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Sunset Arch, Croatia
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Dawn, Venice, Italy
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Reading visual art: 19 Weaving
Wow- went to a fascinating talk this week about Crysede’s- the silk factories which were block printed and where Patrick Heron’s father was involved in the direction.
With the wool or other natural fibres spun into yarn in the first of these two articles, we move on to building that yarn into fabric, to assemble into clothing. As with spinning, there are several ancient associations with the craft of weaving.
Primary purpose
Elizabeth Nourse (1859–1938), Tennessee Woman (c 1885), oil on canvas, 94.6 x 64.8 cm, Private collection. The Athenaeum.
Elizabeth Nourse’s portrait of a Tennessee Woman from about 1885 shows her weaving at a large loom, with her cat for company.
Paul Sérusier (1864–1927), Tapestry (Five Weavers) (1924), oil on canvas, dimensions and location not known. Image by Bastenbas, via Wikimedia Commons.
Paul Sérusier’s later paintings returned to styles more akin to those of the late Middle Ages. Tapestry (Five Weavers) from 1924 shows five women working on various stages of a tapestry, from winding the wool to hand-weaving. As none of the figures is holding…
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Fascinating……as is Wittgenstein!
I read a very enjoyable non-fiction book by Polly Barton, who is a translator of literature from Japanese, which was published by the wonderful Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2021. Fitzcarraldo produce such beautiful books, that I’d be tempted to buy them for home decor reasons alone!
Fifty Sounds combines three of my interests: memoir, language acquisition and translation, so it was likely that I would enjoy it. The book is divided into 50 short chapters, each referencing one of fifty onomatopoeic Japanese phrases.
I attempted to learn Japanese for about six months from late last year, and my progress was so painfully slow that I jacked it in, despite the help of DuoLingo, plus a book-based course and eventually Zoom lessons with a professional. It’s so damn hard! So I’m awe-struck really that Polly Barton was able to hone her Japanese to such a high standard after starting to learn it…
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A Ravilious Christmas
Brilliant……lovely
A Ravilious Christmas 
Christmas Card 1938. The Theatrical Costumer Shop lithograph from the book High Street.
We were as usual terribly busy sending Christmas cards and presents. The Christmas cards of our more sophisticated friends were every year getting more and more elaborate and as pioneers of this industry among the Bowker circle, we felt that we had to keep ours up to standard. We had started this phase in Hammersmith when we had sent birds made of folded paper which flapped their wings when you pulled their tails. Geoffrey Fry had taught me to make them and he told us how he had once made money for some charity by having a stall and charging people sixpence by being shown how to fold them. When we sent them for Christmas cards we made them of paper from an old geometry book and Eric painted red on their wing tips…
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#Biography Stefan Zweig
Love Zweig and his protégé Joseph Roth
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Classics Club
That would take me years- only read about 4 of them and interested that fellow Cornishman DMThomas makes the list!
Joining in with this for the first time, as I’m working my way through a pile of ad hoc classics as well as the 1001 books list.
My Book Spin List for the Classics Club
1 Memento Mori by Muriel Spark
2 Promise at Dawn by Romain Gary
3 The Life and Death of Harriett Frean by May Sinclair
4 A Grain of Wheat by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
5 Jacob’s Room by Virginia Woolf
6 Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald
7 Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence
8 The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene
9 Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges
10 Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis
11 Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
12 Second Class Citizen by Buchi Emecheta
13 The Faces by Tove Ditlevsen
14 Antic Hay by Aldous Huxley
15 On Writing by Stephen King
16 The Middle Ground by Margaret Drabble
17 The…
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A random survey of self-portraits created by women through the centuries
Greek abstract sculptor Soso Houtopoulou-Kontaratou (1923-1984)
Self portrait, 1947 / Bronze / Private collection
[2 embedded links above]
After Brexit, I can’t get enough of European novels- especially Eastern European ones like this one.
The Hungarian writer Magda Szabó is perhaps best known for her 1987 novel The Door, a poignant story of the relationship between two women – a writer and her housekeeper. (It’s been on my radar for a while, although I’ve yet to read it.) Iza’s Ballad (an earlier novel) also features a complex relationship between two women at its heart – in this instance, the frustrations and heartbreak of a distant mother-daughter relationship. More specifically, the book digs deep into the damage we inflict on those closest to us – often unintentionally but inhumanely nonetheless. It is a story of many contrasts; the differences between the generations; the traditional vs the new; the rural vs the urban; and the generous vs the self-centred.
Seventy-five-year-old Ettie and her husband Vince have lived a traditional life in the Hungarian countryside since their marriage some fifty years before. They have one…
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penwithlit 