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Franz Liszt at wikiwand

Image Credit

Georgia O’Keeffe, Lake George Reflection, c1921-22, oil on canvas 147.3 x 86.4 cm, Image Source: Christie’s

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~Sunnyside

I’ve read 11 books so far this summer, and this review of Aminatta Forna’s 2010 The Memory of Love is review number 8.

Forna was born in Scotland to a Scottish mother and Sierra Leonean father. However, she spent much of her childhood in Sierra Leone, where her activist father was murdered by the authorities when she was 11 (and which she has written about in her memoir, The Devil that Danced on the Water).

Forna’s novels are often interested in how people deal with trauma (I’ve previously read her 2018 novel, Happiness), and The Memory of Love, published in 2010, is no exception, set in an unnamed Sierra Leone, against a background of lives marked by unrest and civil conflict.

The story has a dual timeline, each featuring an intense love triangle. The first thread of the story focuses on the memories of a dying man…

Huge brick arches carry the railway lines into Waterloo Station. Here is a view looking North up Great Suffolk Street.

This is a packaging monoprint. It is an intaglio print from a “plate” made from a milk carton. Here is the plate:

I’ve described the process in this blog post: Print plates made of packaging. The basic method is to use the shiny metallic surface inside the carton. I cut out the shapes I want and peel back the shiny surface to reveal a rougher surface which takes the ink. The yellow colour you see on the plate is shellac, a varnish that I paint on to make the plate last a little longer.

The plates are quite fragile, and can only…

The Birth of Cubism

Painted in 1909, L’église de Carrières-Saint-Denis dates from the early moments of Cubism. It is in the late landscapes of Braque’s transitional period that the bare bones of the movement truly consolidated. Now, he had advanced on Cézanne in rendering form in two dimensions, and he needed only his return to his studio in Paris and his collaboration with Picasso for full-blown Cubism to be born. Pepe Karmel has related about the period from 1909-1910, “the dialogue between Picasso and Braque seems to have been most intense.” (E. Braun and R. Rabinow, Cubism: The Leonard Lauder Collection, exh. cat., The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2014, p. 43).Braque’s most important artistic…

Over the last three weeks I have shown a few of the watercolour sketches made by Paul Signac (1863-1935), which may have come as a surprise if you’ve previously only known his pointillist oil paintings. In this article I look at how those watercolour sketches changed in response to Signac’s exposure to the late watercolours of Paul Cézanne.

Although I’ve been unable to find many good images of Signac’s early watercolour sketches, the following seems to be fairly representative of those he painted in the nineteenth century.

Paul Signac (1863-1935), Harbour (1894), further details not known. Wikimedia Commons.

Harbour (1894) is one of the many sketches he made of the harbour of Saint-Tropez while he lived there, which appear to have been primarily intended to lead to finished oil paintings in pointillist style.

Paul Signac (1863-1935), Rotterdam (1906), watercolour and graphite, 25.4 x 40.6 cm, The Metropolitan Museum of Art…