Archive for March, 2010

Oranges and lemons,
Say the bells of St. Clement’s.
You owe me five farthings,
Say the bells of St. Martin’s.
When will you pay me?
Say the bells of Old Bailey.
When I grow rich,
Say the bells of Shoreditch.
When will that be?
Say the bells of Stepney.
I do not know,
Says the great bell of Bow.
Here comes a candle to light you to bed,
And here comes a chopper to chop off your head!

These are the words to “Oranges and Lemons”, an old English nursery rhyme and singing game that features the bells of several churches from the City of London. To this day, the tune of “Oranges and Lemons” is played on the church bells of St. Clement Danes, the church referred to in the first verse. Years ago, when the river Thames was wider than it is now, barges carrying oranges and lemons landed just below the churchyard of St. Clement Dane. On the last day of March it was customary for children to gather at the church to attend a service and to receive presents of fresh fruit.

For our own citrus burst at the end of March I’ve plucked this tasty work by the French Post-Impressionist painter Paul Cézanne (1839 – 1906). The son of a wealthy hat-maker and banker, Cézanne studied law before persuading his father to allow him to abandon his studies and train as an artist in Paris. His early works were dark, thickly painted and sometimes wildly erotic. But under Pissarro’s influence, Cézanne lightened his palette and touch and turned his attention to the study of nature.

The NGA’s Still Life with Milk Jug and Fruit (c.1900) goes some way to showing us why Cézanne is regarded as “the father of modern art.” Cézanne painted hundreds of still-life pictures, exploring spatial relationships by arranging and rearranging a small set of household objects along with fruits and vegetables.

Cézanne set on out on a personal path in his painting, in which he left behind conventional perspective and modeling, instead using subtle color variation and distortion of forms to suggest solidity and depth. Unlike the Impressionists, who were concerned with surfaces, Cézanne was preoccupied with structure, and how to represent the solid, round features of nature on the flat plane of a canvas. Here, the table looks like it’s buckled, as if it’s viewed from shifting angles. The tilted, precariously balanced objects are given stability by the underlying geometry created by the edges of the objects and the table. See how what the artist called “modulations” of color are applied to depict the 3D dimensions of the fruit. He’s peeled away the surface detail to use a delectable mush of reds, oranges and yellows to give the fruits graspable definition.

Cézanne developed an entirely original language in art, based on his tack of treating nature “by means of the cylinder, the sphere and the cone.” He had a huge impact on 20th century artists, paving the way for Cubism and abstract art.

As a tangy treat for the end of the month, here’s a recipe from the UK chef Jo Pratt, from her fantastic cookbook, In the Mood for Entertaining: Food for Every Occasion.

St Clement’s Drizzle Cake

175g caster sugar
175g softened butter
grated zest and juice of 1 large lemon
grated zest and juice of 1 large orange
4 tablespoons milk
2 eggs
175g self-raising flour
3 tablespoons granulated sugar

Preheat the oven to 180° C. Grease and line the base of 1 large (900g) or two small (450g) loaf tins. Place the caster sugar, butter and the zest of the lemon and orange in a bowl and beat together until pale and creamy. Add the milk, and then beat in the eggs, one at a time, with a spoon of flour to prevent the mixture from curdling. Mix in the remaining flour. Spoon into the prepared tin/ tins and level the surface flat.

Bake in the oven for about 45 minutes for a large cake or 30 minutes for the smaller cakes, until they are golden and a skewer comes out clean when inserted into the center of the cake. Don’t worry if you see the cake peak in the middle and split – it all adds character and will also give you a crunchier drizzle topping.

While the cake is cooking, place the lemon and orange juice in a saucepan, bring to the boil and allow to reduce in quantity to about 3 tablespoons. Leave to cool, and then stir in the granulated sugar so it just starts to dissolve.

As soon as the cake comes out of the oven, prick several times with a skewer, then slowly pour the lemon and orange sugar all over the top, letting it soak into the cake. Leave to cool completely in the tin before turning out and cutting into slices to serve.

“No two days are alike, nor even two hours; neither was there ever two leaves of tree alike since the creation of the world.” So said John Constable (1776 – 1837), regarded by many as England’s greatest landscape painter. His work Wivenhoe Park, Essex (1816) at the National Gallery of Art vibrates with the verdant essence of the countryside. Constable’s studies, sketchbooks and paintings all reveal the profound connection he felt to the landscapes of his native Suffolk and the surrounding counties.

Wivenhoe Park, Essex was commissioned by the owner of the estate, Major General Francis Slater-Rebow, who’d been a friend of Constable’s father and was the artist’s first important patron. The work, done in oil on canvas, conveys how Constable was keen to capture particular sensations created by nature. He used brushwork to this end: look to the vigorous strokes on the water, that whip the paint into a reflecting pool. Elsewhere, the precision of the brush clarifies small details, such as the cows and people, for example. The colors also add to the immediacy: white dashes on the clouds flash sunlight through the sky, and the dappled dark-to-light green ground brings in the breath of a breeze.

It’s odd to think, looking at this rural idyll, that Constable struggled hard to gain success. His father and his wife’s family disapproved of his career choice and official recognition in English art circles was slow in coming. Contemporary commentators deemed his paintings to be lacking in the picturesque and said they looked rough and unfinished of surface. People also preferred not to see the working mills, barges, and busy canalized rivers that Constable often inserted in his scenes.

Now of course, this artist is seen for the master he was and the harmony and poetry of his natural settings are much admired. And it seems these are the days to take time for this sort of scene, since there’s a sinister new trend that’s trying to wend its way into our lives, where nature’s concerned. It was a few years ago that the term Nature Deficit Disorder was coined by Richard Louv, in his book Last Child in the Woods. After spending 10 years traveling around the US speaking to parents and children in rural and urban areas about their experiences in nature, Louv claimed that children are spending less time outdoors. The diverse causes for the phenomenon (parental fear, restricted access to natural areas and the lure of the electronic media) all lead to a range of behavioral problems.

Many people believe that humans have a strong link to nature (the biophilia hypothesis suggests that there is an instinctive bond between us and other living systems), so it seems logical that spending time outside is beneficial for children and adults alike. Lots of school curricula incorporate structured learning outdoors and some parents even opt to send their children to “Forest Schools”, where the woods are used as a means to build independence and self-esteem. And how interesting also that “Slow Parenting” advocates sending children into natural environments rather than keeping them indoors.

Constable can be an inspiration for us if we’re living nature-starved lives. Here’s a painter who saw meandering meadows, sparkling waters, plodding cows and fluffed-up clouds as being inherently as lovely as anything the human heart could desire. The two small figures in the boat in this picture seem to promote the right kind of respect and wonder for their surroundings. Who knew that a painting made years ago could still speak so freshly of the need to go and explore our connection with nature?

What’s on the menu for supper tonight? Some sizzling pork chops? Tender chicken thighs? Beef steaks? Lamb stew? Or is flesh (be it red, white or of the processed variety) completely off the cards? If so, you might have heard of Meat Free Monday, the environmental campaign that’s raising awareness of the climate-changing impact of meat production and consumption. Livestock production is responsible for 18% of global greenhouse gas emissions (more than the entire transport sector) and MFM is about avoiding meat once a week as a small step in the fight against climate change.

MFM is spearheaded by Paul McCartney, and his daughters Mary and Stella and already has a slew of celebrity supporters. The volume of greenhouse gases generated by the livestock industry are especially alarming when you consider that the meat industry is set to double its production by 2050! The gases produced by livestock are methane and nitrous oxide (respectively 21 and 310 times more powerful than CO2) and stay in the atmosphere for longer. Compassion in World Farming says that the average UK household could cut more emissions by halving meat consumption than by halving car use.

I’m signing up for MFM to reduce the meat consumption in our home, and hope others do the same. And in case any of us are concerned about symptoms of meat-withdrawal, I’ve found something for us to sink our canines into at the NGA. Still Life with Dead Game (1661) by the Dutch painter Willem van Aelst (1626 – 1683) should be more than enough fabulous flesh to keep any cravings at bay until Tuesday.

Born in Delft, van Aelst came from a wealthy family. His specialist subject was still-life painting, but he diversified within the genre, painting fruit and flower pieces as well as hunting scenes. This kind of painting typically shows stacks of dead game together with hunting gear: they became popular after mid-century, and van Aelst appears to have been particularly influential in the development of the genre.

Here the artist picks out a bundle of dead animals slung off a hook and resting upon a stone ledge (where there’s also a blue and gold hunter’s pouch). The verisimilitude is just so striking. How does he make the rabbit’s fur so soft, and the whiskers so fine? Then see how he brings out an entirely different texture for the cockerel’s feathers. For me, this bird’s comb and wattle are even sharper and more convincing than Audubon’s attempts from yesterday. Hanging up high are a partridge, a kingfisher and a common wheatear. There are also two falconer’s hoods, indicating the nature of the hunt.

As well as accosting us with its fresh-flesh spoils, this painting also addresses the theme of hunting more broadly, through the relief on the front of the stone ledge. It shows Diana and Actaeon (a popular story from Ovid’s Metamorphoses), which describes how Actaeon, a mortal hunter, accidentally disturbs Diana, the goddess of the hunt, at her bath; Diana transforms him into a stag as punishment.

Paintings like this were greatly praised in their day and van Aelst received high prices for his works. No doubt changes in Dutch society played their part: mountains of meat reflected the growing wealth and increasing sophistication of patrons in the Golden Age of the seventeenth century. But even in our changing times, when we’re beginning to shift our attitudes towards meat consumption, this picture loses none of its relevance. Because you see, chomping down on this sort of fleshy feast doesn’t stress our environment one bit.

Today is Palm Sunday and the start of Holy Week, which recalls the entry of Jesus into Jerusalem for the Jewish festival of Passover. The Gospel of John tells us that crowds of people lined the streets, welcoming Jesus, waving palm branches, laying them down to bedeck his path into the city. In many countries it’s traditional for today’s congregation to receive small crosses made from palm leaves. Some churches will also put on a procession around the building, with songs and waving of crosses, imagining the entry into Jerusalem.

The week following Palm Sunday charts the sequence of events that led to the crucifixion. Maundy Thursday (or Holy Thursday) marks the Last Supper and the betrayal by Judas, and Good Friday (or Holy Friday) commemorates the arrest, trial, crucifixion, death and burial of Jesus. Holy Saturday is the Sabbath on which Jesus rested in the grave.

For Christians, the cockerel can be a prominent symbol at this time, since he announces loud and clear to the world that a new day will soon be dawning. So a scrabble of scrapping, squawking Farmyard Fowls (c. 1827) is what’s needed today. These birds of a feather come courtesy of John James Audubon (1785 – 1851), the renowned French-American ornithologist, naturalist, hunter and painter. Born in what is now Haiti to a French sea captain and a servant, Audubon was taken to France as a boy and raised by his father and step-mother.

From his earliest days, Audubon felt an affinity for birds and sensed they’d play a role in his life: “I felt an intimacy with them, bordering on frenzy.” He recalls how his father encouraged the interest and “would point out the elegant movement of the birds, and the beauty and softness of their plumage. He called my attention to their show of pleasure or sense of danger, their perfect forms and splendid attire. He would speak of their departure and return with the seasons.” In 1803, Audubon’s father got a false passport for his son to travel to the US; from that time on Audubon made America his most permanent home.

Among all bird-lovers, Audubon is most-known for Birds of America (completed 1838), his seminal study containing 435 hand-colored engravings of 1,065 birds of 489 species. This painting isn’t part of that project per se, but it will reveal some of the approaches Audubon used in documenting birds. Farmyard Fowls is an oil on canvas and showcases the artist’s astonishing ornithological exactness. Quite simply, he’s captured the physical essence of these animals: just take a gander at the scaly talons, quivering tail feathers and red, rubbery comb of that cockerel. And quite aside from the bodily believability, this picture is also about character and drama. The pitch-black background (unusual in nature studies) and punchy poses of the birds both add electricity. For Birds of America, Audubon took the revolutionary approach of placing specimens in the way he thought they moved in the wild. Here too, the downward, dipping diagonals of the birds spark the image into instant life. There’s a narrative too, to the point that we can actually relate to the tussle unfolding here: the fowls’ face-off (which includes a feathered frisson between a male and females) makes it clear this artist absorbed and understood the animals’ real-life behavior.

In many parts of Europe processions are held on Palm Sunday in which children carry light wooden crosses decorated with strings of dried fruit and papery streamers. Spiked onto the top sits a bread cockerel, glowing golden and crowing of the new dawn to come.

Curiouser and curiouser! It seems we’re all mad for a little Alice in our lives! From the start of March, Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland has been fueling our fetish for fantasy and odd-ball adventure. Of course, the original novel by Lewis Carroll is well-thumbed and much-loved by many. Since it came out in 1865, Carroll’s cast of colorful characters (in many cases based on his friends and acquaintances) has been re-visited by writers and film-makers alike. Burton’s version is an extension of sorts, with a 19-year old Alice accidentally returning to the Wonderland she visited 13 years before. The film’s narrative follows her attempts to slay the Jabberwocky, a dragon-like creature controlled by the Red Queen.

The film has got Alice and her friends cropping up and popping up in all sorts of places. For a start, fashion has fallen down the rabbit hole, with high-street stores reeling out racks of powder-blue tea dresses, bright-white pinafores and stripy tights. Claire’s Accessories has a whole line called Alice in Fashionland, tinkling with charm bracelets, feathered brooches, dotted neck-ties, kooky hats, funny gloves and more. Websites like eHow are offering advice on how to throw a Mad Hatter Tea Party, and London’s Hummingbird bakery is selling out of its tasty, brightly-iced “EAT ME” cupcakes and confections. Even interiors are taking a turn towards Wonderland whimsy: Vincent Leman and David Coddaire have each produced bending book-cases while Lila Jang’s done a funky-formed sofa.

In honor of Alice we’re looking at a cat today, if only for the fact that this picture reminded me instantly of Carroll’s iconic Cheshire Cat. Remember his haunting habit of disappearing bodily, while leaving his grin behind to float on its own? That prompted Alice to say she’d often seen a cat without a grin but never a grin without a cat, and while this one mightn’t have that mischievous smile, his outsized head does seem to be missing a body.

In some ways, The Cat is a bit of a mystery, painted by an anonymous American of the 19th century. And yet its clear character and special style can lead us to link it to folk or primitive painting (sometimes also called naive painting). Folk art is loosely defined as that produced by artists with little or no formal training in conventional techniques. While folk artists aren’t amateurs, they do tend to remain untouched by broader trends in the art world.

What’s obvious here is that the artist is driven by a keen interest in his subject. His cat takes center-stage, with a green bird caught, lolling, in its mouth. See how the composition is so simple and instinctive: there’s a pure symmetry in the framing trees that extends to the birds in the branches and the plants on the horizon. The colors are strong and saturated, kept to an earthy and naturalistic palette. Everything in the painting is presented as sitting close to the picture plane: the lack of perspective and discrepancies of scale lend an unsophisticated air to the whole.

I like that this picture is so clean and uncluttered: the fact that it’s not over-detailed allows us to look long and hard at the cat. There’s a disarming directness in the animal’s stare and real depth of character in the ways of his gaze. Folk or primitive art like this can exude real freshness and vitality and if anything, the off-kilter elements add an appealing, child-like innocence. Not unlike Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland I’d say, a novel of charming nonsense and child-like attitude that’s captivated young and old readers for years and years.

Flowers – they’re everywhere! How many of us know a Rose, a Lily or a Bluebell perhaps? Let’s see: there’s Clover, Flora, Heather, Iris, Jasmine, Lavender, Lilac, Violet. My brother-in-law and his girlfriend are great friends with a lovely little lady called Petunia. And the UK chef Jamie Oliver and his wife Jools have three floral-named daughters: a Poppy, a Daisy and a Petal Blossom Rainbow. I wonder if they’ll stick with the theme when baby No. 4 arrives in autumn.

Check out this week’s video blog entry. Special thanks to the United States Botanic Garden on Capitol Hill. And if you are in DC, for more of Georgia O’Keeffe’s flowers check out the exhibition running at the Phillips Collection through May 9th.

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The Netherlandish painter Jan van Eyck (c. 1390 – 1441) was one of the best and most important artists of the Northern Renaissance, and his Annunciation at the National Gallery of Art leaves no question in the mind as to why. It shows the moment of the annunciation (from the Latin annuntiare, to announce) as described in the Bible in the Gospel of Luke: the angel Gabriel delivers a message to Mary that she’ll conceive a son, the Son of God.

Today is the Feast of the Annunciation, commemorating Christ’s miraculous incarnation nine months before the Nativity at Christmas. The annunciation was a central topic in Christian art during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, physicalizing this most ungraspable of events. Van Eyck’s version (1434 – 36) was probably once the left wing of a triptych (a three-paneled piece). The picture spells out in golden script the words spoken at the meeting: Gabriel’s greeting (“Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you”) provokes Mary’s response of humble faith (“I am the handmaid of the Lord; let it be done to me according to your word”).

But it’s more than words that are written here: van Eyck’s skills are clearly legible on the canvas. He was an artist of rigorous observation, a “what you see is what you paint” kind of guy. He was especially sensitive to the fall of light, so that his physical forms (even that of the archangel) become laden with weight and invested with volume. See the shading that renders the faces round and the way he describes folds of cloth, delineating precisely where Mary’s mantle and Gabriel’s cape turn away from the light.

The facial features are also remarkable. Van Eyck was a gifted portraitist, with a nit-picking eye that he brings to bear here. I adore Gabriel’s rounded, apple-red cheeks and the way Mary’s tucked-in (dimpled?) chin ripples her neck. The fact these faces are 3/4 view (rather than profile) gives us a chance to read the expressions. This lends human freshness to a scene like this, since we can relate to Gabriel’s joy burst and Mary’s consternation.

In the 16th century the artist-biographer Vasari suggested that van Eyck had invented oil painting (mixing pigments with oil as opposed to egg yolk). This is now discredited, but van Eyck did perfect the technique of glazing (building up layers of transparent paint). It is this technique that helped him create the deep, rich colors seen here, as well as the super minute details. It’s astounding, how van Eyck could distinguish between textures from hard, polished stone to papery petals. See the bespoke, bejeweled cape and the brushy, brocaded pillow. Which figure do you think is having a bad hair day? It’s all quite eye-boggling: no artist before (and very few since) had mimicked reality so very well.

The details aren’t there just for the sake of it either. The small white dove channeling towards Mary on gilded rays stands for the Holy Spirit. The white lily near the foreground is an emblem of purity. Even the church can be seen symbolically, with the dark upper story standing for the Old Testament, and ground floor (illuminated by three Trinity-referencing windows) the New. It gets better: the floor tiles show David beheading Goliath and Samson destroying the Philistine temple, two Old Testament events in the salvation of the Jewish people that prefigure the salvation of humankind through the coming of Christ.

Whether you believe in the annunciation or not – I’m willing to bet you’ll find something to marvel at in van Eyck’s painting at the NGA.