Artist of the Day: Yayoi Kusama.

"My life a dot: that is, one of a million particles. A white net of nothingness composed of an astronomical aggregation of connected dots will obliterate me and others, and the whole of the universe." - Yayoi Kusama

I really wish I'd seen the retrospective of  Yayoi Kusama's work at Tate Modern in 2012, but at that time she hadn't really crossed my radar. It was only when I came across her earlier work in a book in the university library whilst shelving, that I became a fan. I love her organic forms and obsessive patterns that speak of the interconnectedness of everything, encouraging one to forget all limits, abandon a sense of self.

Kusama is one of Japan’s best-known living artists and has spent the past 34 years as a voluntary in-patient in a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo. Born in 1929, she has produced six decades of pioneering work. Arriving in New York in 1958, she become part of the avant-garde art scene of the Sixties, making work that anticipated both Andy Warhol’s repeated-motif “Cow Wallpaper” and Claes Oldenburg’s soft sculptures.

Kusama’s family made their living by cultivating plant seeds and she grew up surrounded by fields full of flowers. This formative environment has been a touchstone for the artist throughout her life. From her earliest sketches to her most recent large-scale sculptures, Kusama has been fascinated by the plant world.

As a child she had visions and always found a way to draw despite her family's objections. Around the age of ten, Kusama began using polka dots and net motifs in her drawings, watercolours, pastels and oils. She later attributes this to a series of hallucinations, the result of a volatile family environment. At around 20, she left home to enter a class to study nihonga (Japanese-style painting).
Being extraordinarily prolific, Kusama managed to produce enough work for many exhibitions and began corresponding with American artist Georgia O’Keeffe, sending her 14 watercolours. In 1956 she was able to exhibit in America, and her name started to be known.





Archaic Dance Costume, 1953 - Yayoi Kusama



Yayoi Kusama, The Woman, 1953, pastel, aqueous tempera and acrylic paint, 45,4 x 38,2 cm

 

 

 

Column No.1, 1953 - Yayoi Kusama

Though it took a while for Kusama to re-emerge as an artworld celebrity outside Japan, neither her circumstances nor her fragile mental health have curtailed her productivity. Between 1978 and 2002 she produced 14 novels, a collection of poetry and an autobiography. Kusama seems to skip effortlessly through a number of different styles in a wide variety of media.

In her series of Infinity Net paintings, she adopts the minimalism of the white canvas. A close look reveals not the broad-brush approach of artists such as Robert Ryman, but tiny, obsessively repeated loops and arcs of white paint encircling darker-hued specks. A wash of thin white paint has also been applied, creating a soft veil over these coarse, gnarly textures.

INFINITY NETS [MAE], 2013
130.3 x 130.3 cm. (51.3 x 51.3 in.)




Snow Ball in Sunset (Snow Ball in Sansunset), 1953

Kusama’s achievement as a woman artist, coming as she did from a traditional background in a conservative part of Japan in the early part of the twentieth century, cannot be underestimated. It was her own unwavering drive and confidence in her talent that enabled her to forge her extraordinary career from such humble beginnings.



Gisèle Prassinos’s Surrealist Texts.

In 2009, I went to see Angels of Anarchy, the wonderful Women Artists and Surrealism exhibition in Manchester:

http://www.manchestergalleries.org/angelsofanarchy/resources/artists/index.html,

Angels was the first major exhibition in Europe to explore the crucial role that women artists played in the surrealist art movement and featured over 150 artworks, including paintings, photography, sculpture and surreal objects, created by three generations of artists from around the globe.
The 32 artists are some of the most important and influential artists of the 20th century, including Frida Kahlo, Lee Miller, Meret Oppenheim and Leonora Carrington. These were radical, revolutionary women whose work still inspires, and sometimes shocks, today.

Since then, I have been interested in tracking down other female surrealist artists and writers, and recently I came across Gisèle Prassinos. She is a writer of novels, stories and poems and she also creates objects - particularly in fabric (I can't find any examples on-line, but if anyone does, please post as if they're anything like her stories,I would love to see them) .

“I never knew how to write a realistic story. I never knew how to draw or to write life as it is. Each line, each word distracts me and pulls me towards the impossible,” writes Gisèle Prassinos in her semi-autobiographical novel Time is Nothing (Le Temps n’est rien).



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Gisèle Prassinos reads to the surrealists. Photo by Man Ray

She was adopted into Andre Breton's surrealist group age 14 as the embodiment of the “femme-enfant.” She had no knowledge of surrealist practice of automatism, but wrote ecstatic literature from her unconscious and continued to produce stories, novels and poems long after her association with Surrealism had ended, proving her true importance as an independent artist. What the Surrealists took for a juvenile ease in exposing the unconscious was actually the first sign of a burgeoning literary talent.

Born in 1920 into what had been a wealthy and cultured Greek family which was forced to move to France to avoid persecution during hostilities between Greece and Turkey when Gisèle was only two (her father had to sell his library of 100,000 books to pay for the journey), she grew up in a difficult but stimulating environment that is reflected in her work.

She released her first book La Sauterelle Arthritique (The Arthritic Grasshopper) in 1935, supported by Paul Eluard’s preface and the photograph, above, by Man Ray. Holding her own among the formidable male personalities of the surrealist group, she was one of two female writers included in Breton’s 1940 Anthologie de l’humour noir.

What makes her writing fascinating is its intense association with the worlds of dream and myth. The construction of many of her stories leave the reader with the feeling of just emerging from a nightmare. Others incorporate the enduring themes and structures of myth, allowing her to create a personal Surrealist mythology.
There are frequently strange lapses in logic that the reader must simply accept as reasonable in Prassinos’s fictional worlds, such as in “Arrogant Hair”:

In the meantime, someone, no doubt, came in. It could be a little girl because I heard her teeth crack the shell of a nut…She looked at me, then, pointing her yellowish hands to the first child, said to me: ‘His hair must be smelly because I have found a small woodchip on the floor’.

The narrator assumes the entrant is a little girl because, apparently, little girls crack nuts with their teeth. Woodchips are indicative of bad smelling hair, and, even more strange, although the smelly hair seems to permeate the entire room, the girl is only made aware of its smell by a visual input. The short stories in this collection often concern children, or are written from a childlike point of view, from which this sort of imaginative logic might seem perfectly reasonable.

Now, Black Scat Books, a small publishing venture dedicated to “sublime art and literature,” offers the first comprehensive selection of Prassinos’s neglected surrealist texts to appear in English.




http://readingintranslation.com/2014/02/25/bleak-fairy-tales-gisele-prassinoss-surrealist-texts-translated-by-ellen-nations/

 

Gisele Prassinos
for the speech of early morning
and its muscular taste of rebirth
even if daylight arriving should choke it
I would open the flowers of poison unaided
and let the last day dawn
I function, fertile
uselessly repeat
cannot offer oblivion
its gone way beyond tears
where are the flowery phrases of yesteryear?

Artist of the Day: Viera Bombová

Exploring cyberspace often means drifting into many cul-de-sacs of distraction where sometimes wondrous discoveries and treasures can be found. Today I discovered the work of  Slovakian Viera Bombová (b 1932)  who illustrated books mainly in the 60s and 70s such as Janko Gondášik (Swine Herdsman Janko, 1969), retitled Die Goldene Frau (The Golden Woman, 1972) in German, a series of Slovak folk tales originally compiled at the turn of the century by Samo Czambel. (Thanks to https://clivehicksjenkins.wordpress.com for posting about her. Also excited to discover Clive's work - he's originally from Newport where I used to live, and has work in the museum there).

Here is a selection of beautiful mixed media pieces by Viera Bombová. I love the rich and textured colours, elements of primitivism and abstract expressionism, collage and print used to render the dreamlike narratives.



 

Manitou ajándéka. Indián mesék (Manitou’s Gift. Native American folk tales),
Bratislava-Budapest, 1968

The elements of Slovak folk art later,  mix just as naturally in the American Native or Pacific motifs in the folk tale books of the respective people.



Pred Odchodom


 

 “Under this mask, another mask”.  

- Claude Cahun 

 

 

 

Shadow hand IV



The Other

 

The Other calls again.

It wants to turn the inward out,

give shape to things

I would rather remain formless.

I must become a distiller,

get back to the essence,

cultivate a sense of presence.

Resist all definition.

I’II never finish taking off these masks.

 

 

I was excited to discover the work of Gertrude Hermes today while viewing some of the beautiful first editions from the Gregynog Press that was set up by the Davies sisters in 1922.

Five Senses 1934

The Yoke woodcut, 1954-75



Gertrude Hermes (1901 − 1983) THE WARRIOR’S TOMB 1941





Bees. Colour woodcut, 1963









 



Down by the River



 

With thanks to Arrastoneglade www.arrastoneglade.wordpress.com for the inspiration to place text and image together.

To Be is to be Percieved: experiencing Beckett's later works.

The theatre is in utter darkness.

A spot-lit mouth seems to float disembodied on the stage.

Almost immediately the mouth begins a deluge of sound, a stream of consciousness you can barely understand. Like being cornered by a lonely stranger who gushes torrents of words at you as if you can somehow expunge her pain, it is exposing, disturbing, bewildering, yet strangely compelling.

  "Out into this world …" it begins. Did you turn off the gas? Your mobile? "This World …"

Not I, the first of three short plays by Samuel Beckett that I saw at the Barbican on Saturday as part of the month long International Beckett season, is inspired by the woman covering her ears in Carravaggio's Beheading of St. John the Baptist, and the numberless muttering old crones one sees in the streets ("Ireland is full of them," Beckett said). It is the sound of a woman unbridled, telling the truth about how it is to live the fragmented life of women, perpetually having to stitch the pieces together to attempt to make a whole.
 

Footfalls, in contrast, sees the actor obsessively pacing up and down the stage like Hamlet’s father, doomed for a certain term to walk the earth. It has a very musical structure, the walking like a metronome, one length measured in exactly nine seconds. I can still hear the rhythm of her shoes on the boards.
The mother asks of her daughter, May: "Will you never have done? Will you never have done revolving it all?" But May cannot stop walking, searching for something that happened, a secret or suppressed memory, an "it" that remains forever elusive. She may or may not be a ghost and is undoubtedly a haunted individual. The womb as also being the tomb is a recurring theme with Beckett who was very familiar with the work of Munch and May’s pose is reminiscent of Munch’s Madonna.

"another creature there
somewhere there
behind the pane
another living soul
one other living soul
till the end came
in the end came
close of a long day"

Rockaby is a performance poem in the shape of a play. The title refers to  traditional lullaby where a baby's cradle falls from the treetops, again bringing together Beckett's favourite juxtapositions of life and death. As she rocks herself towards death in her mother’s chair, a woman hears a dull, expressionless pre-recorded voice – her own – recount details from her own life, and that of her dead mother’s. One rock back-and-forth per line plays against the recorded narrative, the movements coming in and out of the light. As with Not I, the voice speaks in the third person. Life is nothing more nor less than the act of perception or the state of being perceived. The woman sees no one and is seen by no one. Voice has become her own observer, without whose surveillance any claim to existence would be invalidated. As the woman descends deeper into the depths of her self, the voice gets progressively weaker.

 

Afterwards, emerging, the audience was bewildered, disorientated, yet it was a strangely bonding experience. I found myself walking no where in particular with Cormac Sheridan, a student at Goldsmiths college who happened to come from Enniskillen, the town that hosts Happy Days, the annual International Beckett festival. He told me how he'd seen Waiting for Godot performed in Yiddish, and had taken part in a John Cage piece in the underground caves of Marble Arch.
As we parted with a hug, Cormac said, I might see you there some time, and I said, yes, probably, because somehow, after the magical intensity of the past hour, anything seemed possible.


     


HAPPY DAYS

  

I went to see this production tonight.  It is part of the summer season at RWCMD, written and directed by the wonderful Firenza Guidi.


Joy House




 
This is a harrowing and powerful piece of theatre about the first few women forced to be prostitutes in 1942 when Himmler opened brothels in the concentration camps.
The women were told that they would be freed, fed and have warmth if they 'volunteered'. Those that were desperate enough to believe these lies were told to take five steps forward.

For the women who survived in the Sonderbau, the first brothel for Buchenwald concentration-camp prisoners, talking about their experiences was virtually impossible. The topic was, and still is, taboo.

Director and writer Firenza Guidi has succeeded in giving these women a voice. Interspersing the scenes of the brutality with personal details and tender moments when the women try to help each other, she gives us glimpses of humanity - small sparks in the darkness.

With a cast of ten women and three men, this is an innovative and ambitious production by the final year students at RWCMD.

The audience is not static, but encouraged to move with the actors, often inadvertently becoming part of a scene as onlookers sometimes separated by the barbed wire fences, sometimes not. This is uncomfortable and totally immersive. Beginning on an upper level railway track and descending with the women into the hell of the camp, we follow the actors through stark, minimalist settings with mostly subdued and occasionally brutal lighting that heightens the tension as the women are stripped of every shred of dignity and hope.

 Firenza Guidi,in an interview on Radio Wales, states that an influential dance tutor of hers (and author of the biography A Time to Speak) survived Auschwitz and still had the number branded on her arm. This made a strong impression on Guidi, and she wrote the play to give these forgotten women a voice. She has a long history of writing strong parts for and about women including: The Miracle set in 1789 about women sentenced to seven years transportation to Australia on a ship known as the floating brothel, and Fear No Man's Return, an adaptation of the Trojan Women.

Artist of the Day: Caspar David Friedrich

This enigmatic painting was on the cover of a Schumann score that I was labelling for our collection in work today.



The Monk by the SeaCaspar David Friedrich (1808-10)
Earth, water, sky: the elements are stacked in three bands, radically abstract. But the horizontals are countered by the tiny upright figure of the monk, who stands alone on the edge of the Earth. A black ocean extends immeasurably before him, opening like an abyss without comforting pictorial borders. The German romantic Caspar David Friedrich spent two years working on this alarming vision of a sea of darkness, with only the slightest hope in the hint of blue sky above the leaden clouds. The monk stands between the two sins against hope: presumption and despair. This is a sea of faith

Natalia Goncharova and the Ancestors - Returning to the Source

       

                                  
I discovered the artist Natalia Goncharova while looking at Futurism on the Art Foundation course last year. I liked the fact that through her well-known painting The Cyclist with its Futurist devices of depicting time and speed with multiple outlines, she challenged the Italian Futurists obsession with machines by choosing a more peaceful mode of transport, a bicycle. The cyclist is also willfully heading in the opposite direction to that indicated by the pointing authoritarian finger, but then Goncharova was definitely not afraid of challenging convention throughout her life.



The Cyclist (1912-13)

As I'm currently working on some pieces influenced by Mithila painting (traditional folk art of Nepal), and want to express a connection to my own agriculturist ancestors, I re-visited Goncharova's paintings from her Neo-Primitivism stage that were influenced by Russian peasant culture and country life. 
Already for several years before 1912, she and her partner Mikhail Larionov were intrigued with folk art, children’s paintings and self-taught artists, such as Georgian Niko Piromanishvili.
  
At the start of the twentieth century, Russia was primarily
a peasant country steeped in folk aesthetics such as icons, embroidered towels, home-made mats and rugs, wooden houses with carved window casings, jambs and lintels, painted clay toys - all made by the hands of friends and relatives - and not considered works of art. Goncharova was one of the first Russian artists to perceive and value the high artistic merits of Russian national creativity.
 
                                                                                                                                                       



Round Dance, 1910  The artist suggests notions of purity and tradition by imitating peasant woodcuts in paint. She portrays the peasants with faces like in icons, which has the effect of a attributing to them a saintly status.              

The hard edges, strong images, colours, lines, flatness and naively depicted characters are typical of indigenous folk painting.  However, although on the surface, these paintings are bold and deceptively simple, on closer inspection they brim with subtleties and emotional potency. As explained by Goncharova, the need to go back to these naive forms of art, are necessary to find new forms.
 Folk art is not refined. But it is direct and sincere, taken from its direct surroundings revealing the instinct of the tribe/community, the people unconsciously preserving the treasure of these primal concerns. 



 1910, ʻHay Cuttingʼ has elements of Cubism and Gauguin

 

Scything at Tinker's Bubble Eco-village where no mechanised tools are used and I felt close to my own ancestors.

I can relate to how Goncharova yearned for the countryside and its seasonal rituals which she witnessed in her youth. In reaction to modern urban life, she emphasised a sense of community and spirituality in her images of rural labour.
 

Gardening

1908

Oil paint on canvas


 

Allotment, 2014



                  

Woman washing on rooftop in Nepal, 2015          

 

 

Washerwoman, 1910’s

Unlike Gauguin's weightless native people, who do not so much stand on the soil as appear "suspended" between beams of golden light, Goncharova's peasant women have their feet more firmly planted on the ground.  

 

Goncharova was fascinated by the 6-8 feet high rough hewn stone statues of male and female figures known as kamennaia baba, that are scattered over the southern steppes of Russia, frequently found atop burial mounds and believed to represent the ancestors of those who originally erected them: non-Slavic tribes, among them the Scythians who occupied these areas as far back as the iron and bronze age. Growing up on her grandmother's country estate, Goncharova would have heard popular legends that tell of the rootedness of the Russian people in nature. 


Stone maiden (Still life)



Pillars of Salt (1908)

 

 

 

Fertility God 1909 /1910





Rusalka (1908-09) This seated naked woman with dark eyes testifies to Goncharova’s familiarity with pagan folk beliefs. The fishes underline the woman’s personification of a water spirit (rusalka) who had just come ashore, and the young branch decoration her hiding place in the woods at the end of winter. Traditionally feared and revered by peasants who tried to win Rusalka’s favour for the fertilization of their soil with new crops, she is depicted in a modern idiom of a fusion of cubist and fauvist elements. 

 
Goncharova's paintings were not just beautiful in themselves. They made socio-political statements, were full of symbolism such as woodcutters cutting away the old to make way for the new reflecting the 1905 and 1917 Russian revolutions. She choses ubiquitous figures at work and makes them her own by incorporating elements of styles such as cubism and fauvism. 

 

Relating this to my own work has given me new insight and ideas. For example, I might chose to depict people living alternative lifestyles such as those I have stayed with in Tinker's Bubble and Tipi Valley as a statement about manmade environmental destruction of the planet. I might depict these 'basic' ways of living - in yurts, not using machines - as an anti-capitalist statement. I might depict women talking in groups sitting on the earth with their children as a way of showing that motherhood is still undervalued in society, or groups of all ages of people sitting together in front of a fire on the street (as in Nepal) to show how capitalism has alienated us from each other in the West.

 

Another concern is where to locate my source for the primitive in my art. Do I stay close to my ancestors like Russian artists and writers, (south-west England and Wales)? Or do I turn, like Picasso to Africa, or Maia Deren to Haiti (perhaps important soul places rather than being actually ancestrally linked). In which case, looking to Nepal and India seems valid for me also. Perhaps there are more similarities than one might think anyway - as theories such as Jung's collective unconscious imply.

 

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Breaking the Mould: The Bronte Sisters

It is a sobering thought that it was only 150 years ago that women were not allowed to enter a library, had to publish under men's names and had no part in public life.


The Brontes broke the mould against all odds; that is why so many are fascinated by them and why so many continue to go on pilgrimages to the parsonage in Yorkshire where the famous books were written, from all over the world.







I've been fascinated with the Brontes since reading Jane Eyre in the last year of school, and later all about the sisters who lived for most of their short lives in an isolated house on the moors, yet produced some of the most passionate and original literature ever written. None of their books have ever gone out of print. Jane Eyre is believed to be the second-most read book in the English language (after the Bible).


I feel an affinity with both Emily and Charlotte, both of whom reacted to their isolation and severe limitation of their life options at that time in very different ways: Emily withdrew from society, refused to wear the petticoats and corsets and spent her time roaming the moors, and Charlotte was hugely ambitious, longing for fame and recognition. Just as well, for it was she who persuaded Emily to send their work to publishers (under the male names of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell). For Emily though, writing was a deeply private act, an outlet that allowed her to live as she would want to - in her imagination - free to roam in communion with nature, free of social restraints and expectations.

There have been numerous cultural interpretations of the Brontes novels, poems and life including opera, dance, and music; even asteroids have been named after them. And now another off-shoot: Sally Wainwright is to write and direct a new one-off film for BBC1 about the Brontë sisters - To Walk Invisible: The Brontë Sisters, a drama that will focus on the three sisters' "increasingly difficult relationship with their brother Branwell, who in the last three years of his life – following a tragically misguided love affair – sank into alcoholism, drug addiction and appalling behaviour." The period of time was a tough one for the Brontë family, but coincided with the years the three women penned their now world-famous novels.

Many writers and artists, including myself have been fascinated by the mad woman in the attic in Jane Eyre. Why did Charlotte Bronte invent Bertha, Rochester's first wife, locked in an attic to torment her heroine? Perhaps Bertha is a part of Jane, and indeed their author, Charlotte Bronte - the part that had to be repressed in Victorian society where women were expected to be restrained, calm  and decorous at all times. Bertha represents the wild, instinctual nature of women that had to be locked away in order for a woman to be acceptable. Perhaps she represents all of us when we ignore and try to suppress our creative, curious, instinctual selves. She is the self screaming to be acknowledged.

 Paula Rego painted a whole series of work inspired by Jane Eyre.

A portrait of Bertha by Paula Rego

               

Lithograph from Paula Rego's illustrations of Jane Eyre

Paula Rego read the prequel Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys before reading Jane Eyre. She has transposed the context of  her Wide Sargasso Sea paintings onto her own background of growing up in Portugal, and she had added her own content as well. There is a play in the library about the author of Wide Sagasso Sea - Jean Rhys - called After Mrs Rochester by Polly Teale. It also features the mad woman that the book is about.

Which just shows how great art never grows old but continues to metamorphosize into new forms, feeding into and inspiring new creations, building layers, or perhaps revealing new truths.

All great artists break the mould in some way...The Brontes were true pioneers.
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Photography. Nepal.

 

  Please donate what you can to help those living with the aftermath of the earthquake: http://www.dec.org.uk/

These photos are a record of Nepal in January when I was so lucky to visit and experience a country that holds onto and honours its spirituality and culture.So many things – religious, cultural, historical, social, economic – are interconnected here and I hope the wonderful temples and shrines can be restored.

 

 

Stones
 Near Swayambhunath stupa, Kathmandu








 

Washing and wires
Kathmandu

Stupa, Kathmandu

Bike
Patan

Coin collector
Kathmandu

No Parking.
Off of Durbar Square, Kathmandu.

Feet.
Buddhist shrine Durbar Square, Kathmandu.

Shiva in the sky 
Hanuman-dhoka Durbar Square, Kathmandu, Nepal

 Mask with thangkas
Freak street, near Durbar Square. In the 1960s, hippies used to congregate here when Marujuana was still legal in Nepal

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Flags.
View from stupa, Pokhara

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Flower mandala.

Circuambulation.
Boudhanath Stupa, Boudhanath Kathmandu

Young monks in the rain

Sadhu
Kathmandu Gokarna Mahadev Temple 

Goddess
Gokarna Mahadev Temple 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Priest
Changu Narayan temple,  1,600 years old - oldest Hindu temple in Nepal, near Bhaktapur

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Children, Changu Narayan temple
Oldest Hindu temple in Nepal, near Bhaktapur

Wall
Near Kathmandu




Tree shrine

Dog and cow, Gokarna Mahadev Temple
Kathmandu



Woman, Kathmandu

Graffiti on shrine, Kathmandu

Street sellers, Kathmandu

Pottery Square, Bhaktapur


 

Offerings

Namaste