Dark Blue Square

 

St Ives remains with me even now I’ve returned to the urban hub of Stockwell – the hard beauty of the landscape matched by the clarity of the artists who depicted it. So with the landscape still very present, I was saddened to read of the passing on Sunday of Breon O’Casey, one of the last of the generation of St Ives artists apprenticed to Hepworth at Trewyn. It is of particular interest to me that O’Casey came from a literary background – his father was the playwright Sean O’Casey, a contemporary of Yeats. It is perhaps too easy then to say that his paintings have the feeling of small moments arrested in time: birds captured mid-flight, landscapes reduced to the elemental (a field in spring, a group of circles resembling a cairn or pagan stones, a constellation suspended in a night time sky). There is the exuberance of the French painters he loved, Braque and Matisse, but in the restrained and earthy palette of the Penwith School.

It was only a few months ago that I went to a show of his work at Somerset House. I didn’t actually know it was on; I’d just come from the Courtauld where there was a show of Cezanne’s sketches for The Card Players (an interesting transition, as it happens). It was a bleak winter day, flat grey and featureless; the sort of day you get in London in January and February, when one day blends into the next and seems to go on forever, and you are just waiting for a small sign of spring. And O’Casey cheered me, with his simple birds and flat squares of pure colour – the sort of painting that looks simple enough (well, maybe to those who can’t paint) but which is pared down and spare and studied, like a poem by Charles Simic. Difficult to accomplish without being twee or shallow. But O’Casey’s work is resonant, meaningful.

Take for example this painting, one of his many stylised depictions of birds, the title of which is Dark Blue Square. In that title there is a statement about proportion, measurement; I think of the way the sky is viewed from the ground, slivered between buildings or trees. It is a portion of sky, like the painter’s own patch. But then it appears in the bottom left of the picture, not at the top as we’d expect, so maybe our bird is swooping over a lake or reservoir. There is a paler shade of blue just touching its body – a shadow, a memory of light. The two brown columns that hold it are like tree trunks, or legs. A simple juxtaposition of shapes and colours, the colours simplified to brown, white, blue. But it’s the blue O’Casey wants us to focus on, bright and vital against the dark brown, the bird just passing through.

It’s like the last soldiers of the Great War, all those artists of that generation passing. They brought us modernism, which might feel like old hat now, but they were pioneers then (with Hepworth cracking the whip). And the work still feels valid and exciting.

Measuring the Universe

 

As I walked through the galleries at Tate St Ives on a sultry Friday evening last week (beginning in a room of stunning Gabo constructions) it seemed to me that the artists assembled were concerned in various ways with measurement: of distances, of shapes and forms, of human scale, of volume and air, of experience.

How does a person walk through an enclosed space, from one end of a room to another?  It’s just something you do, naturally, instinctively, one foot in front of the other, without thinking about it. In Martin Creed’s installation, Half the air in a given space, he has filled half the volume of the Tate’s curved gallery with white balloons, like cartoon clouds. The visitor is invited to move through them; it was surprising how resilient, how hard they were, every now and then, one yielding to enough pressure to burst. You had to fight your way through a solid, rubbery mass, your steps slowed, as you poked and kicked them into submission – the brilliant plot of some demented clown. When I was finally released at the other end of the gallery through a glass door, one or two balloons escaping in my wake, I smelled of rubber, like something slick and strange and my hair was standing on end.  But what I thought of was breath, the breath of a person walking, the breath of effort, the breathlessness of blowing up thousands and thousands of balloons (ok, I concede they would have used a machine for that). Charles Olson said that a poem represents certain laws and possibilities of breath, of the breathing of the man who writes as well as his listenings. In the gallery, muffled by those rubber cushions, all I could hear was the sound of myself breathing (as well as the sounds of fellow balloon-strugglers laughing and trying to find each other in the depths).  

The gallery above contained Lucio Fontana’s canvases and structures, slashed and shot full of holes, as if the artist was hell-bent on destroying whatever perfection he might create— although Fontana did not consider his holes, his interruptions, to be a form of destruction. A hole is an intervention, something which disrupts, but not necessarily in a negative way. You want to touch it, to stick your finger in it. It suggests the hand of the artist, a bit of a joker, winking at the viewer. But the hole has (excuse the pun) deeper connotations. Jeanette Winterson, writing about Barbara Hepworth, said

Holes are also tunnels or worm-holes making a route through time … The hole is a way back and a way forward. The hole is also the space occupied by the air we are breathing now, by the sunlight that has taken eight minutes to reach us, and by the starlight that is two thousand years old. In the space inside, or rather through, the sculpture, time is both present and meaningless – and that is time’s true nature, it does and it does not exist …

Moving away from Fontana, I found myself in a room full of Margaret Mellis’s driftwood constructions; another way of looking at proportions, associations. Mellis trawled the shore for pieces of wood – the remains of larger structures; dissembled, worthless – and by bringing them together made something new. That’s what poets do too – find connections in what is seemingly random.  So I was particularly pleased to hear Telfer Stokes, Mellis’s son, quote her as saying that when she was able to make such connections, to see how a construction might come together, it was like reading a really good poem. Each construction is like a window framing multiple landscapes; the landscape of the beach where Mellis found the constituent parts, the landscape of the boat or crate or tool that once was whole (now ‘hole’), the new landscape she’s made from such simple means, and which means more than the sum of its parts. It is hard to say why they are so beautiful, so complex and compelling; maybe it has to do with all the hands that went into making things, things which were destroyed then constructed anew.

And to move from Mellis’s constructions to Agnes Martin’s bands of soft colour – almost non-colour; just shade, tone, light – on canvas made perfect sense. As Martin said, like crossing an empty beach to look at the ocean. And there it was, outside the gallery, just waiting for us …

http://www.tate.org.uk/stives/

The title of this post comes from an installation by Roman Ondák, which invites visitors to have their height measured and recorded on the gallery wall:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNiwsDnzFiw

The show Margaret Mellis – Structure and Colour is also showing at the Wills Lane Gallery during the Tate Summer season: www.willslanegallery.co.uk

True north

You know when you’ve been to a place and you come away with a particular image in your head of how it looked (often determined by what your camera chose to capture); with distance the picture becomes a bit grainy, and the longer you’re away, the more faded the image becomes. I have such an image of the Norwegian coast in winter, but the image is no longer mine alone. The visual memory of the journey I made about ten years ago from Bergen to Tromsø is now intertwined with the paintings of Ørnulf Opdahl, whose work I discovered not long after I’d returned from Norway. I remember seeing one of his paintings and thinking that although you could describe it as abstract, it was clear and true to that rugged and strange coastline. When I was on that trip, I tried several times to photograph the landscape, particularly in that weird winter light that dulls and lengthens everything. The camera could not do justice to the place; the landscape was too subtle and complicated, the colours too dense, to be preserved so easily. But in Opdahl’s paintings, that indeterminate grey-blue where sea and sky meet takes on a complexity – it is several colours at once, a colour you can’t describe.  

His new paintings (which we saw on Friday at Purdy Hicks) occasionally introduce slashes of yellow or red or green, little flashes of activity against a dark ground. But mostly the palette is reduced; to that strange grey, and many other shades of grey – slate, charcoal, tarnished silver, pearl, smoke – more kinds of grey than you thought existed, as well as startling white, pure black. He is a painter of winter, but not the bright and populated winter of Brueghel, this is the dark Scandinavian winter that reigns the land for months, drives people to drink. To Opdahl it is far more beautiful than spring, and more intense. And yet, Ørnulf is not a gloomy man; he is someone who can find light and hue even in the darkest night.

‘Light’ is very hard to describe in a poem (as is ‘dark’, which I discovered was the word I used the most – over 30 times – in my previous collection). It is too easy to revert to cliché, to dull the experience. This is when both cameras and poems fail – the first for being too exact, the second for not being exact enough. If you say ‘blue sky’ in a poem, it means nothing, not only because skies are always blue, but because ‘blue’ is not precise enough. You need to be a painter, a very good one, to do it properly.

The show is on until 4^th June, and will be up when Katy Evans-Bush and I launch our new books at Purdy Hicks on the 2^nd. See Katy’s blog Baroque in Hackney for another take on the Opdahl pv: http://baroqueinhackney.wordpress.com/2011/05/08/some-things-i-have-done/

Oslo in the mind

In a previous post I speculated about Oslo, a city I had yet to visit. Now that I have been, I can say that the buildings, as pictured in my guide book, were very much what I’d expected. The City Hall is very much like the City Hall in Stockholm, a severe red brick structure that is unadorned and unpretentious (and beautiful, in the way that Tate Modern is beautiful – utilitarian but perfectly balanced). And the palace looked like a palace, with a manicured park surrounding it. And even in the centre of the city you find vernacular houses painted in red and yellow – more at home in the country perhaps – settings for Ibsen plays and Munch interiors. Oh, I can see Norwegians wincing at the obvious clichés …

But cities are never quite what you expect before you actually set foot in them. What the guide books don’t show you are streets where there is nothing to see, just the places where people live, where they buy groceries or batteries, in other words, where nothing much happens. It is in these areas where you might speculate how your life would be different if this were your city. Walking around such neighbourhoods in a foreign city always reminds me of this passage from Paris by Julian Green (an Englishman in the French capital):

I shall always see Paris as the setting of a novel that will never be written. The times I have returned from long walks through ancient streets with my heart laden with all the inexpressible things I have seen! Is this an illusion? I think not. It happens frequently that, brought up short before, say, a large window draped with mock lace curtains, tucked away in one of the old quarters, I embark on an interminable fancy about the unknown destinies unfolding beyond its dark panes. My eye makes out a little bunch of flowers, which will change or disappear with the seasons, set in the middle of a table covered with it dark cloth; that is all, yet it may be enough. Who lives in that room? Who is dying between those four walls? In the novelist’s eyes every life, even the humblest, possesses that itch of mystery, and there is something about the sum total of all the secrets contained in a city that he finds by turns stimulating and oppressive.

What I didn’t expect to find in Oslo was an edgier Oslo, a place where there is graffiti, where weeds spring up from vacant lots. Perhaps it is naive to think that Oslo should be any different from any other city. But in comparison to Stockholm or Helsinki, it feels smaller, shabbier. When I say “shabby” I am not being pejorative. I like cities that are a bit shabby (London has its fair share of shabby amidst the grand), that display signs of ordinary life. The centre of Washington DC, with its perfect, pristine monuments (and homeless men sleeping in the shadows of those monuments) is one of the most depressing cities I have visited.

But although I enjoyed my wanderings, I failed on two counts. Firstly, I have come back without seeing ‘The Scream’, the most famous Norwegian painting by the most famous Norwegian artist. How is this possible, for a tourist like myself whose priority destinations in every city I visit are the main art gallery and the cemetery? The answer is that the Nasjonalmuseet happened to be closed this past Sunday, 1^st May, a public holiday. The idea of a public holiday on a Sunday is bizarre to me (and to the other bewildered tourists climbing the steps of the museum, scratching their heads, then shuffling off towards Tourist Information). I console myself by thinking that maybe ‘The Scream’ would have been like the ‘Mona Lisa’: disappointing in the flesh, too ubiquitous to still be powerful.  I did manage to visit the great man’s grave, adorned with his bust; it reminded me of my favourite self-portrait of him, moody and handsome, surrounded by a cloud of cigarette smoke.

I also failed to find any English translations of current Norwegian poetry. A very helpful bookseller in Tanum told me he thought there had been a bilingual anthology which is now out of print. So I have poets in translation from all the other Scandinavian countries, but not Norway. There was a beautiful series of little pamphlets in the bookshop, some with CDs of the poets reading; all very tantalising, and the Norwegian looks beautiful simply as a printed language, but perhaps I’ll wait for the next translation to come along …

So in the absence of Munch and any Norwegian poetry in English translation, I leave you with this installation by the Oslo-based artist Jon Gundersen, which is called Water on the Way to the Sea (Vann på vei mot havet). It sums up what Oslo felt like for me; a city on  the water, on the edge of the country. Gundersen picked up these battered kettles and coffee pots in flea markets, and so the whole installation has the feel of something that’s been assembled from simple means, but which adds up to a beautiful and moving statement.

The book beautiful

There are too many books in my house. I know this, as I walk into rooms where they are stacked in neat(ish) piles on the floor, but it doesn’t stop me from acquiring more, and more. ‘Books do furnish a room,’ as Anthony Powell said. I do not (yet) possess a Kindle – but I am not against them. Anything that makes knowledge portable and easy is a good thing. But nothing will replace the feel of a book for me – the heft, the scent, the flick of its pages. There are books I love simply because they are beautiful; their words are important too, but sometimes it is enough just to turn the pages and feel their texture, the bite of the type, the glossy cover.

I grew up in a house full of books; my father, who was a publisher, taught me to appreciate hand-stitched bindings, the heady scent of paper and leather. His library had a particular musty smell that I can still conjure up from my childhood sanctuary within its cool walls. There were certain books I wasn’t allowed to read (I remember a book by Havelock Ellis on sexual deviation was a particular favourite) and books I didn’t understand, but the excitement of all those words, all those things one could know, kept me enthralled for hours.

My father’s library is the reason I am a writer. I thought there could be no higher achievement than to be an author, someone who had something to say, and readers to receive his / her words. I have never stopped thinking that. And so, a few hours ago, when I took receipt of a package, although the contents were known to me before I opened it, there was still a little prickle of excitement. I have had this experience before, but each time I open a package containing a book I have written, it is the first time all over again. It never ceases to be surprising – here is an object that in some way I am responsible for, but which now has a presence of its own. Yes, my book, my name on the cover, but a book destined for other libraries in other places, where there will be readers I don’t know taking in my words.

This might sound egotistical; I don’t mean it to be. Although I don’t exactly believe in the “death” of the author, I feel he / she recedes as books make their way in the world, and readers make their own sense of what they find in them. All the books I love have authors (some long dead) that speak to me when their pages are turned, but what I make of them might not always be exactly what that author intended. As it should be. And maybe that transference from author to reader is no different if the text is electronically generated than it is printed in the pages of a book. But the book somehow makes it official – in this case the physical manifestation of three years of thinking, and writing, and rewriting, and despairing, and then writing some more. And it is a wonderful feeling to hold this book in my hand.