Solid air

Rodin said: 

There are unknown forces in nature; when we give ourselves wholly to her, without reserve, she lends them to us; she shows us these forms, which our watching eyes do not see, which our intelligence does not understand or suspect.

Peter Randall-Page's work feels ‘unmade’; strange organic shapes mimicking pods and seeds. The pieces on display at the Jerwood Space are sculpted from rare  Rossa Luna marble, which is cool and smooth, multi-hued, from pale beige to bruised purple. Like dark planets.

Down the road on Hopton Street, behind the gates of the 18th century almshouses, two pocked, charcoal-dark forms frame the path; as if they have landed there from nowhere, as if they have been there forever. We saw them in twilight, which lended them added mystery. The wall pieces next door at Purdy Hicks resemble Indian vegetable prints or recent aboriginal art. The rust-red clays reminded me that autumn is truly upon us.

http://www.jerwoodgallery.org/news/jerwood-news/peter-randallpage-jerwood-space

http://www.purdyhicks.com/exhibitionsept2010.php

Taking the strain

At his reading in London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall last night, Seamus Heaney said that it is a poet’s task to ‘take the strain’: to locate the musical phrases of the poem but also to accept (and record) the traumas and stresses of life. It reminded me of another line of his: 'the music of what happens’. The title of his new book, 'Human Chain’ summarises another duality: we are human, we cannot escape our destinies or the passage of time, we are bound to each other (for better or worse), there will be wars and deaths which are inevitable (all part of the 'chain’ of events).

This is the poem he read as an encore (the audience wouldn’t let him leave), the final poem in his 1995 collection 'The Spirit Level’. It is one of my favourite Heaney poems, which in the end is about the poet’s vain efforts to 'capture’ the scene, which will always 'catch the heart offguard’.

And yes, I know, there are swans in this poem …

Postscript

And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you’ll park and capture it
More thoroughly.  You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

Prunella Clough, part two

Here is a poem about Prunella Clough’s work. The title is a phrase from an article by Margaret Drabble which appeared recently in Tate Magazine. It perfectly describes the emotional tone of the paintings.


The Sadness of the Scrapyard

A plastic arm, tiny fingers grasping
nothing. One shoe, the other
long missing. No attachments

in this corrugated space,
this ochre mound of loss
where things shed their colours.

To love the scraggy ends
is to love everything;
our heaven’s a slab of ruin,

broken glass and scrap
piercing skin, heralding
rusty blood, cloudy courage.

What is hard we’ll soften
with our shapes, what we see
indefinable in the heap

but still something gleams
even when all around us
is asleep.

Prunella Clough, the poet's painter?

I’ve been wondering why Prunella Clough isn’t more famous, or at least as famous as some of her male contemporaries, such as John Piper and Frank Auerbach. Is it because she was a woman? Her subject matter was anything but ‘feminine’: dockyards and quarries, building sites and scrap yards. Like Auerbach, she painted the post-war industrial wastelands of Britain and was fascinated by their by-products: corrugated metal, concrete, tangled wire. But these were never figurative representations like the American murals of the WPA artists a generation before. David Sylvester wrote of her work: 'the subjects are those of a social realist; the paintings are private and abstract.’ It’s as if these disused spaces became a way of expressing something internal; although many of the late landscapes were emptied of people, they were always places where human industry had once occurred. And although she had a life-long attraction to East Anglia, she was essentially an urban painter, a London painter, trawling unloved corners of Battersea and Wandsworth for inspiration. She was interested in patterns and forms, grids and blocks, which were almost always man-made, but also accidental in the wearing down or tearing up of things.

This interest in pattern and form is what should attract poets to her. There are certain painters who are beloved of poets, such as Bonnard and Hopper and Rothko. Perhaps Clough’s work is too spiky, too mysterious in comparison, not beautiful enough? But I would argue that she is able to transform the drab and common into something miraculous (isn’t that what poets do too?). She is attempting to get us to look more closely, to observe with our eyes and minds. And she often recorded the experience of 'looking’ initially in words rather than sketches before embarking on a painting; she made notes on all her paintings, right down to colour combinations and ideas for what she wished to achieve. She did write poetry – I have no idea if any of her poems are in print – but I can imagine they are small but full of intricate detail.

Frances Spalding’s book on Clough is due to be published early next year. Can’t wait …