Archive for March, 2010

Today is named Saint Patrick’s Day, after one of Ireland’s best-loved saints. What began as a purely Christian holiday became an official feast day in the 1600s and is now a more secular celebration of Irish culture. Outside the Emerald Isle, St Patrick’s day is feted all over the world, wherever there are large numbers of Irish immigrants and descendants.

Born in 387 in Roman Britain, Patrick was kidnapped by Irish raiders at 16, and taken to Ireland to be a slave. While in captivity God told him in a dream to flee to the coast, to board a ship and return to Britain. Once home, Patrick became a priest. Later in life, he felt called back to Ireland, and dedicated himself to converting the rich and the poor (legend has it that he’d use the three-leaved shamrock to explain the Holy Trinity). From the time of his death, Patrick has endured as the principal champion of Irish Christianity and is held in esteem by the Irish Church.

In honor of Ireland we’re looking at Francis Bacon (1909 – 1992). Bacon was born in Dublin you see, at 63 Lower Baggott Street, to an English-born mother and an Australian-born father. He spent his earliest years in the city, before moving to England and later settling in London as an adult. Bacon became the most celebrated British painter of the 20th century, producing dramatic paintings of figures, which he distorted to express isolation, brutality and terror. He first gained notoriety in 1945 with Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, a triptych depicting horrific half-animal, half-human creatures.

Study for a Running Dog (c. 1954) reveals a central aspect of Bacon’s practice, which was to base most of his paintings on photographs (photos served as a start-point for creativity).  Here it’s Bacon’s technique that rivets: it’s oil on canvas and he’s skilled in the medium. The colours are stark and sparse, so that a slight deviance from the monochromatic palette creates a stop and stir: a dash of mauve! a dot of pink! It’s captivating, how Bacon has smeared and smudged the paint in parts, so the form of the dog becomes blurred. See the astounding effect of movement this creates (can you see which part of the animal is more active?). Bacon was fascinated by Eadweard Muybridge (the 19th-century English photographer) who used multiple cameras to capture motion, and pioneered the zoopraxiscope, a device for projecting motion pictures that pre-dated the flexible perforated film strip. I think Bacon has Muybridge’s sequenced images in mind here.

The mussing of paint also transports the animal to a liminal zone between earthly and ghostly, to a point where it’s recognizable but distinctly ‘different’. Elsewhere, the paint application is sharper: see the shooting straight lines that cut across the canvas, marking in a gutter, a pavement, a road. The diagonal cast of these lines adds a feel of speed: they seem to glint as the dog rushes by. Unlike Bacon’s human figures and portraits – many of which are trapped in geometric or cage-like constructions – this animal retains a sense of instinct and freedom. It’s affirmation in the face of the overall gloom.

What’s amazing about Bacon is his alternative vision: what running dog did you ever see that looked like this? His work reveals a rare and fervid imagination that’s surely worth a toast tonight as the Irish and Irish at heart celebrate all aspects of the country’s culture.

Do you have a favorite poem? One that left a lasting imprint when you first heard it, read it or said it aloud? For me it’s The Listeners by Walter de la Mare (1873 – 1956), English poet, short story writer and novelist. I first learned the poem as a child (our class recited it at a school assembly), and I don’t think it’s left me ever since. Reading it never fails to trail goosebumps along my arms, as the rhymes and reasons of the lines take hold. Here it is:

‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,

Knocking on the moonlit door;

And his horse in the silence champed the grasses

Of the forest’s ferny floor:

And a bird flew up out of the turret,

Above the Traveller’s head:

And he smote upon the door again a second time;

‘Is there anybody there?’ he said.

But no one descended to the Traveller;

No head from the leaf-fringed sill

Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,

Where he stood perplexed and still.

But only a host of phantom listeners

That dwelt in the lone house then

Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight

To that voice from the world of men:

Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,

That goes down to the empty hall,

Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken

By the lonely Traveller’s call.

And he felt in his heart their strangeness,

Their stillness answering his cry,

While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,

‘Neath the starred and leafy sky;

For he suddenly smote on the door, even

Louder, and lifted his head:–

‘Tell them I came, and no one answered,

That I kept my word,’ he said.

Never the least stir made the listeners,

Though every word he spake

Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house

From the one man left awake:

Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,

And the sound of iron on stone,

And how the silence surged softly backward,

When the plunging hoofs were gone.

It was this poem that plunged into my mind when I first saw Wind from the Sea (1947) at the NGA. It’s by Andrew Wyeth (1917 – 2009), one of this country’s best-loved artists. He received the National Medal of Arts in 2007 and his painting Christina’s World (1948) at MOMA, New York is one of the most iconic images of 20th-century America. Wyeth made his name with rural landscapes, portraits, and interior still-life scenes all done in his signature sharp-edged style. This picture is one of his earliest of a window: on a hot summer’s day he’d opened a seldom-used window in the attic of his neighbor’s house in Maine.

Somehow, this scene sends shivers down my spine, and I’ve tried to decide why exactly this is. Breaths of wind make the filmy, tattered curtains billow off the wood of the windowsill. The fine, white fabric reveals the painstaking, precise way that Wyeth worked. He used tempera paint (in which pigment is mixed with yolk, then thinned with water), which demanded slow application: here each thread is spun individually off his brush. The palette is pared down to grey, beige, white and black, though the scene outside is brighter than within.

For me, there are two things that make this eery. First is that fact that, though there are no figures in the tree-lined view, their presence is strongly felt (see the tire tracks trundling towards the sea). Second is the unique vantage point we’re given: it’s an up-close shot, with the tightly-cropped window frame hitting the edges of the painting, making it look like we’re actually looking out through this window.

Wind from the Sea is one of the NGA’s recent acquisitions and an emotive example of Wyeth’s haunting landscapes and pin-sharp style. For me, there’s either sackfuls of sorrow here, or an aching loneliness or chilling thoughts on the frailty of life. Whatever the meaning of this may be, for me once seen, rather like The Listeners, it’s impossible to get Wyeth out of my head.

Yesterday was Mothering Sunday in the UK, a centuries-old feast when priests would go to the Mother Church of their district, and parishioners would visit the church of their baptism. From the 16th century, job rules were relaxed on the day, so that boys and girls working “in service” could take time off to visit mum, half-way through their year’s contract. Employers would pack young staff off with a simnel cake (a rich fruit cake with layers of marzipan) to bring home, in hopes that the gesture would bring a return of blessings.

In honor of all traditions that commemorate mums, we’re looking at an old picture in the NGA today. The medieval painter Giotto di Bondone (1267 – 1337) is credited with releasing Italian painting from the Byzantine style, and produced moving and memorable images of mothers. Byzantine art flourished from 330 to 1453 and used lots of gold-leaf, stylized faces, rigid poses, stiff drapery and little sense of space or volume. It was Giotto, with works like this Madonna and Child (1320 – 1330), who ushered in a new age of naturalism.

This picture was originally the central part of an altarpiece made up of five panels. Painted late in Giotto’s career, it shows the artistic leaps and bounds he made. The use of gold-leaf on the background is traditional (and typical for an altarpiece like this), symbolizing heaven. There’s gold-tooling too (on the haloes and around the edges), where the wood has been “punched” with a point to indent dotted patterns in the surface. But despite the shimmer, the other colors retain their warmth and vibrancy: soft flesh tones, slivers of hot red here and there, the deep blue mantle and the fresh green at its hem.

But the true revelation here is realism. Giotto makes this flat surface look 3D with a new approach to form. The bodies of Mary and Jesus aren’t flimsy cardboard cut-outs: instead they carry convincing corporeal weight. It’s the soft and subtle shading that’s key to carving out the impression of mass and volume. The folds of Mary’s mantle flow from dark (in the crook of her elbow, in the area of her armpit) to light (at the point of her shoulder, down her bicep) to suggest the real, physical being beneath. The baby too is rounded through tonal gradations that shape his chest and the chub at his wrists.

Giotto observed the world around him to achieve his natural look, and put his skills in pursuit of one ultimate aim: to bring new human drama and meaning to religious stories. He diminished the divide between “them” and “us” by making holy bodies look like ours and bringing us up close to his subjects. See how Mary stands almost as if in our company here (no distancing thrones or the like in sight). She’s cropped at the waist and gazes into our eyes. Gestures too are entirely relatable: she holds a rose (symbol of her purity), and baby’s decided it looks interesting, reaching to grab it with his right hand. With his other he’s got a hold of mum’s index finger, in a move we all recognize as typical of infants.

Giotto’s big steps towards realism played a fundamental role in the development of Western painting, which is why writers on the Renaissance always begin with him. Due to his focus on real experience, a picture like this becomes universal, revealing the relatable essence of human motherhood. And it seems pretty clear from this glowing image that he held the role in sparkling regard.

Last Sunday, Sandra Bullock won the Best Actress Oscar for her role in The Blind Side, a film based on the true story of how football star Michael Oher was taken in by a family that helped him realize his potential. I’m pleased Bullock won and I liked her acceptance speech, which was humorous and moving, and celebrated uncelebrated mums everywhere.

And the speech stressed something else. When Bullock thanked people who’d supported her “when it wasn’t fashionable”, she plainly acknowledged that her career has had both ups and downs. Typically, the more terrible stuff happens early on and one’s work gets better with time and maturation. But for Bullock (who picked up her Worst Actress Golden Raspberry for her role in All About Steve the night before the Oscars), the highs and lows couldn’t have come closer together.

One artist at the NGA who’d have been able to empathize is the Florentine painter Sandro Botticelli (1445 – 1510). At the peak of his powers, Botticelli was successful and sought-after, and this Portrait of a Youth (c. 1482 – 1485) has all the hallmarks of his heyday. The sitter may have been a member of the Medici family, who ruled Florence and were prolific patrons of the arts. This sort of secular portrait was popular at the time, chiming nicely with the cultural movement of humanism, which honored man’s reason and centrality, rather than God’s supremacy alone. As a Medici artist, Botticelli was exposed to a humanist education, which included classical texts and the liberal arts.

Here we see Botticelli’s graceful, linear style. Florentine artists were known for their draughtsmanship and precise drawing practice, and Botticelli uses contour in a very emphatic, elegant way. See the decorative waves of the chestnut hair, lined and luscious against the face, or the ornamental curled trim, running down the torso and around the neck.

In a bust-length picture, expression comes first from the face and next from the hands. And what a pulsing personality comes across here! Never mind the shaping and shading of the nose, the pouting of lips, and the etched-in eyebrows. Let’s focus on the fantastic idea to cock the head, while keeping those big baby browns locked on the onlooker. Instantly, for me, there’s a sense of a challenging, believable character. The hand’s not idle either and nimbly conveys Botticelli’s sophisticated understanding of anatomy. But even here, anatomical accuracy gives way to an impulsive desire to create pattern and beauty. Now, I’m pretty sure that this hand gesture must have meant something specific at the time, but even for us in the dark without a definitive interpretation, it’s still an attractive thing to see.

Not too long after this was made, Florence fell into political crisis. The Medici were expelled in 1492 and there followed four years of extremist rule under a dominican preacher called Savonarola, who forced religious observance in all aspects of life. Most likely in response to this, Botticelli devoted his later years to painting religious themes. Since they were all rather clumsy and rather obscure, these pictures were derided and he fell out of favour. He spent his last decades in obscurity, considered passé compared to a new generation of artists. It was only much later that Botticelli was rediscovered, by a group of painters called the Pre-Raphaelites in the mid-19th century, who valued his design and decorative charm.

Now, of course, Botticelli is one of our best-loved painters, despite the marked peaks and pitfalls of his career. I suppose we can learn from both Sandro and Sandra, that flops and failures are all part of the journey and our best performance could be just around the corner.

Were you tempted today by some spring/ summer pieces fluttering in those fresh-dressed windows on the high street? A few years ago, a March Saturday would’ve seen lots of ladies surging to splurge on a new wardrobe for coming months, especially at the cheaper, more throwaway end of fashion. But now we’re looking at a whole new scenario: it seems our relationship with fashion has changed and that we’re coming to some sartorial sense.

Whether our wardrobes are stuffed to beyond bursting or we’re trimming back a bit since the recession hit, shopping to excess has become démodé. Remember that rabid rootling through a stack of sale items? Or the nervous wait while on the short-list for some designer bag? Well, it’s just not where we’re at right now. We’re also thinking more clearly about clothes and climate, with people cottoning onto the fact that cheap clothes come from cheap factories. In the UK, charity shops are refusing cheap-end fashion (prices can’t be marked down beyond rock bottom), so suddenly we’re looking at a whole lot of land filled with disposable clothes.

These days, people are taking a new fashion tack and finding ways to get a clothes high without so much buy. You can rent a frock, or customize your clothes for the latest look.  You can arrange to swap and share with friends, sew-your-own, or simply give a new lease of life to that 80s jacket at the back of your cupboard.

Gilbert Stuart has gauged our mood perfectly with his Catherine Brass Yates (Mrs. Richard Yates) 1793/1794, which shows the wife of a New York importer. Stuart (1755 – 1828) is an American painter and one of the most original portraitists of the 18th century. He traveled to London at 20 to train under the American history painter Benjamin West. Stuart was a hit in London, so much so that he was mistaken for the great British painter Gainsborough.

But Stuart has a style that’s all his own (far more recklessly truthful than Gainsborough ever got), as is patent and plain in this picture. Can you imagine any other artist painting in the traces of a lady’s mustache, blotting it carefully onto her upper lip? Well that’s exactly what Stuart does in his bid not to shy from the physical truth. Clock the big-lidded eyes, bumpy long nose and slightly put-out, appraising gaze. And yet, this lack of flattery is what the Yankee sitters wanted. When he returned to America in 1793, Stuart was surprised by the down-to-earth tastes of his US clientele, saying: “In England my efforts were compared with those of Van Dyck, Titian, and other great painters: here they are compared with the works of the Almighty!”

So Stuart developed a dab-hand at reality and became a master at manipulating paint. Here he uses it thickly or thinly, with opacity or translucence, in different places depending on the effect he’s after. Fabrics, needle, thimble, wedding band, flesh, and fingernails are all wrought with terrific truth-to-life.

I love the determined domesticity of Mrs Yates (not wanting to waste time in posing for Stuart, she simply decided to tend to her sewing). Stuart is well-known for his presidential portraits, but this picture shows how candid his domestic scenes can be. Mrs Yates is one of the US’s best-loved pictures, as a masterpiece and symbol of the early republic’s rigor. Right now, I bet she’s gaining new batches of fans, all keen to emulate her thriftiness and craftiness.

Have you ever thought about how light can affect a building? Perhaps when you last saw a sun-beam beat through your bedroom window or the rising moon made your roof-gutters glitter? That power of light to totally transform a building is what I’m looking at today.

Come see my third video blog, which will get you in the mood for spring… And special thanks to the Washington National Cathedral.

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It’s officially cool to be kind, the original win-win scenario that benefits the bestower as well as the people it’s directed at. Studies show that people who demonstrate kindness decrease their risk of depression, since they experience ‘helper’s high’ from a release of natural opiates in the brain. Where kindness involves human interaction, all our personal relationships see improvements. There’s even physical evidence to suggest that kindness strengthens your heart and boosts your immune system.

President Obama has got the kindness message ringing in our ears. He’s been stressing the point that kindness is key and that it usually begins with empathy. He has said: “There’s a lot of talk in this country about the federal deficit, but I think we should talk more about our empathy deficit: the ability to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes; to see the world through the eyes of those who are different from us – the child who’s hungry, the steelworker who’s been laid off, the family who lost the entire life they built together when the storm came to town.”

The spirit of empathy is at the heart of Home Sweet Home (c. 1863), an early work by the American artist Winslow Homer (1836 – 1910). One of the leading painters of his time, Homer excelled at illustration, watercolor and oils. It’s a surprise to discover he was largely self-taught, and that he came to art late, having worked first as a commercial print-maker.

This picture was exhibited early in 1863 and marked the start of Homer’s art career. He’d visited the Front in 1861 and 1862 as an artist-correspondent for Harper’s Illustrated so it’s a scene he’s seen for real. Two union soldiers listen as the regimental band plays “Home, Sweet Home.” This is painted in oils, so the colors show saturated strength. There’s impressive modeling on the figures in the foreground and believable recession into the middle ground, where there are more soldiers gathered around. Homer picks out realistic details, such as the pot steaming on the hot embers, the bag slung on a stick and the foliage in the foreground. The composition is neat and ordered – the standing figure hits just off center, his vertical line picked up by the two upright poles behind. Horizontals run through the tents and horizon. The blue on the left in the many men is balanced by that on the right in the sitting man.

But quite aside from the visuals here, there’s a feeling that’s deeply affecting. It’s not sentimental, but straight-forward and direct. Homer isolates the movements of the men with a sharp photographic accuracy (unbuttoned shirts, shunted caps, loose body language), to convey their moment of reflection amidst a bloody war. Union general Nelson Miles described what would happen between the bands of the two warring armies: “… the animosity disappeared when at the close some band would strike up that melody which comes nearest the hearts of all true men, “Home, Sweet Home,” and every band within hearing would join in that sacred anthem with unbroken accord and enthusiasm.”

This simmering to a sonorous sense of understanding suggests the essence of the human inclination to show empathy. We’ve evolved this way – it’s why we feel bad when we aren’t nice and it’s why we rely on each other for social support. Home Sweet Home makes Obama’s words all the more meaningful: “when you empathize with the plight of others, whether they are close friends or distant strangers – it becomes harder not to act; harder not to help.”