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The critically-acclaimed French writer Annie Ernaux is fast becoming one of my favourite chroniclers of the female experience. She writes with remarkable honesty, clarity and a note of vulnerability about various aspects of life, including adolescence, lovemaking, abortion and family. Throughout her work there is an interest in broader society, from social development and progression, to the relationship between individual and collective experiences. 

In Simple Passion (which clocks in at just under 40 pages), Ernaux reflects on the emotional impact of her two-year affair with an attractive married man in the late 1980s. Ernaux is approaching fifty at this time, while her lover — a smart, well-dressed Eastern European with a resemblance to Alain Delon — is thirteen years younger. The passion she feels for this man – referred to as ‘A’ in the book – is all-consuming, to the extent where virtually everything she does revolves around their liaison.

Nature is complaining as it goes into decline.

“AUTUMN”, the opening word of Joaquim Ruyra’s short story ‘Jacobé’, a period of shedding, dying back before hibernation and then (later) rejuvenation. Immediately you are transported to the season where the natural world is shedding its vibrancy.

…it is something death-like which moves through the land in accordance with an annual rhythm.

As the author biography tells us:

Joaquim Ruyra was a short story writer, poet and translator, considered a key figure in modern Catalan literature and one of the great narrators of the 20^th century. He was in the vanguard of the Catalan Modernist generation as they constructed a new literary model after 1860, when the Catalan language became the vehicle of cultural nationalism. Although he did not produce a large body of work, his short stories set a stylistic benchmark for Catalan literature, including the shaping of a ‘landscape…

Day and Night – (Max Ernst)

“Absence is a house so vast that inside you will pass through its walls and hang pictures on the air.”

Pablo Neruda

Unlike peace and solitude, a sense of absence can be powerfully disturbing and deeply emotional. What does the concept of absence mean to us? It touches all of us at some points in our lives, in different ways.

Below are 5 interesting thoughts about absence……

1. Neither Presence Nor Absence: Traces.

Traces. Abstract Painting 780-1 – Gerhard Richter. Wikioo.

“To live means to leave traces.”

Walter Benjamin

Absence and presence are not always clear cut and they do not have definitive boundaries. There is certainly something in between both of these opposites, and it sometimes feels quite mystical, affecting the atmosphere in a room.

Sun in an Empty Room.Edward Hopper. 1963. Wikiart.

“People also leave presence in a place even when they are…

A random survey of self-portraits created by women through the centuries

Scottish painter Dame Ethel Walker DBE ARA (1861-1951)

1. Self Portrait in a Green Blouse, ND / Oil on canvas / Private collection

2. Self-Portrait, c.1925 / Oil on canvas / National Portrait Gallery, London, UK

3. Self-Portrait, c.1930 / Oil on canvas / Tate, London, UK

[4 embedded links above]