Magnolia Exmouth

Ithaca

While working on my second novel, When the Colours Sing, I have been thinking about colour in painting and especially the use of colour by the Blue Rider painters. So it is with a lot of interest and pride that I visited my own daughter’s exhibition in the Deaf Cat Gallery in Rochester, Kent, and had the opportunity to start reflecting on her work.

Painting mainly abstract landscapes, Maria Pierides (http://www.mariapierides.co.uk) makes her paintings sing. They also draw the eye to areas, washes and masses of colour that suggest landscapes emerging from history, from maps, from physical and emotional references to the world.

Using “mixed media, building up and scraping back areas of paint to capture the atmosphere, mass, and light of the landscapes,” she is creating landscapes of the mind. Exploring aspects of the search for “home,” for “rootedness” in the moment, she works on the most basic and important areas of being.

Drawing on Kavafis’ poem ‘Ithaca,’ Maria investigates her own versions of Ithaca. If you can visit this exhibition do; let yourself experience her paintings by allowing the levels of beauty, meaning and lyricism in the pictures emerge in yourself. Don’t take my word for it: see for yourself!

The Deaf Cat is a spacious, warm and trendy exhibition space, with an excellent atmosphere, providing a much needed meeting platform for Kent artists and those interested in their work.

With both a real as well as a virtual space for local artists and art lovers to meet, it is fast becoming the place to be in Rochester and Kent.

The Deaf Cat was the winner in the category of Best Newcomer in the culture and Design Awards 2010, and received nominations in three other categories.

Maria’s work can be viewed in the The Deaf Cat daily, Monday to Sunday from 9.30 am to 5 pm.

Some of her work can also be viewed on her website here

Night

Night

 As darkness falls over the Thames,

a liquid haze swims in from the sea

and the city steels its heart for the night.

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This post can be found in Stella’s Stones  here

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Ammersee

The lake Ammersee puts in a pre-Christmas snow show; steam included!

In the foothills of the lower Alpine Mountains, the Ammersee, one of several glacial lakes, is a real jewel in all seasons — and a place to collect “stones.”

More pictures here

See also here

Old Boat

In the years after World War II, a Civil War raged in Greece until 1949 which proved to be one of the worst disasters that befell Greece. Greek against Greek, the Right fought with the Left a war of the utmost cruelty.

This war left many wounds in Greek society. Memories of it still scar the Greek psyche, even across several generations, influencing the current social and political climate.

An important aspect of this war, and the horrendous atrocities inflicted during it, often by members of the same family fighting each other, has been the silence it generated. The trauma robbed people of the words to describe what happened to them, or what they did to others. Whole families stopped communicating; individuals refrained from speaking about the period of the war; history books omitted important events that took place as if they never had happened.

Over the years, the situation slowly changed, especially after the fall of the military Junta and the opening up of the political system in Greece – though even now sections of Greek society insist that there are still many unspoken matters that need to be talked about and worked through.

In my story Postcards, I allude to the period of the Greek Civil War, and to this silence, symbolized by the fighter/husband: he stops using words/language when writing to his wife and instead communicates through drawings in his postcards.

You can read the short story “Postcards” here 

Lemon Tree Magic

This month’s theme of the Festival of the Trees is “The Magic of Faerie Trees.”  Hosted by Salix of Windy Willow, it is an interesting if bewitching topic. If you are into magic and fairies, fine. If you are not, what can you say about mystery or magic in a tree?

On the other hand, how is it that the olive tree is capable of living thousands of years? Is there magic involved? With its strong roots surviving underground, even when the trunk looks dead, the olive tree can make a claim to magic – though less so to mystery, if the strong roots explain its longevity! Then there is its outstanding beauty: its silvery foliage, almost like a whispering cloud, fused with its ragged, gnarled, twisted trunk, providing a unique image. This tree has so many associations for me that I decided to find a space for it in my second novel, When the Colours Sing.  An olive tree in pre-alpine Bavaria! We’ll see how this strand is going to develop. But first things first.

There is the lemon tree (for which I made space in my first novel, Alexandrias 40: In the Shade of the Lemon Tree) to talk about. Glossy foliage, waxy, white-purple flowers, divine fragrance, fruit to grace any table, book or poem!

Lemon trees are said to have originated in Asia and spread in the Mediterranean regions after Alexander the Great’s soldiers brought them back from India. They are treasured trees in the Mediterranean lands. They are as important as olive trees and vines. They are vital to the health and well-being of the people living in those lands, as they have numerous medicinal, hygienic, cooking and culinary uses. From the abundant vitamin C, to the taste-enhancing addition to salads, soups, and various dishes, to decorative and aesthetic uses, to the perfume industry, lemons are most versatile.

In Northern Europe and America, there are additional associations which emphasize the lemon’s bitter taste, as in the expression “when life gives you lemons,” or the “lemon car,” referring to a defective, multi-flaw car. In a painting by Paolo Morando, The Virgin and Child, Saint John the Baptists and an Angel, Christ as a child is being offered a lemon, an act frequently associated with learning a variety of tastes and therefore being weaned off baby food.

In this sense, the lemon bridges opposites in taste (bitter-sweet), between cultural perceptions, and generations (weaning the baby off baby food). Is that a clue for interpreting the Italian, unknown artist’s painting Man and Wife, in the National Gallery of London, which has a lemon tree as a background?  

Readers’ Digest lists 34 uses for the lemon. In Alexandrias 40: In the Shade of the Lemon Tree,  there is a whole number of other uses – some surprising ones – for the lemon.  But please note: try them at your own risk!

(Forthcoming:  Alexandrias 40: In the Shade of the Lemon Tree: www.voxhumana-books.com)

18 November 2010

Tate Sunflower Seeds

Following the enormous disappointment at the Tate’s stopping the public from walking on  Ai Weiwei’s seed landscape, Tate Modern had a better idea: for all those wishing to at least touch the seeds, there is now a narrow corridor to the side of the sunflower seed installation. Now, we can walk on the edge, and we can touch.

Thank you Tate!

Guardian article about the Tate rethink (and the guards offering seeds in mugs for people to feel!), here

My own post on the Sunflower Seeds show, here

27 October 2010

Bremen Musicians

In this tale, four animals: a donkey, a dog, a cat and a cock, having worked hard for their human owners, but getting on in years, are facing redundancy, abandonment, abuse, and slaughter. This unsavoury predicament brings them together and they decide to set off for the town of Bremen to find work as official musicians there.

Before reaching the town, however, they come across a house in the forest, as one does in fairy tales, and agree to try to scare away a gang of robbers feasting inside it. The dog stands on top of the donkey, the cat on top of the dog, the rooster on top of the cat, and each making its own, unique cry – their concerted braying, barking, meowing, and crowing – they crash through the window inside the house and scare the robbers off. In this remarkable way of co-operation, the four animals repel an attack by the robbers during the subsequent night, and settle to live there for the rest of their lives.

Bremen Town Musicians

(I took a picture of this sculpture from the street; it is made of papier mache by Gaby Bertram of scrap-pap.de)

I wonder why this fairy tale has become so important to the city. Might it have to do with a wish for all kinds of people, of all backgrounds, ages, ethnic origins to live together happily, like those seemingly incompatible animals did in the story? I hope so anyway.

Readers of this blog will know about my novel Alexandrias 40: In the Shade of the Lemon Tree, and my interest in the ways people (in this novel, mainly Greeks and Turks) come together – or not. It seems that having a sense of shared humanity and a common purpose, and project helps: this Grimm tale shows us how.

In any case, I had fun walking around and finding depictions of the animals to photograph.

Atomic Clock USNO

I just read that Einstein’s Theory of Relativity was shown to apply to altitude differences as small as 33 centimeters. Scientists at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado, using the latest and most accurate atomic clocks, found that the higher you are above sea level, the faster time runs for you.

In addition, as Einstein had also suggested, the scientists found that travel through space influences clock speed. A stationary clock ticks slower than a moving one. So, if your clock is moving rather than stationary and, in addition, you live high up, then you might start thinking about botox, moving to sea-level, or buying a bungalow!
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The time differences at these small distances are minuscule, but now measurable.
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This demonstration of time dilation leads me on to another, though I believe related, track. Einstein conceived of his Relativity Theory more than one hundred years ago, and yet we are only now able to confirm its predictions on our, human level! Atomic theory, stating that matter is composed of discrete units called atoms, according to Wikipedia, “began as a philosophical concept in ancient Greece and India” and only entered scientific thinking in the early nineteenth century. Thus, “time” is also relative, depending on the prevailing culture, socio-political conditions, etc., when it comes to the interval between ideas being born and their progressing to proof and acceptance. Just think of the effect of certain periods of the Middle Ages on the progression of ideas!
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Moving on to a more experiential level: In my forthcoming novel Alexandrias 40: In the Shade of the Lemon Tree, a little girl is obsessed with time. She fears changes of plan, the adults changing their mind, things happening unexpectedly – “Can you do that?” she wants to know. If you change your plans, then time becomes unpredictable. She keeps comparing the time on her watch with that of other family members, to reassure herself of the stability of her world. Like most of us, she confuses the subjective timeline of our lives, and its curves, ambits, u-turns and roundabouts, with the instrument of its measurement, her watch.
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On the other hand, shrinking or speeding up time, for instance through time-lapse photography, can provide us with a new, marvelous perspective on the world. The BBC has a great video on this, “Timelapse: Speeding up life” Watch it; I added it to my previous post.
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For musings and poetry on Time, read Asian Cha’s Random musings on Time: “Pray, my dear, quoth my mother, have you not forgot to wind up the clock?” They claim their clock does not tick. Not even tock?
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Perhaps this, the dilation of time, the arrhythmia of time, where the interval between “tick” and “tock” is unpredictable, or different to what our current understanding would lead us to expect, is a major, crucial point where the arts and the sciences intersect – where the subjective and objective meet. Let us stay with this thought for a minute. Stop all the clocks!

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Nolde Question

While working on my novel When the Colors Sing, about The Blue Rider (Der blaue Reiter) movement, especially Kandinsky, Münter and Marc, I came across the work of Emil Nolde and his struggles with the development of his art. Readers of this blog will know I recently visited his house – now a museum – in Seebüll, North Frisia, to get a better feeling of his surroundings and the areas where he liked to work.

Having dipped a bit deeper in Nolde’s bio, I came back with more questions than I went with; which is something I appreciate. For instance, I kept thinking, how did Emil Nolde hold the tension between his art and his craft; between his personal, conservative philosophy and his experimental and liberating work; between his roots in the farming community and artistically, in a German tradition of painting, and freedom of expression in his own artistic explorations of landscape, nature and humans. In other words, how did Nolde carry his own, individual cross to produce such work of great depth, intensity, and appeal?

Interesting questions? There is no easy answer to them, of course. And no answer will be attempted here. Just a few facts I gathered about Nolde, and a few links that might spark some new lines of enquiry.

Coming from a family of farmers, Nolde, acting on his father’s wishes, trained and worked as a woodcarver and furniture designer. He also took drawing classes, and taught drawing in a variety of venues.

He came to painting later. Having been rejected by the Munich Art Academy, like Kandinsky, Nolde took private painting lessons and visited Paris and other European art centers. His rejection seems to have driven him to cast his net wider and to look at and absorb other styles and ideas. The Parisian Impressionism, the angular and extreme approach of the artists of Die Brücke, the work of the group The Berlin Secession, the spiritual expressionism of Der Blaue Reiter influenced the development of his work. Bright pigments, free brushstrokes, search for the essence/soul of the subject, mystical and symbolic preoccupations became his ongoing concerns and he found his own way of depicting them on canvas and paper.

While he exhibited with all these groups in the earlier part of the twentieth century, Nolde was an individualist at heart, happiest while painting, not in society or groups of artists. He cut links with all groups after a while.

Nolde became one of the most known and respected painters up to the 1930s even in the climate of racial hatred and divisive currents that were deepening within German society at that time. In part, this success may have to do with similarities between Nolde’s ideas and those of nationalist groups and even Nazi philosophy, as some have argued.

Nevertheless, his popularity and individualistic expressionist ideography did not sit well with some members of the National Socialist Party at least, and with Hitler in particular – another “painter” rejected by the Munich Art Academy – who saw Expressionism as “corrupting” and “degenerate art.” Nolde’s work was confiscated and exhibited with other expressionist paintings in the infamous Munich exhibition “Degenerate Art” – an exhibition meant to humiliate the artists and their work.

Nolde painted his Unpainted Pictures during this period, especially from 1941 onwards when he was officially prohibited to paint. While he meant to render these small-scale watercolors in oil one day, most of them remained unpainted. I wonder what this means. What it is these pictures represent. Might one say that they help, like free associations, lead to the not so obvious, not so known Nolde?

The novel Deutschstunde, The German Lesson, by Siegfried Lenz, published in 1968, was inspired by Nolde and the time of his being prohibited to paint. While the name of the painter, as well as of those in his immediate circle, has been changed (to Nansen, a paraphrase of Nolde’s family name: Hansen), there is an unmistakable line of character and biographical detail running through the novel. As a novel, it is original, well-thought out, extremely well-written and atmospheric. Even the landscape speaks!

Lenz, in this novel, contributes a major idea about Nolde and his work. By pitting him against someone (a policeman) deadened by his unthinking and unwavering dedication to duty and discipline (namely, to enforce the painting ban that Nansen/Nolde had been subjected to), Lenz shows Nolde’s individualism, dedication to his art, as well as conscience, and sense of moral responsibility.

Might this juxtaposition in Lenz’s novel serve as a clue to thinking about Nolde’s balancing of opposing elements? A clue to his ability to survive adversity and continue his artistic development without selling-out his soul?  Certainly worth thinking about.

Photo credit: Maria Pierides www.mariapierides.co.uk

6 September 2010

Murnau Moor

I am delighted and  honored! My micro-poem They send light to Earth was chosen to be the first piece to be published by new e-zine @textofiction.

Brand new, “Textofiction is an online literary publication dedicated to bringing the best writing in under 140 characters.”

Read my micro-poem and think, it packs a lot in. Better still, let me know your thoughts about it! Read it here

Date of publication: 29 August 2010

David vs Goliath

A tribe in India has won a stunning victory over one of the world’s biggest mining companies. The Dongria Kondh, a tribe of 8000 people, with the help of Survival International and others, has won a victory over a multibillion company which proposed to mine bauxite on the sacred hills of the tribe. The Dongria Kondh’s struggle had a happier ending than that of the film Avatar, in which a tribe was pitted against a ruthless mining company. The Dongria Kondh’s perseverance, courage, and victory will encourage indigenous tribes everywhere.

Well done to Dongria Kondh, their supporters, and to Survival!

I was reminded of Sartre’s “Hell is other people.” Not the way he meant it – which was that if our relationship with a particular person is  bad, then our being with them becomes hell;  but the way it is usually understood, namely, that all other people are, and our relating with them is, torture.

I wonder what Sartre would have made of the idea that all humankind could theoretically be squeezed into a sugar cube! Horror of horrors! He might well have been a bit more appreciative of the already existing space inside and in-between other people’s atoms.

Now that’s a thought (for a short story).

I see that the ideas in the photo essay are explored in Chown’s “The Matchbox That Ate A Forty-Ton Truck: What everyday things tell us about the universe.” Well then, I am off to get this book…

For an essay on the quote “Hell is other people” see: http://legacy.lclark.edu/~clayton/commentaries/hell.html

Also, for the real thing:  http://www.sartre.org/

No Exit, the play from which the quotation arises http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Exit

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marcus-chown/11-of-the-craziest-things_b_628481.html#s107477

Photo credit:  Constantina Pierides

Click for Maria’s website

Beyond Madness Psychosocial Interventions in Psychosis

Edited by Joseph H. Berke, Margaret Fagan, George Mak-Pearce and Stella Pierides-Müller

Paperback 1-85302-889-4, 2001, 240 pages, £17.95 $29.95

BIC: MMJT MBPK JCAF JCF

Number 7 in the Community, Culture and Change series