Lucky Dip

I meant to write an entry about the work of Russian painter Mikhail Vrubel (1865-1910), and may still do so one day, but, seeing as how his work is already so well-represented on-line, I will post only one image for now, just taking the time to point out that it has always struck me that there is something very wrong-looking about the girl’s right hand, the one holding the flower…

I recently read Robert Aickman’s entertainingly lugubrious autobiography The Attempted Rescue. Aickman comes across as a curmudgeonly soul, scarred by a deeply unhappy childhood, and dominated by the figure of his eccentric father. Indeed the book’s opening line is: ‘My father remains the oddest man I have ever known.’ The chapter-titles are grimly enjoyable in their own right: the second chapter, ‘I Loom’, which relates what he knows of his parents’ meeting and ill-advised marriage, is followed by a third entitled ‘I am Born and Immediately Fall Ill.’

The national sport of England is obstacle-racing. People fill their rooms with useless and cumbersome furniture and spend the rest of their lives trying to dodge it - Herbert Beerbohm Tree, quoted by Aickman.

Also, one of these days, I will write up something about the caricaturist James Gillray (1756-1815), whom I find an absolutely fascinating figure: a compromised and a commercial artist who nevertheless achieved a kind of greatness. The image below, ‘Very Slippy-Weather’ shows Mrs Humphrey’s print-shop in the background (Mrs H. was Gillray’s friend, landlady and exclusive agent during the latter part of his life.) Like Vrubel, Gillray died mad and blind.

I find it a little dispiriting that Johanna Sinisalo’s novel Not Before Sundown is the first work of fiction translated from Finnish to be published in the UK for six years. This book, another recentish read, relates how Mikael, a young photographer, happens upon an injured and malnourished troll-cub in the courtyard of his apartment block. Mikael takes pity on the beast, and takes it into his home, where he slowly nurses it back to health, meanwhile finding out everything he can about trolls from the internet, from folklore, nature journals and newspaper cuttings. In the world Sinisalo describes, trolls exist as flesh-and-blood carnivores which, despite their reticence and scarcity, nevertheless carry with them an ominous freight of cautionary legend. What Mikael fails to realise, until events have begun to spin out of control, is that the potent pheromones given off by the troll exert an irresistably aphrodisiac influence on those around him… This, to me, was a novel whose several interesting ingedients didn’t quite combine into an entirely satisfying blend, but which was, even so, a sharply unusual and memorable tale.

Lastly, here is an image which caught my eye by the Estonian artist Eduard Wiiralt (aka Viiralt, 1898-1954). I neglected to make a note of its title, or the site’s URL, and now I can’t find it, & am unable to offer further details. Update: my thanks to Mr G______ for tracking down the source for this image.

Geometry & Perspective

When scanning in the images for the entry below, I noticed a couple of small geometrical illustrations in Mauriès’ book that I had previously overlooked. These were taken, I read, from a work entitled Geometria et Perspectiva, by one Lorenz Stoer (also spelt Stöer, and Stör), which was published in Augsburg, in 1567, the year before the appearance of Jamnitzer’s Perspectiva Corporum Regularium in the rival Bavarian city of Nuremburg.

Whereas Jamnitzer was a goldsmith, Stoer’s preferred medium was, apparently, wood: his figures being intended to serve as ‘perspectival examples specifically for craftsmen in wood, involving various semi-regular solids and ruins’ (Dr. Kim H. Veltman).

The juxtaposition of geometrical figures and ruinous backdrops simultaneously brings to mind Escher, and Piranesi, an anachronism further confused and compounded by the elaborately decorative forms in the foregrounds of some of these woodcuts, which, as George Hart has observed, could pass for abstract 20th-Century sculptures.

All of the above images were taken from the Freiberg site behind the second of the above links. I lifted the image below from a page at a Munich University site. Clicking on any of the present images will open larger, pop-up versions of the same.

Ivories

Of the many fine and interesting things illustrated in Patrick Mauriès’ book Cabinets of Curiosities, some of the most eye-catching, to me, were the remarkable, hyper-elaborate 16th and 17th-Century ivory carvings, such as the one pictured left, a miniature corkscrewing tower by, or after the style of the Milanese collector and instrument-maker Manfredo Settala (1600-1680). There is a portrait of Settala in which he is depicted wearing a rather melancholy expression, and delicately holding just such a carving between his fingers, ‘the visual equivalent of a rhetorical flourish, as impressive as it is ultimately futile.’ as Mauriès puts it. One of the largest collections of these virtuoso carvings was held in Dresden, and included over two hundred such pieces, including the four pictured below. One common characteristic of these marvels was the attempt to carve one shape inside another, as many times as was possible, an endeavour which seems scarcely less arbitrary and difficult than assembling a ship-in-a-bottle within the bottle itself… No less a figure than the Habsburg emperor Rudolf II is supposed to have practiced this art. ‘Ivory-carving was nourished by the contemporary obsession with perspective and solid geometry’ writes Mauriès. It is startling to think, when presented with artefacts like these, that designs such as Wentzel Jamnitzer’s were not, as one might otherwise suppose, abstract and conceptual, but rather stood perhaps, as idealised templates toward which the master-carver might hope to aspire.

Movable Books

The on-line exhibitions on pop-up and movable books at the University of North Texas’ library have been there for years, but are new to me.

The exhibition’s introduction traces the history of movable books back as far as the 13th Century, when mystic and philosopher Ramón Llull used volvelles or revolving discs, to illustrate his combinatorial concepts. We learn also that Andreas Vesalius’ De humani corporis fabrica librorum epitome, printed in Basel in 1543, ‘features a movable illustration in which the human anatomy is shown in seven detailed superimposed layers.’

The exhibition’s main focus, however, is on movable and pop-up books created for children from the mid-nineteenth century until the present day.

For more pop-up book fun, see also Nick Bantock’s site, and Jan Pienkowski’s, and Robert Sabuda’s.

On the Balcony

Here are a few scanned photographs of various souvenirs and ornaments perched on the rail of our balcony. I had meant to try out the tripod I’d been given to use with the 35mm camera we’d bought last year, but had hardly yet used. In the end, though, I found the tripod frustratingly fiddly, and ended up just holding the camera anyway. One day soon I shall venture away from the camera’s fully-automatic settings, and find out what some of those buttons and dials on there actually do.

The vase pictured above is an elegant but inexpensive thing we picked up from a trip to the Kosta Boda factory the year before last.

Also from Kosta Boda is the bottle with the metal screw-top lid in the second picture. The brown fluid therein is cognac. The jar on the right was purchased from a souvenir shop in the town of Casares, in Andalucía.

I don’t recall where we picked up the green glass vase in the third picture. The blue-glazed ceramic thingy was brought back from from Morrocco for us by our intrepid friend Mr. T_____. If anyone reading this knows what kind of thingy this is, then please leave a comment below: we have no idea what such an item should be used for.

In the last picture, a bovine salt-&-pepper shaker set faces a framed photograph of a cow. I snapped that picture in a field near Winchester, during a visit to my old friend Mr. R_________ in ’98. The frame and the salt-&-pepper set came later. One of the two pieces has recently broken in two, alas, after taking a fall.

As usual, clicking on the above images will open enlarged versions of the same.

Thomas Jones

On first encountering the paintings of Thomas Jones, I probably walked right past them after only the most cursory of glances. I surely must have seen them in one of my many visits to the National Museum of Wales when I lived just around the corner from it in a dingy and cold shared house on Colum Road. At that time though, ’93/’94, my interest in art was still at an awkward and an early stage, when I would relegate most anything pre-1880 to a generic boring old stuff category.

Then, on a visit to the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome, in February or March ’97, to see an exhibition entitled Grand Tour: il fascino dell’Italia nel XVIII secolo, I met them again, but saw them as though for the first time. Amongst all the cluttered interiors, the periwigged portraits and serenely classical landscapes, ‘improved’ from Nature, Jones’ little Neapolitan cityscapes leapt off the wall, with their bright simplicity and deep calm.

Jones, 1742-1803, came from a landowning family in Radnorshire, Wales. As a second son, a career in the clergy was expected of him, but, feeling art to be his true vocation, he rebelled. He succeeded in persuading the successful and well-connected landscape painter Richard Wilson, a fellow Welshman, to accept him as a student. Many of the works produced in Wilson’s studio at that time were derived from, or were strongly influenced by the painter’s recent travels through Italy. Jones was struck by the beauty of the landscapes he saw take shape around him, and formed a determination to see their originals for himself.

In the years that followed, Jones achieved some fitful success as a landscape artist in his own right. Almost from the beginning, there is a sharp distinction in style between the stiff formality of his public work, and the much freer and more relaxed manner of his preparatory sketches and other pieces painted for his own amusement. Of the latter, the landscape above, painted near his family home at Pencerrig, is a vibrant early example. By 1776, after suffering several setbacks, Jones was finally ready to prepare for his long-anticipated journey to Italy.

Jones went first to Rome, and made a modest name for himself in that city’s busily cosmopolitan art-scene. Despite winning a few substantial commissions, and making many friends, he was, at length, unable to draw in a steady income from his painting. Then, after inadvertently alienating an important middleman, he decided to cut his losses and relocate to Naples, still capital, at that time, of the Kingdom of the two Sicilies.

Once again, however, after a few initial successes, the commissioned work dried up. Jones reckoned that his remaining funds were sufficient to support himself, his Danish lover (who masqueraded for propriety’s sake as his housekeeper) and their two children, for another couple of years. Thus freed from the obligation to please or impress, Jones continued to paint, but now almost exclusively for his own satisfaction. The carefree sketches that resulted are exactly the paintings for which Jones is chiefly admired today.

In Naples, Jones found lodgings with a roof terrace in a house near the harbour. It is from this vantage-point, or from that of his studio window, that he made his highly finished oil studies of the neighbouring buildings, which are remarkable for their freshness and immediacy.

Jones was the first British painter to make outdoor oil sketching a significant part of his practice as an artist. His most original work of this kind was done in Italy in the years 1776-83, and particularly in Naples in 1782. Combining acuity of observation with a genius for selection and abstraction, such oil sketches foreshadow much that occurred in the plein-air movements of the following century - (Tate Gallery caption).

In 1783, Jones returned to London with high hopes of continuing his artistic career. During his absence, however, fashions had changed, and he struggled once more in vain for recognition. The death of his older brother in 1789 obliged him to return to his family’s estates in Wales, whereupon he assumed the mantle of country squire, with, by all accounts, good-natured and forward-thinking enthusiasm. He still painted sporadically, and found the time to write an breezily anecdotal volume of memoirs, much valued today by art-historians.

My occasion for writing all this is the current exhibition of Jones’ work in Cardiff, which will move on later this year to Manchester and London: sadly, I shall probably not have the opportunity to visit it. As a consolation, I ordered a copy of the exhibition catalogue, which also serves as a comprehensive biography of the artist and monograph of his work. I read it a few weeks ago, and more recently scanned from it the images presented here: click on each one to see an enlarged version of the same.

An Island of Our Own

When making our last-minute booking for a holiday cottage up in the Stockholm archipelago the other week, we initially, in our haste, overlooked the Swedish brochure’s phrase på egen sagolikt vacker ö, which, we later realised, means something like on its own fantastic, beautiful island.

So, for a week at least, we had one of the archipelago’s ca. 24,000 islands all to oursleves. Fortunately, it was reassuringly close to terra-firma, and only 500m or so from a large marina, making for a short each-way trip in the four-person, four-horsepower boat that was provided. There were a couple of bumpy landings during my first attempts at driving the boat, but I soon got the hang of it.

The house itself comprised a lounge/kitchen, bedroom and bathroom, with a low attic doubling as a second bedroom. There was also an annexe which consisted of another bedroom, and a sauna. Besides that there was a separate fishing lodge, away from the main house, where there were yet another couple of beds.

The island was about a hectare in size, well-forested, and home to many birds, frogs, bats, and voles. Alas, there were less pleasant fauna too, in the shape of mosquitoes, and ticks. Its northern extreme was rather rocky, but its southern and western shores sloped gently into the surrounding Baltic, with a miniature sandy beach next to the wharf where the boat was tied up.

Our dog loved the freedom of being able to run unleashed, without his owners anxiously fussing over him at every step. Somewhat apprehensive of the water at first, he was splashing unprompted into the shallows by the end of the week, and standing nose-forward at the prow of the boat, like a figurehead.

From our isolated base, we travelled up the coast to the nearby village of Dalarö, or more often, when in search of supplies, to the town of Haninge.

We also made a couple of daytrips to Stockholm itself, no more than a half-hour away, taking in the Vasa Museum, and the National Museum of Fine Arts. We did a little shopping too, merely skimming the surface, alas, of the big-city stores that, in the little town where we live, we can only dream about.

Below is a chart, digitally enhanced to highlight the island where we stayed. ‘X’, naturally, marks the spot…

All but the last of the images above were lifted from the Novasol web-site.

Soft Music and Soothing Words

I’ll be on vacation for two weeks from this afternoon, and, although I won’t be off-line the whole time, I do intend to take a break from this journal until ca. the 21st.

Until then, I leave you with some soft music and soothing words.

The music features samples from two pieces of music I’ve written about in earlier entries here, Valentin Silvestrov’s Kitsch-Musik, and Vladimir Martynov’s Come In!

The words are by Thomas Ligotti, also the subject of a recent entry, and are taken from a CD of spoken-word pieces, accompanied by guitar-and-synth backing-tracks composed by the author, which was supplied with the Crampton book. The CD is entitled The Unholy City, and the track I’ve excerpted here Welcome to the Unholy City. It strikes me as more a brave attempt than an entirely successful endeavour. What other authors, I wonder, might try their hands at such a thing?

El Port de la Selva

One year ago today, my wife and I awoke in a two-star, beachfront hotel in the slightly shabby town of St. Pierre-sur-Mer, having arrived there from Barcelona, where we’d enjoyed a delightful weekend, and from where we’d set out on a mapless, and consequently rather aimless day’s cross-border drive. Between us, we’d concocted a composite mental image of a place combining maritime quaintness and salubriousness, and, not having discovered this ideal in France, we headed back Spainward, stopping first in Narbonne to buy some roadmaps.

We followed the toll-roads back as far as Figueres, and from there we headed for the Cap de Creus, which I’d gathered was a picturesque area. Our first port of call there was Llança, where we failed find a hotel that quite matched what we had in mind. Looking at the map, I thought we could try following the coast road to the resort town of Roses, but, before we got that far, we happened upon El Port de la Selva…

Here we found the Hotel Porto Cristo, which was to be our base for the next three days, a very comfortable three-star place with particularly warm and welcoming staff. As the sun smiled on us but fleetingly, we weren’t much tempted to loll on the nearby beach but instead lazed in the hotelroom a good deal, heading out for the occasional excursion, to the nearby Gulf of Roses, and to the Teatro-Museo Salvador Dalí in Figueres.

We enjoyed a couple of good meals at the Porto Cristo’s restaurant, a high-ceilinged, stone-walled place, whose waiters we came to think of as ‘Penn & Teller’— one big, tall, and garrulous, the other diminutive and almost silent. ‘Penn’ was a most helpful and hospitable chap, translating items on the menu, recommending local wines and plying us with after-dinner drinks after we’d dispensed with our portions of Crema Catalana. The only word we heard ‘Teller’ utter, on the other hand, was, on the evening before our departure: Adios.