November 17th

Memento mori
the vanity of excess
and the peace of death

What an incredible exhibition Death: A Self Portrait at the Wellcome Collection is. I’m going to visit again as it’s quite a sensory overload. It’s a celebration of death, it’s not at all morbid in my mind. Some of it is sad and tragic of course but on the whole it’s about attitudes to life and our inevitable death, how we cope and the celebration of life.

One of the exhibits - “Death the Friend” by Alfred Rethel (wood engraving 1851). This is quite a compassionate piece. The old bellringer has died. Death waits till dawn and rings the bell on his behalf, paying respect to the fact that the bellringer has to some degree, been working for him all his life.

April 18th

Cinders wind scattered
weeping woman wails for child
lost in the rubble

We went to an evening private view of the Picasso and Modern British Art exhibition at Tate Britain. There was a lot to take in, very interesting how Picasso influenced and overlapped with so many British artists. The piece of art that I’ve focused on however is called Dream and Lie of Franco (1937), it’s a print which he produced to make money for the Republican cause during the Spanish Civil War. Franco himself is depicted as an inhuman beast, a monster terrorising the innocent populace. The weeping woman theme was something Picasso kept visiting during this tragic period in Spanish history. It seems so sad in this work. 

(image from metropolitan museum of art website)

March 29th

White horses gallop

Leaping over the coral

Unremitting wave

 

Was looking at one of my birthday presents today, a book from Debbie about Hokusai’s great wave. It’s a wood block (cherry wood) print from the Japanese Edo period (approx 1829- 33) of (as you would expect) a great wave. It’s caught at its apex and it looks like it will crash down onto the insignificant boats below it. Mount Fuji looks tiny in the background, giving the impression that the boatmen are far from shore and are facing a likely death.

It truly is a testament to the raw strength and power of nature. The British Museum has chosen it as one of their 100 objects from their radio series “A history of the world in 100 objects”, number 93 in fact. I’ve got them all downloaded on my iphone as podcasts (free). Well worth a listen. The podcast itself gives some Art History background to the image, talking of Japan’s insularity at the time the image was made, giving some sense of allegory about the image and Japan’s place in the world.

Looking at the print literally however, I’ve always had a healthy respect, I’d go so far to say, a fear, of the sea. I don’t like being out of my depth. I’m not a great swimmer. The ancient fear of being smote (smited?) by a sea god still lingers somewhere in my psyche. I wouldn’t take the sea for granted.

But, being by the sea, the smell of salt, soft sand underfoot, seafood, the sound of gulls, the persistent lapping of the waves, there’s no better place to be for me. It’s fair to say that I do like to be beside the seaside.