Stephen Gardiner on Elizabeth Frink
“If one were searching for clues to Lis’s state of mind as an artist…her annual output of work -it’s quantity, quality, nature, character – would be a good place to start. Was she happy, confident, living it up, on an inspirational trip, anxious, in love, out of love?”
“It was a question decided by two people, between one heart and another. Something had to be given, and something had to be accepted.” Haruki Murakami
When things get a little tough I turn to Sylvia Plath.
Love Letter is one of my favourites.
It speaks to me of the awakenings and intoxication that come with love, and also of what Rumi described as the “howling hurt.” A heady mix of the real with the ideal. A genius poem in the way it speaks of balance and unbalance.
For Thich Nhat Hanh love means understanding suffering. Suffering, here, equates to dissatisfaction whether physical, emotional or spiritual. To understand, ourselves or others, all we need to do is listen. Perception, feelings, body – whatever is calling us, we need to listen.
Dream Weave – Unseen Energies © JudithAnnBrown
Preliminary study for Dream Weave
“The Dream Weave responds to the changes we make in ourselves and offers us new opportunities every time we open our perceptions to new possibilities, changing the habits that could have kept us stuck in a rut.”
Jamie Sams
Any chance that I get and I am avidly reading the life stories of artists, particularly women and their differing mixes of relationships, motherhood and work. I remember doing the same with writers just before I set out on my degree in English Literature at eighteen. At the moment it is Elizabeth Frink that I am enamoured with.
There is a lovely little introduction to her in this video with words by her son Lin Jammet. It is clear that experience and proximity to war imbued Elizabeth’s work with a lasting concern for the fragility of the human body. She famously said “I have focused on the male because to me he is a subtle combination of sensuality and strength with vulnerability.”
Walking Madonna is a bold and compelling statement about human dignity and strength, it has also been seen as a metaphor for the artist’s life. What strikes me from reading about her life is that she is an inspirational mix of complexity and contradiction. There is also a tremendous sense of the discipline that she applied to her work. She died too young at 63, which is stimulus enough for me to treasure every art making minute.
“This boundary is not something at which space stops, but something from which space begins.”
Anthony de Jong Cleyndert
A tantric time of focused energy and expansion. No distinction between what is contained and what is not. Desire is the pull. The yes that has no doubt.
Going deeper and being honest about connection amazes me every time.
In “Frida Kahlo’s Garden” edited by Adriana Zavala there is a photograph of Frida and Diego Rivera looking at each other with such intensity that it holds you in amazement.
Over the summer I threw away a bundle of letters which catalogued a brief connection with someone, a connection that was at once disarmingly intense yet bounded by past hurt and childhood experiences. For him the reason why we came together was clear right from the start; for me less so, I was not so far along in my healing. Re-reading these letters felt like reading about someone else. The need to keep them had long passed as I had absorbed the lessons so deeply.
It is rich and illuminating to look at connection from this perspective.
Enamoured with Eva Hesse’s Spectre paintings I set about exploring the self portrait as a state of consciousness. This feels at once frenzied and contained, with the certainty of an ending which includes a new beginning.
“Art is all about the sky is blue.” Lawrence Weiner
When I am resisting there is always a part of me which is in agreement with that which I am resisting. The challenge is to integrate the knowledge I have and welcome it into my life with impeccability.
I love this talk by Ian Massey on Sandra Blow. In it he describes a fascination with how artists encode elements of themselves into their work, giving Helix as an example and menstral blood as an alternative reading. It is interesting, then, to know that she regretted not having children.
Sandra was dedicated to the idea of “a startling rightness” – a way of giving balance an edge. I’ve been struggling to find out much about this remarkable artist, definitely someone who demands greater attention.
“As well as wanting a balance in the composition, there should be what I call a startling rightness. This can be any shape or colour: the crucial thing is that although perfect in its place, there is an unexpected quality about it, an element of surprise.”
Sandra Blow
JudithAnnBrown 