring to the process themselves.

http://www.robertdevriendt.be/news.html

Robert Devriendt, A Voyeur’s Devotion, 2012 (Sequence of 4 paintings) Oil on canvas — one piece

Attachment and loss at Waterstones

Impressed by the quality of the materials, design and story I bought little B this children's book for Christmas at Waterstones. William Blake’s poem Eternity inspired the story about Fox who lives in the forest and looses his dear friend Star and it is Waterstones book of the year.

“He who binds to himself a joy 

Does the winged life destroy;

But he who kisses the joy as it flies 

Lives in eternity’s sun rise”

 

 

"I am all about the physical book" said Bickford-Smith. " We haven't released The Fox and the Star as an ebook because I dont think it would work -its all about the paper. I wanted to create something which harked back to the beautiful visual thinking of William Morris and William Blake, so that people would really appreciate the book as an object"   

                                                                                       Quoted from the Guardian online

15th Century Immigration Crisis

https://www.englandsimmigrants.com/ 

 The website 'England’s Immigrants 1330-1550' is described as 'a fully-searchable database containing over 64,000 names of people known to have migrated to England during the period of the Hundred Years’ War and the Black Death, the Wars of the Roses and the Reformation.'

It contains records of 1139 'Flemings' resident in England in this period, 34 of whom where from Bruges.

Part of a letter of denization

It is interesting to wonder what John Hughson (clearly an anglicised name) was escaping when he left Bruges. His occupation is described as a 'spicer' and his letters of denization, granting legal rights and protections, where made on 26th July 1475, ten years prior to the Battle of Bosworth which established the Tudor dynasty. Was it war, politics, religion or economics in the low countries that brought this skilled immigrant to England?  It is not recorded in which town or city he was resident or other details of his life. Was he married, did he have children or establish a business or trade in spices, did he prosper and integrate or meet with prejudice as a stranger ?

As as English immigrant in Bruges I feel a certain empathy for John Hughson and his ilk.

New Year Renovations

Lancaster with a view of the castle and Lakeland fells

Spent Christmas with the family, young and old, in Heysham, Lancashire and Todmorden, West Yorkshire, amid scenes of flood devastation across the North of England in the most hard hit areas although luckily we escaped the worst of the weather without power cuts or water damage and Lancaster on the days I arrived and left was bathed in mild winter sunshine. At the labyrinthine second hand bookshop in Carnforth I bought and read 'Rats, Lice and History' by Hans Zinsser which gives an oblique historical perspective on diseases and how the lives of insects and men are inter-connected. From the point of view of 'kamma', or the ripening of volitional action into its corresponding fruit, this is something to consider perhaps every time a spider is trapped in the bathtub.

Swinside stone circle. late Neolithic

On an early morning walk around Heysham Head I found myself musing about the juncture of ancient and modern 'power lines'. Look south and there are the two nuclear power stations as controversial as the one at Windscale, now Sellafield, over the sands on the Cumbrian coast, which was the site of Britain's worst nuclear power accident involving a fire in 1957. Look north across the treacherous sands of Morecambe Bay and the recumbent form of Black Combe rises gently from the coast of the Irish Sea. Lying in its flank is Swinside or Sunkenkirk stone circle which the stone age people of The Barrows, for whom Heysham Head was an a burial ground, must have known about. Perhaps they looked from these coastal cliffs towards the mountains of the Lake District, connected by a network of similar stone circles, and felt the signification of these collective and ritual lines of energy and communication between people, times and places.  

The site has one of only three pre-Roman labyrinth carvings in Britain and Ireland, the ruins of the 8th century St Patrick's chapel, which local legend says he founded when he landed here, and 11th century rock cut tombs. Below this the small St. Peter's church dates from 14th century with pre-Norman conquest, Saxon and Viking remains, which include a rare hogback Viking tomb. Adding my regular comings and goings here to the many before me I am struck by the long memory of the stones.

St Peter's church in spring

  We are born with the dead:
See, they return, and bring us with them.
The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree
Are of equal duration.

T S Elliot, The Four Quartets, Little Gidding. 

Returning laden with my mother's boiled fruit cake and supplies of Stilton cheese I spent the second week of the holiday working in Bruges with Patrick making a new kitchen step from the hall with terracotta tiles and lime plaster on brick and laying the kitchen and bathroom tiles. Before and after scenes reveal this is still a work in progress. 

Most exciting is the limecrete hall floor with its two breathable membranes and expanded clay ball layer and sand, lime and aggregate mix which has worked very well and is level, hard, dry and ready now for me to lay Patrick's reclaimed 17th/18th century handmade bricks in herringbone pattern before sanding and cleaning them and treating them with a mixture of linseed oil and turpentine. All the floor surfaces will have natural materials in subtle and restrained colours with different textures, patterns and rhythms transitioning through the old house to the new kitchen and integrating with the lime plastered walls

My efforts to speak the West Flanders version of Dutch is not very good and attempts at pronouncing schilt ende vriend (Shield and Friend) from the Bruges Matins, when the rebellious citizens used this phrase as a test to find all the Frenchmen in the city and kill them before the Battle of the Golden Spurs in 1302, comes out more like Scheel ende Vriend which means 'cross eyed friend'. I would have almost certainly been massacred, although being English might have saved me.

I am not sure what they would have thought in the 14th century about the Mexicans carved into the 'traditional' Flemish fireplace with its 19th century Dutch tiles, made and installed over a much older fireplace in the 1960s by the previous occupants.  Perhaps they would not have found them so strange, after all Bruges was probably one of the most international cities in Europe at the time. In 1520 Albrecht Durer saw Montezuma's treasures sent by Cortez from Mexico to the Queen of Spain on display in Brussels as part of the entourage of the Emperor Charles V and said this. 

All the days of my life I have seen nothing that has gladdened my heart so much as these things,  for I saw amongst them wonderful works of art, and I marvelled at the subtle ingenia of men in foreign lands, indeed, I cannot express all that I thought there.

A World History of Art.  Hugh Honour and John Fleming

I have finally found a place for the English 'Delft' tiles I made in Malta 20 years ago, after much trial and error, based on designs found in Jonathon Horn's 'English Tin-Glazed Tiles' and the techniques described in Daphne Carnegy's book, 'Tin Glazed Earthenware.'

The development, quality and character of European pottery without the influence of north African and far Eastern ceramics would have been much poorer. Arab technology in the tin-opacified white glazes and Chinese Ming dynasty blue and white porcelain designs fused with the European figurative tradition in Renaissance and Baroque pictorial and decorative schemes, creating in turn Majolica, Faenza and Deruta ceramics as well as Dutch Delftware tiles and the Portuguese Baroque azulejos as the influences spread from the Mediterranean into Northern Europe. 

Elsewhere in the house oak beam renovations with a simple galvanized steel extension are a prelude to the more extensive woodwork planned for the new and repaired floors, windows and doors.

Below are some photos of the various stages in stripping back pine paneling, scraping, cleaning and consolidating certain internal composite walls in living room and in particular around an oak beam embedded in masonry and anchored to the front and back wall before pointing, dubbing out, and plastering with first a scratch coat then floating coat of lime which in this case is the final coat. Evidently from the remaining oak lintels either an earlier door and/or windows have been later bricked up, and it took some significant effort to chip off the cement layer that was plastered over these bricks. 

Finally burning the recycled wooden pallets brought by P in the new wood-stove has kept the house warm and cheerful during work in a remarkably mild winter.  15 months since the start of the process it really feels as though it has reached half way and turned a corner although there is still much to do.