Paintings "Made Better with Cats"

Love it. Love it. Love it.  Full story (and pictures) here on the BBC website.  Could never resist a ginger cat.

Shetland

I've never visited them nor have I given the Shetland Islands too much thought  until recently, but a month or so ago I started reading Ann Cleeves' Shetland detective stories.   Gripping they are too.  Elegant writing, clever plots, a sympathetic detective and, above all, vivid descriptions of the British Isles' most northerly islands. ( I've long realised I read detective stories as much for the descriptions of the land and cityscapes as for the plot).

As I've worked my way through the series Ms Cleeves and the Sheltland Islands have reeled me in. I started scanning the internet for images, plotting routes, studying maps. Even though I'm in no state to walk any distance and I take taxis to go to where I need to go, I'm planning hikes across the rocky, treeless moors under the wide skies where the only sounds are the wind, the waves and the sea birds.  Where Bergen is closer than Edinburgh and the names of the little towns and settlements come from Old Norse.  Wildness and wilderness attracts me, it always has.  So I'm smitten. It's like falling in love again at an age where you should know better. 

By happy coincidence I caught a TV programme the other night on the landscape artist and printmaker, Norman Ackroyd,.  The son of a Yorkshire butcher, apart from being stunningly talented he came across as a humble, down to earth man who produces haunting, powerful yet delicate etchings and aquatints of the remote and wild places of the British landscape.  He is particularly captivated by the Scottish islands, including the Shetlands and I in turn was moved and excited by his work.  A new discovery. 
 





More prints and biographical notes on Norman Ackroyd's website here.    Take a look.

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 I've told myself of late that travel no longer holds the same appeal, that I'm jaded and weak and old, that I want to stay home. I may perhaps be pickier now, but there are  moors, cliffs, rocks and islands, that still call to me and to my spirit.  I can still fall in love.

Diffuse

The Bristol Channel and Severn Bridge from north Somerset.


A blustery wind rushed in from the Atlantic. Diffuse light, muted colours, boundaries between sea and sky and land softened. Studies in blue and grey. The Impressionists would have loved it. (In fact Sisley did paint some later landscapes on the opposite side of the water).



If you can see Wales, according to the locals - tongue in cheek - there's rain on the way. If you can't, then it's already raining. Sure enough a few hours after these were taken the heavens opened.

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A line is crossed.

Certainties dissolve. Or maybe are distorted by the mists within.

Create

For his cut-outs he used paper that had been hand-painted with gouache, laid down in abstract or figurative patterns: 'the paper cut-out allows me to draw in the colour... Instead of drawing the outline and putting the colour inside it... I draw straight into the colour'. The colours he used were so strong that he was advised by his doctor to wear dark glasses.

Drawing with Scissors


Decision made. The week goes on. A sense that things will work out, better perhaps than can be imagined.

The Matisse touring exhibition Drawing with Scissors is in town. Lucky us.

In the local museum the lithographs on the wall glow, vibrant and joyous. Red. Blue. Yellow. Flowers. Leaves. Women. The art of an elderly man (Matisse started working with gouaches découpés or cut-outs late in life) in a wheelchair, eventually bed-ridden, using a pair of scissors and coloured paper to create. Assistants would prepare the paper and pin the cut-outs on the wall for him. The imperative was so powerful.

Outside, the winter sky a deep, intense blue. Like one of his nudes. Evening now and the mental image remains of the old artist sitting up in bed, cutting shapes from sheets of paper.

Strong colours, bright and clear and true.

Le Plat Pays

Weide in de lente - Veldweg: Albijn Van den Abeele

Waiting in for a carpet to be delivered a few Saturdays ago I caught a fascinating radio programme, Brel et Moi, featuring the Belgian singer/songwriter, Jacques Brel and presented and written by Alastair Campbell (yes, that Alastair Campbell). Such a short life. A serial womaniser in Paris, a demanding paterfamilias in Brussels. Self centred and driven but loved by those he worked with and, heavens, what a talent.

Years ago the Brel song that seduced me was Le Plat Pays (the Flat Land), a love song to his native Flanders. A poem in its own right, lyrical and elegaic. I was born and spent my childhood in a similarly flat land of earth, water and wide skies on the other side of the North Sea and the song stopped me in my tracks the first time I heard it. It still does.

Maybe only a Belgian could pull it off. Using each of the four winds Brel celebrates the different moods and seasons of this modest and - nowadays at least - peaceful stretch of land. He opens himself to embrace the rain and cold and the tedium and monotony, as well as warmth and sunlight. Winter. Summer. Everything in between.

The lyrics are below. I'm not attempting a translation. There are a few versions floating around on the web but they don't really reach the level of the original. According to one contributor to the programme there is a view that Brel's work is pretty much untranslatable and it's true that those songs that have made it into English haven't necessarily benefitted. One of the other contributors, Mel Smith, is a Brel devotee who neither reads nor understands French: the ferocious intensity, the sweat and saliva (literally) of Brel's performances were enough to captivate him.

Cue for a video of a mesmerising live performance of Le Plat Pays. Enough of my words. Listen.



Avec la mer du Nord pour dernier terrain vague
Et des vagues de dunes pour arrêter les vagues
Et de vagues rochers que les marées dépassent
Et qui ont à jamais le cœur à marée basse
Avec infiniment de brumes à venir
Avec le vent de l'ouest écoutez-le tenir
Le plat pays qui est le mien

Avec des cathédrales pour uniques montagnes
Et de noirs clochers comme mâts de cocagne
Où des diables en pierre décrochent les nuages
Avec le fil des jours pour unique voyage
Et des chemins de pluie pour unique bonsoir
Avec le vent de l'est écoutez-le vouloir
Le plat pays qui est le mien

Avec un ciel si bas qu'un canal s'est perdu
Avec un ciel si bas qu'il fait l'humilité
Avec un ciel si gris qu'un canal s'est pendu
Avec un ciel si gris qu'il faut lui pardonner
Avec le vent du nord qui vient s'écarteler
Avec le vent du nord écoutez-le craquer
Le plat pays qui est le mien

Avec de l'Italie qui descendrait l'Escaut
Avec Frida la Blonde quand elle devient Margot
Quand les fils de novembre nous reviennent en mai
Quand la plaine est fumante et tremble sous juillet
Quand le vent est au rire quand le vent est au blé
Quand le vent est au sud écoutez-le chanter
Le plat pays qui est le mien.

Jacques Brel

More insight into the inspiration for the song? There's a set of masterly, evocative photographs of Le Plat Pays here, just a click away.

I keep returning to them.

Face

One of a pair of stone carved heads on either side of an iron gate in Ludlow, where I met up with a friend a few weeks back. No idea who or what they are, nor of their age, though obviously this one has sustained damage during its existence. But the broad face with its high cheekbones and fleshy lips and those large, hooded eyes, is so compelling. I've been wondering whether a real person served as a model or if this very human representation in fact originated in the mind of the sculptor .....

The image keeps drawing me back. I'm not even sure if it's male or female. Raw material for the imagination to chisel and shape.

Five

1. Seriously large leaves. Magnolia macrophyllia, or Big Leaf Magnolia,a native of the south-eastern United States and one of the hundreds of trees from around the world at the local arboretum. Sunshine. Walking in the woods. Feeling heard. Listening in return. Good advice. More pictures on Flickr.

2. Friday 13th lived up to its reputation. A catalyst of a day that ended in tears. My colleagues are as hard working and caring as any I have come across but good management is vital. An organisation simply can't function without it. That's all I'm saying.

3. I meant to blog about this extraordinary photograph and article when it first appeared last month. The subject is a Premiership footballer who had just scored a decisive penalty goal and who had lost his mother earlier that same week. The author is The Times's art critic. On the quiet I'm a follower of soccer, but even if you aren't, do read it. The commenters debate whether the piece is celebrity-fawning or superb artistic analysis. My inclination is towards the latter.

4. The shoulder pain has lessened. Oddly enough, apart from the deep tissue work, what seems to have turned it around was tackling a full body massage myself and not listening to the internal voices that told me I shouldn't because of the injury. I went ahead. The friend was effusive. I loved it and am almost pain-free. We're doing it again.

5. I need to register as self-employed.