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Monday, December 16, 2013


Quel dommage....buche de noel without a sparkler!

Buche de Noel

One year in the 1980s, we went to Paris for Christmas. We had thought at first of going to Portugal, just for a few days, for something different. Our travel agent--remember travel agents? what magic they were!--knew us and said, "No, you will just be bored. Go to Paris. That's where you really want to go." He was right. The worst part was the flight out of Miami, as we lived in Fort Lauderdale at the time; ten long hours across the Atlantic at night. But the best parts, and there were so many, far outweighed the misery of the flight.

When we landed on Christmas Eve day, it was snowing lightly. Magic already! We got a mid-day meal of some sort at a really horrid cafe near our hotel, the Hotel de Varenne, modest but nice and in the 7th arrondissement, to my mind the most lovely section of Paris. Then I bought a hair dryer as hotels did not regularly offer them in those days. I had memorized the phrases needed while being bored in flight. Then we took a nap, finally giving in to the jet lag. When we awakened at about six pm, we went out to seek dinner.

We found, on the Champs Elysees in the nearby 8th arrondissement, a restaurant called La Maison de L'Alsace. It is a panelling-heavy old-world restaurant serving huge trays of fresh shellfish, Alsatian specialties, and lovely wines.

It is impossible to get a table in a good and reasonably priced restaurant on Christmas Eve in Paris. But, for reasons known only to the gods of cultural appreciation, the maitre d' found us a table for two in a raised section of the restaurant next to a table for four--packed in, really--at which he shortly seated a couple, their ten-ish daughter, and a grandmama.

I had the Coquille St. Jacques. Sublime. What my husband ordered I cannot recall, but it probably had fish in it some way or other. We were enjoying the experience completely, not least because the service is perfect there and the French family, though we could not understand much of their conversation, was so engaging.

Finally, it was time to order dessert. I had never had, and had always wanted to have, a slice of buche de noel. Aha! There it was on the menu. Expensive, mon dieu! It was the equivalent of about ten bucks American at the time, VERY dear for the 1980s. What the heck? We were already spending three times what we had planned when the original cheap-date-Portugal-four-days trip had turned into ten in Paris. At Christmas. And New Year's.

My dessert arrived,  borne to me on a platter, adorned with a sparkler flinging points of sizzling light everywhere. I was charmed.

And so was the little girl at the next table. Her eyes went wide, her lips turned up into a wheedling smile, and we knew her Papa was about to spring for a ten buck dessert for his charming little girl.

I don't think I have ever, before or since, loved a dessert as I loved that piece of pure Paris in chocolate ganache on a silver platter.

Monday, November 18, 2013

A good day


Detail from Wedding at Cana by Duccio di Buoninsegna, painted in oil on wood between 1308-1311 (Wiki Commons)

Today has been a good day.

A friend and I have just about completed the book we've been working on; it probably ships to the printer tomorrow.

I tinkered ONE LAST TIME with a watercolour commission and actually packed it up and sent it to the buyer. Simon took some good photos of it.

The Chieftains' Timpan Reel is playing on YouTube. My belly is full of strong coffee and mini mince pies (2).

The dog is asleep at my feet, and the cat is curled up on our bed.

I submitted my bio for an art show in Exeter that goes up next Sunday.

What could be wrong?

Nothing.

No, wait. That can't be. I'm an artist and writer. Something MUST be wrong. If nothing is wrong, then something is wrong.

So this is what I want to know: How could I chide my mother for her constant search for some physical ailment until, at last, she found one and it killed her? I do the same thing but not with my health, just with THE REST OF MY FREAKING LIFE.

Uh oh. Did I just identify something important? Something other artistic types--overly sensitive, prone to looking for the fly in the ointment, prone to both perfectionising and awfulising--are prone to do?

Well then. If there's any truth in the phrase seek and ye shall find, it would pay to cease and desist with the quest for what's wrong. My poor, dear mother died a thousand times worrying about what she might die of until, at last, she had a terminal illness. Which, I must say, she faced as courageously as I've ever seen anyone face anything, seemingly completely at odds with her worry-wart proclivities. She is, actually my hero.

My poor mother was brave, having achieved the certainty she sought.

So what then for us worry-wart artist types? Do we wait to relax into a fulfilling life when there's no more life to have? Worrying, that. I'd rather be happy for a long time than brave for a short time.

I think, then, it's time for us artistic types to embrace wholeheartedly a new (well, quite old) mandate:

"A man hath no better thing under the sun than to eat, and to drink and to be merry: for that shall abide with him of his labour the days of his life, which God giveth him under the sun." (Ecclesiastes 8:15)

N.B. Ecclesiastes is the Old Testament, before all the good stuff got mixed up with the misreadings of the stuff in the New Testament who tried to make the Hippy from Nazareth into the Corporation Man.

A little revelry, then, bunkies: I think our art serves no one if it doesn't serve us well. And, as Woody Allen once said, "Man lives to eat and often there must be a beverage as well."

Make mine a martini!

Tuesday, November 5, 2013

Art, wires and Pizza Hut


A large peperoni pizza. Hey, just because I didn't like managing a Pizza Hut doesn't mean I loathe the best of all comfort foods. TO BE EATEN WITH HANDS ONLY. NO KNIFE AND FORK ALLOWED. THE NATIVE NEW YORKER HAS SPOKEN! (Wiki commons photo)

This is not amusing. BT has placed its internet boxes on busy corners. Last Friday morning, about 1 a.m., a drunk decided to decorate the bonnet of his car with the backside of the BT box.

Since that moment, we have been paying BT for nothing. For a while, Simon and I used the single wireless dongle we possess to connect, running the thing up and down the stairs as needed. OK, it was exercise. But I can think of better ways.

Finally, with a long siege in view, Simon strung wires from his main computer, down the staircase from the top floor of the house to the middle floor, where my studio/office is, and to my computer so we could both use the dongle at the same time. Of course, we both have to be careful of using too much bandwidth. But still, much better than a constant chorus of "Are you finished with it yet?"

Now then, to tidy up before I go on.

In the US, the ground floor is the first floor, the next one up is the second floor, the third is the third. Simple. In the UK, the ground floor is the ground floor, the next one up is the first floor, and the third floor is the second floor. Confusing. Because I've inhabited both worlds, I use whichever is appropriate to the audience. Problem: This blog has UK and US readers.

A right mess an' all

Anyway, the result of all this interfloor wire stringing is that the house looks like it was jerry-built. This does not please my design-oriented soul. At all. I will admit that my office/studio is not the neatest thing on earth, but the rest of my living space is pretty darn neat, always is, always was. Clutter upsets me. Bad design upsets me. Things out of place upset me. No, I am not all chilled properly out as an artist ought, I suppose, to be. But remember, please, that I was a journalist for 30 years, which meant I really had to know where things were--like my notebook, my car keys, my next meal--and that has sort of been the substrate of my life.

I expect I will, just for fun, send BT a bill for my lost time. Or maybe I should just thank the goddess of communication that the dumbshit who lost it on the curve didn't knacker the telephone service as well.

All this at the precise time I need to be online A LOT to promote my artwork. Sigh. Not that I like doing that social networking thing. But I suppose it beats some of the jobs I've had in the past, including:

Deli clerk. I took the job before college, left it when I sliced my thumb down to the bone on the rotary slicer while cleaning same. That wasn't the bad part, though. The bad part was that I always smelled like chubs, the name by which horrid, rancid-looking dried fish bought by old farts were called.

Waitress/short order cook at a diner near a New York State mental health hospital. OK. Yes, there were releasees who came in, but you could hardly tell them from the staff, frankly. I did it for about three days, but after cooking fried eggs while trying to serve customers including the ubiquitous cops who had come in for their daily freebies...enough already.

Typist in dean's office at the university I went to. Did I mention I never took typing and got through 14 papers a semester for four years with two-finger typing? Lots of wite-out. When I took the typing job, I needed money for an end-of-term trip to Montreal with friends. The dean's office needed envelopes typed and didn't care what they looked like. Finite gig. Thankfully.

Editor of insurance industry magazine. Oy vay. OK. I needed the money. Bush had been elected and the economy began to shut down the minute he opened the White House door, really. The publisher was a fat jackass who demanded I watch Jerry Springer with him in his office any day I hadn't managed an appointment out of the office. He fired me. Thank goodness. It meant I got unemployment payments for months and months, so I rebuilt my freelance business.

Assistant manager, Pizza Hut. No kidding. Really. I did that, as recently as nine years ago. There was another freelance slump, so it seemed tempting. Managers could earn 100 grand. And I love pizza. It was nasty, though. Every night, the till had to balance to the penny, which simply isn't possible in retail, and it was crazy-making to grill every server and hostess to see who might have tucked 17 cents in their pocket, or dropped it on the floor. I got a job as an editor of a dental magazine (not really better, money was worse and the people were slimeballs...but at least I wasn't chasing small change until midnight in the stench of rancid grease.)

Yup, going on line to promote my artwork looks pretty darn good.





Tuesday, September 24, 2013

Revisions

Well, I've done it. I understand the great masters sometimes did it. Very possibly my Aunt La Te Da, who generally painted blue swans with rhinestone eyes, did it. So, then, it's universal.

What?

Reworking an older painting.

The thing is, I really loved the portrait in the original painting. It was done, in fact, as a sample of a dog portrait for sales purposes. And it is of my own little dog, Brownie, aka Lady Bronwen Marbella McGee, at her favorite place, South Milton Sands beach.

As it happens, Delacroix repainted the background of his 1824 painting, Massacre de Scio, after seeing how Constable painted backgrounds. Fair enough.

Massacre de Scio, Delacroix,1824 (Wikipedia)


And, I have repainted the background of Brownie, because I have decided the painting was a perfect candidate to morph into a naif.

I have liked naifs since I first saw a great number of them in Paris eons ago. But with all the art training I've had, it seemed silly to me not to use the techniques and knowledge imparted to me by the modern masters who taught at The Art Students League of New York, where I studied, and which I also picked up by modeling for Silvermine Guild in Connecticut and The New School's art classes in NYC.

But I came to a conclusion recently: Unless one is doing angry paintings, perhaps all other paintings--except portraits--are too ephemeral in today's world to be meaningful. In a world where anyone can Photoshop any assortment of elements into something else and call it art. But naifs--primitives--are a bit different. They are more honestly the reaction of an artist to a place, person, event or even idea than most things, I think. And a reaction, to be valid, must simply BE, it need not be expressed in a particular manner.

That having been said, primitives are, indeed, very mannerist. They would have to be, as the artist is not only expressing his or her reaction, but is also expressing it in a way completely individual to that person, simply because that person has not been trained, taught to think of line in a particular way, or of colour in a particular way, or composition, or anything. 

Even trained artists will express as themselves. My nude drawings are nothing like the turgid, Renaissance-like work of my first tutor, Gustave Rehberger. (I had an abortive first attempt at studying at the Art Students League. I unwittingly signed up for Rehberger's class, and was so terrified of him that I dropped out in less than a month. Truly, his raw power distressed my soul and even years later, when I would happen to pass him while walking on 57th Street, I would quake inside myself and cross the street.)


Nor are they like the precise anatomical work of Robert Beverly Hale. Nor yet like the more commercial style of D'Alessio...or any of my other teachers.

They are like me.

BUT  they do depend on what I learned at the Art Students League and elsewhere.

The primitives I have painted require that I forget all that and simply go to the subject itself, choose colors along the lines of what pleases me or what I think might make the painting please viewers or both. And, as it happens, viewers who can't spend multiple thousands for artwork for their homes, it seems to me, are generally not interested in difficult works, or works that one needs to have read all of Germany's modern authors to understand, or that will only look well in a Philip Johnson-designed minimalist house.

They are interested in colourful work that makes them happy, reminds them of good times, nice places, swell food, cute doggies, happy children. 

I decided, first and foremost, that after 40 years working mainly as a journalist--and even now, penning rants about current political conditions in the US and the EU because although it's a dirty job, someone has to do it--I needed more HAPPY in my life.

I'm not going to disavow my education and cease doing work in other genres. But I think the way to get happy is by painting some primitives. With luck, others will like them, too.

Brownie's Excellent Beach Adventure, copyright Laura Harrison McBride 2013

Copyright Laura Harrison McBride 2013







Thursday, September 12, 2013

Philistines abound; avoid their cheap advice at all costs

The Horse Fair by Rosa Bonheur (1852) (Wiki Commons) This picture is owned by the Metropolitan Museum of New York: I spent hours of my youth sitting entranced before it, and knowing the story of Rosa Bonheur who refused to do needlework to become a painter instead.

NOTE:  If you are having trouble reading this, please click here. Blogger seems to have issues today.
I'm fairly certain I'm a feminist. I don't, however, think I would call myself a feminist; I think I would call myself a progressive pragmatic humanist. Which means? That I believe in humanist ideals for all people, including women, but we are not there yet. Feminism implies too much of an Us v. Them mentality for my taste. And I believe that the entire world will benefit when the entire world is equally valued, equally paid and when the innate characteristics of all sorts of people are equally valued.
This morning, viewing a slide show that accompanied the story "23 things every woman should stop doing," on Huffington Post, I noticed they had recommended the book Get To Work...And Get A Life, Before It's Too Late by Linda R. Hirshman.

Included in Hirshman's "strategic plan for women" was the following advice: "don't study art."
I am appalled. What was this woman thinking? Or not thinking. Is it really better to become an accountant for the potential of big money when your heart says to be a painter? Will one, in fact, make big money if one's heart is not in it? And if one does make a relative fortune despite a lukewarm attitude toward the work itself, what happens after 40 years of that? Does one then curl up and die immediately of regret, having beaten one's muse into an early grave? Maybe trading passion for the pocketbook explains all the sour old bats one meets. 
Some of us go ahead and paint--forty years later--because we have a nest egg or a working spouse and don't need to scrimp and save through retirement. But some, having squandered their youth and strength rushing down paths they really dislike, are simply locked out, unable to raise either the blood pressure or financing to follow their passion, their dream. 

How sad. I can tell you first-hand that living a life for a paycheck--even a paycheck achieved by relatively satisfying work--is no substitute for expressing the life one wants, regardless of the size of the paycheck. Waiting 40 years to do what one loves is damaging, not only to one's soul, but to the world deprived of whatever in one's heart was yearning to be free.

A Baby Boomer searches for life

My first love was theatre. But my father talked me out of studying it at university, or maybe it's more as if he was so frightened that I'd get ahead by lying down, as it were, that his disapproval of the whole idea influenced me. So I decided I would be a writer instead. It never occurred to me, not even at university, that I could work in theatre without being an actress which did, in fact, bore me to tears. I loathed learning lines, and if there was ever a show I was in during my youth in which I didn't do a bit of improv because I hadn't learned my lines, I don't know about it.
So, writing then. I went to journalism grad school. I became a journalist, a pretty good one. I made a good living for 35 years or so. But I was never, ever happy about it. Firstly,
I'm an introvert, and it took a bit of self-flagellation to get me to pick up the phone. Eventually, though, I got stuck in and had quite a bit of fun asking politicians questions they didn't like, even face to face. One of my favorite moments was asking one such question of the Secretary of State of the state of Tennessee; he saw a female journalist and expected fluff. HAH! The look on his face was almost worth the price of admission.

Maybe that's what kept me at it, the fact that I was having a good time making a decent living in what is still, I hasten to add, a man's world. It is the rare female journalist who gets the kudos. But I digress.

Following yet ANOTHER wrong path

Several years into that career, my need to express demanded to be let out of its cage. I started by going to the New York School of Interior Design. I like nice houses. I thought if I did that, it would be a REAL profession, with real money...etc. And a chance to...dare I believe it?...dabble in art. Of course, the fact that I aced the colour course without actually waking up and the instructor was a horrific witch and endured the chatter of dingbats throughout the period furniture lectures...well, it was a non-starter.

Finally, I gave in. I went to the Art Students League of New York for real lessons in real drawing and painting with real instructors, so real that they had to be working artists, well represented, even to teach there. 

And I never looked back.

I loved art school. I really did. So many interesting people, aside from the chance to actually learn how it's done. But I failed again to switch horses. I made a small attempt when I lived in Florida to start a gallery for my own work and a friend's, a former architect who had become a watercolourist in his retirement. But I depended on my freelance writing income to support it...and a major client went belly up. End of experiment.

Hard to get stuck in when one has been dulled for 40 years...

So...here it is...I am retired from journalism, though you'd never know it to see my byline all over the place, but now I write only what I want, not only what is paid for as I did before.

I'm having a hard time getting stuck into a career in art; my career should be over, after all. I should be doing nothing but what I want and traveling. I've paid the piper, paid my dues in several wrong professions. I'm getting, well, old if the truth be told. (Reference the line above about raising the blood pressure and the cash to finally paint, sculpt or whatever later in life.)

Still, I have begun doing what I want. I am painting, although the usual socially/culturally influenced negativity that afflicts most women puts the brakes on my forward movement more often than I would like. (Must work on that.)

But worse, I spent an entire life denying myself what I wanted to do: art. Theatre, art, or even writing poetry (something else that seems to have taken on its own life all of a sudden.) I was a journeyman journalist making a good income writing about stuff that seemed to be useful, and that sometimes I even enjoyed, for instance, the years when I was a theatre reviewer. But it didn't feed my soul. It fed my horse, and my horse fed my soul. But then, I view riding a horse over fences as kinetic art; indeed, that's exactly what I was doing, and doing well when I managed to win a ribbon.

All this chequered past makes it all the harder to begin now, knowing I cannot in this lifetime achieve the mastery of a Rembrandt, the temporal fame of a Basquiat or Hockney, the money of a Warhol.
I would like to meet Linda R. Hirshman and possibly punch her right in the nose. How dare she tell women not to pursue their passion! How dare she assume for others that having work that pays well is all a good life is about. I think money is the least a good life is about. I'd tell her to get a life before it's too late, but I doubt she'd hear me. Apparently, the demands of a dying culture are sufficient for her: work, save, put off anything that makes your soul sing. Get a life, you know, one of those cookie-cutter things one can find on TV.
It's bullshit, her statement. And it needs to be put in a paper bag and set afire on her front steps so she gets the full benefit of the stench of her soul-deadening plan for women. I've got a few choice words for the editors of HuffPo, as well.


 

Thursday, September 5, 2013

Muse on the ropes. Again. Plus Sarin.

My Muse, pondering (Laura Harrison McBride, 2012)

A few weeks ago, I had a moribund muse, half killed by months of visitors and no opportunity to let her exercise either her verbal or visual powers, to express her needs for truth or beauty or both.

And then, freedom. An empty house. A house with cleaning needing to be done, laundry needing to be washed, food needing to be cooked, husband needing to be looked after, dog needing to be groomed and cat needing to be waited on hand and foot. (Cat lovers will know that the last part is the only essential one.)

Still, I made a start at feeding my muse with things she needs and enjoys.

And then came Syria.

Who cares? Well. Let it be known that I am not a political animal. When I wrote for newspapers and magazines, I steered clear of politics. I wrote features and reviews.

Did I mention Syria popped up?

The Rime of the Aging Painter


Segway again. Last weekend, on our way back from Wells, Simon and I stopped at Coleridge Cottage, and there the subject of the Romantic poets returned to my consciousness. It would be fair to note here that, although I double majored in English Lit. and Theatre at university, I was a casual student at best. Mostly. I didn't give a rat's ass about most subjects and saw no reason at all that the world would be better or worse off if I got a wonderful grade in the work as opposed to an acceptable one. I had already figured out that employers didn't really care as long as you had a sheepskin from someplace, and I didn't have any intention of going to grad school. The B.A. was fine; M.A.? Why? I didn't plan to teach. I planned to write. Not poetry; journalism. In aid of which I did, in fact, go to grad school. 

Anyway, for reasons only my spirit could enumerate, I was drawn to the Romantic poets, much as, I suppose, I've been drawn to the Impressionist painters. So, there it was, the Big Class in Romantic poetry. The final exam was being shown 50 snippets of poems by the major and minor Romantic poets--minor works we had not studied--and determining who wrote each and why. I lost only two points out of a hundred on that test. And for years, although I never cracked it again, I dragged around a huge academic volume of the Romantic poets. And now I can't find it. Somewhere between Maryland, USA and Cornwall, UK, it got dumped-lost-given away-something.

But I found, in talking to the docent at Coleridge Cottage, that I still recall an amazing amount of stuff about those poets, 45 years later. That the Romantic poets were all political animals, that Coleridge was an activist who was often regarded by the authorities as a danger to decent society. My memory banks were pleased, and transferred the resurrected knowledge to my conscious brain; it's OK, then, to be a poet and an activist.

Truth will out

Well before last weekend, I had begun writing poetry that was rather well-received, I thought, on Glipho. I was actually quite pleased with that, if not quite as pleased as I would be for a similar reception to my paintings. I suspect my muse has wanted to write poetry for decades, but her journalist overseer prevented it.

Unfortunately, since the day it became clear that the United States meant to bomb another sovereign state because it is annoying America's rich folk and bankers, my muse has gone to ground. And the journalist has usurped her time.

I've renounced my US citizenship. I don't live in the US or Syria, and have no plans to go to either place, ever. So neither I nor my muse should really not give a rat's ass, especially since Labour made the UK do the right thing.

But I was planning to go to Cyprus in October. It has been three years since we last were there, so, during the upheavals of the summer, I decided a good dose of sun, sand and antiquities would restore my muse, and me, to health. Booked it...and these days, booking is the same as paying. No longer can one make any changes to flights, even for a fee. If we don't go, we just lose the entire fare. BUT...and it's a significant but...I have no intention of being a schnook and canceling. I simply won't show up for the flight as the cost to me will be the same, and I might thus prevent the greedy airline (in this case, one that begins with T) selling our seats for full stroke, twice. They MIGHT get takers at the gate...but probably not. It seems to me this ought to become a movement, in fact, among airline customers. If you can't go, don't show. Snappy, yes?

Common sense dictates...maybe

I doubt that I will go. I need to gin out a few more paintings to be juried so that I might join an artists' group that I hope will have me. 

I'm tired, though. Tired enough to run my mouth about all the crap the US is perpetrating on the world now. I'm feeling good about Labour turning off Cameron's plans for supporting Uncle Sod-All, but feeling bad about watching Obama follow the example of that most horrific of US presidents, George W. Bush. Up to and including lies, in this case, pressing the air strike issue with not one shred of proof that any Sarin attack happened, never mind that it was by Assad. As one commentator said, why would Assad do it? He was winning against the insurgents (American-backed, we understand), and gassing his own citizens certainly wouldn't help him win their hearts and minds.

But never mind. I have a muse to resurrect. Darned if I know how, though. I'm having a hard time concentrating on cleaning brushed, never mind using them.

And then there's this: If I am ever even tempted to paint on a canvas board again, might someone please strike me hard with their open palm? Nasty stuff, that. Did it for cheapness, as I meant only to sell copies of the original. Never again. My muse is worth canvas with a bit of life, after all, or how will she know when she's moving in the right direction?









Thursday, August 29, 2013

How do you spell that?




Finally.

Finallyfinallyfinallyfinallyfinally.

When one is getting over an illness, one does first that which comes most naturally. When it is a malady of the soul caused by the logistics of life (that is, having houseguests all summer, which is not conducive to artsy thinking or doing), then one works one's way back by doing that for which the muscles of body or soul or both are most easily resurrected.

In my case, it was writing, and particularly, it was writing journalism, columns on the vicissitudes of modern life. I was a journalist for 40 years, after all, and only a part-time artist and equestrienne during that time.

So I dumped a tirade about the reprehensible current mayor of my birthplace (Michael Bloomberg of NYC) into cyberspace. Ah. Felt pretty good. (It would feel better to write a paean to the late Ed Koch, the best mayor of NYC there ever was...but the subject isn't "sexy." No one suffered, as New Yorkers are suffering now.)

Today, finally, a poem escaped me. It needed to. And it meant I had at least partly processed the upsetting events of last week, horrific environmental damage on a small scale by a truly reprehensible old geezer who lives next door and destroyed our common hedgerow.

And I worked a bit on two paintings.

I am turning a portrait of my dog into a primitive.

And, I have begun a painting of two dogs who frequent a pub in Gwithian and, as it happens, sit on bar stools covered with doggie-paw-print fabric. They are real dogs; I ate lunch with them one day in early spring.

Late discovery

I have suddenly discovered primitives. I do recall having seen a gallery devoted to Naifs in Paris 35 years ago. As I recall, the palette of most artists shown was either blue or green. And there were a lot of cats.

But I couldn't recall seeing many more naive paintings until I picked up a book including works by members of The Association of British Naive Artists during a visit to Penlee House, Penzance, last summer.

And then I recalled--doh!--a piece in my own collection. A small painting, about 6 inches by 9 inches, that I bought in Paris about 35 years ago, give or take. Possibly on the same visit in which I saw the gallery, possibly not. Back then, I went to Paris whenever the spirit moved me AND I had the wherewithal at the same time. It didn't happen all that often, not half often enough.

Anyway, I carried the little painting around unframed for a while, quite a while, while I ended a marriage and made a couple of long-distance moves. Plus, I had a horse to buy; I couldn't afford framing. But eventually, the little painting got framed. And since then, it has always hung in my kitchen. Not the ideal place for a painting, I suspect, but it is done in acrylics, so probably a bit less difficult to ruin than oils.

And I love it. Not for the subject matter. Not for the colour. Not for the style. Not for the artist whose name I haven't the foggiest idea of, although I recall he was a big guy, didn't speak much, and had hung his paintings on the fence around a church on Boulevard St. Germain. And I think I paid about 15 bucks for it, at whatever American money was exchanging for with francs back then.

What I love about it is this: Charcuterie is misspelled as Charcutrie.

Despite my almost obsessional demand that English should be written correctly, whether English English, American English or even pidgin English, all according to its own rules, the fact that charcuterie was misspelled said something to me.

It said that art was art and didn't really need to represent anything in a standard manner. Probably, the artist was simply a lousy speller. Why not? He was studying art, not French....if he was French. Maybe he wasn't. Maybe that's why he didn't speak much, because we tourists wouldn't want to buy art on the street in Paris created by an English guy, or a German or Italian or even an American in Paris, no matter how cheap the art or how charming the art or the artist. Maybe he was a foreigner and that's why he misspelled that common French word.

A feast of possibilities

So, there it hangs in my kitchen among the pots and pans reminding me as I create our meals that I can create other stuff, too. Stuff that doesn't depend on years and years of study, as my journalism and horse-showing lives did. I did study art, though, because that's the way I'm made, with a penchant to find out HOW things are done and to have the best instruction I can find. But I think, now, I might forget those studies, the magic of Robert Beverly Hale's anatomical drawing instruction et al, and do a little naif painting myself. It's happy, and lord knows happy would be good both in the big world and my little one at the moment.

But I don't think I'll have a green or blue palette; so far, both paintings seem to be a little red- and orange-heavy...but who knows? I still do love oils far more than acrylics. So, after a little waiting, and I can paint over it, change the palette if I feel like it, and maybe even misspell a common Englesh wurd.



Thursday, July 25, 2013

A sprinking of fairy dust

 George Bernard Shaw's writing desk in his writing hut in the garden at his home, Shaw's Corner. 





This morning, I read an article in The Author, the publication of The Society of Authors, titled "Payments in the digital age."

My first reaction was, "What payments?" As an author, I did pretty well from 1975 until 1997 out of writing non-fiction books for major publishers such as Simon & Schuster. I didn't write blockbusters; I wrote travel and business books under a couple of pen names. The books reached a modest audience, and I'm still getting small royalties from some of them. (There were 14 books in all.)

And then, the internet began to erode the income of virtually all professional writers except big-book novelists. I think my last decent contract was in 2000, for The Complete Idiot's Guide to Natural Disasters. Thank goodness writing the thing was fun, because the advance was a few grand less than the same publisher had paid me in 1999 to write The Unofficial Guide to Surviving Y2K and Beyond. That book got one stunning review; it said it was the only balanced report on the subject, and so it was. Of course, that's because I was a journalist, not a fear-monger like those nuts Gary North and Edward Yourdon. As I read it, North is a bona fide right-wing whacko, a nut who managed to turn his religious zeal into a humongous mess for the rest of us and profit for himself into the bargain, and Yourdon is a bona fide computer dude who saw the main chance by setting the rest of us on edge for a couple of years by convincing us that cyberspace was going to wreck our world.

So, anyway, I had a contract, so I began the research. As it turned out, there never really was a Y2K problem. An independent IT consultant in Columbia, MD, told me (paraphrase) during my research: "Your car has chips in it, sure. But the car doesn't really care what the date is--except maybe the one in the clock--and were not designed to melt down at midnight in 2000."

So, I told the truth. No problem. And I was right. Which ultimately sold very, very few books. The publisher, thankfully, stood behind me when I presented 400 pages of my findings, as I had a track record for accuracy. Still, none of us made much money. North and Yourdon, however, were sitting pretty. And today Yourdon, at least, doesn't even acknowledge the useless brouhaha he started. His website doesn't mention his involvement--nay, his masterminding--of the Y2K debacle, and he's still being paid lots of money as an expert witness on IT matters, apparently.

Which just goes to show the importance of fairy dust.

What is fairy dust? It is the ineffable something writers sprinkle over the very same words that might be turned out by a computer in the next generation of cyberspace. Indeed, Pearson publishers have already gone to work-for-hire contracts rather than royalty deals as often as they can, apparently, so that the writer--the sprinkler of fairy dust--will not profit nearly to the same percentage as the publisher will. (Yes, that was always true, but it's a matter of balance.) Next, according to Steve Ellsworth, in the article cited above, the publishers will attempt to cut out the writer completely, even (or maybe especially) those like Ellsworth who write ESL books (English as a second language). Yes, a computer could probably do that. I use the computer now to translate French sites for me on occasion, in fact. I get the information I need, but it is hardly deathless prose.

Ellsworth believes that if computerization of ESL books happens--and there are already novel-writing software programs out there, for crying out loud, so ESL should be easy--the fairy dust will disappear. While there isn't much fairy dust in ESL, and the fairy dust used by North and Yourdon was suspect, I think the fairy dust is what convinced people there was a Y2K problem, but also kept me employed all those years, churning out journalism--accurate journalism--but with a very human(e) face. And it doubtless adds to the success of Ellsworth's books, since he writes accessible and even perhaps deathless prose in teaching English because he is not a machine.

I love the fairy dust. I love it when I read it; I love it when I write it. I do not want HAL to attempt fairy dust. It would sicken me. It might never get things so wrong as did North and Yourdon because of its computer accuracy and lack of fairy dust. But it wouldn't mean much either. Who could laugh or cry or even be amused or aggravated by the bits and bytes that some hunk of silica turned into words?

I can tell you one thing: I'm glad my body of work when I moved to the UK four years ago was sufficient for me to gain membership in The Society of Authors. It's a great organization, pursuing income and rights for writers and offering certain perks every fairy dust producer deserves: lodging at The New Cavendish Club and the Goodenough Club in central London at special rates, membership in The Poets' Society Cafe, and discounts at Specsavers, all the better to keep that fairy dust coming during advancing years. And more.

I've been concentrating on the painting recently, but perhaps Ellsworth's article will draw me back to writing, if only to add one more writer's hand in staving off the introduction of HAL WRITER. Perhaps it will make a difference,  one more writer  toiling with pen and ink...or, in my case, Microsoft Bloody Word.

Wednesday, July 24, 2013

Why do artists love art?

Dun horse, Lascaux, France. (Wiki Commons)


Because it isn't accounting, that's why. It's endlessly different, and thereby entertaining and demanding of the intellect's and the spirit's attentions.

A column of numbers remains the same no matter what interrupts one's work with it. A painting? No. It changes, and not just because the paint dries, either. It changes because each time you approach the canvas or paper or clay, you will approach it with a different attitude than you were experiencing last time you worked on it. You might more accurately say the artist has changed, but can one really separate the artist and the art?

Art isn't accounting because there is no one simple point to reach that says the work is finished. If you add a column of numbers, you will know you are done when you have checked your work and realize all numbers were correctly entered, correctly added, and that the final sum is correct.

You will know when the artwork you are creating is done when....when....when....

Now. Is it done now? Probably not. Probably, it is never really finished. You may stop work because the commission has to be delivered SOON, or because you think one more stroke of the brush will push it into the muddy waters of overpainting, or because you're bloody sick of the damn thing and wish you had never started it. So you finish it and stash it in the basement behind the broken bicycles and half-empty paint cans and your heirs find it and--since artists only get popular after death--they sell the awful thing and get rich as Croesus, while you were almost as poor as a church mouse.

Still, thank goodness art isn't accounting. It's much more important than that. (By the way, I do have friends who are accountants, and my mother was an accountant. But I think they'd agree with me...besides which, the accountants I know these days all dabble in an artform at least; one books musical acts, for example, because he's a folk music aficionado.)

Even in prehistory, art was of ultimate importance. The cavemen didn't paint numbers in that underground grotto in Lascaux; they painted horses and bulls. Of course, you might say numbers--Arabic numbers and even Roman numerals--had not been invented yet, so they didn't have a choice. Yes, and? Proving my point: Art is more important than numbers, and was invented first. Numbers can tell how much, but art can tell what. Knowing what is, in my opinion, a lot more important to human life than knowing how many. And it would seem that is very deeply ingrained in the human psyche.

Still, I wouldn't mind having a few more quid to count. But I'm not going to trade the life of the right side of my brain for the satisfaction of the left. I'm not going to become an accountant so I can toil at stuff I don't like in order to have more holidays in Cyprus, and the much-awaited trip to Cuba (still being awaited.)

But I did have the good sense to marry an engineer. 


Wednesday, July 17, 2013

The arts of boxing and life


Stag at Sharkey's, 1909 by American Ashcan School artist George Bellows*
When I was a little girl, I used to sit on the wide, flat arm of my grandfather's favorite chair and watch The Saturday Night Fights with him. My grandfather was a tiny fellow, a chemist/accountant with a more than respectably large nose, and a brain to match. I doubt he ever hit anything in his life, although I'm sure he'd have made every attempt to punch out Richard M. Nixon. My first political memory is of Gramps saying Vice President Nixon (Eisenhower was president then) was the most disgusting politician he'd ever seen, quite a statement since Gramps was born in 1886 and had seen lots of scoundrels in office before Dickie's first election to national office.

Gramps was always right. I adored him, even when he complained when my grandmother bought me "paper shoes"...sneakers in US terms, plimsolls UK. Or when he wouldn't eat chocolate cake because he claimed it was just burnt vanilla. Gramps was a work of art. He was a kindly curmudgeon, a down-to-earth genius, a former country boy who never wore anything but a starched white dress shirt in his adult life as far as I can tell.

He certainly didn't encourage me to be an artist. Indeed, he didn't encourage me to be anything, except successful and even that he didn't push. But he read six newspapers every day, devoured detective novels for relaxation, smoked one huge smelly cigar a week during baseball season while watching double-headers, and instructed me in the art of boxing.

Gramps couldn't tolerate the sluggers; he liked the boxers, the fighters who used tactics more than mere muscle, and who stood for something. This was all transmitted to me, wordlessly I imagine. And so, I ended up being a rare bird, a liberal woman who appreciates a good boxing match.

Yes, I know. Boxing is deadly; aside from giving Muhammad Ali a good life, it is also taking it by bits, through the Parkinson's disease repetitive slams to the skull have produced and which this rare, bona fide American hero endures with a great deal of grace. It is definitely a case of the good with the bad. Ali got himself out of the ghetto, as have so many others, by boxing. A shame they had to do it that way, but it was a pragmatic approach in mid-century America. Ali also stood for something, having dumped his precious Olympic medal into the Mississippi River in protest against the treatment of blacks in the US. I was a fan of Ali when I was in high school, when he was still called Cassius Clay. Even on eastern Long Island where I lived, being fond of a black athlete, even the  poetry-spouting, totally unique Cassius Clay,  constituted a prescription for ostracism by one's peers.

What brought all these thoughts on was a Facebook exchange with a friend today that included lyrics from Paul Simon's "The Boxer." It led me to think about Angelo Dundee, Ali's "cut man" and trainer.

So I looked him up. Dundee died about a year ago, RIP. But the article mentioned that he had got his start as a cornerman/jack-of-all-trades at Stillman's Gym, a New York City boxing establishment.

I lived there. No, not in the gym. It was torn down in the 1960s and a high-rise apartment building erected on the site. I lived in that for about three years in the late 1970s. I confess that I didn't even know of the connection until a really slimy politician my former husband was working for (he eventually quit) told me about it, trying to aggravate me, I suspect. I'm sure the politician was shocked when I genuinely thanked him for the information.

My grandfather's name was Harry Stillman. No, no connection to the gym that I know of. But then, I didn't know much about my family until I began doing research on the Irish side to establish my descent and gain Irish citizenship (I was successful!), so I could more easily move to the UK with my current husband, a UK citizen.

It turns out Harry's descent was from English forebears who settled early in Rhode Island, fanning out later to western New York State. Every time I check ancestry.com, it turns out someone has added information to my family tree on my Irish father's side. I wonder if sometime the Stillmans who began Stillman's Gym will turn up on my mother's somewhat more difficult-to-research family tree, and if I'd even figure out that's who they were.


* Bellows also taught at my alma mater, The Art Students League of New York.
 

Tuesday, July 2, 2013

Who needs critics? I've got me.



It's a shame any of us has to grow up before going to art school. 

It has been a while since I mused aloud on the inherent problems of creating pictures. But today, after a sleepless night in which the idea for a semi-Persian miniature tromped all over the Fields of Morpheus with heavy feet and clanging bells, I find I cannot go on.

Don't be afraid. I don't mean that as in, "I can't go on, therefore I am taking arsenic."

I mean I can't go on with the painting. At least not now.

See. There it is. An egotistical unwillingness to tear up the paper--expensive though cold-pressed watercolour paper is--and start again, possibly at another image entirely.

Or, I could go back to it and reclaim it, as I did thousands of times--literally thousands--during my life as a journalist, but have not yet learned to do as an artist. Or not well, anyway. A couple of months ago, after working and working and working on a portrait of Boadicea (or Boudicca, if you prefer, but I'm very fond of the Latin) drawn from a modeling session a month or so before that, and Celtic lore, I gessoed the canvas.

My husband was horrified. He liked the portrait. He liked it when it had boobs, and after they got cloaked. He liked it when the face was too ruddy, and when it was too pale. I liked it none of those ways. I did quite like the hair, embellished with some gold paint woven through it as light-catching strands and also as part of a hair decoration, and I liked the background. It was so fen-like. I was really very pleased with that.

But the main part of the picture was a disaster.

What I'm working on today, the semi-Persian miniature, is not even close to deserving my disdain the way the Boadicea did. But I did notice that the sky was not quite the teal I had imagined, and, actually, the thing looks a bit "school-ish."

***

So of course, I took a nap. It is now two hours later, I'm awake (sort of), the dog and cat have been fed, and I am busy destroying my adrenal health with a cup of strong French roast coffee accompanied by pain au chocolat with chocolate cream cheese on it. I was quite peckish, always am after a nap, and drinkies and dinner are 1.5 hours off.

The picture, barely started, isn't as bad as I thought. After all, the only things done so far are the sketch and the three main color blocks. Since it's a sharp focus watercolour done wet on dry, I'm going carefully. I can adjust the sky later, which I couldn't do wet-on-wet.

But I really do need to stop being an adult about this, and assessing every little bit as I go.

Or maybe it's age. I don't have a 40-year career stretching ahead of me at this point, in all likelihood. Being a Type A, I naturally pressure myself to get to the professional level I desire RIGHT BLOODY NOW!  Ostensibly so I can enjoy its fruits for longer, of course, never mind that I am driving myself nuts on the way.

We are so crazy, humans are. And artists are possibly undeniably the nuttiest of us all. I'm proud to claim it, really. I certainly wouldn't want to be a well-balanced banker, for example, hated these days more even than dentists. Being an artist gives one a lot of latitude to be a child.

Now if I could only figure out how to do that....

PS I put up a Marley version of Paul Simon's song because it seems closer to the simple original than Simon's recent performance versions. More childlike. More about connecting the inner to the outer, the child to the adult...and very importantly, vice versa. Mind you, I still love Paul Simon, always have, but reggae and the name Marley...well, enough said. Hope you enjoyed it.



Tuesday, June 25, 2013

Highly Sensitive People


Yes, that's me on Major Yeats in a "fun day" costume competition at Fox Hollow in Tennessee. We got a 4th. The costume was a couch and a couch potato. I was wearing an old dressing gown, had a packet of chocolate chip cookies in one pocket and a TV guide in the other. I had a shower cap over my riding helmet. I covered Yeats in the ugliest sofa cover I could find, and pinned little pillows to it. The costume was suggested to me by a journalist colleague, David Wickert (now of the Atlanta Journal and Constitution) because he had heard me moan about Yeats' laziness so often.

One would assume, I assume, that artists would be highly sensitive people (HSPs). I suspect there are some exceptions, and that some artists can cope with crowds and noise and excessive demands on their time and all sorts of upheaval. I suspect there is a continuum, with some artists being extremely highly sensitive, and others being a little more towards laid-back and unflappable.

I would place myself at the far end of the bell curve on the extremely highly sensitive side.

I loathe loud music. I find it offensive when someone else's music invades my space. What makes them think I would enjoy whatever gormless crap they are subjecting their ears and mind to? I had neighbors like that in Maryland; summer was often a trial. It turns out that some new people who have moved in near me recently in Cornwall are of that ilk. The people who lived there before had a pre-teen son whose friends came over and they got quite noisy in the garden on the trampoline...but it was happy noise and not arrogant, like the playing of your music for other people's ears, unasked. Kid happy noise=good; arrogant subjection of others to crappy music=bad. Or simply, relaxingly human v. aggravating.

Poster child for pernickety (that's persnickety in the US)

Which leads me to suspect that--using myself as the poster child--a certain amount of personal space is part of the sensitivity, as is a highly developed concept of polite behaviour.

Of course, I may be wrong. But once again, I shall make an assumption that artists are HSPs and, as well, usually introverts.

There are people who would debate that about me. I'm one of the few writer/editors I know who didn't mind giving speeches to civic groups when I was doing special projects for a daily newspaper in Virginia/Tennessee (in a town on the state line). I also worked in national marketing for the second-oldest theatre in the US; I had to get up on stage occasionally and give the "curtain speech" when the Artistic Director was out of town. I thought it was fun.

But now...well, all that belongs where one of my horse trainer friends, my dear friend Peter Krukoski of Fox Hollow Riding Academy in Tennessee, put it many years ago when he and I were having a tiff. "Your problem," he said, "Is that you are an introvert who learned to act like an extrovert to get what you want." 

Coping with faux extroversion

He was right. Exactly right. As a journalist, I phoned and met people day in and day out. At the theatre, ditto. It was a living, a pretty good one, and sometimes exciting. But the horses were my safe, quiet place. On horseback, I was in another world. Riding horses over fences is wonderfully relaxing simply because you will have only one thing on your mind; communicating perfectly and wordlessly with that horse so that you both land on the other side together. I loved it. It was the antidote to the faux extroversion I practiced when I wasn't on horseback.

Now that I've (mostly) left the journalism behind, and working for a wacky organization like a theatre isn't even on the radar screen, I find I've reverted to introvert. I scarcely want to answer the phone. It takes me a week to recover emotionally from hosting a small dinner party. The thought of going out stumping to promote my artworks leaves me...well...in search of an arsenic substitute and the courage to take it.  (I might also propose that arty folk have a tendency to dramatise......)

I've retired my horse and frankly, he and I together were an art form--a sort of free-form flying expressionist art form at times when we magically and suddenly parted company, other times exhibiting classical perfection over fences.  I have no intention of getting another horse. Indeed, there is no other horse in the world I'd care to ride except Yeats. I did ride others...lots of others...and even leased a few before and during my years showing Yeats, just so I wouldn't get stale. But as for the ride, Yeats is a huge bugger, as stubborn as the day is long, too smart for our own good...and the apple of my eye from the minute I first sat on his broad back. His gaits are not great; when we won a class, it was over fences, not on the flat. He's a great, careful jumper. Well, he was after Peter and I trained him, with some help from my friend January Johnson, an artist on horseback, who is now an artist with food. Yeats is larking about in a friend's pasture in Tennessee in his rather posh retirement; I still own him and pay his bills because, well, I love him.

A good substitute for a horse?

I need to replace horsemanship in my life; I need the total immersion break from the pursuit of art, the sort of break that riding gave me from the pursuit of interviewees or promotion of a theatre. I have no idea what that might be. (All suggestions gratefully accepted.)

Unless, of course, it could be art that is the relief from the pursuit of art. Perhaps I should just give up the perfectionism of the mid-century-born American to be the hostess with the mostess and every other screwy thing heaped on some of us by grandmothers giving Victorian ideals another life, and do more painting when I'm tired of painting. Or at least, relax about anything else I do.

Right then. My next dinner party won't be a selection of wonders from my French cookbooks served amongst the Irish crystal. It will be spag bol* with jug wine in Jamie Oliver glasses (dishwasher safe), take it or leave it.


*Americans: Spag bol is Britspeak for spaghetti bolognese, or in other words, pasta with tomato-meat sauce.




Monday, June 24, 2013

Wrist watches as life and art


A watch designed after Chagall's work. I MIGHT concede to owning one...if I could conceive of paying for it. See the story about it here.

I have never really liked watches. I only grudgingly wear one, and only because I'm a tiny bit obsessive about being on time. But I disliked them so much when I was a child that I refused to learn to tell time for years. I was about nine years old before I admitted to my mother that I actually had been able to tell time for about six years at that point. I just found the entire idea, I think, of living by the hour to be ludicrous. And yes, I guess they had their hands full with me.

As I got older, I found that watches were also impractical for much of my life. I spent a lot of time tucking my watch someplace safe when I went to ride a horse because I knew the watch would be ruined if, a) I came off in the mud, or, b) I had to bathe the horse after the ride, quite a common thing except in the middle of winter. And then I discovered plastic watches.

Oh, for joy!  Three bucks at the local convenience store/gas station (UK residents, read 2 quid and petrol station), they lasted several months, and who cared? Toss it, buy a new one.

Before that, though, I had--I shamefacedly admit--gotten into a novelty watch phase. If the watch was weird, would buy it. Before a trip to Paris, I bought a really fun (and plastic!) watch that had a vibrant parrot head cover that flipped open to reveal the watch face beneath. As I have small wrists, it was probably the first thing about me anyone saw.

On the plane to Paris, I noticed in the "buy me" magazine a lovely thing called a Rock Watch. The works were by some respected watchmaker, and the face was a bit of pink quartz, I believe. I really liked it but decided I could buy one cheaper in Paris.

Fast-forward to four days later. My husband and I were sitting in a little Alsatian restaurant on the Rue St. Germain. We were sitting on the glassed-in porch. A mother, her little girl of about seven and the grandmother were seated a few tables away, also on the porch.

Throughout my meal, the little girl stared at me. When the trio was finished, the little girl bounded over to me and stood beside the table, staring at MY WATCH.

The mother hurried over. "Non, non, Sandrine," she said, followed by rapid gentle scolding in French. I don't speak French, except for phrasebook French. But we communicated  partly in English, partly in German and a bit in French. The little girl was in love with my watch. I asked if I might make a present of it. The mother said no, no, it was too extravagant. I said it wasn't, that I had paid no more than ten dollars for it in Miami and I was happy for the child to have it as she so adored it. Besides, I thought, it would give me an excuse to buy the Rock Watch.

So the mother relented, I put my watch on the little girl's wrist, and off the trio went up the street.

Shortly, the little girl was back, this time outside the window, blowing me kisses. Certainly, that was worth ten bucks.

I never did get a Rock Watch. We were busy seeing things. When we finally got to Bon Marche, I refused to spend that much on a blasted watch; the one in the airplane catalog had been cheaper, as it turned out.

But I did decide that someday, I would write a story about Sandrine. This is not that story. It will be fiction, and it will have a very lovely, totally natural character named Sandrine, not unlike Madeleine...but nicer.

Wednesday, June 19, 2013

Rant: Carrion crows of the art world


Rembrandt van Rijn self-portrait, one of two "given" to Spain by the late Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza (Wiki Commons)

 


I have been reading, when the spirit moves me, a collection of the late Dominick Dunne's Vanity Fair articles, Fatal Charms and The Mansions of Limbo. I had already read all of his novels, all of those based on real members of either the fabulously wealthy 400 old families in New York City, or the upstart nouveau riche of Hollywood. Dunne had some connection to both those populations.


Dunne was a good writer. And brave. He said OJ was guilty before anyone else did. He also had to insert himself into the events and lifestyles of the rich and infamous to produce his detailed descriptions of how the one-percenter live, just as he had had to attend every revolting minute of the OJ courtroom fiasco.

By the time I was two-thirds through the book, I knew more than anyone has a need to know about robber politicians such as the Ferdinand and Imelda Marcoso, and upstart nobility wannabes such as Claus von Bulow.  Dunne also wrote about the unspeakable Menendez brothers, and Lady Kenmare, who may or may not have hastened the departures from life of four husbands. (Noel Coward thought she had, according to Dunne.) Dunne threw in a few articles about a couple of decent sorts, actress Diane Keaton among them. But still...

Where art enters, so do rogues

And then, last night, I got to the art part: The story of some of the peregrinations of art collector Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza.

Who?

Well. Let me tell you. Years ago, I adored Architectural Digest magazine. In my heart of hearts, I wanted to live in one of the houses they profiled. Almost any one of them, really. But I vividly recall the article about Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza and his fabulous houses; it was probably the late 1970s or early 1980s when I read that article. Most of the houses in Architectural Digest belong to unspeakably rich people, many of whom are also unspeakably tacky. Perfect Dominick Dunne fodder. And, while I might have hoped to become unspeakably rich myself, tackiness was never one of my life goals.

I say that, doubtless, because I'm hopelessly middle-class. Too bad.

Rich and tacky didn't seem to faze the Thyssen-Bornemiszas, especially when it came to foisting his expenses onto others while extracting coinage from their pockets.

Baron HH Thyssen-Bornemisza (doesn't it sound like a pirate's sailing ship?) had amassed a truly astonishing art collection that he didn't want to be sundered after his death. So he decided to give it to whatever nation was willing to pay him handsomely AND build a brand new, state-of-the-art museum to house it in. Prince Charles paid a visit to the baron's castle trying to get the collection for the UK. The executive director of New York City's Metropolitan Museum approached the baron to try to snag it for his already obscenely overstocked collection; there are more paintings and objets d'art stored in underground passages below the place than are hung on its wall. German Chancellor Helmut Kohl also entered the race. (Note: Dunne said the baron's collection was second only to Her Majesty's, and hers is the greatest in the world.)

In the end, Spain got the collection--probably because the baron's fifth wife was Spanish--and the citizens of Spain got stuck footing the bill for the collection. Granted, they've got back some Goyas and El Grecos that had left the country. But it begs the term "gift" when the nation has to pony up boatloads of cash to acquire the "gift." Isn't that just a purchase? In fact, in this case, it is even worse; it is a rental agreement. According to Dunne, the Spanish government would be paying to the baron's foundation a rental of $5 million for ten years, after which, one supposes, the "gift" would be renegotiated.

Duke of Plaza Toro? (with apologies to Gilbert & Sullivan)

In addition, the baron expected to become a duke as a result of the gift, which would make his commoner wife a baroness.  Baron T-B was already a baron via his first marriage (of five) to a Hungarian baroness and some convoluted hurly-burly to get the title bestowed upon him. Otherwise, he was just little Hans Heinrich Thyssen, son of a robber baron. But robber barons who become so-called hereditary barons are SO much more acceptable in the BEST homes, don't you know? And I suppose similar would pertain to wives of barons of either sort who had started out as beauty queens: Tita Thyssen-Bornemisza had been Miss Spain in 1961. The poor thing had a crown, but no hereditary title.


Regardless of whose offspring are noble and whose are not, the thing that is abundantly clear is that this pack of greedy, self-absorbed humans don't enjoy their wealth of art treasures; they display them and use them to enhance their putative standing amongst other humans of similar ilk. They are, indeed, little better than carrion crows, picking over the remains left by people with bona fide talent and brains, i.e., the artists. On the one hand, they deny the public the opportunity to appreciate great artworks by keeping them behind their own gates; on the other hand, when they figure the pearly gates are the next ones they might see, they entice governments to pay them and their heirs handsomely to return the art to public view.

No set of blackguards is, apparently, more crow-like than the Thyssen-Bornemiszas. Even those who are not of their blood are out for blood. Tita's son by a former spouse, adopted by the baron, sued his mother and lord knows who else, to acquire $7 million worth of paintings from the gifted collection that he said his adoptive father had promised to him. And apparently, the gift was even more convoluted than Dunne knew in the late 1980s, when he was writing about it.

Crowing about art

Indeed, if you click the link above and even skim the article, you'll conclude the only thing possible to conclude:

If these folks lived in the rural United States, shopped at Wal-Mart, ate too much, drank panther-piss beer, hit their wives and lived in mobile homes instead of living in the best cities in Europe, shopping in Paris, eating small portions of foie gras, drinking Cristal champagne, suing each other at the drop of a hat and living in palaces, then the best art they'd have on their walls would be the free calendar from the auto repair shop. Indeed, we would give up our fascination with them fairly quickly.

Postscript: Tonight, if I have the stomach for it, I will get to the article about the auction of the jewels of the Duchess of Windsor.  I might have to go to the hairdresser tomorrow so I can shed the useless and doubtless disgusting gossip I will pick up tonight. Providing anyone remembers who the late and not widely lamented Wallis Warfield Simpson even was, that is.







Monday, June 17, 2013

The Age of Miracles, redux

Earth's Axis (small)
(Wiki Commons)


I just finished an awful/good book. No, I don't mean awfully good. I mean it was awful, but it was good. It was The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker. When I bought it in Waitrose one day last week--when I was hungering for a real book and not something downloaded to my Kindle--I thought it looked like it might be Chick Lit, but a bit better.

It wasn't Chick Lit, and it was better, but it was terrifying. It concerns The Slowing, a time when the earth ceases rotating on its axis every 24 hours, with the rotation getting slower and slower and slower.

You can't imagine what that does to life on earth, human and otherwise.

But Walker imagined it, and the more I thought about it, the more I realized this novel could, some time or other, be true. After all, we really don't know what the effects would be on earth of some disaster in the universe beyond the light years we have so far been able to detect. It could show up some day, without warning, and turn everything on its head, so to speak.

And then, earlier today, I saw Sandy Wager's post on Facebook's Plymouth & Southwest Artists page about the problems inherent in getting the UK government to cease supporting the unspeakably rich by gutting the programs that serve the rest of us--approximately 99%--and especially crafts workers. Considering that crafts workers encompasses a large number of professions, from people making inexpensive papier mache utilitarian objects to silversmiths working in precious metals and stones, anything that happens to them will have a domino effect on everyone else

So then, I thought, "Someone needs to write a novel about life on earth after the unspeakable few destroy all the arts for the many." This would include crafts, of course, but also music, theatre, and the written word--poetry, novels, ephemera of all sorts. What sort of world would it be? What sort of illnesses would people develop? Walker posits a few illnesses caused by The Slowing in her book. An anti-Stendahl syndrome would be a natural: a person passes out and goes into shock from his or her first encounter with completely unembellished ugliness. In Walker's book, people sicken and die from the disturbed circadian rhythms. Can people die from unrelieved ugliness, out of control utilitarianism in all they encounter? I suspect they could. I suspect I could.

Sandy's post noted, "Most craft occupations are subsumed within occupational and industrial codes which are mainly non-creative." That is, government statisticians, in their infinite absence of wisdom, may well have classified a company that makes leather seats for Mercedes automobiles in the same code as the leather worker who crafts Druid items and sells them at craft fairs. And then the statistics wonks could conclude, after surveying the financial health of that "code", that there is no need for intervention of a helpful kind by the government. That will be fine for the maker of Mercedes seats, but not for Sally Leathercrafter in Pentreskeard, Cornwall.

Here are my two suggestions:

1. Write a book like The Age of Miracles based on the destruction of arts and crafts in developed nations. (I have a feeling, though, it would read a lot like anything by Ayn Rand, and might suggest a screenplay much like Other People's Money...or just an average day's reporting on The City or Wall Street.)

2. Look at the proposed changes to the classification of crafts and offer any cogent support that you can. Click here to see where the statistical issues are at present.The major thrust of all of this is simply to determine the monetary value of creative efforts; this, of course, will influence where government money is spent. It would seem to be paramount to ensure that crafts were included in all considerations governing the arts. Not to do so would be like considering dental services to be divorced from health. And that would be ludicrous, and result in negatives for almost all concerned.

The Age of Miracles, now that I put in perspective, would be one in which the arts were valued once again, as they were in Druid times--when bards and ovates were supported by the clan in toto and held in high esteem as well. Now THAT would be a miracle this crass age.


*"Stendhal syndrome, Stendhal's syndrome, hyperkulturemia, or Florence syndrome is a psychosomatic disorder that causes rapid heartbeat, dizziness, fainting, confusion and even hallucinations when an individual is exposed to art, usually when the art is particularly beautiful or a large amount of art is in a single place. The term can also be used to describe a similar reaction to a surfeit of choice in other circumstances, e.g. when confronted with immense beauty in the natural world.
"The illness is named after the famous 19th-century French author Stendhal (pseudonym of Henri-Marie Beyle), who described his experience with the phenomenon during his 1817 visit to Florence in his book Naples and Florence: A Journey from Milan to Reggio." Wikipedia

Wednesday, June 12, 2013

This is your creativity; This is your creativity in cyberspace...


 (Wiki commons)

This is your brain. Note how neat it is, and how each area and its function are identified. This is a nice brain.

(Wiki commons) 

This is your brain after five days of doing computer things. Building websites for your work. Endlessly inputting meta tags and other garbage. Indeed, this IS garbage. No, your brain. No, garbage.....

 

This is all by way of explanation for my absence from the blogosphere recently. But today, finally, I finished a sales page that will go live on Monday. Which means that I can get back to painting. Which means that I can get back to writing about painting...or even writing about writing.

ANYTHING EXCEPT ENTERING THE SAME INFORMATION OVER AND OVER AGAIN TO SATISFY THE REQUIREMENTS OF CAFEPRESS. It is deadly; it is the perfect task for George W. Bush. He might have been up to that; he certainly wasn't up to governing the United States. And if he went on endless vacations, as he did, who would care? One would need only to get another smirking chimp to do the input tasks.

But I digress. I never really saw the need for artists' and writers' retreats before. I do now. After a week of cybercrapola, I need to retreat, into a world where meaningful things exist. Birds. Clouds. Movement. Sounds of nature. Sounds of human life. Interaction. At least two brain cells that are working well enough to communicate with each other and possibly create something...a thought, a picture, an object, even a swell dinner from scratch.

I'm cleaning out the garbage tonight. I'm having a change of scene, and I'm not going to waste the rebirth of my creative juices by cooking. We are going to our favorite Devon restaurant, Steps of Tavistock, a place that's so homey*, it could be home. The fact that the woman owner, Suzanne Oldfield, is a former American and her husband, Adrian Oldfield (the chef) is British--thereby offering precisely the same combination as my husband and I do--has nothing to do with it.

What has something to do with it is that it the atmosphere will be both restful and friendly, and the food excellent and well-prepared. The background music is either classical or post-big-band jazz, either of which let one's mind wander in gentle ways. 

Steps restaurant is familiar, indeed, it is almost genetic. Simon's late father, Ronald, went there once or twice a week for a good meal and some company after Simon's mother had died and Ronald had moved into town, diagonally across the street, in fact, from the restaurant. We lived in that flat for a year before we bought a house; great location, great flat. It retained the vibes of Ronald, a gentle man who actually wrote letters to his wife from their cat--in Cockney--when she was in the hospital giving birth to Simon. They used to keep mother and baby for a week back then, even when all was well as it was in her case.

I know what I'm having tonight: Adrian's fantastic green salad, perfectly dressed. The shallow fried crab cakes or maybe the sea bass, with sauteed potatoes. Adrian Oldfield is an artist with those potatoes. They are so perfect, so delicious that I could be perfectly happy with those alone. A bottle of Belle Muraille, a red wine, not expensive, but a favorite of Suzanne Oldfield, and us. And very probably the creme brulee.

See, I told you it was homey. In the perfection of its homey-ness, it is high art. In the perfection and consistency of Adrian's traditional Cordon Bleu British cuisine, there is high art. In Suzanne's running of the front of the house, there is high art. But it is comfortable art, precisely the kind that will salve the misuse of a creative brain so that it can begin again to find some new and interesting things about its own creative world, in my case, painting and writing.


* I must persist in the American usage. The British usage would be homeliness, but in the US that means ugly...and I can't gt past it. Mea culpa.