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…

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Posted by misteraitch at July 30, 2003 01:45 PM | TrackBack