The truth about green

The Courtauld Gallery in London invites writers to talk about art. I watched novelist Ali Smith's fabulous 3.52 mins video clip 'The Truth about Green' (her response to Cézanne’s L'Etang des Soeurs à Osny) recommended by a friend, and it made my day. It also reminded me of how overused and flattened out both  the word and colour green have become. Applied to everything supposedly politically correct and used to endorse anything that can claim the labels wellness or health, however suspect, enchanting hues like chartreuse, viridian, emerald, lime and beryl are pressed into the service of banal everyday commerce from promoting chewing gum to scrubbing brushes. This is a long way from Smith's reality of feeling shot with the truth about green, akin to 'being mugged by life'......

Apart from the obvious aesthetic pleasure afforded by trees, it is the saturated mystery deep in the life of the green sap that stirs something in the blood. No matter how bleak the start of a day, a drive past, through and under the magnificent gigantic trees in my neighbourhood makes one understand how people deprived of such wealth in stark built-up landscapes are driven to acts of desperation. If leaves were purple, would one feel the same? I don't think so.

The truth about green? It's the unwritten signature in the body; red's deep opposite. In my view, the body is green incarnate. Ali Smith muses, 'anyone can snap me open, I'll bend like a sapling, my skin will split open and I'll see the red insides of me astonished into green...'

My Rasta friends would say: 'Green. Respect.' For the record: I've shed involuntary tears over a red and green Richard Diebenkorn colour field. Enjoy Ali Smith!

Hennie Stroebel’s turquoise Levant – art sans frontières

Ceramist Hendrik Stroebel grew up in a young country and yearned for antiquity. So when travel restrictions in South Africa were lifted, he headed for the Levant in pursuit of ancient ruins and relics imbued with the present, and for places like Samarkand and Ardebil whose names lie like jewels in the mouth. The embroidered recollections of this personal odyssey synthesise the Apollononian and the Dyonisian; here are the responses of both Narcissus the priest-monk and Goldmund the wanderer and artist. Austere temples, towers and statues compete with lush fruit, sensual flowers, veiled women and strong men. Ethereal turquoises juxtapose visceral reds.

Silhouette with Tiles, 2007

Detail, Between the Euphrates and the Tigris, 1999

Russell Hoban says if you put certain words together, how the thunder rolls. One can say the same for Stroebel’s seductive choices of images, fusion of craft and art (the materiality of the wooden and ceramic frames are a great counterpoint for the delicate embroideries), and fine blend of colours. I have loved Stroebel’s embroidery for more than a decade so this is not a review of his recent exhibition in Durban which spanned 17 years of work, but a tribute to his patience, keen observations, and exquisite rendering of detail, place and (bygone) time. A tribute to this ‘paint on a string applied with a needle’, as he calls it....

Silybum Marianum (Milk Thistle) Turkey, 2011

What is it that draws Stroebel to Biblical cities, the crossroads of  Egyptian, Greek, Ottoman, Byzantine and Roman empires, the silk roads of Uzbekistan and beyond?  He loves the largeness, he says, which takes your breath away, and the fact that what is left over in the ruins is still enough; the unembellished restraint in statues washed clean by time, the purity of stripped essences. He reveres both the complexity and simplicity of these cultures so different from our own and yet so close in space and time. And then there is the ‘godly colour’ turquoise which in Islam symbolises the union between heaven and earth. Stroebel uses it with incandescent effect as in my personal favourite, The Remains of Tamerlane. 

Remains of Tamerlane, 2001- 2002



Camel Pot, Esfahan, intimate in scale, invokes the monumentality Stroebel responds to, as well as that of his own ceramic pots. This monumental/intimate play ranges over many pieces: from arches to niches, from marble pillars to thistles and buzzing bees.

Camel Pot, Esfahan, 2009





And now a number of significant pieces (Remains of Tamerlane is one of them) are migrating back to the Persian Gulf as part of a private art collection; back to be reabsorbed in the culture that inspired them. And here at home a detail printed on the inside of the catalogue cover has inspired a number of Zulu women to imitate the design in beadwork. The turquoise dialogue continues....

What next? Stroebel wants to go and see the glazed turquoise lions in Babylon of course. And travel though Iraq, if possible.

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*Also read Marily Martin’s excellent essay, Hendrik Stroebel – Recollect, in the exhibition catalogue.

Blue, colour of the imagination

Blue is a mysterious colour, hue of illness and nobility, the rarest colour in nature.It is the colour of ambiguous depth, of the heavens and of the abyss at once… of the blue movie…of anode plates, royalty at Rome, smoke, distant hills, Georgian silver, thin milk and hardened steel  – Matthias Ostermann, The New Maiolica

Blue is tout court, the colour of imagination – James Hillman

  

Yes Klein Monochrome

Do you think about blue? We are awash in it: the skies above us, the seas beneath us, which has everything to do with light of course, but it’s paradoxically rare in nature - which may account for its lack of lexical attribution in many languages. Cultivating blue roses and tulips is a horticultural grail which promises fame and reward.

Blue marks merit and distinction: cordon bleu, blue chip, blue blood. Blue diamonds are very valuable and lapis lazuli was once prized above diamonds. The old masters used ultramarine to paint the robes of revered subjects like the Madonna and Christ and the more saturated the colour, the greater its symbolical and actual value since ultramarine was made from ground lapis lazuli.

 

Few artists tackle blue. Picasso, Chagall, Anish Kapoor but most notably Yves Klein have all used it with striking effect. For Kapoor  "…blue reinforces a sense of freedom… The immense inspires us all. Eyes wide open if you like." And then there’s the dizzying breathtaking must-be-experienced saturation of International Klein blue (ultramarine pigment suspended in resin): "From a phenomenological point of view your eyes can't quite focus on blue." For Klein monochrome painting was also an "open window to freedom," and blue held the power to reveal the indefinable, the unknown. His famous symbolic gesture of signing the sky maybe says it all.

Mystics hold that seeing a tiny blue light in meditation is to experience the goal of human life. The throat chakra, symbolising communication, is blue, and the third eye chakra referred to as the gate which leads to higher consciousness, is indigo. The medicine Buddha is translucent blue and certain Hindu gods have blue skins.

In short, the Smurfs are in good company... and if you're feeling blue, there is nothing like a shot of Yves Klein (even on your computer screen) to notch you up!

For a compelling academic essay on blue, also referencing her own work, see Virginia Mackenny’s Blue – a shifting horizon (posted with permission) below.

Void - Anish Kapoor

ADDENDUM 30.12.2011:
Male blue-eyed satin bower birds decorate the inside of their nests with blue bits: feathers, candy wrappers, flowers, glass fragments, bus tickets, ribbons, bottle tops - to attract females who respond to blue.

Photo: R. Major © Australian Museum

PS A must view: Ali Smith - 'The truth about Green'

Blue - a shifting horizon. Virginia Mackenny

Blue - A Shifting Horizon

The depression cul-de-sac

              They want production to be limited to useful things but they forget that the
              production of too many useful things results in too many useless people - Marx

             Creators...infuse the colours and music of their souls into the structures of
             existence  - Tagore


We all know it’s depressing to live in a society that enshrines excess, expenditure and  material possession, where the ubiquitous lure of commodities  replaces the call to matins and vespers, and where ‘enough’ has almost lost all meaning. We know ‘progress’ just means more and more things and that consumerism derails a host of human qualities, a very important one being creativity.

But if we assign creativity only to artists whose work is enshrined in exhibition spaces or played out on stages, we’re missing the point.  All you have to do is observe a child at play to know that human beings are naturally creative, curious, intellectually playful, and complex. And seen through a Schumacher lens, the loss may lie in small acts of creativity which we seem to express less and less in our homes, in our daily lives; diminished creativity on an intimate level.

In short, we no longer make many things for our personal use. If you knit, crochet, sew, bake, make pottery or do carpentry these days you’re not someone simply going about your daily life and you're not like everybody else; you may even have a shop or a website, or are at least be contracted to a home industry. My readymade, about-to-break, soon-to-be-replaced item looks exactly like yours; the best I can do is put a spin on the selections I make. Less originating involvement in what we’re surrounded by and live with means fewer opportunities to imbue our lives with personal meaning and joy derived from the tactile engagement with handmade products.

Contrast the palpable joy felt by those who do attend classes like pottery, carpentry, decoupage, cooking. The point is, there’s little left for us to do in our homes: everything we eat, wear and use is a dollar away. Is it surprising that global depression levels are high? What satisfaction is there in being a consumer first and foremost, for a creature who is a maker of things? How do you derive self-worth from a cul-de-sac of  repetitive consumption?

I watched my grandmother  make, mend and cherish things. I learnt from her that we love what we labour for and labour for what we love. I understand that Marx’s loss of savoir-faire leads to  loss of   savoir-vivre.  Bronowski pins the ascent of man on the first handmade flint axes. We may be paying dearly for passive hands.

 

Source: Physorg.com

                                                             

                                                      

                                                           Source: Needlenthread

                                                                                          

Euclidian lace - Christina Bryer

“My work is geometry. I do the work.”

Aperiodic blooms, merit award, 7th International Ceramic Competition 2011, Japan

                     

Detail

       I have been a privileged witness to the development of Christina Bryer’s tile installations and porcelain mandalas over many years. Their deception is fabulous. Beyond the superficial embellishment these fragile objects reminiscent of frozen lace or French patisserie are solidly grounded in mathematics

Her starting point is a fascination with aperiodic tiling and Roger Penrose. In periodic tiling you can trace a piece of a pattern as in the example below, and recreate it by infinite repetition in either direction. In other words, the pattern can fit into a lattice.

Aperiodic tiling lacks this simple translational symmetry. If you trace a piece of this pattern, you have to rotate it to find a match:

Pentaplexity (Graphics: C.Bryer)

                                                                                                                               
Penrose's infinite aperiodic tiling is generated by pentagons with the help of his famous ‘kites’ and ‘darts’, plus thin and fat rhombuses (or diamond shapes). Bryer likes using the pentagons themselves rather than the kites and darts, and the five-, three- and one-point star patterns which unfold in the pattern.
                                                                

                                                                       
                                                                                                    Daisy field
                      
Additional inspiration comes from repetitive patterns contiguous with infinity in the Alhambra mosaics for example, as well as nature’s tendency to construct complex geometries on micro and macro levels such as unicellular organisms, DNA strands, and stellar configurations. Bryer avoids the term ‘sacred geometry’ but this is of course how mathematical laws in natural forms are popularly referred to.

The implicit link with metaphysics is ineluctable. Even if you don’t subscribe to assumptions held by philosophers from Descartes to Kant to Frege, that Euclidean geometry is a paradigm of epistemic certainty, or the idea in platonism that mathematical truths are discovered, not invented, I invite you to pay attention to the multiple layers and complex overlaps in Bryer’s UpDown below. Patterns within patterns, shifting substrata, stars and pentagons, dazzlingly cohesive, move and loop without upsetting the overall harmony - making it easy to entertain  notions of absolute principles and Islamic ‘hidden one-ness’. 

       Digital 2D UpDown

The strict discipline involved in crafting the patterns evokes a meditative state of mind (we tend to forget in how many cultures the artist, monk and mathematician are often the same person), and Bryer doesn't control the unfolding of the pattern but follows  a “quest into the unfathomable depths of the web of aperiodicity from which straight lines, circles, rhythms and scaling emerge by themselves.” Contrary perhaps to expectation, she notes that “starting with the absolute of the grid frees you to work with infinite possibilities.”

                                                                      

  Tanit tile murat, Ibiza 1995

www                    ce

  

                                                                                       

Bryer’s work forms part of a long discourse that goes back to  Renaissance parquetry and marquetry. Vasarely (1930s) and Agam gave us 3D kinetic effects through repetitive elements in painting. Escher (1930s to 1960s) introduced a 4D timeline in his bird/fish transformations. Nowadays there’s talk of 5D hyperspace and in A New Kind of Science Wolfram posits that “all processes, whether they are produced by human effort or occur spontaneously in nature, can be viewed as computations.”

Bryer will tell you that the centres are fractal, which Mandelbrot explains as being able to split into parts, each of which is a reduced-size copy of the whole; and that depending on the decisions you make, recognisable ‘seed patterns’ unfold in the infinite tilings namely ‘stars’, ‘cartwheels’ and ‘suns’ –which she prefers to call exploding or yin stars, cartwheels, and contracting or yang stars.

                                       Star                                Sun                                 Cartwheel

                                                           

Anyway, Bryer has to contain or ‘stop’ the patterns from their tendency to infinity and gives them a border. The choice of a circular (plate) presentation with soft edges immediately places the patterns in the arena of women’s craft and art and the Pattern and Decoration Movement of the 70s. Artists  like Judy Chicago, Sonia Delauney, Miriam Shapiro and Joyce Kozloff come to mind. And when Bryer meticulously ‘cuts’ into the clay to allow an interplay of shadow and light, she claims the patterns. They are no longer digital, but gestural and plastic.

The silent earth

 
I see the fact that these mathematical ‘truths’ are comfortably situated in the discourse of female craft of doilies, swatches, flounces, and indigo designs, as an ingenious (although not intended as such) infiltration. They innocently decorate walls in homes like tiles in temples while hinting at  a much bigger picture.

PS See Christina's beatiful after the rain close-ups on Hartbron, Montagu.

Exquisite pursuit - Willem Boshoff

If it were up to me Willem Boshoff would be declared a living treasure. Not only is he enchanted with words, and deeply examines our taxonomies and lexicons, he constantly flags, in a prodigious body of ecology aesthetics, our destructive presence on the planet.  In the words of Natalie Souchon*, “He is not working with the image[s] of plants, but with the hopeless memory, where words become gardens of remembrance. The memory is what grows, not the plants themselves.” Keywords, for me, through which to read his work are numinosity, silence, patience, exquisitus negotium (I looked up the Latin for the title of this piece because Latin features among Boshoff’s  projects of remembrance).

Over the years Boshoff has taken it upon himself to memorise the names of thousands of extinct flower species. In the spirit of transmitting cultural history through vocal utterance in oral traditions, remembering equals preserving. In an e.mail Boshoff writes: "I do not include the names of plants in my artworks Gardens of Words I, II and III if I had not actually encountered them and if I had not tried to fix their names in my memory; only real experiences count. That does not mean that I do not look at plants in books and on the internet. I do that all the time, but I only consider the ‘face-to-face’ experience as relevant for the artworks." And: "For my sins I become endlessly and boringly philosophical about memorising existing plant species. I refer to my head as a ‘garden’ and my activities of writing of dictionaries and compiling plant lists and other notes as ‘gardening in my mind.’ The trouble with this garden in my head is that, like any other garden, it needs constant care and attention. I need to repeat what I remember of the 20,000 plant names on my list of encountered plants often and for good reason, or else those plants die of neglect. The GARDENS OF WORDS projects and all other efforts are there to help the plants in my head not to become extinct. As I get older, I get a very real experience of what it means for words and names to become extinct by simply forgetting them."

The thousands of ‘flowers’ in Garden of Words III are made of white cloths folded into red holding cups and both the botanical and vernacular names of the flowers are printed on the cloths – rendering these elegiac conceptual representations of the living plants both epitaphs and mnemonics.

                                 

                                                          Garden of Words III, 2006 (Source: Art South Africa)

This is not the place to even begin to explore Boshoff’s philosophical concerns, which are rich and deep, but I want to pay tribute to his cranial garden and the way in which his work of preservation is 'never ending', that is, can only end when he dies. In a culture that marginalises invisibles and forgets all too easily, we need custodians like Boshoff. His meticulous pursuits remind one of Bacon’s identification of 'exhilarated despair…[that] painful yet lyrical disturbance felt by all those who, living in these times of horror spangled with enchantment, can contemplate them with lucidity.'

 When Boshoff dies, we lose a chunk of living history.

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*Dissertation: Repositioning Marianne North and Botanical Art, 1999