A Tale of Two Paintings

I’ve talked about how an exhibition at the Tate Modern plays a critical role in Dancing Prince. In turn, two paintings in the exhibition play a critical role in the narrative of the novel.  

Jason Kent-Hughes, the adopted son of Michael and Sarah, is working as an assistant curator at the Tate Modern. Sarah describes him as their “San Francisco street child with a gift for painting and art administration.” After graduating from school in London, he did a year of military and then enrolled at the Slade School of Fine Art, part of University College London. After receiving his degree, he joined the Tate Modern.

 

As he explains to Michael, he gave a talk at the museum about the paintings done by Sarah that are in the Tate’s collection. It’s part of a regular weekly feature, he says, in which a staff member speaks about their choice of topic – something they’re working on, something in the collection, an upcoming exhibition, a research project, and so on. 

 

To continue reading, please see my post at Dancing Priest.

 

Photograph by Abbie Bernet via Unsplash. Used with permission.

“Sir Winston Churchill: His Life and His Paintings”

The Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum in St. Louis, on the grounds of Washington University, has an excellent exhibit of “The Paintings of Sir Winston Churchill” which will close on Feb. 14. In November, I had a post about the exhibit, noting that it was sponsored by the National Churchill Museum in Fulton, Mo., site of Churchill’s famous “Iron Curtain” speech in 1946.

The companion book for the exhibition, Sir Winston Churchill: His Life and Paintings by David Coombs with Minnie Churchill, is something of an anomaly. At the exhibition, you can buy it for $71.95. On Amazon, it is available through third-party sellers, with prices starting at 353 for a used copy and $611 for a new copy. The book originally published in 2011 and, I believe, “adopted” for the exhibition.

It’s a coffee table kind of book – large, rather lavish, filled with color reproductions of virtually all of Churchill’s known paintings and a few photographs of some that are currently lost.

Churchill began to paint in 1915, when he was 40 years old. He had a penchant for landscapes of almost all kinds – beaches, valleys, meadows, the Kentish countryside around his home, Chartwell, and mountains, but he was by no means limited to landscapes. He also painted still lifes, buildings, homes, rooms, and people. He managed to work himself into his paintings (such as the one at the top – the figure at the furthest right). He even wrote a book about painting – Painting as Pastime.

To see Churchill’s paintings together gives a sense of what the man accomplished as a “pastime.” He wasn’t “just a painter;” he was a good painter, an artist, certainly influenced by Impressionism but with his own unique style.

The exhibit at the Kemper is a wonderful show; as good as the book it, it’s no substitute for seeing the real paintings up close and with explanations of many of them as to their context, little known facts, and the historical circumstances surrounding them.

Painting: Beach at Walmer, oil on canvas by Sir Winston Churchill (1938); private collection.

“Some Corner of a Foreign Field” by James Bentley

I’ve been posting a number of articles over at Tweetspeak Poetry on World War I, and specifically on the poetry of World War I. This year marks the 100^th anniversary of the beginning of the conflict, and poetry is associated with the war in a significant way.

Poetry wasn’t the only art associated with the war. Painting and illustration played major roles as well, including in propaganda efforts on both sides.

Last month, we were fortunate to see the World War I exhibit at the Imperial War Museum in London. The exhibition is extensive, and it took us longer that I expected (including the walk-through experience of trench warfare). So we missed the art exhibition on another floor.

I did find a book that combined both the poetry and the painting of World War I, Some Corner of a Foreign Field: Poetry and Art of the First World War, edited by James Bentley, the author of a number of travel, historical and biographical works. It’s a small and beautiful volume, alternating poems and paintings and often pairing them together. It was first published in 1992, but a new edition was published this year for the centenary of the war.

The poets represented include Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen, Edward Thomas, Ivor Gurney, Isaac Rosenberg, Siegfried Sassoon, Charles Sorley, William Butler Yeats, Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, and G.K. Chesterton, among several others. The arts include brothers John and Paul Nash, Walter Bayes, William Orpen, Geoffrey Allfree, David Bomberg, Dora Carrington, Colin Gill, Eric Kennington and many others.

Together, the poems and paintings speak powerfully of the war, what happened, and how the war affected the soldiers on the fields, the sailors on the ships, and the pilots in the air (World War I was the first war involving aerial combat). And the book includes poems and art on war on the home front, including a painting by Bayes on Londoners taking shelter in a tube station during an air raid (yes, London experienced air raids in World War I, although not as serious as the blitz of World War II).

While the Second World War had more of an impact on the United States, the First World War changed everything for Europe and the Mideast. In additional to the deaths and physical destruction, it destroyed or transformed nations’ and individuals’ understandings of who they were. The old order toppled – revolutions destroyed the governments of Russia, Austria-Hungary, Germany, and the Ottoman Empire. Belgium caught the vicious brunt of a German army focused on attacking France, including the totally unnecessary burning of the famous library at Louvain and rape and pillage by soldiers of a country long associated with education and civilization. A multitude of new democracies were born. And the seeds were sown for the next war only two decades later.

In Britain, the class system, while surviving, was never again viewed the same way as it was before the war. The country was close to financial ruin. Almost 900,000 young men had died, creating a huge hole in a young generation.

Poetry and art told the story of what was happening during and after the conflict, and attempted to make sense of it afterward.  Some Corner of a Foreign Field helps tell that story.

Articles at Tweetspeak Poetry (so far; there are still two more to come):

Brian Gardner’s “Up the Line to Death: The War Poets 1914-1918”

The Poetry of World War I

The Most Famous Poem of World War I

The Poems the Soldiers Read in World War I

Painting: Capture of Oppy Wood by Paul Nash. This was part of the Arras offensive in June 1917, where British and Canadian troops battled the Germans for control of a one-acre wood. The Allies were ultimately successful. 

Flowers at church

Sunflowers on either side

of the altar, black centers

fringed in yellow, looking

upward as they tend to do,

upward to find the sun,

sunflowers from Arles

painted repeatedly

as he slipped into madness

painted originally

by God.

Was God in the yellow house,

the yellow room in Arles,

the odd-shaped room

and the odd-shaped man

in the odd-shaped house

on Place Lamartine,

in Arles.

 Paintings: Top, Vase with Twelve Sunflowers by Vincent Van Gogh (1888); bottom, The Yellow House in Arles by Vincent Van Gogh (1888).

Saturday Good Reads: Paintings and Photographs

The worldwide web affords the opportunity to see some remarkable paintings and photographs that one might not otherwise get to see. Here are some of the sites I regularly visit specific to art (painting and photographic mostly, but not entirely) (some of these may be second references from earlier posts)

First is Writing Without Paper, the blog of Maureen Doallas. Maureen has led me to some incredible sites, both through her regular posts (she’s an art lover if there ever was one, and she shares that loves online with the rest of us) and her All Art Friday posts.

One of the sites Maureen led me to was Randall David Tipton’s A Painter’s Process. He does oils, he does watercolors, he does mixed media. His works are generally of nature, and I can sit and study his works for a long time.

Susan Etole at Just…A Moment seems to capture some of the simplest and simultaneously spectacular photographs I think I’ve come across. And the photos are given a theme.

Nancy Rosback at A Little Somethin’ is a poet, a writer, a photographer, and an artist all rolled into one, and she often blurs the lines between all of them in her posts.

Steve Gravano at Take a Look Around goes out walking with his camera, and finds some amazing things, often if the everyday and obvious.

Timothy Good, who goes by the name of Naked Alien, maintains three blogs, and one of them is Photography by Tiwago. Like Steve Gravano, Tim goes on walks regularly with his camera, and takes some spectacular shots.

Kelly Sauer is a professional photographer, and manages to take some of the most romantic engagement and wedding pictures I’ve ever seen. And she takes a lot of other kinds of photos as well, and there is a certain look and feel to each one of her photographs that are the “Kelly Sauer brand.” She blogs at KellySauer.com.

Claire Burge, a native South African living in Dublin and maintaining an international travel schedule that is awe-inspiring, is the photographer who did the photograph for the cover of my novel, Dancing Priest. Her eye for her subjects is simply wonderful. You can see some of her work at Claire Burge Photography.

I’ll have more links to photographers and painters in future posts, but these are some of the ones I see on a regular basis.

Photograph: Yorkshire by Petr Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.