penwithlit

“…Simone Fayet, Gustave Fayet’s daughter, is represented taking her first communion in front of a backdrop of stained glass. Like the portrait which Redon had painted of her two years earlier, Simone Fayet avec sa poupe, the young girl’s expression is serious and thoughtful...The composition of the work is unusual. Simone, seen in profile, occupies only the first third of the composition, the rest being devoted to scenery...the stained glass occupying half of the work is directly inspired by the stained glass at Chartres, for it was during a visit to the cathedral there with Fayet in June 1908 that the artist was commissioned to paint the portrait of his…

Fierce Appetites: Lessons from my year of untamed thinking is a collection of personal essays by Irish medieval historian Elizabeth Boyle. Sub-(sub-)titled Loving, Losing and Living to Excess in My Present and in the Writings of the Past, the book was published in 2022 by Penguin, and (appropriately enough) I’ve read it during Cathy‘s Reading Ireland month ’23

Part memoir and part deep-dive into medieval Irish poetry, it meditates on the interconnectedness of time and place, and describes a year in Boyle’s life, the pandemic year of 2020, which opens with her father’s death in January.

“My brother poured seventeen sachets of sugar into his black coffee. I muttered to him, ‘If dad dies while you’re adding all these fucking sugars I will never speak to you again.’

We walked back to the ward. Dad had died…”

There are 12 chapters, broken down by month, containing personal meditations…

“…Watkins has described the process by which Bonnard mediated and transposed these observations of the landscape back in his studio: “Paintings begun in the memory of a visual experience encapsulated in a drawing were transformed through color into a rich, immensely varied surface made up of a tapestry of brushstrokes, glazes, scumbles, impasto, and highlights of pentimenti” (op. cit., p. 171).”In 1940, Bonnard reported to Vuillard, “I am very much interested in landscape, and my strolls are full of considerations in this regard. I am about to understand this land and no longer try to find what isn’t there, since it conceals tremendous beauties. To establish the different conceptions to which nature gives birth from this perspective…

“We don’t want to become what we are. We want to become a concept, a fantasy, what we should be like. Sometimes we have what people always call the ideal, what I call the curse, to be perfect, and then nothing we do gives us satisfaction.” -Fritz Perls

Idealism is the progenitor of shame.

On the one hand, it helps us cultivate a better world; but, on the other, it forms the foundation of a myriad of emotional maladies. Perfectionism is tied to the beliefs that one is inherently bad and unlovable, but it holds the promise of abundant affection if she can rid herself of her impurities. This love is as divine as she can be (and, sometimes, thinks she is), but it resides only in the fantasy of her daydreams. So, she lives in a juxtaposed state, in which she craves perfection but suffers immensely when recognizing her…