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.

 

Books: Journal of a Solitude by May Sarton

 

 

 

 

“Whatever peace I know rests in the natural world, in feeling myself a part of it, even in a small way.”   (Sarton, May: Journal of a Solitude, W.W Norton & Company, New York 1992, p.16)

"There is nothing to be done but go ahead with life moment by moment and hour by hour - put out birdseed, tidy the rooms, try to create order and peace around me even if I cannot achieve it inside me. [...] And here in my study the sunlight is that autumn white, so clear, it calls for an inward act to match it... clarify, clarify." (ibid., p.33)

Best known for her poetry, this is one of the journals May Sarton published, of a year in her life in the early 1970s when she was approaching sixty and living on her own in New Hampshire. It is a beautifully written account of life in solitude, her inner world, her connection to nature, the changing seasons, her love of gardening and animals, her writing process, ageing, depression and the meaning of home.

Sarton is honest about her flaws, such as anger and being difficult, but her self-criticism is tempered by compassion and serenity. She writes movingly about the redemption (and the restrictions) of  friendship and love, and her journal includes reflections on politics, race, feminism and literature and extracts of her correspondence and from other writers’ works.

I love her descriptions of simple pleasures and how she imbues everything with a sense of wonder. I am obsessed with observing the changing light around the house and the pattern it forms and was delighted to see Sarton detail this play of light and shadow in a lot of her entries. She also creates a vivid picture of the various ways she brings nature into her home - each of those still lifes is seen through her poet eyes. 

As I mentioned here before, the theme of home has been a big one over the past year, and so many of the books I read in 2020 happened to have the houses we live in and the homes we leave or lose as well as those we create for ourselves as a central theme, or perhaps I was more attuned to it in the year my childhood home was transformed and I wasn't able to visit my family. And of course I have spent most of the past ten months at home, and the fabric of the house (with all its issues!) has become interwoven with nearly everything I do.

Journal of a Solitude is the perfect read for level 5 restrictions / stormy weather / any time, especially for introverts. I read this over a stormy couple of days during one of the lockdowns and wanted to re-read it straight away – it is one of those books that you want to revisit and that reveals more layers each time. 

 

Books: On Chapel Sands by Laura Cumming

"The Misses Williamson inspired in her the gift of transforming the everyday that has enriched my whole life." Cumming, Laura: On Chapel Sands, Chatto & Windus, London 2019, p.145*

Laura Cumming writes about art like no other critic and with great sensitivity and empathy towards her subjects, evoking the life behind the work. Her books on self-portraits and Velázquez were both outstanding, and her most recent, a memoir about her mother and thus a deeply personal project, is no exception - I read it in April and still think about it almost every day.

The photograph shown in the last image above is reproduced early on in the book and then again at the very end, with a revelation that moved me to tears (not the only time while reading this book) and that has been hinted at in some articles and reviews, but I don't want to include any spoilers here.

Cumming's art critic's eye is evident throughout and she brings alive the art of famous artists (Bruegel's "Fall of Icarus" is central to the book) as well as artworks by her relatives, some acknowledged and celebrated during their lifetime - her father's, who died prematurely of cancer -, others hidden and only freed from obscurity through this labour of love - the photograph that looks like a Vermeer painting, taken by her grandfather, a "travelling salesman who would like to have been an artist", with dreams unfulfilled and buried. Her mother was a gifted artist who gave up painting when she got married, as she felt there "was only room for one painter", but she took up weaving instead, painting compositions with wool.

Cumming unravels her mother's life and the secrets around her disappearance as a young child (when she was abducted from the beach) with the help of images, constructing a biography via the interpretation of pictures both real - photographs, paintings - and those formed in the mind. She also quotes passages from her mother's own memoir, which like her daughter's is beautifully written and was a birthday gift to Laura. The book is suffused with her mother's artistic sensibility and ability to "transform the everyday".

I don't write detailed book reviews here, and I am hesitant to sum up the content. I noticed that a lot of the marketing centered on the kidnapping, a sensationalist approach that is misleading and does the book a disservice. While the book does relate a real-life mystery, there are so many layers to it: It is about family and memory, community and the individual, the psychology of identity and consciousness, art, the power of images and objects, silence and lies, class, the sea, and most importantly, about love in its many forms. It is a delicate and intimate piece of life writing and an exquisite meditation on loss.

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*The US title is Five Days Gone: The Mystery of My Mother's Disappearance as a Child

See also: Laura Cumming talks about On Chapel Sands in this interview in The New York Times

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"

Birthday, houses and home

From Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold (we sometimes put on subtitles in German if available, as John is learning it, or French or Spanish, as a brush-up exercise, but I put on English subtitles when I rewatched some of this, as there were so many quotes that I wanted to see in writing in addition to hearing the voice; it can add a layer of something I can't quite put my finger on)

‘I realised [the novel Play It as It Lays] was about anticipating Quintana was growing up. I was anticipating separation. […] I was actually working through that separation ahead of time. So novels are also about things you’re afraid you can’t deal with. In that sense that a novel is a cautionary tale, if you tell the story and work it out all right, then it won’t happen to you.’

Joan Didion, in Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold

What I paint and what I read and think about and feel, and things that come into my life without my prompting them, seem to constantly interweave in astonishing - or perhaps expected - synchronicity.

It was my birthday yesterday, and talking to my mentor and friend Margie, the themes of home and rebirth and becoming through coming home to ourselves came up. I am working on the painting above, which was also born (excuse the pun) out of conversations with Margie and inner child work (my younger sister had recommended the book by Stefanie Stahl, which is about accepting our ‘shadow child’ and thus freeing our ‘sunshine child’) and may call it 'Birthday' (also as a nod to one of my favourite paintings). 

Margie had asked me a while ago whether I had something symbolic that could represent the child in me, and while I searched I kept thinking of a blurry sepia photo of me on a beach that I had saved when my sister sent me a digital copy of it and that I had been meaning to use as the starting point for a painting. 

The book I mentioned in my last post, On Chapel Sands, starts with a girl – the author’s mother - disappearing from a beach, and the memoir is about where we come from, among other things. And incidentally, I just started swimming in the sea again last week.

The house my sisters and I spent the best part of our childhood in is being transformed into a home for my younger sister and her family, with an integrated apartment for our mum. I am so glad they will be under the same roof (the guilt of having left my tribe and moved to another country remains), but there must be something potent in the symbolism of the dismantling and rebuilding, as a lot of my dreams these last few weeks have been about home and a nostalgia for my childhood. Not being able to go to Germany at the moment comes into it as well, no doubt. There is a walk John and I like to go on here that, even though it is at the edge of wild dramatic windswept Connemara, has a softness that reminds me of the fields and ditches surrounding our village at home.

In a sense a lot of art is ultimately about the journey home; it is one of those archetypal themes that underpin pretty much everything. Yet I am still struck by how it is such a dominant thread in my reading and painting at the moment. 

John gave me the recently published Lives of Houses, a collection of essays about the physical homes of various artists, literary figures, composers, politicians, etc. and how they shaped their lives and work. And I bought (and have read the first few pages - then I put it away, as my currently-reading pile is about to topple) Elizabeth-Jane Burnett's The Grassling, about place and landscape, memory and grief. It also includes wild swimming.

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We watched two excellent documentaries that are available on Netflix at the moment. Becoming, about Michelle Obama’s memoir of the same title, which also has some moving scenes of her revisiting her childhood home and reminiscing about her late father, and Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold, a portrait of the iconic writer, created by her nephew. 

I realised recently that I had quite the collection of literary works dealing with grief and packed away some of them to donate, but I still have Didion’s exceptional memoirs about the deaths of her husband and daughter, The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights, and I want to reread them after watching the documentary.

A lot of my recommendations these days are the opposite of feel-good escapism*; between my choice of books and TV and the themes of my paintings (and the sea-swimming!), salt water is featuring heavily at the moment!

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* We are also watching After Life.

Biophilia

Homemade bird food - attempt #1, and a book on bees

'Barnabee', oil on canvas board (the model was already dead!)

"The effects of nature’s qualities on health are not only spiritual and emotional but physical and neurological. I have no doubt that they reflect deep changes in the brain’s physiology, and perhaps even its structure."

 Oliver Sacks, quoted in this Brain Pickings post

"When humans come into contact with benign soil bacteria such as Mycobacterium vaccae, proteins from its cell wall trigger a further release of serotonin from a specific group of nerve cells in our brains. So it seems that a bit of weeding can be good for more than just your herbaceous borders."

Mitchell, Emma: The Wild Remedy. How Nature Mends Us, 

Michael O'Mara Books Limited, London 2019, pp.9f.

I have always found weeding therapeutic (although sometimes it can lead to ruminating), but it was interesting to read the scientific explanation in Emma Mitchell's wonderful book about the medicinal effect of nature on her depression. Through that contact with soil, together with inhalation of the volatile compounds and oils of plants (which produce some of the same effects on the systems of the human body as on plants - protection from viruses and bacteria), the endorphins from exercise, and the release of serotonin via sunlight on our skin and the eye's retina, a simple walk in a green space yields numerous benefits from nature's pharmacy.

There was an interesting article in The Irish Times recently about reconnecting with nature that specifically mentioned fractals, the visually complex patterns found in nature. I cannot find it online, but it quoted physicist  Richard Taylor, who explained that "Your visual system is in some way hardwired to understand fractals, and the stress reduction [of being in nature] is triggered by a physiological resonance when the fractal structure of the eye matches that of the fractal image being viewed." In some of Joe Dispenza's newer guided meditations, he uses fractals for tuning into the energy centres of the body, and I am keen to get back into those, though they seem too advanced for this lapsed meditator (I have only been doing very short meditations in the last few weeks).

I know I will always feel better after spending some time outside, but some days I don't heed that call and self-sabotage instead. So I am grateful for friends who get me out even on my worst fatigue days. This morning I was on the couch as my body was aching all over (the now familiar aftermath of going to see my oncologist for results - thankfully they were good! And yet, for the first few days the relief and gratitude are mixed with utter exhaustion), and just as I was tempted to binge-watch Grace and Frankie at 9:30 in the morning my neighbour asked me whether I wanted to join her for a walk. And of course it helped.

A few weeks ago we were dog-sitting, and even though I had a flu-like cold and there were almost continuous storms, I managed to take the dog for walks. They were exhilarating. I would slowly crawl up the hill to the bog road at the end of our cul-de-sac while the dog kept running ahead and looping back. There was a puddle that had turned into a pond and was effectively blocking access to the grassy bog road. But I was wearing wellies and waded through it, and each time I would stop in the middle, feeling the cold of the water around my feet and legs and looking at the abundance of lichen on a tree which seemed to glow in the dim grey daylight, and I would temporarily be lifted out of whatever thoughts were going around in my head and feel immensely grateful for another day.

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My nephew and I made posh bird food recently - it involved coconut oil and organic pumpkin seeds. I won't link to the recipe, as it wasn't really a success (it didn't hold together when I cut it). We might try the recipe from Emma Mitchell's book Making Winter next. The bird balls we usually put in the feeders all come in plastic packaging (though admittedly I haven't done much research around it. There must be other options - we did spot fancy ones sold individually in a shop in Oughterard, but they wouldn't be feasible for the amount the birds in our garden get through in a week!), so I figured making our own would be a good idea.

We had looked into getting bees, but right now it feels like a lot to take on, so for now we are focusing on making our garden as bee-friendly as possible. My sister gave John this beautiful illustrated book on bees. A while ago I brought a dead bumblebee back to life on canvas and we hung the painting at a child-friendly height in our sitting room.

Books for wholeness | Author Sophie Sabbage

from The Cancer Whisperer by Sophie Sabbage

"The sorrow which has no vent in tears may make other organs weep."
Henry Maudsley

Back in November I posted a shorter version of the below on my social media accounts for Lung Cancer Awareness Month and have been meaning to include it here as well.

I want to start sharing some of the books I have found helpful in my recovery, a steady stream of books that seem to keep coming into my life each at the exact right time. I was going to put 'Books for healing' in the title, but these days I prefer the term 'wholeness' and putting the focus on (already) being whole and healed.  

Among these books are a couple that upon finishing leave you feeling almost complete and as though they had unlocked the secret to life, the universe, everything - years ago I felt that way when reading Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now, a book that seemed to make all other self-help books redundant. More recently books such as Michael A. Singer's The Untethered Soul and A Return to Love by Marianne Williamson have had this effect. And it has become clear that I need to read those kinds of spiritual texts on a daily basis, in order to fully absorb and consolidate the teachings, and that I enjoy reading 'variations on the same theme' by different writers and masters. 

There is a sub-section in this category: books that are specifically about cancer, though obviously go beyond that, and while I am a bit unsure as to how much I want to read about cancer - inevitably you come across statistics or other details pertaining to your own situation that you then try to erase from your mind - I still have a few of them.

One of those 'cancer' books is The Cancer Whisperer by Sophie Sabbage. She has stage IV of the same type of lung cancer that I was diagnosed with, but with a different mutation, and has miraculously overcome several rounds of brain metastases. Her book is part memoir, part self-help, part spiritual guide. She writes eloquently and beautifully, with wisdom and authenticity and a rawness that will resonate with anyone on a similar path. I can open it on any page and find something that will connect me to that inner source of strength we all have.

The book also acknowledges the role grief may play in lung disease. I was familiar with Traditional Chinese Medicine, and while it was a huge shock when I found out I had lung cancer, a part of me felt it made sense, as the lungs are the seat of grief in TCM and I had never worked through my grief following my dad's death from cancer when I was a teenager (he died within weeks of being diagnosed) and other trauma. Sophie has a lot to say about this topic. She gave a TedX talk about grief and loss in her exquisitely poetic style that implores us to express sorrow.

Hers is a book for anybody dealing with cancer (not just lung cancer) and their family and friends, and it would also be of value to people who are not affected by the disease. She wrote it not long after her 'terminal' diagnosis - an incredibly generous thing to do. I first got it from the library, but then bought my own copy, as I knew I would want to return to it again and again. Her other book, Lifeshocks, is also worth rereading. She continues to inspire me, and it is wonderful to see her thriving.