Poetry Thursday - a snippet of Shelley

John Caple, Midsummer Eve, 2019

One darkest glen
Sends from its woods of musk-rose, twined with jasmine
A soul-dissolving odour, to invite
to some more lovely mystery. Through the dell
Silence and twilight here, twin sisters, keep
Their noonday watch, and sail among the shades
Like vaporous shapes, half-seen …

From Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude, 1815
Percy Bysshe Shelley


Part of doing "Poetry Thursday" every week is waiting for the poem to appear. This one appeared in an online catalogue of paintings by John Caple for his upcoming exhibition "Silence and Twilight", inspired by this poem and by the poetry of Emily Dickinson.

Alastor has an epigraph, which relates nicely (I think) with Caple's paintings -

The epigraph to the poem is from St. Augustine's Confessions, III, i, written between 397 and 398 AD:

Nondum amabam, et amare amabam, quaerebam quid amarem, amans amare.

The English translation of the Latin is: "I was not yet in love, and I loved to be in love, I sought what I might love, in love with loving."

John Caple, Where I Have Lost I Softer Tread, 2019

Painted faces, close up

After looking long and hard at the Vuillard exhibition (a few of the 500 paintings he made of his mother), we turned to the permanent display at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, which has a little of everything, not overwhelming in size but a good survey of the history of painting. 

The light on the paint texture got me looking closely at how faces were painted ... here are a few from the 18th, 17th, 16th centuries. 

And here's the 19th century painting that got me looking, and paying attention to the informative text on the labels:

"the portrait is unfinished, especially its rapidly-improvised landscape"

ah yes, those brush marks

 The "boldly painted figure is resolved enough to demonstrate the impact Manet made as a provocative painter of modern life subjects" -

but "the boldly painted figure" is resolved

Comparing his use of provocative paint with that of Renoir's impressionist palette and techniques was what promoted the series of close-ups - 

Jameel Prize 5

A quick visit to the V&A to see the Jameel prize show (till 25 November). Worth £25,000, the prize is an international award for contemporary art and design inspired by Islamic tradition, awarded every two years.

It's spaciously displayed in the Porter Gallery, just off the front entrance, and there's a film introducing the finalists: Kamrooz Aram, Hayv Kahraman, Hala Kaiksow, Mehdi Moutashar, naqsh collective, Younes Rahmoun, Wardha Shabbir, and Marina Tabassum.

My favourite piece -

"House in Gaylani" by Hayv Kahraman

See examples of work by other finalists here.

And the winner? ... the first joint winners ... Mehdi Moutashar and Marina Tabassum.

Poetry Thursday - The Great Figure by William Carlos Williams

Charles Demuth, "I saw the figure 5 in gold", 1928 (via)

The Great Figure

Among the rain
and lights
I saw the figure 5
in gold
on a red
fire truck
moving
tense
unheeded
to gong clangs
siren howls
and wheels rumbling
through the dark city.

-- William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)

In 1920, William Carlos Williams scribbled this poem on a sheet of paper while he was walking in Manhattan - when a phrase came to mind, he would write it down on anything to hand, and some of his poems were born on prescription blanks and others written in a few minutes between seeing patients in his medical practice. "The Great Figure" inspired his friend Charles Demuth to paint The Figure Five in Gold in 1928. 

Later, Robert Indiana based a painting on Demuth's -

Robert Indiana, The Figure Five, 1963 (via)

Rachel Howard at Newport Street Gallery

The series, "Repetition is Truth - Via Dolorosa" includes 14 paintings, in parallel with the Stations of the Cross, and standing in front of each does make you pause. The colours are subtle, the content is abstracted, the finish is extraordinary. And the connection to violence, horror, atrocity isn't immediately obvious.

But the subject matter is based on a famous photograph, The Hooded Man - showing the torture of an Iraqui detainee at Abu Ghraib prison in 2004. 

Study, 2005

A small painting that started a large series

Walking between the paintings in the large rooms in the gallery is rather like visiting a cathedral...

Howard's method of creating these works involves a process stretched out over time. She uses household gloss paint, and allows it to sit in the can so that pigment and varnish separate. Standing on ladders and scaffolding, she pours "vast swathes" of the pigment down from the top of the canvas "before using the varnish to add weight and momentum to the medium, pushing the paint down the surface to produce a veil-like effect". Each layer is left to dry for a month. Sometimes she applies a layer of acrylic paint before the gloss, "giving rise to occasional glimpses of fluorescence".

Shiny, glossy, smooth, subtle

The layers of paint and the veil of varnish create a subliminal surface, catching the internal and external lighting in subtle ways -

Reflective

More glimpses of under-layers at the edge

Howard became fixated by the box the hooded man was standing on - an interplay with the cross in the crucifixion - which emerges and dissolves in some of the paintings -

The fascinating box - with "glimpses of fluorescence"

 The information leaflet offers a fuller explanation -

Showing till 28 May.

Giorgio Griffa at Camden Arts Centre

The exhibition finished in early April; I went several times, the work really grew on (?in) me. A video in which the artist talks about the work, and his relationship to the materials, is here.

Lines and shapes of colour painted onto, or rather, into, unprimed fabric, which has been folded and retains those fold marks. Many works are large and fill the rooms of the gallery wonderfully. It was hard to stop taking photographs: each new angle was another spatial revelation.

Frammenti, a work from the 1980s, was reconfigured in response to the
architecture, atmospherics, and light of the gallery

The number used in these works from the early 2000s is the Golden Ratio

 Details -

When I revisited, just before the exhibition closed, I spent some time in the Reading Room, where books about Griffa's previous exhibitions were laid out.

This collage (?montage) of marks on transparent paper, exhibited at the XXXIX Venice Biennale (1980) caught my eye and imagination ... how, if at all, could it be done in stitch (and: why?) ....

Other works had been exhibited in a medieval palazzo in 1995 -

One of the books had text on the right-hand page, and a tantalising flutter of careful marks and colours on the left -

 In his studio! -

 A happy conjunction of fragments -

 Larger works, fitted onto the page -

 Fragments and overlays -

"Griffa sees painting as an unmediated experience of the physical world. Though often minimal from afar, his works invite intimate attention to the exacting behaviours of their materials, to consider the experience of pigment on canvas at a molecular level. ... The modest appearance [of the creased canvases] reaffirms their reality in material and temporal terms, while underlying each work with a geoetric grid."