Jenni in London
Sunday, December 31, 2017
Awaiting the New Year, part two
The ten days between the Winter Solstice begins and ends with the revelry of Christmas and the New Year, but the days in-between are the Janus days, looking both backward and forward. The slippery slope where dreams of ambitious plans compete with the memory of past abandoned, or derailed, plans. Approaching 70 in the New Year, I am most familiar with derailed plans after the past two years of unwelcome moments, the untuned instruments and the static on the radio, the we are not prepared to hear. The heavy weather of fortune has turned and abated for us at the moment, but storms, personal, national and international, are always on the horizon in these tricky times. We always enter into the unknown.
The grey skies and the occasional "oblique light" of the northern latitudes is very depressing as winter moves into the early months of the year. I am writing at 3 o'clock in the afternoon in a dark room. The light is beginning to come back, but that is hard to remember. By the end of this week, we will have added one minute of light in the morning and six minutes in the afternoon. If you are a photosensitive sleeper like I am, and have no need to rise early for work or family, the darkness until after 8 am is a seasonal luxury. The miraculous side of winter is how life goes on for plants and animals who have adapted in ways to be ready for the arrival of spring. The bulbs and plants and shrubs and trees have set their flower and leaf buds, ready for the proper hours of sun to return. Very soon the British daffodil season will be on us as a precursor to real spring when the crops are harvested on the Channel Islands still warmed, for now, by the North Atlantic Drift of the Gulf Stream. Last evening, I heard "the heart-chilling scream of the courted vixen" as we ate supper. Hampstead has an abundance of foxes, and unlike the first year we lived here, I am used to their noisy mating season, and familiar with their charming kits in the spring.
I read Julian Beach's poem Lux Brumalis two days ago in Winter, part of a four volume seasonal anthology of prose and poetry edited by Melissa Harrison for England's Wildlife Trust. I began with Spring late last winter and tried to read a selection every morning through Summer and Autumn as the year unfolded. In two months, I will start all over again, as commanded by the closing lines of Lux. I am embarrassed to admit this: I am not a poetry person, in fact I have sometimes wondered what is the point of poetry when a full sentence with subject and verb would communicate ideas much more clearly. When I read Lux, I knew this was special; when I went back and reread it several times, I discovered that I finally understood the point of poetry. Perhaps this is a one-off, and I will only ever truly appreciate Julian Beach. His website https://julianbeachwriting.wordpress.com is packed with many beautiful poems.
Melissa Harrison's anthologies are available here in the UK everywhere, and in the US according to Amazon.com, but they are very much geared to English nature and landscapes. The beautiful covers are enough to justify having them on the coffee table.
Saturday, December 30, 2017
Awaiting the New Year
Lux Brumalis
I
I am the trumpet muted
the bow unrosined
and the fiddle unstrung.
I am oblique sunlight
pale illumination of
a world undernourished.
I am the broadcast interrupted
dead air, station leeching
anaemic, into station.
II
I am the garnet shock
of rosehip on frost
the robin's titian flare.
I am the icebound babble
observed, not heard
under brittle silver.
I am the creeping metabolism
of the trout, wintering
deep below the current.
I am the heart-chilling scream
of the courted vixen
the crowing pheasant's boast
the snipe's 'peep-peep'
defying, folding distance
across the whispering marsh.
I am the withered husk
on the naked briar
the sap retreating.
I am the fiery Saturnalia
the blacksmith spark, rising
then extinguished, spent.
I am the otherworld
beyond the black perimeter
of the sheltering blaze.
I am the chiselled gravestone
of the old year in repose
and the muttered obsequies.
I am Janus, churlish sentry
clinging to yesterday
wary of tomorrow.
III
I am the child yet unfathered
the page from a book
you read once, forgot
but must surely read again.
Julian Beach, 2016
https://julianbeachwriting.wordpress.com/2016/07/06/lux-brumalis/
Wednesday, December 27, 2017
Christmas 2017
Jonas discovers the wonder of Christmas |
2017 was a year of ups and downs and saves. Not very many ups, but the downs and saves were enough to let us crawl into 2018 later this week.
A down was not seeing our grandchildren in Hingham, Massachusetts at all in 2017. Trips were called off or cancelled for a variety of health reasons. The save is that those health issues seem to be resolved.
An unreserved up is spending time with our grandchildren in the Kent seaside town of Margate. We spent Christmas and Boxing Day with them. I made Bob get out of bed at 6:30 a.m. in our bed-and-breakfast hotel to travel the few blocks to see Jonas's 2 year old face when he first discovered what it is Santa Claus does overnight whilst children are asleep in their beds dreaming of sugarplums. I think this photo was worth the early rise. His sister Dervla is only 1 year old, so she slept in this year. Next year will be her moment of wonder.
Sunday, November 16, 2014
England's Greatest Painter?
For the past year or so, we have been very remiss in keeping up with the exhibitions in London's museums. In my head, I tally up a remorse list of exhibitions I have missed over the years, and I'm afraid I have added quite a few entries to the list recently. I can't even come up with a reasonable excuse other than the lame one that time seemed to fly by so quickly I could hardly keep up with anything, even exhibitions that were on display for months, but were gone before I remembered they were happening. There are so many exhibitions to see at the moment, we decided to attack them with gusto today. No excuses for being tired, it might rain, or it's a bit chilly today.
Two weekends ago we saw the film Mr Turner, relying on the 100% assurance of every film critic in London this was the film of the year to see. Bob hated the film; I found its pretentious arty-ness insufferable. (Both Timothy Spall, as Mr Turner, and the cinematography are great.) The film is a bio-pic of Turner's last years. He lived a very long time —75 years— and painted until the very end. Audience critics (who are no where near 100% in their appreciation) complain there is no plot, just a series of vignettes haphazardly thrown together. There is truth in the no plot critique, but after a day or so I decided the plot is hidden in the vignettes, which can each be seen as an evidence of loss as Mr Turner ages, the loss of family, friends, reputation, mobility, memory, ability, one by one, and finally loss of life. When I explained this insight to Bob, he said, a plot that needs 24 hours of work to understand and then needs to be explained, is not a plot. I couldn't entirely disagree.
Since we had seen the film I felt we should go the Tate Britain to see the accompanying exhibition of Turner's Last Works. Bob likes Turner's work more than I like them. And Turner did so many . . . and he willed them to the nation, so they are easy to find in order to fill rooms and rooms. Jonathan Jones, art critic of The Guardian, fast becoming the worst newspaper in the world, says Turner is England's greatest artist, as the film's trailer declares, but I will add that last month, Jonathan Jones also called the Tower of London's poppy display "fake, trite and inward-looking" along with "deeply aestheticised, prettified, and toothless." So what does he know. His written response the following week to the outcry of commenters who were aghast was even dimmer with an explanation that he was not speaking from "trendy cynicism," but from his preference for Otto Dix's skull paintings. Jones offers the suggestion the Tower's moat should have been filled with blood, bones, and barbed wire for a real memorial. Perhaps people will keep that in mind for the display needed in 2018 to top this year's poppies.
As we toured the rooms of the exhibition, all I could think of was Henning Mankell's police detective Kurt Wallander, whose father spent his life painting the same painting . . . some with a grouse, some without. I guess it's not fair to blame the artist when his style has been appropriated to decorate motel rooms and dentist's offices a century later. Turner is a brilliant painter, and his watercolours are even better, but is the sky always the same colour every day? Jonathan Jones will be happy to know the Tate's galleries were nearly as crowded today as the walkways around the Tower were last week. So perhaps some of those he lambasted for enjoying "popular art" are also prepared to enjoy "fine art."
After we finished at the Tate, we headed to the V&A for the chance to compare and contrast Turner with England's other great painter of the first half of the 19th century, John Constable. Poor Mr Constable was always the loser in his rivalry with Mr Turner. Born only a year apart, Turner began his art training at the Royal Academy when he was 14 years old, and became an R.A. less than 10 years later. Meanwhile, Constable's father kept John at home to help run the family's prosperous grain milling and coal supply business, and would not let him begin his studies at the Academy until he was nearly 25 years old. His rivalry with Turner and his innovative painting techniques kept Constable from becoming an R.A. until he was in his mid-50s. As a final insult, Constable died at 60, depriving him of the last decade and a half of painting enjoyed so effusively by Turner which filled the walls of the Tate's exhibition space.
Over the past few years, the V&A has had some poorly curated shows, but happily Constable, the Making of a Master is not one of them. He was a meticulous painter who wanted to bring back landscape painting to the standards of the French painters Poussin and Claude Lorrain, especially Claude Lorrain. The exhibition takes you through the steps Constable employed to meet his own exacting standards. The plein air pencil sketching and oil sketches were blocked into larger paintings in the studio. Detailed studies of landscape elements — the flora and especially the clouds in the sky — were done to depict them accurately in the final work. This was an era when science was burgeoning, and Constable believed artists needed to be accurate because landscape painting could be seen as a facet of the scientific study of the natural world. He used measured grids and glass overlays to get the correct proportions of landscape features within a scene. When preparing his large paintings for the Royal Academy's Annual Show, he did full size sketches of the 6-foot paintings.
The best part of the exhibition is the large number of oil sketches that are on display. The V&A has so many Constables because in 1888 his surviving daughter Isabel donated the contents of his studio to the Museum. The collection included notebooks, and sketchbooks, and the supremely beautiful little oil sketches Constable did in the open air. Some are always on display, but this exhibition has many more on the walls. My very favourite, of a elm tree trunk (that I initially thought was a photograph when I saw it years ago, and then realised the camera had not yet been invented) turns out to have been Lucian Freud's favourite too. For an homage to Constable exhibition mounted in Paris about 10 years ago, Freud produced an etching of a tree trunk because as an art student he tried to copy Constable's sketch and gave up. The French have always appreciated Constable, much more than the English did during his life time, and despite the fact he never crossed the Channel. The French bought his work and awarded him honorary medals. His plein air painting influenced the mid-century French landscapes of Courbet and Corot, the forerunners of Impressionism and other modern movements in France that followed.
I am not a fan of calculating who is great, who is greater, who is the greatest. Clearly I am biased toward Constable in this match. But what a great afternoon . . . and it didn't rain and it wasn't very cold and we had good reason to be tired when we got home.
Two weekends ago we saw the film Mr Turner, relying on the 100% assurance of every film critic in London this was the film of the year to see. Bob hated the film; I found its pretentious arty-ness insufferable. (Both Timothy Spall, as Mr Turner, and the cinematography are great.) The film is a bio-pic of Turner's last years. He lived a very long time —75 years— and painted until the very end. Audience critics (who are no where near 100% in their appreciation) complain there is no plot, just a series of vignettes haphazardly thrown together. There is truth in the no plot critique, but after a day or so I decided the plot is hidden in the vignettes, which can each be seen as an evidence of loss as Mr Turner ages, the loss of family, friends, reputation, mobility, memory, ability, one by one, and finally loss of life. When I explained this insight to Bob, he said, a plot that needs 24 hours of work to understand and then needs to be explained, is not a plot. I couldn't entirely disagree.
Since we had seen the film I felt we should go the Tate Britain to see the accompanying exhibition of Turner's Last Works. Bob likes Turner's work more than I like them. And Turner did so many . . . and he willed them to the nation, so they are easy to find in order to fill rooms and rooms. Jonathan Jones, art critic of The Guardian, fast becoming the worst newspaper in the world, says Turner is England's greatest artist, as the film's trailer declares, but I will add that last month, Jonathan Jones also called the Tower of London's poppy display "fake, trite and inward-looking" along with "deeply aestheticised, prettified, and toothless." So what does he know. His written response the following week to the outcry of commenters who were aghast was even dimmer with an explanation that he was not speaking from "trendy cynicism," but from his preference for Otto Dix's skull paintings. Jones offers the suggestion the Tower's moat should have been filled with blood, bones, and barbed wire for a real memorial. Perhaps people will keep that in mind for the display needed in 2018 to top this year's poppies.
As we toured the rooms of the exhibition, all I could think of was Henning Mankell's police detective Kurt Wallander, whose father spent his life painting the same painting . . . some with a grouse, some without. I guess it's not fair to blame the artist when his style has been appropriated to decorate motel rooms and dentist's offices a century later. Turner is a brilliant painter, and his watercolours are even better, but is the sky always the same colour every day? Jonathan Jones will be happy to know the Tate's galleries were nearly as crowded today as the walkways around the Tower were last week. So perhaps some of those he lambasted for enjoying "popular art" are also prepared to enjoy "fine art."
After we finished at the Tate, we headed to the V&A for the chance to compare and contrast Turner with England's other great painter of the first half of the 19th century, John Constable. Poor Mr Constable was always the loser in his rivalry with Mr Turner. Born only a year apart, Turner began his art training at the Royal Academy when he was 14 years old, and became an R.A. less than 10 years later. Meanwhile, Constable's father kept John at home to help run the family's prosperous grain milling and coal supply business, and would not let him begin his studies at the Academy until he was nearly 25 years old. His rivalry with Turner and his innovative painting techniques kept Constable from becoming an R.A. until he was in his mid-50s. As a final insult, Constable died at 60, depriving him of the last decade and a half of painting enjoyed so effusively by Turner which filled the walls of the Tate's exhibition space.
Over the past few years, the V&A has had some poorly curated shows, but happily Constable, the Making of a Master is not one of them. He was a meticulous painter who wanted to bring back landscape painting to the standards of the French painters Poussin and Claude Lorrain, especially Claude Lorrain. The exhibition takes you through the steps Constable employed to meet his own exacting standards. The plein air pencil sketching and oil sketches were blocked into larger paintings in the studio. Detailed studies of landscape elements — the flora and especially the clouds in the sky — were done to depict them accurately in the final work. This was an era when science was burgeoning, and Constable believed artists needed to be accurate because landscape painting could be seen as a facet of the scientific study of the natural world. He used measured grids and glass overlays to get the correct proportions of landscape features within a scene. When preparing his large paintings for the Royal Academy's Annual Show, he did full size sketches of the 6-foot paintings.
The best part of the exhibition is the large number of oil sketches that are on display. The V&A has so many Constables because in 1888 his surviving daughter Isabel donated the contents of his studio to the Museum. The collection included notebooks, and sketchbooks, and the supremely beautiful little oil sketches Constable did in the open air. Some are always on display, but this exhibition has many more on the walls. My very favourite, of a elm tree trunk (that I initially thought was a photograph when I saw it years ago, and then realised the camera had not yet been invented) turns out to have been Lucian Freud's favourite too. For an homage to Constable exhibition mounted in Paris about 10 years ago, Freud produced an etching of a tree trunk because as an art student he tried to copy Constable's sketch and gave up. The French have always appreciated Constable, much more than the English did during his life time, and despite the fact he never crossed the Channel. The French bought his work and awarded him honorary medals. His plein air painting influenced the mid-century French landscapes of Courbet and Corot, the forerunners of Impressionism and other modern movements in France that followed.
I am not a fan of calculating who is great, who is greater, who is the greatest. Clearly I am biased toward Constable in this match. But what a great afternoon . . . and it didn't rain and it wasn't very cold and we had good reason to be tired when we got home.
October Autumn to Finish
After the reunion, we headed up the river to Poughkeepsie to visit my high school classmate Charlotte and her husband John on another perfect autumn weather day. |
. . . with its elegant porte cochere . . . |
. . . and wrap-around porches . . . |
The gardens are extensive . . . |
. . . and beautiful even in the autumn season of dying. |
The kitchen garden is especially lovely . . . |
. . . and still filled with seasonal crops. |
Next we come to Poughkeepsie's number one must-do . . . |
. . . a rehabbed railroad bridge . . . |
. . . that lets you walk in the air over the city, looking downstream . . . |
. . . and upstream . . . |
. . . and across at the patchwork quilt of autumn leaves . . . |
. . . standing over the water as it flows under you . . . |
. . . whilst the wild wind blows over you. |
We wound our way back to Hingham with some stops along the way. I hadn't thought about this until our friend Deborah in New Jersey said last week, "You are always stopping at places. When I go somewhere, I just want to get where I am going." after I had mentioned our stop at the Bush-Holley House in Greenwich, Connecticut on our way to New Jersey. Perhaps it comes with living in a small country. When places are not very far apart, there always seems like time can be found to stop on the way. Also, we have become delighted with the treasures to be found in small local museums. Reminders of American art with the Cos Cob School and the Hudson River School had piqued our interest, and Bob found two museums that offered American art collections of interest. The Mattatuck Museum in Waterbury is a beautiful museum with a collection of Connecticut art , along with much else, and where we also had a wonderful lunch. I just loved their decorative painting on the museum's back wall. |
The real treasure trove was The New Britain Museum of American Art, a museum that no one has ever heard of that houses a wonderful collection of American art from the itinerants of the 18th century to today's artists in nicely laid out chronological galleries. And it has been there since 1903! |
Back in Hingham, and Bob has flown back to London, so there is time to enjoy beautiful days with friends. Nantasket Beach with Anne . . . |
. . . watching the surfers . . . |
. . . take advantage of waves from Hurricane Gonzalo in Bermuda. |
And a Walking Tour of Hingham's oldest burial ground behind the Old Ship Meeting House with Sunny and Charlotte on her lead. |
Like any old cemetery, stones are moved around to accommodate changes. . |
The Weeping Angel . . . a graveyard favourite. |
Lavinia's home school curriculum allows trips into Boston on the commuter boat from Hingham Shipyard. |
Lavinia the builder . . . |
. . . at the Science Museum. |
. . . sometimes with odd information . . . a shoe store? |
. . . and a walk through the six towers . . . |
. . . whose glass walls are incised with six million identification numbers. |
And finally the day has arrived! Eloise is 4 years old! |
Getting ready for the family party. |
Beautiful decorations |
Monkey Face cupcakes as requested and made by Mommy |
A sea of presents |
And since Halloween is nearly here, the second party of the day is the Old Colony Montessori Halloween Party. A pretty Kitty Witch . . . |
A powerful X-Man . . . |
And a beautiful Elsa ready to roll. |
Eloise is smiling because she is looking forward to getting her bed back when I leave! |
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