Loss and absence, art and nature

 

From Celia Paul: Self-Portrait (Jonathan Cape, London 2019, p.152)

  

 

"A garden is always a series of losses set against a few triumphs, like life itself." May Sarton

 

"[W]hen I look at this painting, even in reproduction, even in a black-and-white reproduction, it inspires in me an almost inexpressible tenderness that is close to pain [...] But again, why do I feel like weeping over a glass of water standing near a coffeepot? A real pot and glass of water would never have this effect on me, unless perhaps these objects had belonged to a beloved person who had died [...]

Chardin's body has left its mark on the canvas, and even though for many viewers that imprint may be subliminal, it is felt - the simpler the subject matter, the more opulent the human presence." 

Hustvedt, Siri: Mysteries of the Rectangle. Essays on Painting, Princeton Architectural Press, New York 2005, pp.35f.

 

 

Knits, reads, paints

 

|  Knitting cushion covers in two-purl-two-knit squares and washcloths with leftover yarn from my jumper (bamboo washcloth pattern by John's cousin Lisa. My sister also makes her own washcloths) - I love spotting and noting random beautiful colour combinations, such as this one in my knitting basket: sage green, mint, magenta and silver grey.

|  This is not my current reading list (I am always late taking photos, and I already posted this on Instagram), but some highlights from last year, though not all recent publications. I am trying to remind myself to incorporate what I learnt from James Nestor's Breath (especially taping my mouth at night and doing coherent breathing: inhale for 5.5 seconds, exhale for 5.5 seconds), Glennon Doyle (stop caring what other people think, for example) and of course Pema Chödrön's wisdom. I read so many self-help books, and while I often take notes, once the books are back on a shelf, it is easy to forget the aha moments.

|  Working on a portrait of John: I am taking a lot of photos along the way, as he has given me permission to use this as an example in the online classes I am teaching, and I might add the work-in-progress shots to my website, if I ever revive the art blog I sporadically update on there (I am thinking of merging it with this one). The above photo is cropped; the painting is portrait format and will include seaweed, flowers and a bee when it is finished, symbols of John's love of nature, gardening and the sea and his new passion beekeeping.

Art books: Peter Campbell - Artwork

 

"One mark of an artist is that he or she alerts us to a world. Modest and wholly without pretension this Campbell repeatedly does. Unsurprisingly he was a lovely man." Alan Bennett on Artwork by Peter Campbell

"Dogs.I thought it was the dog I wanted pictures of, then I found it was dog plus shadows and dog plus spots plus green grass. But I didn't know that until I had taken the pictures. Snapshots are a way of thinking after you have seen something, otherwise you could just have a camera with no film."

Peter Campbell, "Art Lessons", in London Review of Books, 13 August 2020

The second extract is from a lovely piece by Peter Campbell, a letter to "Anna" (Anna Fender) that combines a selection of photographs of Italy with the "art lessons" of the title: his "notes [...] about what I looked at and noticed". He repeatedly emphasises the subjectivity of art and perception: "You would take different pictures and see different things in them". One of the photos, of a Dalmatian walking on grass that is broken up by the shadows of trees branching out, prompts the above observation. 

In a conversational and seemingly effortless tone, Campbell walks Anna and subsequent readers through his snapshots and the thoughts they spark, taking in themes such as composition, architecture, mark-making, light and shadow, abstraction, pattern, and art history along the way. The result is a unique lecture on art appreciation, his own philosophy of art. 

Peter Campbell was a Renaissance man (designer, artist, typographer, critic, children's author, amateur botanist) and a vital part of the London Review of Books from when it was first published until his death in 2011. He was the LRB's designer and art critic and created the cover artwork for every issue over a period of nearly twenty years, mainly in watercolour. The last one was of a view from his window when he was dying: a fox passing by in the street. Apart from the title no text was superimposed on this final cover image.

The letter to Anna prompted us to buy this book of Campbell's illustrations and designs and a set of postcards featuring work by Campbell and other artists, including Cressida Bell. This website was created to catalogue his work and make it available to the public. Both the book and the online archive are a treasure trove of his wide-ranging subjects and styles.

 

I am a big fan of Maira Kalman's work, and while Peter Campbell's illustrations are often more restrained, I find the two artists share a certain whimsy and wit, and both elevate the mundane and ordinary. There is a playfulness to Campbell's work that, together with his deeply caring view of the world, makes the viewer appreciate the beauty of the everyday in new and often surprising ways. You might even fall in love with your washing machine.

Around here

 

Dotty

Matcha tea ceremony

Some fiction highlights from last year

Sideboard still life

Work-in-progress: John and Cillian

"She walks back, more slowly, the way she came. How odd it feels, to move along the same streets, the route in reverse, like inking over old words, her feet the quill, going back over work, rewriting, erasing. Partings are strange." O'Farrell, Maggie: Hamnet, Tinder Press, London 2020, p.214

 

|  I like to knit all year round, but often abandon it during the summer months. At the end of the year, while on an unplanned break from work due to a health complication (neither cancer-related nor COVID), I picked up my knitting needles again and have been knitting every day since. It can be addictive, and even though I am a morning person, I can see how my sister is able to stay up past midnight while working on a project. You don't notice the time going by, and the movement of your hands keeps you alert, albeit in a lulled, relaxed way.

|  I had been drinking matcha tea for years and John never showed any interest, until one of his favourite podcasts dedicated an episode to it, which prompted him to order a matcha tea set and introduce a weekly ritual.

|  Books are my weakness when it comes to acquiring things (outside of lockdowns I also use the library a lot) - even though there must be dozens of books in the house that I haven't read yet, I keep getting more. I always have several books on the go and make sure at least one of them is fiction, and I exchange books with friends and family and often pass on novels when I am finished with them.

|  Apart from the books that are scattered everywhere, I lean towards minimalism and try to limit clutter (of course everyone has a different interpretation of what constitutes clutter, and the definitions of minimalism are equally varied), but I do get aesthetic satisfaction from the objects surrounding us, including the jars of fermenting kale that are currently fizzing away on the sideboard (not pictured). The Irish Times recently featured Kopper Kreation, a Dublin brand that makes homeware out of reclaimed and recycled materials, and John bought a copper pipe candelabra. It has been brightening up our dinners.

|  A couple of weeks ago, when my energy had returned, I gave my little studio some TLC and am now back in there for hours every day, preparing videos for my art classes, finishing commissions, working on illustrations, and getting started on a new series of personal paintings on wooden boards - as much as I love the texture of canvas, I want to experiment with smooth surfaces.

Two kinds of light

 

 

"...[T]he light behind the figures seems almost the subject of the painting, rather than the figures themselves, and there's quite a melancholy feeling about that, that the light will actually outlast the figures." (Celia Paul on Goya, from "A Conversation with Celia Paul" by The Huntington on Youtube)

“The most valuable thing we can do for the psyche, occasionally, is to let it rest, wander, live in the changing light of a room, not try to be or do anything whatever.” May Sarton

 

// Light emerging //

The print of Francisco Goya's Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zúñiga (1787-88), also known as the "Red Boy", has been on our bathroom wall for the past year or so, and I love seeing it every day. It provokes a feeling similar to the visceral reaction I have to the figures in  Diego Velázquez's Las Meninas, and Celia Paul's words come close to describing it. The little boy died a few years after this portrait was painted, at the age of eight. 

Although this portrait was a commission, it reveals a tender touch and humanity that Goya's other sitters of nobility would not necessarily have been conferred with. There are various interpretations of the symbolism Goya employed and the influence of both Enlightenment and Romanticism that can be found in his work from this phase. Some argue that the portrait contrasts the innocence of childhood with the evils of the world - the latter represented by the animals in their slightly disturbing configuration: the magpie on a leash; the expression on the cats' faces; the caged finches. However, the animals may also simply have been included as the boy's beloved pets, and perhaps as a supporting cast to the ephemeral nature of youth captured in Manuel's features.

Above all, it is the spectral light that keeps haunting me (also one of the reasons I love Celia Paul's work so much). And although nobody could have foreseen the child's fate, the portrait seems strangely prescient: the lost look on his face set against the opulence of his clothing is poignant, and he appears almost as a ghost, his family's nobility and wealth no guarantee against an early demise.

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// Wandering light //

The low winter sun has been throwing unexpected patches of light on the surfaces of the rooms, triggering glints on gold frames and other shiny objects, and one morning I caught a moment when its brightness highlighted the diffuse light I had painted on the horizon of a seascape. When I photographed the Red Boy, the window beside the print caused dots of light to appear around it. Observing the movement of light has become a meditation in itself and a starting point for extended daydreaming.

 

Silence and Quiet (and kale)

 

 

Some snapshots from the last few months:

1  |  The perfect book pair. I had been meaning to read Susan Cain's Quiet. The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking ever since its publication spawned myriad articles, talks and interviews. This summer I finally bought it in a small independent bookshop in West Cork (sometimes it is nice to wait for serendipity - I will always remember where I got this book). It has helped me focus on the positive sides of my (often extreme) introversion instead of beating myself up for the downsides, of which there are many: to name just one example, in my thirties I still have a phone phobia that means I have to settle and prepare myself in a quiet room to ring places such as the dental surgery, and I will shake when making those calls.
My sister-in-law gave me explorer Erling Kagge's book Silence in the Age of Noise, and I read his philosophical vignettes parallel to Quiet. 

2  |   Light-and-shadow patterns in the living room

3  |  Kale is officially this year's polytunnel star - it has been thriving. I add it to nearly every meal I make and we have been giving a lot away, yet I still cannot keep up.
Cut off in the corner of this photo is my paperback of The Dutch House by Ann Patchett, another book that had been on my list for a while and that also 'came to me' when I was browsing that new-to-me bookshop on holiday. I had given my mum a hardcover copy a year earlier. Patchett is one of my favourite writers, and this may well be my favourite novel of hers - it also fit perfectly with my ongoing preoccupation with the symbolism of houses (I still have strange dreams about my childhood home). I love the story behind the painting on the cover: Patchett commissioned an artist friend, Noah Saterstrom, to paint one of the main characters for the book jacket, and the mesmerising portrait has taken on a life of its own.
Speaking of paintings, I only realised after I had taken the photo of the kale bouquet that John is in it twice - on the couch in the background and in the painting on the wall, both in profile and in the same shirt!

4  |  More light at play. An (indoor) plant that hasn't been thriving is the money plant a friend and former housemate gave me over ten years ago when she moved out. It is down to a stump, with some struggling tiny green leaves that I won't give up on. I am fairly certain that where we put it is not the correct location according to Feng Shui, but refuse to worry about what this might signify. But the citrus trees are doing well, thanks to John's green fingers and my nephew's diligent watering (it is one of the first things he will check whenever he visits - he loves refilling the drip-watering glass bird planters). 

We have the late Tim Robinson's Burren map in the living room (from where we can look out across the bay at the Burren) and his Aran Islands map in the guest room.

In the studio

 

 

Just a few glimpses of my studio/office (a spare room in our house), where I am spending even more time now that I am also teaching remotely:

 1  |  I have four of these bamboo picture ledges in two rows on one wall, with finished canvases and paintings that are drying. On the wall opposite I put this one up behind my desk to keep pencils, pens, small brushes and other supplies I use frequently within reach, but where they don't clutter up my desk. This is currently the backdrop for the majority of my video calls and classes.

2  |  One of these skinny drawers (which are great for storing work on paper) holds an antique letterpress tray I got John as a gift, with the type pieces he had bought. We use these to make cards and similar and are going to create the text for our next picture book with them. The plan is to get a glass lid made for the tray and put it on a frame with legs, so it can be used as a side table, but for now it is stored away in this drawer.

3  |  I have a couple of desk easels for smaller canvases and one standing easel. I try to paint standing at the large easel as much as possible, and the desk easels are great for displaying work-in-progress, as I tend to have several paintings on the go at any one time and like being able to have them all in view.

4  |  For oil paintings I mainly use water-mixable oils, for environmental reasons and so I don't have to breathe in turpentine fumes and other toxic solvents. Cleaning up is much easier with these, too. I bought a Dyson purifying fan heater (with a cooling function and a detailed analysis of potential pollutants) a few months ago, as I was worried about the air quality in the room, but it tells me everything is in the green range, so that is reassuring. We also had the house tested for radon after I was diagnosed with lung cancer as a young non-smoker. I try not to worry too much about all the external factors that may contribute to cancer, and some, such as electromagnetic radiation, are beyond my control to a large extent, but it gives me peace of mind to have these tests done. 

5  |  Marion Milner's books have their own shelf (most of my art books are kept in this room). I have started using my ink pen (not pictured) and bottled ink more again. The beautiful glass pen was a present from my aunt - I had kept it at my mum's house for years and finally took it with me after my last visit. 

6. We have plants in every room of the house and I am trying to keep these two happy. The vegetation in the self-portrait is a field with thistles close to my childhood home in Germany.

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The window is to the right of my desk and I can see a large part of the garden, including our three new hens and one of our bird feeders. There is a white horse in the field across the road, which offers some consolation in the wake of the departure of 'our' beloved donkeys that used to come to the wall in our back garden. They must have been moved to a different field, as that land was sold recently. We miss them a lot.

I have rituals around working from home that I have been using for years to mark some sort of division between work and home life (though the lines are blurred), but now they have taken on extra significance. At the moment I am recording videos for some of my classes, and I plan my outfits, jewellery and nail polish for those, whereas on days nobody will see me I put on my large painting jumper or apron (I am looking into sustainable boiler suits and dungarees for more coverage, even though I am not that messy a painter, but I still manage to get stains on unlikely areas of my clothes).

In any case I attempt to generate a 'going to work' feeling by getting ready as if I were leaving the house. This also involves a few morning routine clichés such as meditation, a yoga sequence, making celery juice and writing my morning pages. I air the room for a few minutes and clap to clear stagnant energy, and I mix essential oils for the diffuser that are stimulating and help with concentration or create an uplifting atmosphere, so a lot of peppermint, rosemary, clary sage, geranium, lemon, orange and lemongrass. There are endless mugs of (mostly herbal) tea and some of them get spoiled by accidentally dipping my brush in them, but I try not to eat in this room (as I want to eat mindfully - nothing to do with weight control; I am trying to put on weight!), though snacks will find their way in here.

I have my laughing Buddha on a bookshelf to the left of my desk and a stuffed elephant my younger sister made for me on my desk for a similar reason (or up on a shelf when I am recording videos for children and the elephant represents my audience - this was a tip we were given) - it keeps me in touch with my inner child and the playful side of life and is a reminder not to take anything too seriously.

Portraits

I have been painting and drawing a lot of people and animals, especially portraits of family and friends. If anyone is interested, I posted some work-in-progress photos of two of the paintings above on my long-neglected art blog (though the plan is to merge the two blogs in an effort to simplify). At one point I had all my nephews keeping me company in the studio, albeit in 2-D!

While I sometimes have people sit for me, the examples shown here were all based on photographs and screenshots of paused videos - the latter works very well, as I can choose the 'pose' from a much wider range. I tend to start out with a very rough sketch and let the face emerge gradually.

In Enda's portrait (third picture above - when he was one year old and pre-haircut, for those who know him only with short hair) he is wearing a soft knitted top my sister had made for him that is tied at the back with a ribbon. I loved painting the stocking stitch and the ribbon and the light in his hair. With Henry (fourth picture) it was the oval of the snap fastener on his little shoulder that caught my attention - sometimes it is those small details that I find particularly poignant.

Love, compassion, light: Celia Paul's Self-Portrait

This memoir by the artist Celia Paul has accompanied me for the last few months, moving from bedside table to coffee table to dining table to my desk in the studio. I read it almost in one go, but I have been going back over certain passages and revisiting the reproductions of her work and the photographs.

While substantial parts of the book are about Lucian Freud (another artist whose work I admire - Celia Paul was one of his lovers and muses and they had a son together), she emphasises that he is made part of her story instead of the other way around, "as is usually the case".

I was more intrigued by her relationship with her family and her mother in particular and the work that arose (and continues to arise) from those family bonds. Her paintings of her mother and of her sisters are very moving and tender. Paul does not consider herself a portrait painter, but rather an "autobiographer and chronicler" of her life and her family, telling their story in images.

The memoir charts finding her own voice as an artist and breaking away from the role of the muse. So many artist couples have played out the dynamic of the woman making sacrifices that enable their partner to thrive. Paul shares a lot of insight into the challenges and obstacles to becoming an artist that women face and offers up her experience of working out "a strategy" to carve out the solitude that is essential for making art. This involves not living with her husband, as she needs to have her own private space*. She also talks about the conflict between motherhood and artistic creation, how being with her son makes her unable to work, as "all my concerns are for him" when he is present, and how she feels the guilt and separation acutely.

This interview includes interesting observations about Paul's connection to other artists (I love her voice; she emanates such calm and poise). She feels "this moral quality to Constable, this kind of love and compassion that comes through...", informed by familiarity with the subject matter: "you can't do anything unless you understand it".  As she writes in her memoir,

"I only ever work from people and places that I know well. This insider knowledge gives me freedom to take liberties with the forms and structures of the faces and figures, the clouds, the waves, the houses. [...] If I know my subject well, it's almost as if I don't need to look at them in order to give them intense attention, and yet I need their physical presence."

(Paul, Celia: Self-Portrait, Jonathan Cape, London 2019, p.3)

This is what gives her paintings their intimate and empathic quality. Even in reproductions in print or on the screen the spectral light in her paintings is powerfully conveyed - her work contains a "juxtaposition of the mystical with direct observation" (p.5). Her mother would regularly travel to London from Cambridge, climb the 80 steps to Paul's flat and pose for long periods of time, during which both artist and sitter would enter into a meditative, elevated state. Paul often uses spiritual language to describe the process of painting people, and her sisters and husband also give their perspective of what it is like to sit for her, by all accounts a transcendental experience.

In the interview the curator asks her about the evanescence of her seascapes and Paul reveals that she only really started working from water after her mother's death, when "forms broke up, nothing seemed permanent. So my subject seemed to be water, in a new way." She also talks about her "struggle between dark and light", with the light always emerging from the darkness, and the influence of Goya, how the light behind the figures in his family group paintings seems to be the subject of the painting, and how there is a "melancholy feeling about that, that the light will actually outlast the figures".

The language in the book is often sparse, and this minimalism, coupled with clear-eyed honesty, carries an even stronger emotional impact. There is one passage, when describing her mother's childhood, that relates a tragedy her mother was witness to and haunted by, and it is something I haven't been able to get out of my head.

Gwen John was another inspiration that is apparent in the two paintings above and below, in the containment and stillness of the self-portraits (John is also another example of a female artist having an all-consuming affair with an older male artist - Auguste Rodin. It appears Freud expected a similar subservience from Paul).

The book is also a meditation on the intersection between the written word and visual art. Paul says writing the memoir - she had not written much previously, apart from early diary entries and poems, and found 'freedom of speech' in painting instead - has affected her art: "I feel a new assurance in my painting, through a growing confidence about using words again."(p.5)

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* Her husband Steven Kupfer wrote this essay about Celia Paul's art: "Celia Paul - Painting her Life"

On scanxiety

Photo taken in Italy last year - my first swim in the sea since my diagnosis

the marks on my back after a session on my 'bed of nails'

"All patients have complicated relationships with their scans [...]. We first learn we have cancer from scans, then learn from them if that cancer has shrunk or disappeared, then learn if it has come back. Scans are like revolving doors, emotional roulette wheels that spin us around for a few days and spit us out the other side. Land on red, we're in for another trip to Cancerland; land on black, we have a few more months of freedom." - Bruce Feiler

I am so relieved that I have 'a few more months of freedom' before my next appointment.

Cancer - or rather my own cancer - hadn't been on my mind that much until the scan date approached. Other things, both in the world at large and my personal life, have been taking up a lot of my mental energy, and when I veer towards fear I ground myself in activities I love, such as painting and reading. My cancer-related thoughts are mainly with people I know who are facing tough decisions or are running out of options. Right now I am lucky.

And yet, knowing too much about my diagnosis, the awareness of the high risk of a recurrence is always at the back of my mind. My therapist once said that any fears we have as humans, when peeled back, ultimately reveal a fear of death. And scanxiety is pretty close to that original fear.

While I was calm overall, the week between the scan and getting the results I felt the familiar tension, and since the scan the fatigue has been acting up.

 

The scans that fall into June are also a painful reminder of what could have been, as my due date was June 30, 2018 - instead, around that time I found myself at my lowest during chemoradiation for the inoperable lung cancer I had been diagnosed with as a fit 34-year old non-smoker (I did have surgery as well, but it is not the standard protocol for the type of stage III the cancer was). I was propped up on our daybed, unable to move and with excruciating side effects that many people would find TMI.

 

In December 2017, after a week of bleeding, I had braced myself for the 12-week scan at the gynaecologist's, willing the image to show growth. Fast-forward to my regular oncology scans, and it is the opposite - staring at different black-and-white images at appointments during treatment, looking for shrinkage and disintegration; the fear when the lymph nodes didn't respond as hoped; and now, post-treatment, always wishing for a 'nothing'. And repeatedly having to confirm I am definitely not pregnant each time so I can have the CT scans.

But all of that is a small price to pay for being able to live a fairly normal life, or a 'new normal' post-cancer life. 

Something that isn't talked about that often is how scanxiety also affects those close to the patient. In fact, it can be worse for family members or spouses. My deepest worries are about how my diagnosis affects John and my family, though I try not to entertain the spiralling thoughts about what might happen. And I am no stranger to what it is like for close relatives - my dad died of cancer and my mum was diagnosed after me. The feeling of helplessness and the fear are definitely worse when it is somebody you love, and I am feeling both right now, as my mum has to have a biopsy because her last check-up didn't go as we had hoped, so there is more waiting.

These days I am frequently reminded of 'lifeshocks' - they keep coming. 

My coping mechanisms include my usual rituals and this time especially the return to sea-swimming and my new 'bed of nails', aka an acupressure mat, a birthday present from John, who knew I wanted one. I sometimes do yoga nidra while on the mat and often fall asleep on it.

Creativity is another tool, and Julia Barnickle's wise words soothed me when I felt overwhelmed. This is what she has to say about scanxiety and anxiety in general - I aspire to her serenity. She also uses the exercises from The Artist's Way and believes creativity to be an important part of her healing.

I read an interview with an actress whose brother had died, and she talked about how around the same time work got very busy for her and the shock gave her a surge in energy. Looking back over shocks big and small I find that to have been true for me at certain points - trauma often paralyses you, but sometimes it can fuel your creativity and productivity.

Speaking of creativity, I am grateful for all the commissions coming my way and am donating half of the money from art sales since my return to work to charities and to our local cancer centre, which has been a great support for the last two years.  

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Here is another article on scanxiety, including tips on how to cope with it.

Also, it would be lying by omission if I didn't admit that sometimes the only thing that works to pause the thoughts is binge-watching a series (most recently Self-Made).