Peacock-thoughts for a Pandemic Sunday

Peacock by Clive Hicks-Jenkins
for Charis in the World of Wonders
Ignatius Press, 26 March 2020

It's quiet in the village today. My amaryllis is silently, slowly opening. Though we're near the hospital, there is little traffic going by, and a good many Sunday villagers are or have been or will be snug in a comfy chair, watching the streaming services of their local church... or not, as they choose. 

At top, see a Clive Hicks-Jenkins peacock with its tail furled, one of the chapter division images for Charis in the World of Wonders. Peacocks have been a natural for symbolic bird since ancient times and for many cultures. Those eyes. The splendor of the shaking, unfurling fan. The rich, glitter of color. The piercing cry.

The early Christians adopted a belief of the ancient Greeks that the peacock was connected to immortality. Aristotle believed that the flesh of the peacock did not become corrupt after death. Perhaps ancient Greeks never let peacock leftovers last long enough to find out! But many years later, St. Augustine made experiment of the meat and agreed with Aristotle, finding that the flesh became only a little drier over time. Curiouser and curiouser!

Our modern image of a medieval royal table probably includes all sorts of weird, fantastic platters of food, including swans in plumage and peacocks with the great fan attached and spread. Desiring to have your own medieval feast, you might follow this advice:

A pecoke

Cut hym yn necke and skald hym 

cut of þe fete & hede 

cast hym on a spete 

bake hym well 

the sauce ys gynger.

That's a recipe from fifteenth-century England (Pepys MS 1047), by way of godecookery. The site also suggests that you not eat a peacock because it is tough and stringy. For myself, I would recommend that you not eat peacock because the peacock is beautiful and will give you a great deal more pleasure when rustling its tail of stars.

Nevertheless, godecookery offers a fourteenth-century sauce for your inedible peacock: poivre jaunet, from the 14th century Le Viandier de Taillevent. Grind up ginger, long pepper, saffron, an optional bit of cloves with verjuice, all toasted and then infused in vinegar or verjuice. Verjuice (Middle French "green juice") is a juice to pucker your mouth. Press some sour fruits like crabapples or grapes not yet ripe, and maybe even add some lemon or sorrel juice. 

Now you have it; take your scalded and spitted and stringy peacock and slather him in a sharp yellow pepper sauce. Tada! Here is the immortal flesh, preserved in acid and spice!

Paintings or mosaic work with peacocks appears as early as the third century A. D. in Roman catacombs. Part of this seems to be bound to the earlier idea that the flesh of the bird does not decay and holds some sort of immortality; that thought becomes a symbol wandering into regions of eternal life and resurrection. Part must be bound to the idea of leaving the earthly body and receiving a glorified body and soul, for the peacock in his fully revealed green and bronze and cobalt pomp and magnificence is an image of radiance and splendor. This sumptuousness finds its culmination in the peacock as symbol of Christ, who did not decay in the tomb and is transfigured and glorified.

 The Annunciation, with Saint Emidius by Carlo Crivelli, 1486
National Gallery.jpg (Public domain Wikipedia)
I see a kind of triangle between the source of God-radiance in the sky,
the figure of Mary at prayer, and the peacock with its tail pointing toward Mary.

Flannery O'Connor was child-famous at the age of five for her backwards-walking chicken, a buff-colored Cochin Bantam, and later for her writing and her love of peacocks, kept on the farm at Andalusia. And given O'Connor's Catholic faith and the great fan of symbolic meanings associated with the peacock, that's not surprising. Her "Living with a Peacock" is a marvelous thing, and you should go and read it right now. The dressing ("A gray bantam named Colonel Eggbert wore a white piqué coat with a lace collar and two buttons in the back.") and addressing of chickens, the aloof habits of peacocks, and much more are delightful. Her first peacock arrives with no tail but "carried himself as if he not only had a train behind him but a retinue to attend it." Here, go! And if you need a nibble to entice, here is one:

When the peacock has presented his back, the spectator will usually begin to walk around him to get a front view; but the peacock will continue to turn so that no front view is possible. The thing to do then is to stand still and wait until it pleases him to turn. When it suits him, the peacock will face you. Then you will see in a green-bronze arch around him a galaxy of gazing haloed suns. This is the moment when most people are silent.
“Amen! Amen!” an old Negro woman once cried when this happened and I have heard many similar remarks at this moment that show the inade­quacy of human speech. Some people whistle; a few, for once, are silent. A truck driver who was driving up with a load of hay and found a peacock turn­ing before him in the middle of our road shouted, “Get a load of that bas­tard!” and braked his truck to a shat­tering halt. I have never known a strut­ting peacock to budge a fraction of an inch for truck or tractor or automobile. It is up to the vehicle to get out of the way. No peafowl of mine has ever been run over, though one year one of them lost a foot in the mowing machine.

And doesn't this sound like an O'Connor encounter with strange grace from her stories?

An old man and five or six white-haired, barefooted children were piling out the back of the automobile as the bird approached. Catching sight of him, the children stopped in their tracks and stared, plainly hacked to find this superior figure blocking their path. There was silence as the bird re­garded them, his head drawn back at its most majestic angle, his folded train glittering behind him in the sunlight.
“Whut is thet thang?” one of the small boys asked finally in a sullen voice.
The old man had got out of the car and was gazing at the peacock with an astounded look of recognition. “I ain’t seen one of them since my grand­daddy’s day,” he said, respectfully re­moving his hat. “Folks used to have ’em, but they don’t no more.”
“Whut is it?” the child asked again in the same tone he had used before.
“Churren,” the old man said, “that’s the king of the birds!”
The children received this informa­tion in silence. After a minute they climbed back into the car and con­tinued from there to stare at the pea­cock, their expressions annoyed, as if they disliked catching the old man in the truth. 

What stops so many is that galaxy of eyes in the shivering fan of feathers. O'Connor's people, black and white, instinctively grasp what a medieval man or woman felt about the peacock. Awe in the presence of the utterly strange and beautiful knocks at their doors. Symbolically for the medieval Christian, the spread feathers expresses the overwhelming, beatific vision of God. For them, the feathers made an analogue to God's glory.

Further, the eyes suggested the all-knowing nature of God, who sees and fathoms both the depths of all things and even what we may regard as things of the surface and small like the death of a sparrow or the number of hairs currently residing on your head. Interestingly, the peacock is also the vanquisher of serpents in medieval bestiaries, and also a bird immune to poisons. That means that the peacock stands in relation to the serpent as Christ stands in relation to the devious snake in Eden's garden.

I found this shot of Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church (San Francisco)
on Pinterest, and can't seem to find the photographer...

The peacock still lingers in our world as a resplendent symbol of majesty, particularly in the Orthodox church. The rich double peacock image above shows the part of an Orthodox church called the Beautiful Gate, used by clergy, with its deacon doors or angel doors on each side. As is usual, Christ is on the right and the Theotokos on the left of the gate and doors.

I'll end with a poet who reached for the effulgence of the peacock and the preternatural nature of its cry. Here's a snip from a poem:

 And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.
 .
 The colors of their tails
 Were like the leaves themselves
 Turning in the wind,
 In the twilight wind.
 They swept over the room,
 Just as they flew from the boughs of the hemlocks
 Down to the ground.
 I heard them cry—the peacocks.
 Was it a cry against the twilight
 Or against the leaves themselves
 Turning in the wind,
 Turning as the flames
 Turned in the fire,
 Turning as the tails of the peacocks
 Turned in the loud fire,
 Loud as the hemlocks
 Full of the cry of the peacocks?
 Or was it a cry against the hemlocks?

In "Domination of Black," Wallace Stevens sweeps together darkness and autumn, deathly hemlocks, the gathering planets (so like the unfurling galaxy-tail of the peacock), and the idea of turning... all set against the memory of the preternatural cry of the peacocks. The otherworldliness of that stands opposed to dark and year's end, autumn and the hemlock, long associated (via funereal plantings and by the hemlock--not really the same hemlock as ours!--drink of Socrates) with death in the West. And this turning of autumn leaves in the wind, of flames in fire, of feathers in firelight is, not so surprisingly, a motion familiar to the peacock, who turns as he shivers his fantastical milky way of eyes.

And here's an image mixing peacock and leaves--
could not find peacocks in hemlocks!
Peacock in the Woods - 1907  (Public domain Wikipedia)
by Abbott Handerson Thayer (August 12, 1849 – May 29, 1921)

Christmas thoughts on painting and symbol...

Detail, Zanobi Strozzi, c.1433.

(Perhaps with some figure work by Fra Angelico?)

Predella to an altarpiece.

Tempera with gold on wood.

Wikipedia Creative Commons licence.

Image donated to CC by the Met.

* * *

                                           Oh Thou, whose glorious, yet contracted light,

                                           Wrapt in night's mantle, stole into a manger;

                                           Since my dark soul and brutish is Thy right,

                                           To man of all beasts be not Thou a stranger

                                                 --from George Herbert, "Christmas" (I), 1633

I've long been friends with painters, and I love wandering among drawings and paintings. I have a particular affection for medieval paintings, and for the iconography of that era. One thing I especially find intriguing about medieval religious paintings is that the images possessed a function that was far more vital than that of paintings today. A painter in our time often wishes to have his or her painting in a static or traveling group show or a solo show. The painter desires to have images appear in an article or review, and longs to achieve the status of seeing his or her own paintings housed permanently in a museum. I dearly love to visit museums and would never dismiss them. But a medieval painter's labors joined a great variety of other crafted works to beautify and inspire in churches, cathedrals, synagogues, shrines, and castles. Art meant skill to make significant, beautiful creations. And many an artisan felt himself to be such a maker, part of a great body of people crafting and incarnating a house or way-station for God. Afterward, the made things were intimately connected to the highest spiritual feelings of many people, and they became an essential part of worship. Paintings, carvings, and sculpted pieces have frequently ended up in our museum collections, where they now have a more limited existence, drained of prior life and power, but yet... they once had that earlier glory. The symbolism in medieval paintings and icons likewise held meaning and a living power, where for most viewers today it remains merely a colorful mystery. 

So here's my Christmas greeting, rife with symbol and beauty: an adoration scene with ox and ass portraying the yoking of clean and unclean, centered on the infant Jesus. This iconography is extra-biblical, though reflected in St. Peter's highly symbolic dream of a sheet of clean and unclean foods let down from heaven. Such yokings reflect the baby's bringing of clean (Jewish) and unclean (Gentile) peoples together under the rule of Christ. Meanwhile the baby who binds the earthly and divine is radiant and haloed in gold, the metal at the top of the medieval hierarchy of metals. Perhaps he is so nearly naked and so radiant because painters of the era were inspired by a mystical vision from the prior century. St. Bridget of Sweden saw the baby lying naked on the ground, transfigured by light. 

St. Bridget may also be the source of the portrayal of Mary in prayer--and of her oddly blonde hair as well. Meanwhile, Joseph is less important, smaller, set back, crossing his arms in the attitude of one receiving a blessing. Mary wears a robe of heavenly, royal blue that discloses red, the color linked to Pentecost and the influx of the Holy Spirit. In Joseph, the colors are reversed. I imagine that for a Medieval viewer, the link from red to blood and martyrdom would have been clear as well--the fact that this strange, surprising child is born to die a martyr's death. Mary and Joseph are both serious-faced, befitting their role as guardians of the Messiah and the womb-tomb suggestions of the picture. I'm a little puzzled about the angels, as eleven is a peculiar choice, given medieval numerology. But there is another medieval piece that gives us eleven angels, the wonderful Wilton Diptych (and it has been argued that its heavenly court parallels Joseph's dream with sun, moon, and eleven stars, with Joseph himself honored as the twelfth.)

As in many medieval portrayals of the Nativity, the scene takes place before the shelter of a cave. The visual link between womb and tomb runs back to certain Neolithic passage tombs, and probably earlier. The womb is a place of transformation leading to new birth; the Christian vision of the tomb is also one of transformation and rebirth. The image of the cave (a mix of natural and altered stone) also reminds the viewer of the placing of the body of Christ in the cave (rock-hewn) tomb of Joseph of Arimathea. A cave being a piercing of the hard substance of the world by an ethereal body of air, the shape also suggests the divine that has come to pierce through the material world, and to be pierced in turn. The two support poles before the cave and the single bole of a tree may well have suggested the three "trees" on Golgotha to a medieval man or woman versed in the symbolism of the time. The tree is flourishing, again emblematic of new life. Far in the background, seven (a number of fullness and completion) towers on a hill and points the way toward heaven.

So there you go--a medieval Christmas card.

Have a joyous Christmas Eve and Day.

The Met site states that this tempera painting was originally attributed to the marvelous Fra Angelico but is now thought to be by his pupil, Zanobi Strozzi. Strozzi is known for his illuminations.

Midsummer reads

Despite rushing-about, despite progeny, despite getting ready for The Book of the Red King, and despite celebrating the 4th of July over three days of barbecues and events and fireworks, I have been managing to do a little reading. And as it is feeling good, I thought to share the list. Please add your own midsummer list in the comments if you're reading something you like...

Irene McManus, Dreamscapes: The Art of Juan González (New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1994.) I picked this up at The Village of Cooperstown Library and was so fascinated by the artist's symbology and concerns (a father who came out as gay and became HIV+ in the 1980's, a man obsessed by Catholic imagery from his Cuban childhood, a painter who shows theatricality and love of tiny stage sets and shrines in his paintings and drawings versus a strong meditative tendency, a master of trompe l'oeil, a reader with a love of poetry, particularly Garcia Lorca's poems, a myth-maker especially down to Narcissus--with mirrors and doublings--and Orpheus, a symbolist who is sometimes clear and sometimes hermetic, a visionary concerned with psychological and spiritual states) that I ordered my own copy. While it's clear that he was influenced by certain contemporaries and movements (his Minimalist-influenced pieces are surely my favorites from that particular corner of the art world), he is strongly drawn by European art made for cathedral and church settings and also by Vermeer and Rembrandt and other Dutch Golden Age painters.

And González has made me go back to Federico García Lorca, Collected Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002). And as I always say, rereading is the best reading.

David Lyle Jeffrey, In the Beauty of Holiness: Art and the Bible in Western Culture (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans, 2017.) I ordered this beautiful volume because of John Wilson's review, which is here: "David Lyle Jeffrey's Unpopular Project." I'm on page 25 and liking the book very much. And one thing I just learned that I like a lot is that the Hebrew word for artistic creativity is chokma-lev, or wise-heartedness. I'll have to aspire to that! Here's some praise from John Wilson: "Jeffrey is a scholar who could easily intimidate readers with his erudition: master of many languages, ancient and modern; equally knowledgeable about literature and the visual arts; and intimately familiar, above all, with Scripture. Open his book at random and read a few pages: You’ll be stunned by the sheer range of his learning. And yet, unlike many of his academic peers, he doesn’t employ a style designed to exclude all but a handful of readers fluent in this or that jargon."

Wow. Crack-stroke of lightning, almost simultaneous with the thunder... Where was I? Hmm. I'm doing my third book event for my women's group (a group focused on creating and attending events related to arts and religion for going-on-two years now.) And the next discussion is of readings from Kathleen Raine, Richard Wilbur, Charles Causley, and Elizabeth Jennings. So of course I am reading those four to get ready. (Past readings: Frederick Buechner's little masterpiece, Godric; and The Cloud of Unknowing in the new Carmen Acevedo Butcher translation from Shambhala.) Oh, and I've just reviewed a book of poems and a novel by Valerie Nieman for North Carolina Literary Review. And that was an interesting assignment for me, as those of us who write poetry and fiction are the in the minority, and an even smaller minority of us write either a book-length poem (see Poochigian below) or a book-length series of poems (Nieman's Leopard Lady, out from Press53 in Winston-Salem, 2018, and Jeffery Beam, below.) As I have done both (Thaliad and The Book of the Red King), I'm always glad to encounter new examples.

Thinking about an unusual book form in a current read...

Jeffery Beam has long been a devotee of beauty, and his Spectral Pegasus / Dark Movements is one of the prettiest books to appear in recent years. This poetry collection is another in the realm of the book-length series of poems, and is also an addition to the world of ekphrastic poetry. It is a book of free verse responses to paintings--and since the art is intricately tied together in a series, naturally the poems are as well. And internally they are held together, elaborate parallelism often binding the lines, so there is a kind of macrocosmic and microcosmic structure in the form.

Spectral Pegasus / Dark Movements display a different way of thinking about what a book of poetry is, and it strikes me that the book is determined to create its own audience--that is, to create the reader's understanding and sympathy for the project--through what is included. Short excerpts from Lindsay Clarke and Joseph Campbell serve as a kind of preface, nudging us in a desired direction. The poems and art form the core of the book, but they are followed by three essays about the poetry and the art. So the book itself teaches how to read it, and also how to look at the art by Clive Hicks-Jenkins... Then there's a whole other dimension to the book in which music and poems join in the CD. It's an interesting and rare way of looking at the making of a poetry collection, and one that must have taken a lot of love and care.

Here's a sample that goes with the weather outside...

THE GRIM REAPER APPEARS AS A NIGHT-FLOWER - Jeffery Beam (see below)

Delicate thief!
I thought your roar something
children imagined in a storm
Instead you light up the night meteoric
I hear you flash
Then all quiet
Done

Currently on the starlit nightstand of poetry:

Ned Balbo, 3 Nights of the Perseids 2018 Richard Wilbur Award
  (Evansville, Indiana: University of Indiana Press, 2019)
Jeffery Beam, Spectral Pegasus / Dark Movements (thank you to Jeffery)
   Higganum, CT: Kin Press, 2019
   Includes reproductions of art by Clive Hicks-Jenkins. And a CD with poems and music!
Maryann Corbett, Mid Evil 2014 Richard Wilbur Award
     (Evansville, Indiana: University of Indiana Press, 2014)
Jeanne Larsen, What Penelope Chooses (thank you to Jeanne) 2017 Cider Press Review Award
   (San Diego, CA: Cider Press Review, 2019)
Amit Majmudar, Dothead
   (New York: Borzoi Book, Knopf, 2016)
A. E. Stallings, Like (thank you to Ashley Cooper)
   (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2018)
Aaron Poochigian, Mr. Either/Or 
   (Wilkes-Barre, PA: Etruscan Press, 2017)

Unweavings

IN ROMARE BEARDEN'S COLLAGE, BODACIOUS - Jeanne Larsen

sirens croon among birds: a small crane, twin
gulls wheeling. Out there on the mast Odysseus
hangs hog-roped, neck a twist, his chin wrenched down.
What binds him is inescapable, & white.
Oh the blue blues, oh naked women's sweet
bone-black hips, oh shoreline's flame-green flames.
Look: in a mirror that is & is not beyond
this hanging objet's frame, a mob. But with honey
-comb our great hearted man stopped up soft ears.
He'll make it to Ithaka, after all. A poem,
then, not about cosseting steep-walled shames. No threnody.
Poem of the trickster's survival. Poem of how
we do go forward. Of shuddering bodies, compassed.

It's always curious how certain threads coalesce in the world of letters. I'm still pondering the current combination on the loom of literary time, of which Jeanne Larsen's book is a part. Why re-think Homer now? Along with Emily Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey, Pat Barker’s Silence of the Girls, and Madeline Miller’s Circe, Jeanne Larsen's twisty, jazzy poems in What Penelope Chooses question (interrogate would be the hip critic's word) that composite, passed-down voice we call Homer. 

Even more than in Wilson's translation, which makes the Homeric line something different, more tense and compact by compression into iambic pentameter, Larsen's lines are tightened, broken, contemporary, full of frisky language play. Try these: nasty / sassy queasy peephole; beagle-brained square-jawed skull-thickener; poly-vocal fingers; sea dog, pollywog, old tarpaulin, / storm-scoured gob; blood-streaky, breached; nerve-zap yearning; clit / -whipped; PTSD blues; future snarled, blue-screened, timed-out. The poems question not just Homer but also form and what language is suited to a trickster--cheerfully tossing out not just the Homeric line but also pulling into new, wild shapes the sonnet form to which Larsen nods.

The freedom of time-leaping and the frolicsome language remind me a bit of Christopher Logue's unfinished versions--or "accounts," as he called them--of the Illiad, War Music. But as with Barker, Miller, and Wilson, a different sort of metamorphosis is underway. What was at the margins or not conceived to be worth sustained attention now gleams under a light: torn, ignored, or cast-off women; autistic (!) Polyphemus who loves his "nubbly" ram; a tapestry- and Homer-unweaving Penelope who may have had "a few brawly boys, a fickle maid" in her bed. What is at the margin takes stage, becomes center.

bethadams.ca

Whelk by Elizabeth Adams. 12" x 10", $150

Elizabeth Adams has a newish art site with portfolio of drawings, watercolors, pastels, oils, acrylics, prints, and drawings. Still life, landscape (Iceland, Vermont, Quebec, New Zealand), and figurative work... Much of the work is for sale, and at reasonable prices. You can also check out her small, lovely publishing company, Phoenicia, and her blog journal, The Cassandra Pages.

Skorradalur, Iceland. Pastel, 63 x 21 cm, 2014.
(Private Collection, Iceland.)

Green Almonds. Watercolor, 4" x 4", 2017. $100.

Listening to the visual

I'm going on something of a computer fast (for a reason that I'll talk about later) till near the end of this month.... Feel free to leave me a note; I will answer eventually! I also have some new book news that I may be able to talk about soon.

I have a good many friends who are painters, and a number of them live in the space that looks as if it exists after photography and its transformations, after Modernism and its shocks; they participate in the return to figuration, narrative, and realism, but they aren't fully realist in the sense of someone like Jacob Collins or Juliette Aristides. I have an interest in the how and why of the return to realism among so many artists, especially since it parallels the return to meter and rhyme and forms in poetry. Lately I have looked at or listened to videos and podcasts about that resurgence; many of the video/audio pieces below fall into that category but not all. 

In poetry and fiction, we have a sense of the materials, the sound and sense of words--yes, we can be carried beyond the work in some way. We can be lost in sound or story for a time. But art in words is both guide dream and little black marks on the page or, read, aloud, "a mouthful of air"; as readers, we're busy translating and so are in two places at once. Paint can go very far, can become photo-realistic, can fool the eye. Where is the line, how much finish ought there to be, how much should the viewer be aware of the medium? Is some pleasure lost when we lose that sense of brushstrokes and layerings of paint? I suppose the contrast with writing is more the difference between limpidity and roughness or an aureate style.

I'm especially fond of the Suggested Donation series with Tony Curanaj and Ted Minoff, all with the recording engineering (and sometimes co-comments) of musician Jay Braun. I have not found one that is not an interesting listen. Great coming-of-age stories, great turning-of-the-wheel of art toward the future by harnessing tradition, metaphysical flourishes, practical discussion of skills. The psychology of art video is also intriguing.

* * *

A short film by Alvaro Aro about Missouri artist Ali Cavanaugh. (Vimage Studios 2011.) Youtube. Watercolor on kaolin. People often ask me about how I have managed being a poet, novelist, and a mother of three--well, here's a modern-day painter of frescoes with a batch of lively children. Cavanaugh makes compromises, having to use fragments of time and also utilizing photographs of her models. (My version of this also involves bits of time. And concentration in what time I have.) The David Jon Kassan podcast also deals with this problem, as he took care of his son as a baby and has continued to be responsible for him. 

Burton Silverman. Suggested Donation. Episode 31. Ideas of the universal, painterly qualities to the work, self-indulgence in art, artists and family, curators and teachers who think arts started with Cezanne, work that is "halfway" between realism and Modernism, the illusion of self-expression as belonging to Modernism, annihilation of skills as important in Modernism, teachers' attempts to suppress his childhood skills, not becoming a slave to the past, transformation after WWI, declining roles of church and royalty, retrieval of the academic tradition, a type of cloying, retrogressive painting, "the more I know, the less I know," the importance of being unsure, the "itness" of things, etc. He talks about Modernism as exacerbating a feeling of public uncertainty--Modernism's paintings with a lack of story as bound to inhuman environments, corporate mentality, and inhuman environments, and more. Validation, patronage. Witnessing and recording history: illustrating seminal black protests in Alabama in the 60's. A little low in volume but well worth a listen.

Daniel Sprick. Suggested Donation. Episode 32. Daniel Sprick is widely considered one of the leading realist painters. His work is featured in numerous private and public collections including the Denver Art Museum, the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC, and the Arkansas Art Center in Little Rock.

David Kassan (KAS-san). Suggested Donation. Episode15. "Falling down the stairs and landing on your feet." Skills and weight in painting. (I really like the podcasts that try to grapple with what it is that takes a painting beyond realism to something more--the heft or freight of life, the energy of life.) Lots of interesting talk about contemporary painters outside North America, including various Israeli painters and Antonio López García. Discussion of the difficulties of being the at-home parent and trying to paint.

Exploring the Psychology of Creativity, 2017. "What is creativity? Can we develop it, or is it innate? Watch the conversation between Marc Mayer, Director and CEO of the National Gallery of Canada, and Dr. Jordan Peterson, Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto, which took place March 9, 2017 at the National Gallery of Canada." Good conversation, in places closely related to Peterson's lectures on personality.

Suggested Donation: Jacob Collins. Podcast series. Episode 4. http://www.suggesteddonationpodcast.com/blog/2014/4/14/episode. Major figure in the return to realist art. Founder of the Water Street Atelier, Grand Central Academy, and Hudson River Fellowship. For more about Jacob Collins, see Adam Gopnik's "Life Studies" in the New Yorker. Clip from "Life Studies":  Jacob was always trying to strike a decent mean between affirmation of his secret faith that art had been going wrong since the eighteen-sixties and his desire not to get caught up in the reactionary grievance-keeping that disfigured much of the revivalist world he lived in. “You’ll outgrow wanting to draw the world as it is, searching for this beauty, this place where light and the body meet—that was the attitude of most of the art teachers I had,” he went on. “So I had to re-create a world in which I could do the kind of drawing I wanted to do. I wasn’t alone in this. There were quite a few of us trying, and, bit by bit, and book by book, and practice by practice, we tried to remake the world of atelier realism that had been discarded and abandoned.” Over time, he assembled a group of teachers and students and enthusiasts, all given over to the practice of classical drawing from life and plaster casts, and from that nucleus came this studio and then the Grand Central Academy.

Suggested Donation: Juliette Aristides. Podcast series. Episode 20. Instructor of Aristides Classical Atelier at the Gage Academy of Art. Lovely, literate, thoughtful discussion of life, beauty, skills, brokenness, what lasts, and the nature of a life of making art. This one is a real discussion, interesting back and forth, and Aristides is wonderfully able to form her thoughts in words. "Juliette Aristides is a monumental figure in the classical art community. Her . . . books on painting have been hugely influential to a generation of artists . . . ." Issues of investment of self in a time without proper response, the online world as a response to the debased environment, the classical atelier and the narrative arc of education, truth and art, art and the feeling that life matters, a context for work that lasts and has meaning, the ability to think and go deep (vs. online life), the personal encounter with paintings, art as backdrop for real life in earlier times, drawing as meditation and connection with life and self--as an antidote to the remoteness of current life with its online hours, physical beings needing physical connections to a physical world, etc.

Michael Klein. Suggested Donation, Episode 9. Interesting podcast with a painter from rural Minnesota who found his way to New York and Argentina. It reminds me a bit of Makoto Fujimura because he talks about being troubled by beauty and what it is for and resolves the issue some time after he becomes a Christian.

Odd Nerdrum: The Self-portrait. Nerdrum Pictures, 2015.

Odd Nerdrum. Time Water Recollection. Norwegian documentary, 1992. Strange and beautiful, with lots of images of Iceland and Nerdrum's home in Norway. The sub-titles end part-way through, but it's still wonderful to see.

Patricia Watwood, Part 1. Suggested Donation. Podcast series, Episode 3. "We talk about her solo show "Venus Apocalypse", education, influences and her perspective as a female artist."

Peter Trippi on Alma-Tadema. Suggested Donation, Episode 35. This year I saw the beautiful show at The Clark Institute he talks about at one point. His curated Alma-Tadema traveling show (in the Netherlands and Venice and London) sounds wonderful. 

Sharon Sprung. Suggested Donation. Episode 26. Great story about Sharon Sprung at 19 and Harvey Dinnerstein. She says Dinnerstein taught her what it meant to be an artist. A purist. "I'd never seen anybody so immersed in anything." Dan Green taught her skills. Quirky coming-of-age story, with lots of talk about older writers and a keen understanding of her own nature and particular demands. I'm still listening to this one... She's a character, quite stubborn and particular in her desires in how to work. And she's one of many examples of how an early death in the family forges a path in the arts. I find it fascinating that her mother threw away every image of her dead father to protect herself, and later Sharon Sprung became a maker of figurative images. Lots of good talk about teaching, too, and the importance of working from life. She's funny! A real character.

The Nerdrum School. Interview w/ Luke Hillestad (2013)

Two Autumns. London: BBC. I'm fond of Thomas Reidelsheimer's lovely Rivers and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working with Time, a great documentary about Goldsworthy in the landscape. If you like that one, try this! Filmed in Scotland and Japan. If hobbits were less satisfied with home and good cooking went on adventures more often, I'm sure they could produce a visual artist like Andy Goldsworthy.

Vincent Desiderio. Suggested Donation, Episode 6. This one is quite good, particularly if you have an interest in art history. Very curious to look at the trajectory of Desiderio's own work. "Vincent Desiderio is one of the leading figurative painters of our time. His work is featured in collections including the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Guggenheim Museum, The Walker Art Center among many others. He is a senior critic at the New York Academy of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Vincent has a reputation as one of the leading intellects in figurative art, and he did not disappoint. We are honored to have him join us on Suggested Donation, at the Salmangundi Club in New York City for a fascinating conversation about his work and his deep love for art history, film and philosophy."

Year in Review. Episode 13, Suggested Donations. 2014. Tony Curanaj and Ted Minoff and Jay Braun talk about the podcast. Close attention to one of Tony Curanaj's paintings.

Art that says life matters

See this and more photographs of Juliette Aristides
at The Bay Area Classical Artist Atelier post
about a 2012 workshop with the artist.

This year, the affliction of perpetual curiosity has sent me to podcasts related to the return to classical realism (or whatever you wish to call it) in painting. Perhaps because I have a lot of friends who are painters, perhaps because I'm always aware of the parallel of "art renewal" to the return of forms, meter, and rhyme in poetry, perhaps because seeing paintings has often felt like experience to me, I have been fascinated by people groping their way out of the mainstream, well-supported world of Koons and Emin and Hirst and into the rich world of Titian and Rembrandt and Caravaggio. I like many of the podcasts--they're often, at least in part, coming-of-age stories, and those always have an in-built structure that appeals--but one of them stands out to me. 

I'm recommending Juliette Aristides' conversation with hosts Tony Curanaj and Edward Minoff at Suggested Donation. The chat might be fruitful for you--it's thoughtful, graceful in places (surprising in a podcast), clear on the collision between what's lasting and the technological transformation of the world, exploratory and metaphysical in its aims, and wonderfully deep-diving (to borrow Melville's word for the profound when it's captured in a net of words.)

Who is Juliette Aristides? "Juliette Aristides is a Seattle based painter who seeks to understand and convey the human spirit through art. Aristides is the founder and instructor of the Classical Atelier at the Gage Academy of Fine Art in Seattle, WA.  Juliette teaches workshops both nationally and internationally. Author of Classical Drawing Atelier, Classical Painting Atelier, Lessons in Classical Drawing, and Lessons in Classical Painting, published by Watson-Guptill, NY." --aristidesart.com

* * *
Eventually I'll post a list of my favorite podcasts / videos about painters and visual artists. I try to listen to one every time I walk the treadmill, and that grows more frequent once winter comes to Cooperstown....

Distractible me

Clive Hicks-Jenkins, My Dream Farm

When I could have been doing research or cleaning the house or writing something more sensible, I have been seized by the possibly-silly impulse to quorate. And as both my current forays into Quora deal with collaborator Clive Hicks-Jenkins, I shall post links to my answers.

Who is your favorite illustrator?

and

If you had to live inside a painting forever, what painting would you choose?

More Quora frittering:

Your answer to What's the difference between "still life", "lanscape" [sic] and "portrait" when talking of paintings?

Your answer to I have an idea for a book. How do I write a fiction story step by step?

Your answer to My parents hate/are scared of some of my art pieces and don't want me to create more similar types. How should I justify my means of painting them?

Clive Hicks-Jenkins and Sarah Raphael-Balme at Lotte Inch, York

CLIVE HICKS-JENKINS & SARAH RAPHAEL-BALME

THE MIND'S EYE

12th May 2017 - 17th June 2017

"Featuring the weird and wonderful, the imagined and the exaggerated, with prints and original paintings by artist, illustrator and designer Clive Hicks-Jenkins and York based painter Sarah Raphael-Balme."

As you can see, original art from Maze of Blood is among the offerings. (The book was Finalist, Forewood Book of the Year Awards, and was featured in Favorite Books of the Year at Books and Culture and Books of 2015 in First Things.) And there are cunning little pendants from Clive as well.

More about the Sarah Raphael-Balme and Clive Hicks-Jenkins here.

Sarah Raphael-Balme

Interior art by Clive Hicks-Jenkins for Maze of Blood

Sarah Raphael-Balme
Lots more of her images collected here

More about Lotte Inch Gallery here

Facebook photo pilfered from Sarah Raphael-Balme.
You can see one of the Gawain prints,
a pen-and-ink piece from The Foliate Head,
as well as copies of Hansel and Gretel,
Clive Hicks-Jenkins, Maze of Blood, 
and Six Poets The Book of Ystwyth - 
Six Poets on the Art of Clive Hicks-Jenkins,
available (click title) post-free from Grey Mare Press.

Curiouser and curiouser

The fabulous Miss Yo-Yo!

I've written seven pieces so far for a collaborative project that will result in a solo show in September, one that mixes visual arts (pen and ink, with colored inks) with poems and stories. Though I can't say anything much about it in public now--because we all love good surprises, and I can't spoil this one--I will be writing about it more privately in The Rollipoke, no. 3, for those of you who are subscribed.

It's one of the odder series of works I have committed to doing, and has certain challenges that are unusual. I was invited to do this work by Detroit-born painter Yolanda Sharpe (who also sings with Glimmerglass Opera and is the highly successful head of the SUNY-Oneonta art department, so she's formidable--see her work at yolandasharpe.com) and am finding it interesting and sometimes amusing.
SaveSave

Good things

Ashley Norwood Cooper, "The Virgin Mary Paints St. Luke on her iPad"
is at left (look for Mary in a red gown.)

no. 1

Hurrah for another Pushcart Prize poetry nomination! Thanks to Trinacria for nominating "Portrait of the Magi as Three Horses."

no. 2

Franklin Einspruch says: "Perhaps for the first time in history, we are looking at the possibility of a conservative avant-garde." He was talking about visual arts, but it works for writing as well.  (I often think that the way forward is through the tradition.)

no. 3

I'll be speaking at The Frederick Buechner Workshops at Fuller Seminary in Pasadena next year! (And I'm going to Kyoto in 2017....) Feeling sorry for family members who will be doomed to stay home and feed the cats!

no. 4

Tonight my friend and neighbor Ashley Norwood Cooper is talking about "The Virgin Mary Paints St. Luke on her iPad" during the Artists' Walk at at the Church of St. Paul the Apostle near Columbus Circle, NYC!

no. 5

The up side of the Elena Ferrante revelation is that her story strikes a blow against cultural appropriation--a belief that could destroy the arts in our time, if allowed full sway.

Fra Angelico at Easter

Update, 16 hours later: One thing I love about comments is that people say curious things, and then that helps me to know my own mind. Here's a bit of my reply to the ever-interesting poet (and more) with the alliterative name, Roderick Robinson, drawn from the just-prior post on Fra Angelico's Christ:

I look at Fra Angelico with a kind of relief, knowing that he would never, ever believe in "a senseless act of beauty," that beauty for him is always meaningful. So different from our own day. He's always so direct and clear and devoted to the art. Like George Herbert, he could have been much in a worldly sense but turned away from those chances. I admire that sort of understanding, one that sees so clearly what is important in life and what is not. And there we are veering closer to what you call "unfashionability as a virtue."

* * *

I'm too tired to think in words, so here's a little more Fra Angelico to admire--a detail from a fresco, "Resurrection of Christ and the Women at the Tomb" at the Convento di San Marco, Florence, 1440-1441. Public domain image. Here are some more beautiful San Marco images from Fra Angelico.

Here is how Giorgio Vasari describes Fra Angelico in his Lives of the Most Excellent Artists, Sculptors, and Architects:

He would not follow the ways of the world, but lived purely and holily, and was a great friend of the poor. He painted constantly, and would never represent anything but the saints. He might have been rich, but did not care about it, saying that true riches are nothing else than being content with little... To sum up, this father, who can never be enough praised, was in all his works and words most humble and modest, and in his paintings facile and devout; and the saints whom he painted have more the air and likeness of saints than those of any one else. It was his habit never to retouch or alter any of his paintings, but to leave them as they came the first time, believing, as he said, that such was the will of God. 

And now good night! Or good morning, elsewhere.

* * *

Nancy Olson, founder and 29-year owner of Quail Ridge Books of Raleigh.

 Requiescat in Pace

500-year art for Good Friday

A few years back, I was startled by a face looking out of the marvelous Fra Angelico show at the Met. It is a common enough compliment to say that images are arresting, even when they are not. I can say from experience that this one is.  ‪It's right for the day, right for a week that reminds us of murdered innocence and grief for the world.

The image also reminds me of painter Makoto Fujimura's essay, "Fra Angelico and the Five Hundred Year Question."

I entered the halls and the golden aura of a diminutive Virgin Mary painting greeted me, with her azurite robe, and the Christ child’s supple body, reflecting her humanity -- a simple work full of weighty colors. Then I had to close my eyes, after a few seconds of pondering the saturated surface. I realized this was too much to behold, all at once. As I staggered about looking for a blank wall to stare at, almost feeling ashamed to be in the presence of such greatness, I had a “500 year” question pop up in my mind.

What is the five hundred year question? Well, it’s a historical look at the reality of our cultures, and asking what ideas, what art, what vision affects humanity for over five hundred years. It’s the opposite of the Warholian “15 seconds of fame.”

It was, you see, inspired by his visit to the Fra Angelico show.

Traveling the Red King's lands

Graham Ward, "Child in Tarifa"
This "starved-brush" painting is one that inspired
one of my poems in the Red King manuscript,
"The Stellar Child."
Generation works both ways!
I've also written some poems
for Graham to use in a future gallery show.

I have a few more interesting questions in the Bullington-Youmans interview party but need to take a small break from them in order to push forward on The Book of the Red King, which has been hanging fire for years now. It has been in the condition of "almost" for so long that I was tempted to let it go on being "almost." Luckily, a shadowy sense of guilt at last crept over me, and I am now crawling through the very long manuscript again for the third time in the past month. And I think that I shall be done creeping along when I get to the end this time. I shall, that is, stop. Nothing is ever done, particularly on such a  very long manuscript of poems.

One of the curious things about this manuscript is that thirteen prints and paintings have been made in response to its poems, even though it is not yet out as a book--not even submitted. One of them is by Mary Bullington, and I've posted it several times before. Some came from a poem that has never ben submitted anywhere, written for a friend, who sent it into the aether. Eventually it landed in an artist's inbox and became a seed. What a surprise!  I've always thought that a work should, in the ideal, be generative. So this makes me feel pleased.

Quite a number of poems about the Red King and the Fool (and Amara the alchemist and many others) are online, but if you would like to see a group of them at once, you may find some at Mezzo Cammin and at At Length. Of course, I have fiddled with them since....

You Asked, no. 15: collage strategies of Mary Bullington

Flaunting my petticoats: The Red Tyger 
glued on a monoprint of the same collage (2012).

In response to a request to interview some of my painter friends, I have been interviewing Mary Boxley Bullington. As she, in turn, insisted on interviewing me, a part of the You asked series is composed of our questions to each other. Soon I'll post an index to our conversations, as well as some information about how to see more of Mary's work, and how to get in touch with her.

Please click to see larger images. Note that some pictures are not embedded but at the foot of the post--all pictures mentioned are in the post. To see more of the Bullington-Youmans interview party, click on the appropriate tag at post's foot. To see more of You Asked, do likewise.

Youmans: As a collagist, you're a follower of a wandering muse, and you often completely revise a collage multiple times before you are satisfied. A visit to your two studio rooms shows that you have a bewildering variety of painted scraps and pieces in baskets and even littering the floor--small catalysts for the imagination. Clearly you often cut up and paint many times before you are finished with a piece. Ignoring for a time the realm of instinct and muse-ravishment, can you describe your methods in a systematic way?

Collage-plate (with drawing atop) 
from which collographs of Red Tyger were printed.

Bullington:  6 Design Strategies in My Collages: A photo essay

For me, collage is a very versatile means of invention and of expression. Below are just some of the many approaches to the technique I've used—with images to go with them.

1. Overlap and Layering: Layers add dimension and texture to a 2-dimensional piece. In layering my collages, I consider what needs to be covered from the bottom layer, and what should still be visible. I like to let my petticoats show a bit.

The Red Tyger (2012) is a collage of figures cut from a drawing in India ink, acrylic and black gesso monoprint using an earlier version of this collage as a plate (technically, this is called a collograph). The blue-gray background of the collage is another collograph taken from the same plate. Thus the blue-grey shapes behind the collaged figures act as shadows. A new intensity and vibrancy in my layering of collages emerged in 2015: In my own Voice (Listen) adds one layer of collage over another, with layers of freshly painted pattern in between.

In My Own Voice (Listen)

2. Repetition and Variation of shapes, colors, and textures create rhythm and harmony. The patchwork structure of the first draft of Antiquity (2014) allowed me to change elements until I arrived at a coherent collection of faces, each individualized and strong enough to hold its own, and yet congruent with the whole. Medallions, a collage made the same year, repeats two patchwork quilt patterns, circle and star, at least 15 times each without using them in quite the same way twice. Rectangles and triangles of different sizes help keep the solar systems in orbit. [See images slightly below in text, and the 7th image at the foot of the post.]

3. Sharp Contrasts in shape, color, value, texture, and pattern generate energy. Lady with Two Cats plays red against green, polka dots against batik-like patterns and near solids, and not least, the human creature against the cat. [See 8th picture at foot of post.]

detail, In My Own Voice (Listen)

4. Jigsaw Puzzling: Collage can be a sort of free-form jigsaw puzzle. I look for unexpected matches, places where I can create connection between diverse materials. To transform Leaves of Grass (2014) from a painting to a collage, I cropped it and then painted a sheet of paper with grasses in different colors and values so I'd have plenty of to cull from. The circular shape at the top invited me to add similar shapes from another painting. Fortuitously, one circular scrap had red, white and blue stripes—contrasting with the dominant orange; this added an American tenor to the grass theme—leading me to steal Walt Whitman's famous title for my collage. [Images 9-10 at foot.]

early draft, Antiquity

5. Surprise and lucky accidents create delight. As I work, I keep my eyeballs peeled for the apparent mismatch that is just right. If all I have when I'm finished is what I was aiming for, I haven’t gone far enough. I have to surprise myself. The Little Engine that Could (2015) first surprised me with the little blue train engine on the pink road. This gave rise in turn to the staccato of railroad tracks and the choo-choo rhythms that become a leitmotif throughout, and most emphatically at the bottom of the piece. The tree shapes inherent in the original patchwork structure and echoed in the skinny man at the bottom suggest a rudimentary landscape. The final surprise was finding the big red bird shape in the upper left quadrant to chime and rhyme with the smaller black bird shapes and avian lines scattered among the patches. In The Family Genome (2014), layering creates surprise. When I put on the orange overlay on the lower half of the mother's face the whole collage snapped to attention. The black, slightly pursed lips added point to the supercilious arch of her eyebrow. [See images 11-12 at foot.]

Antiquity, 2014

6. Incongruities and foreign elements: Surprise and incongruity go hand in hand, but while surprise is often a matter of sheer chance, incongruities are often a deliberate part of my strategy. I pierced my painting Flower Filigree so I could add an underlay—and then tried it atop a few pieces of painted paper. With Background 1, I was a bit bored—it was too much the same palette as the top layer. Background 2, full of larger, more energetic shapes and vibrant colors, brought new energy to the whole. [See images 1-5 at foot.]

7. Vision and Revision: Finally, collage is a very forgiving technique. It allows me to rethink and revise paintings and even collages that don't quite succeed. Though the number of choices it gives me can be confusing, collaging allows me to save the good, remove the bad, and rearrange the whole. Collage often reinspires a piece that is going nowhere. [See image 6 at foot.] In Tijuana 1953 (2011), I cut up and rearranged an abstract painting I'd spoiled, overlapping and reinventing the elements until they danced.

Flower Filigree as a painting on paper, uncut as yet, January 2015

Background for Flower Filigree, March 2015

Flower Filigree with background 1
"Background 1 had a palette too similar 
to the pierced painting Flower Filigree."

Background 2 for Flower Filigree, March 21, 2015

"Pairing Flower Filigree with the 2nd background created visual excitement."

Tijuana 1953, 24" x 24"
"Overlapping the elements until they danced for me."

Medallions "repeats yet varies circle & star at least 15 times each."

Lady with Two Cats plays red against green and
polka dots against patterns and solids.

Leaves of Grass before cropping, with a couple of scraps of collage.

Leaves of Grass, 2014

The Little Engine That Could, 2015
"In The Little Engine that Could, the last surprise, 
perhaps, was the big red bird shape."