Posting this link seems a little futile, since readers of this blog are few and far between. But if you’re reading this, please take the time to follow this link
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jan/09/margaret-atwood-birds-review
and read the article by Margaret Atwood.
It’s very important.
P.S. so important, I’m actually posting this while I’m at work…
Work In Progress
Who knows when this will be done. I haven’t worked on it in awhile, and then this weekend I can’t stop. Starting to delete a lot of elements to work out a lot of compositional problems.
Five Quarters of the Orange by Joanne Harris
Five Quarters of the Orange by Joanne Harris is filled with food. I’ve never read (gasp!) Chocolat (yet!), but I imagine that it was also filled with food, although of the sweeter kind. Five Quarters starts out sweet, then almost half way, gets dark and then darker and then a little mysterious. It’s about pleasure and repression. About family feuds past and present, innocence and experience, guilt, lies, and bold, fiesty hearts.
The writing is the best part. It’s simple but sumptuous and very real. And goes deliciously well with a stack of home made chocolate chip walnut cookies.
Chocolate Chip Walnut Cookies (not to be eaten with lemons)
French Taste by Laura Calder
Steph got this for me for Christmas, and I am just now finally able to sit down with a cup of tea, toast (with lots of butter) and a soft boiled egg, ready to run my hands through its soft, elegant pages and take in the smell of the press (a favourite past-time).
At this time of the year, a lot of us are contemplating what we’ll do different this time around; what we can improve, attempt to define what we want, and configure the necessary steps to get there.
Over the last 5 or 6 months or so, once a week I do two hours of Yoga. Among the many things I have learned in the practice, one of them is “paying attention”. Stop. Breath. Listen to the quiet. Feel the heart thrumping. And in this, I have found the importance, or the value in, taking pleasure.
It may be cliché to go on about pleasure, but I do feel it is the secret to living well. (And I say this fully aware that pursuing it is more easily said than done.) At its most basic, the natural human pursuit of pleasure is what makes the body prefer a ripe fruit over a rotten one (a very practical feat of genetic engineering, that). At a higher level of evolution, it’s what makes a person bother to stop, sit down at a table, and enjoy a sandwich off a plate with some dignity, rather than rip at one like a bloodhound while simultaneously driving a car through a deluge and phoning the cleaners about the overcoat dropped off last Wednesday. (We all have our desparate moments, fair enough, but you’d have to be a masochist to make a habit of them.)
French Taste: Elegant Everyday Eating Laura Calder
How To Eat, French Taste by Laura Calder
So my resolution for this year: take pleasure in everything. But wait. I don’t mean to say that I will quit my job, eat roast every night while polishing off a bottle of wine, and then partake in lusty entertainment. A Taurus like me, must take heed to avoid the fall into pure hedonism - it is no laughing matter.
Rather, when I have my breakfast, I will not gobble and think about my day ahead of me and all the bloody things I have to do, and give myself a stomach ache to boot. I will sit down, and savor the thick, creamy, silky ball of yolk. I will warm my hands on my favorite coffee mug and experience what the good, brown liquid does to me; comfort, warmth, relaxation, nostalgia, home.
Par example: today I have a great deal of sanding, plastering and painting to do. I HATE it. I cannot tell you how much I hate doing it. It is ironic that I, who loves to make paintings, am the worst house painter in the world. I have no patience for it. But rather than do the job in frustration which will most probably guarantee a shitty outcome, I’ll get into my grubby painting clothes, put on some tunes and a happy face, and take pleasure in it.
Self Portrait with Kettle
I watched the kettle boil this morning while preparing coffee and found this - (above).
I thought it so funny, I grabbed my camera.
mmmm...creatures of some sort or other....
‘Nuff said.
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, Illustrated by Quentin Blake
Charles Dickens and I go way back. Way back. And my first experience of him started with this book, A Christmas Carol, when Steph, every Christmas season, would read aloud to me by the Christmas tree and some apple cidar. After that, I was gripped and hooked by his wild imagination, and delicious command of the English Language, his poetry in prose, and his comical and witty humour.
My favourite author? Yes. Indubitably, yes. (Ms. Atwood comes later).
Nicholas Nickelby, Hard Times, A Christmas Carol, Christmas Stories, Domby & Son, Martin Chuzzlewit, David Copperfield, Bleak House, The Pickwick Papers, The Old Curiosity Shop, A Tale of Two Cities
David Copperfield was next, although I was very much aware of A Tale of Two Cities and Madame de Farge. Then Great Expectations and so on and so forth. On and on I read, 900 pages a book, and I am still very touched by them.
My Favourite Author, and My Favourite Illustrator -
Round about the same time I was reading Dickens, I was also reading Roald Dahl (what is it, with the British?) and it was Roald Dahl who introduced me to Quentin Blake. As an artist (one who has wanted to illustrate books from the time I started reading and picked up a pencil), Quentin Blake is my hero. His pictures are such that one can read them. Please explore his website, and watch the videos posted there.
Scrooge in His Countinghouse
Quentin Blake and Charles Dickens, although from the same country, are from a very different time, but parallel in their wit, wild imagination, humour and delight.
"The brightness of the shops where holly sprigs and berries crackled in the lamp heat of the windows, made pale faces ruddy as they passed."
Last year, I got wind of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol illustrated by Quentin Blake and was astounded by the sheer perfectness of a match.
" 'Where is he, my love?' said Scrooge"
I’ve looked all over for it since, and last weekend, after Steph’s return from England, she hands over this book to me. At the right time to inspire me to illustrate T & A’s annual Christmas Card. Please see below.
T & A's Christmas Card 2008, Illustrated Therese Neelands
And now, after I pour myself my last bit of coffee, and sit in my new studio, that is exactly what I am about to do.
White Teeth, by Zadie Smith
Oh, dear. Another “Best Book Ever, If Ever There Was One”, post. Honest to God, I either have a knack for grabbing great books off the shelf or there are a hell of a lot of good books.
I picked this up last week. It is not only hilarious, but superbly well written. It’s definitely a book to be read aloud. It shows Smith’s witty brain, and her acute powers of observation - of people from all walks of life - kids, parents, immigrant parents struggling with their kids. Racists, crazy street people, Roman Catholics, Methodists, Muslims, Hindus, different cultures, different families, different ages, different histories.
Here is an excerpt - pg. 168
Mr J.P. Hamilton, confronted on his doorstep by three dark-skinned children clutching a myriad of projectiles, was duly surprised. As old as they had imagined but far taller and cleaner, he opened the door only slightly, keeping his hand, with its mountain range of blue veins, upon the knob, while his head curled around the frame. To Irie he was reminiscent of some genteel elderly eagle; tufts of feather-like hair protruded from ear drums, shirt cuffs and the neck, with one white spray falling over his forehead, his fingers lay in a permanent tight spasm like talons, and he was well dressed, as one might expect of an elderly English bird in Wonderland - a suede waistcoat and a tweed jacket, and a watch on a gold chain.
And twinkling like a magpie, from the blue scattering in his eyes undimmed by the white and red surround, to the gleam of a signet ring, four argent medals perched just above his heart, and the silver rim of a Senior Service packet peeping over the breast pocket.
‘Please,’ came the voice from the bird-man, a voice that even the children sensed was from a different class, a different era. ‘I must ask that you remove yourselves from my doorstep. I have no money whatsoever; so be your intention robbing or selling I’m afraid you will be disapointed’.
Magid stepped forward, trying to place himself in the old man’s eyeline, for the left eye, blue as Rayleigh scattering, had looked beyond them, while the right was so compacted beneath wrinkles it hardly opened. ‘Mr. Hamilton, don’t you remember, the school sent us, these are - ‘
He said, ‘Goodbye, now,’ as if he were bidding farewell to an elderly aunt embarking on a train journey, then once more ‘Goodbye’, and through two panels of cheap stained-glass on the closed door the children watched the lengthy figure of Mr. Hamilton, blurred as if by heat, walking slowly away from them down a corridor until the brown flecks of him merged with the brown flecks of the household furnishings and the former all but disappeared.
In a way, the book is somewhat Dickensian for me - in the way that her characters are all just slightly absurd, which somehow makes them all the more real, in the way she highlights class distinction and in her very detailed descriptions of personal particulars.
Scrumdidliumptious.
Work in Progress
Still a long way to go before this rights itself…
The Story of Edgar Sawtelle
What I’m listening to….
Endless Forms Most Beautiful
What I’m looking at… I have absolutely no idea what “Evo Devo” is. Evolution Devolution? But apparently, it’s the ‘New Science’…
Terry Winters, Morula III
Bought this Terry Winters catalogue of printed works published by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Back to painting - which seems a bit of a sin on this gorgeous, warm, Fall day!
