While we were in Chihshang a typhoon came and hit the island, actually forcing our return train to be cancelled, but fortunately we were spared the worst of the storm. Typhoons always affect the weather for many days before and after they arrive. This typhoon caused it to rain and become cloudier than it had been. I enjoyed watching the rainstorms coming across the valley and as they left I had the chance to draw these beautiful wispy clouds hugging the mountainsides and snaking across the peaks. It was a lot of fun to draw this constantly changing wonder of nature.
Academic Marxism is hardly the whole of the political Left. Recent symposiums on the Left have stressed that the goals of the past decades have not been met: racism, poverty, discrimination, remain current realities; the 80s will see groups trying to survive in the teeth of government retrenchment and recession. This is undeniable. The struggle to survive cannot be criticized; yet it has little to do with the fate of a political Left. Nor is this an insult. The Left has often confused oppression with revolution; the most oppressed were the most blessed. Yet it belongs to basic Marxism that there is no automatic link between suffering and revolutionary activity. Marx never argued that the working class suffered more than the peasantry. The specific conditions of the working class prompted the hope of revolution. That various socioeconomic groups and minorities are in for a bad deal in the coming years…
A month after the residency at Concordia, I went back for their 75th anniversary. Here’s a sketch of a portion of the choir. I wish I’d had more time to draw them —it was delightful —the hairstyles, the hats, the attitudes, the varying degrees to which uniforms had been bought to be grown into.
It’s good practice, of course —it increases speed and as well as observing motion and proportions you need to watch how these interact, and how people interact in groups. How they respond and evade, how they make different movements to reflect the same emotion or to distinguish themselves from the people nearest, or how they choose to ally themselves with another. Who is distracted, who is peering over shoulders.
This was my second rice field drawing and it’s another impression of the Chihshang area and famous Mr. Brown Boulevard drawn from a different viewpoint to the first. It is a very beautiful, relaxing area and you can see the flowing rice fields stretching out in front of the distant farmhouses and mountains.
Not long ago in The Walls Came Tumbling Down by Henriette Roosenburg, I read the story of a Dutch Resistance woman who made her way home in the chaos of postwar Europe. Roosenburg was a member of the Nacht and Nebel(‘Night and Fog’) group of political prisoners and had been liberated from the Waldheim camp in Germany, but the French Resistance women whose story is told in The Nine, How a Band of Daring Resistance Women Escaped from Nazi Germany had been in Ravensbrück, the camp exclusively for women slave labourers which I had read about in Sarah Helm’s If This is a Woman. The escape of the women who are featured in The Nine was not from the Ravensbrück camp itself but from one of the infamous WW2 Nazi Death Marches. Many of the thousands who perished in this Death March were Jewish, but the…
Last weekend I participated in a workshop led by the artist and printmaker Fiona Fouhy. We worked on the beach and cliffs around Botany Bay, between Margate and Broadstairs in Kent, UK
Here is a selection of the pictures I made during the workshop.
This a drawing done using a piece of white chalk from the cliffs, plus some work-in-progress pictures.
Sketchers on the shore, Kent chalk on black paper, A3
Here is a drawing of the white cliffs, done in white cliff chalk.
White cliffs near Margate, Kent Chalk on black paper, A3
We made some monoprints, using a portable printing press, perched outdoors on the cliff top at Botany Bay.
Monoprints, made outdoors on the cliff top, using a portable press.
Back in the garden, we made more monoprints, this time using colour. Here is my series called “The grass will grow over your cities”.
This is the building on the corner of Worship Street and Clifton Street, on the northern edge of the City of London.
Clifton House, 75-77 Worship Street, EC2, 13 September 2021, 7″ x 10″ in Sketchbook 10
Location of the drawing
Holywell Street is to the left of the drawing. I sketched this from a bench in the little pedestrian square that now exists where Clifton Street meets Worship Street.
What is this building? Well, now it is inhabited by an organisation called “NEL NHS” according to the notice on the door. From what I can discover online, NEL stands for “North East London” and the organisation is an in-house consulting organisation for the NHS. They are a “Commissioning Support Unit (CSU)” which means they supply services to, for example, GPs, and other parts of the NHS. They help with IT projects and change programmes. NEL is quite a big…
I love this poem and MacNeice is a favourite poet. His radio plays and programmes on the BBC should be rebroadcasted. His political attitude remains honest and has stood the test of time.
The sunlight on the garden Hardens and grows cold, We cannot cage the minute Within its nets of gold; When all is told We cannot beg for pardon.
Our freedom as free lances Advances towards its end; The earth compels, upon it Sonnets and birds descend; And soon, my friend, We shall have no time for dances.
The sky was good for flying Defying the church bells And every evil iron Siren and what it tells: The earth compels, We are dying, Egypt, dying
And not expecting pardon, Hardened in heart anew, But glad to have sat under Thunder and rain with you, And grateful too For sunlight on the garden.
Louis MacNeice (1907 – 1963)
The title – The Sunlight on the Garden – this creates an image in the mind and as soon as you have read the poem an association develops. As the…
GUIDO MORRIS – THE LATIN PRESS, SAINT IVES. Catalogue for The Crypt Exhibition at the New Gallery. Limited edition of 100, paintings & prices Sven Berlin, John Wells, Peter Lanyon, W. Barns-Graham, and Recent Printings by Guido Morris. orig wps, August 2nd, 1947 vg. Sold for £250
I have recently come across two references to this important gentleman. Firstly in a recent fascinating book by his daughter; The Museum Makers by Rachel Morris. (Subtitled A Journey Backwards-from Old Boxes of Dark Family Secrets to a Golden Era of Museums) She writes-
I have on my shelf four volumes of small, neat books called The Greek Anthology – a collection of ancient Greek poems that Guido gave me. I remember at the time thinking that I had been short-changed on the father front. Is this all a girl gets from her father? No paternal love, no wit or amusement, no advice, no inheritance nor money nor food on the table nor shoes on my feet, not even a presence round the house. Just an absence that went on for years where a father ought to be. But somehow I seem to have held on to those books – through student rooms and travels and an itinerant life in my twenties, my possessions piled up on someone else’s floor until I could come back to claim them. And now when I open them I find a poem by Callimachus, Hellenistic poet at the Library of Alexandria, written in the limpid Greek of the time. In forty words he says what I have taken seventy thousand to explain.
In this glorious memoir, part detective story, Rachel Morris describes how she became fascinated by memories elicited by objects. She shows the strength of women in their maternal creativity and how she became involved with major museums including the V &A and the Ashmolean. She describes too the weakness of men like Guido who lived in a world of medieval romanticism but sadly addicted to drink. She also shows how she worked through her own disappointments and discovered her own creativity. I thoroughly recommend this book which has recently come out in paperback.
Secondly, I was recently fortunate enough to find U.A. Fanthorpe’s New and Collected Poems in an Oxfam shop- at a very reasonable price and showing this to a friend he discovered a late poem which is entitled, THIS AND THAT: GUIDO MORRIS AT ST IVES in which Fanthorpe writes-
He was impractical. Ran out of full-stops. Charged too much, or too little. Didn’t finish. Lost touch with helpful friends. And drank; and drank.
The painters and potters lost their singular printer. The Underground took him. Gill sans-serif ogled him, From Barking to Bond Street, Richmond to Rotherhithe, How the trains lunge, hesitate, shake and stall, And the faces focus and fade, and are never known. He served for twenty years, having no choice.
penwithlit 