penwithlit

Just before the end of 1895, Siegfried Bing opened his gallery l’Art Nouveau in Paris. Its first exhibition included paintings by Cross, Van Rysselberghe and Paul Signac (1863-1935). In the New Year, Signac made his annual visit to Brussels, after which he and Van Rysselberghe toured the Netherlands together. In the Spring, it was time once again for the Salon des Indépendants, followed by the summer spent at Saint-Tropez, with the Van Rysselberghes as guests. Signac started preliminary work for The Demolisher (1897-9, see later) by way of a lithograph, which was published in an anarchist review.

During the winter of 1896-97, Signac continued to develop his etching and lithography with the aid of Théo van Rysselberghe. His itinerary in 1897 omitted the winter visit to Belgium, replacing it with a couple of weeks sketching and painting Mont-Saint-Michel, the famous tidal island on the Normandy coast. Before the annual Salon…

My latest paper entitled “Autistic Rims and Their Vicissitudes” has just been published in the European Journal of Psychoanalysis. The paper is open-access, so it’s a good opportunity to get updated about my latest developments of the notion fo the rim of the drive.

For those of you interested, here is the abstract:

Lacan states that the rim of the drive is involved in the initiation and preservation of the relationship between the body and language. In the study of autism, a major hypothesis states that the rim of the drive is foreclosed for the autistic subject. This foreclosure causes the drive circuit to short-circuit, thus jeopardizing the preservation of the relationship between the body and language. This paper puts forward the idea that autistic subjects supplement this privation through the construction of secondary rims that enable the “delimitation” of jouissance, giving rise to a…

“I have made up my mind to take Middlemarch as it comes, and shall be much obliged if the town will take me in the same way” – (the all too fallible) Dr Lydgate

I tried to read Middlemarch in January, but my poor addled brain refused to decipher the text or concentrate on the storyline. Have I spend so much time scrolling through Instagram that I can no longer focus on huge, dry Victorian tomes?

Finally, determined to see this through, I switched to the audio book. It was nearly 40 hours long and it took me three months to get through. My kids would wander into the kitchen (listening was usually an accompaniment to domestic tasks) and marvel: “are you STILL really listening to that?”.

It’d odd that I was quite so compelled to persist with Middlemarch, given my longstanding aversion to Eliot’s Silas Marner

I sent some hand-drawn postcards from Crete.

An experimental view from a restaurant:

Another view from a restaurant:

The Roman water cisterns at Aptera:

The beautiful monastery of Agias Triados:

Paint dries really quickly here!

Crete blog posts:

For a few years in the early twentieth century, André Derain, Henri Matisse and others known as the Fauves (‘wild beasts’) dazzled those who viewed their avant garde art. Not only were their colours intense, often raw from the tube, but they were so inappropriate. Flesh became vivid green, buildings and horses blue, and skies blood red. For most it was a passing phase, and by 1908 the wild beasts had stampeded on to the next fad as modernism evolved volcanically.

Their influence was more lasting and general, though, affecting other artists until the Second World War. In this article I look at how other, more mainstream painters had their own Fauvist phase.

In some ways a continuation of the changes seen in Post-Impressionism, high chroma paintings had become common among those painting in the south of France, the Midi, with its brilliant and different light.

Paul Signac (1863-1935), The…