Author: penwithlit

Freelance writer and radio presenter

Pierre Bonnard: Dining Room in the Country (1913)

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Post date April 14, 2023
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Wonderful Bonnard- most gentle impressionist.

At Sunnyside - Where Truth and Beauty Meet

Pierre Bonnard (French, 1867–1947), Grande salle à manger dans le jardin (1913), oil on canvas, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Image Source: wikimedia

“In 1912, Pierre Bonnard bought a country house called Ma Roulotte (“My Caravan”) at Vernonnet, a small town on the Seine. This painting shows the dining room there, with cats perching on the chairs and Marthe de Méligny, the artist’s wife, leaning on the windowsill. Bonnard, who considered himself “the last of the Impressionists,” emphasized the expressive qualities of bright colors and loose brushstrokes in this picture. He united the interior with the exterior through the open window and door, and linked the forms by bathing them in related hues. Unlike the Impressionists, however, Bonnard painted entirely from memory. And like the Symbolists, he wanted his works to reflect his subjective response to the subject.”
Minneapolis Institute of Art

Les Nabis on Wikiwand

Pierre Bonnard…

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White magnolia flower

Vova Zinger's Photoblog

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Siberian squill

Vova Zinger's Photoblog

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Abandoned Railroad Tunnel, France

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Post date April 14, 2023
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St Markos Church, Belgrade, Serbia

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Post date April 14, 2023
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“Free Yet Dry”: Alexander Voloshin Takes Down Prohibition

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Post date April 12, 2023
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Breaded cutlets and rowan gin sounds a delightfully formidable combination!

Boris Dralyuk

When our man Alexander Voloshin and his fellow émigrés, who had seen their share of suffering in the Old World, landed in the United States in the 1920s, they found much to celebrate — but one thing stuck in their craw. That something was prohibition and the Volstead Act, the puritanical law of the land, which wasn’t done away with until 1933. The émigrés had already had a taste of dry living. As I show in one of the first sections of 1917: Stories and Poems from the Russian Revolution, the Tsarist ban on the sale of alcohol during the Great War led to much frustration and, with the coming of the Revolution, to mass raids on cellars and warehouses where wine and vodka were stored. It also led to clever workarounds.

In the brief third chapter of the second part of his epic, On the Tracks and…

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Robert Delaunay: Portuguese Woman (1916)

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Post date April 12, 2023
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At Sunnyside - Where Truth and Beauty Meet

Robert Delaunay, *Portuguese Woman* (The Large Portuguese), 1916, Oil and wax on canvas. 180 x 205 cm Carmen Thyssen Collection

“The outbreak of the First World War found Robert and Sonia Delaunay vacationing in the Spanish resort of San Sebastián. After spending some time in Madrid, they lived from June 1915 to March 1916 in the Portuguese village of Vila do Conde, near Oporto. Both painters were fascinated by the warm, clear light of northern Portugal, which they captured in a series of paintings of country markets. Although Robert Delaunay had ventured into abstract art in 1912–13, unlike other painters, such as Kandinsky and Kupka, he never saw abstraction as an end in itself. Here, figurative and abstract elements merge to enhance the dynamic arrangement of colour. Delaunay maximised colour saturation by mixing oil with wax, a technique he abandoned after his stay in Portugal.”
READ FULL ESSAY: Tomàs Llorens…

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Literature Poetry Psychoanalysis

Discovering Levertov

I was thumbing through a copy of Contemporary American Poetry price six shillings, published 1962 that I borrowed from a friend at University. I couldn’t help noticing that there appeared to be only two woman poets in the collection by Donald Hall and of neither had I heard. At first perusal some of the poems by Denise Levertov seemed to be redolent of new perceptions of American springtime and then I read the blurb in the front-

DENISE LEVERTOV (b. 1923) comes from Ilford in Essex, England, and served as a nurse during the Second World War, when her poems were first published by Wrey Gardiner in London. She married an American and has lived in the United States since 1948. She published her first book, The Double Image, in England in 1946. Her American books are Here and Now (1957), Overland to the Islands (1958), With Eyes at the Back of our Heads (1960), and The Jacob’s Ladder (1961).

This delightful poem about origins and identities is immersed in beautiful place names both suburban and sylvan. Rivers run through it and there is the lovely image of the forlorn white statue standing in the old house garden. It is a reflection of childhood innocence and religious thoughts add to the majesty of the poetic voice. ( ” merciful Phillipa”, “multitudes” and “Simeon quiet evensong”) In the meeting and parting she brings together Belarus and Spain, the United States and Wales. It is about the expansion of the world as in the maps of a child’s imagination; the safety and containment of morning sunlight on garden walls.