David Brazier Meeting Artists
Copyright David Brazier 2008 Amida Trust 12 Coventry Road Narborough Leicestershire LE19 2GR UK dharmavidya@amidatrust.com 0116.2867476 Words, photography, design, interviews - David Brazier
CONTENTS Page Introduction
1
Simon Morley, painter
2
Luc Arbogast, singer
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Marie-Noelle Guyot, plasticienne
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Cathy Savels, painter
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INTRODUCTION This little collection of encounters with artists contains short pieces that first appeared on my weblog on 3c Network. Each is the result of a personal experience and a meeting. There is nothing systematic about the choice of artists except the circumstances that permitted us to meet one another. There is no attempt here to single people out as ‘better’ or ‘worse’. Rather I have made an attempt to render a sympathetic appreciation of each person and his or her work. My aim has been primarily to satisfy my own curiosity and, perhaps, in the process, to arrive at a more rounded sense of the meaning of art and of what it is to be an artist. It is my intention to continue this series and to extend the book as and when opportunity presents. It is too early to present ‘conclusions’, and perhaps an introduction would not be the proper place for them anyway, but in general, while talent and self-expression clearly play a part, my impression is that what distinguishes an artist is a certain attitude toward work and material and that this is an attitude quite different from the one that rules the utilitarian world. Although artistic work must involve a struggle fror mastery over materials, the artist’s attitude must also include a substantial element of relinquishing control and allowing him or herself to become a medium within which a process is being worked out - a process seemingly governed by forces that compel and in the presence of which the artist feels both the necessity to create as well as a sense that source of the creation lies somewhere beyond his or her immediate understanding. As a result, being an artist is inherently an experimental and precarious position to occupy. Some of what I have tried to explore here, therefore, is the nature of this attitude and position as it manifests in ewach of the particular instances, for an abstract generalisation never does full justice to real people. For the most part, however, each piece speaks for itself.
SIMON MORLEY, painter 16th August 2008
What colour is a name? What is a suitable name for an absence? Matching a colour to a concept is an essential element in Simon Morley’s search for an emptiness that also has plenitude, a struggle with a central dilemma of his metier. Just as certain poets struggle to overcome the taint of implication in words and seek poetry that approaches the purity of music, so Simon Morley struggles with the taint of form in his painting, with its inevitable tendency to slide into mere ‘decorativeness’, to achieve the purity of emptiness without losing fullness of significance. So Simon mixes colours and presents them, strong and monochrome, completely filling the canvass. Is a colour beautiful when it is monochrome? Can it retain that beauty without descending into ornament? What can one dare to introduce into the space without crossing the tainted line? Perhaps only the concept that itself provoked the particular colour. This passionate concern to introduce form into the challenging solidity of colour without falling has, in his current phase, led Morley into working with text and, minimally, texture. His recent works are, to the camera, blocks of colour, but to the eye, at the right angle of light, they reveal embedded embossed text that itself has an increasingly subtle significance in relation to his own search for the plenum void. . I had met Simon a number of times as he had attended some of my occasional lectures on spiritual topics, but I did not get to know him in any depth until 13th August 2008 when I was
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one of a party invited by his sister Kate to dine at the house in Ainay le Chateau where he has his studio. It is a tall house, probably formerly a mill, that once was in the possession of a notable local artist, specimens of whose mural work, now in a deteriorated condition, still decorate some of the interior walls. The house is by the bridge in the picturesque village or small town of Ainay le Chateau on the edge of the Troncais Forest. The village itself is a hidden treasure full of medieval features and charming views, but it is the peace and ‘emptiness’ of the place that drew Simon here several years ago, though he makes regular visits back to the ‘London scene’ and the juxtaposition of these two environments – one over-full, clammering, and competitive, the other empty and seductive - is both one of the driving forces of his effort and an expression of his current inner dynamic. Soon he is to take up a part time teaching post in England, which will also draw him back, but, otherwise, he has deliberately relinquished having a fixed pied-a-terre in UK While talking in his studio, I viewed two sequences of material that he is currently working on. They are both text embossed in blocks of carefully selected colour, one being dates, and the other being names of roses. In the case of the dates, the style of text is taken from an original model in an old periodical or inscription or even graffiti. They are dates that were of sufficient significance to somebody to have been once recorded, but for humanity at large, the significance is (now) lost. We see here that the emptiness he is seeking is more an absence than a void. He is painting something that is no longer there. When we turn to the most recent series we see this principle at a multi-layered extreme, though it is perhaps too soon to tell if this is the limit of this development. In the rose sequence, the names are the names of persons after whom roses were named. However, these are roses that no longer exist. They come from a catalogue dated 1924. Each name is embossed within a block of colour appropriate to the particular rose variety. So here we have abstact images of symbols of now non-existent roses themselves named for now non-existent people. Although one could, therefore, consider these to be memorials, and they do have a slightly headstone like quality, really they do not serve to make us remember so much as to make us aware of the emptiness that is left by what is absent and to put us in touch with the ubiquitous quality of such absence permeating our lives. This generalising effect carried a step further by the fact that these are, of all things, roses, and as soon as I indicated my awareness of the symbolic value of the rose to European culture Simon’s energy suddenly waxed and our conversation passed into a new level of appreciation Outside the house, a garden, much of it walled, falls away sharply to the adjacent river. Simon’s garden is substantially a rose garden. “The contemporary rose,” he enthused, “is a cross between the East and West, the European rose that had large blooms that flowered only once, and the Chinese roses that were small but flowered repeatedly.” So the modern rose was an attempt to get the best of both worlds and all our garden roses now come from this cross-fertilisation. Simon’s interest in Zen Buddhism and the centrality of the concept of emptiness has similarly cross-fertilised with the Western concern for fullness of meaning. His art is experimental both at the limit of modern art and at the point where the roots of East and West, Shunyata and Logos, encounter one another The rose is an epitomic European symbol and, particularly, a symbol of love and its contradictions. In the thirteenth century there existed two separate works both called The Romance of the Rose. The first began with a 3000 line lyric by Guillaume de Lorris which was then supplemented by a much longer second part by Jean de Meun. The second work, which appeared slightly later, was by Jean Renart who incorporated many songs into his work. The Rose romance thus became a genre, and one within which there was a dialectic of works feeding off one another and this fabric of reflection upon the meaning of love and its 3
relation to poetry, fame, valour and song became one of the major framing influences upon Medieval courtly and popular culture. The contradictions of love hinge upon the possibility or actuality of loss and it is this presence of absence that Morley wrestles with in his work. Another angle on this same domain can be seen in his earlier ‘English Series’. Again we are confronted with barely visible text, in this case mostly replicas of book covers: books about England. In Simon’s mind is the fact that a country is a fiction based on narrative – a romance – and that “ideas about ‘English’ or Anglo-Saxon culture were always imaginary,” and, to his eye, in this there is also something almost “pernicious”, but also, something that is fragile, evanescent, that could be easily lost or, as in his paintings, overlooked – visible to one who looks closely but unseen by the camera. So ‘England’ is something full of meaning, a romance, whose symbol is the rose, that nonetheless easily disappears, and the sense of ‘Englishness’ remains inseparable from nostalgia for worlds, or ‘little corners’ already gone. It has a sense of the presence of what is already lost at its core. Certainly this was a set of sentiments that my mother would have had no difficulty in recognising and, indeed, deeply identifying with, but for Simon it is a matter that carries a depth of ambivalence that powers his artistic explorations It is also not insignificant that Morley, an Englishman, lives by choice in the ‘emptiness’ of central France, in the midst of villages with thirteenth century churches and ramparts and travels back and forth over the same lands as did Chaucer, that great interpreter to the English of the ‘Rose Romance’ and the troubadour tradition. “We are still ‘late-romantics’” he says, but it is a romanticism now strongly affected by Western utilitarian and Eastern ascetic tendencies, as well as by fear of the threat the former represents, so significantly portrayed in the writings of George Orwell who has also been the subject of a series of Morley’s works, in the same genre, exhibited in the year 2000 and by the perhaps forlorn or even mistaken hope brought by the latter. Though, as Bloom would have said, all good art is a misprison. Simon Morley has a website at http://www.simonmorley.com/
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LUC ARBOGAST, singer 3rd August 2008
It is not exactly Gregorian chant; it is not exactly anything you've heard before. A unique Gothic troubadour, Luc Arbogast is sensational. His astonishingly powerful, pure voice has an amazing range. When I first heard it I was sure that it was a woman singing and even seeing was not immediately believing, though he can also offer a deep male tone too. "Cristaline" one reviwer has called it, but there is also humour, a skill in engaging the audience and even having them sing along, and certainly passion. This is a man who puts heart into soul and produces intensity of emotion in a remarkably controlled manner that nonetheless takes every ounce of the performer. Luc Arbogast was born in La Rochelle. His mother is French, his father German. He is based in Strasbourg, just on the French side of the Franco-German border. For many summers he has travelled and busked his way around the many Medieval festivals of France, dressed in black leather historic costume, sporting numerous tattoos, looking like someone one would not want to meet in a narrow alleyway late at night. But would one not! His self-composed lyrics speak in a mix of Old French, Old German, Latin, Italian - he is more concerned with the weight and tone or vibration than the dialect and mixes words of different languages in his lyrics according as they are sufficiently expressive. Just as some poets have the ambition to make poetry into music he has been willing to make his own 'Esperanto' to serve his song. They celebrate the earth, God, existence, but, above all, the melancholy mood that emerged from the Middle Ages when the demands of life and death had a naked inexorable power in people's daily lives. His favorite instrument is an eight stringed 'Irish bouzouka', but he plays a range of Medieval and modern stringed instruments and also organ. When I watched him his organ accompanied perfomances were the most powerful. He has produced a small number of CDs that he retails personally. He often sings solo and sometimes in duet with his wife Melusine. Their music is inspired by the Medieval troubadours and the music of peasants in France. It blends joy and plaintive melancholy, fervour and pathos, yet also maintains a stong rhythm and vibrant affirming undertone. He is clearly a man who likes his audience, likes to play on the street and meet the people, a modern eccentric full of the inspiration of the troubadour tradition. I can only admire what he has achieved in being a genuine artist and a bridge between worlds.
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MARIE-NOELLE GUYOT, plasticienne 25th July 2008
Today I met Marie-Noelle Guyot. Her card reads Marie-Noelle Guyot, plasticienne, La Galerie, 03150 Ygrande. Ygrande is in the depths of rural France not far from the spa town of Bourbon l’Archambault, near Moulin. Our meeting came about this way. Yesterday, a Buddhist friend, Cedric, took my wife Caroline and I to visit a project called Oasis. Oasis is a scheme to provide sheltered accommodation for elderly Buddhists to live and continue to practice their religion together in their later years. The driving force behind the project is Lama Sherab, a Frenchman who follows a branch of Tibetan Buddhism associated with the famous Tibetan lama Kalu Rimpoche. We had a good visit and established some initial friendship with our host Sherab who invited us to visit his home the following day. So today we visited him and had an interesting time learning how he has converted a set of farm buildings into what is both a home and a small retreat centre. We were anxious by means of this visit not only to see what Sherab has achieved and get to know him better, but also to see Cedric’s wife, Lama Wangmo whom we have known for some years who was leading a workshop jointly with Sherab’s wife. After being entertained for some time and having pleasant conversation with Sherab, therefore, we went to the workshop where Wangmo and
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Marie-Noelle Guyot were completing their day’s work. The workshop that the two women had been leading integrated artistic craft work with spiritual and psychological reflection and we met some of the participants and discussed with them what they had been doing. I, however, became particularly interested in MarieNoelle’s own work which decorates the walls of her house and atelier. Broadly we can say that her opus falls into three categories. She has studied Tibetan tanka painting as part of her religious involvement and a number of her works in this regard are on display in the meditation hall that occupies the upper storey of a converted barn. These are competent works suitable for their devotional purpose. Tankas are painted according to a precise discipline that leaves relatively little scope for the innovative creativity of the artist, though Western practitioners of this art have to some extent broken new ground and been willing to depart somewhat from the traditional strictures, especially in the less iconographically essential elements of the pictures, and Marie-Noelle’s work is no exception. The other two types of work that she has developed are, however, abstract and personally expressive and these may more authentically be regarded as her own style. Both types of work use acrylic. “I like this because it is plastic,” she told me. In some ways, Marie-Noelle’s work is the exact opposite of that of Cathy Savels whom I met last week. Where Cathy sees the naturalness of her subjects as central to the philosophy of her work and uses organic products as far as she can, for Marie-Noelle what is important is the transformation of the products of modern life. “I am a believer in taking material from the dustbin,” she told me. We conversed in French. On the walls of the house we saw several of her paintings which were completely abstract and showed a Zen influence in their simplicity and poise. A particularly fine triptych hung in the living room. These exhibit a refined sense of how to achieve a maximum of effect with a minimum of brushstrokes and the results are attractive and accomplished. These, however, she regards as her conventional works. What she is particularly proud of and constitutes the third category of her work is having developed a method of using acrylic without a canvas. In this method which she had developed by 1980 after considerable trial and error she paints onto glass, allows the paint to dry, and then paints a second layer, allows that too to dry and continues adding up to fifty layers of paint, finally adding layers of white which will in due course be the backing. Particular layers are variously diluted and some are transparent. When all is dry, she peels the whole work off the glass to produce a free hanging piece of art which, she adds with a note of triumph, “is completely plastic!” An interesting 7
and challenging technical aspect of this approach is that whereas in a more normal paining technique one paints fist the background and works ‘forward’ as it were, in this method it is the foremost layer that is painted first and from there one gradually adds in further and further layers of background . The end product is a piece of paint fabric that is pliable – plastic in every sense - and so can be rendered into a picture or used as a material from which objects in volume or items of apparel can equally well be rendered. The results are fine in that the colour is strong, being acrylic, but more particularly in that there is a depth to the colour that makes it seem almost luminous, a quality that she associates as symbolic of the ‘incandescence’ of the spirit. Her joy is to have created something symbolic of the profundity of her spiritual sentiment from, of all things, plastic, the quintessential symbol of modern consumerist ephemerality and shallowness. Some of her works using this technique are poster size and are certainly eye catching. More impressive, however, are miniatures that she sets in small frames or into panels in jewellery boxes. Here the proportion between the depth of the paint and the size of the design is greater due to the smallness of the work and this gives a particularly glowing effect . The relationship with jewellery has then been carried a step further. She has started making items of jewellery using the brightly coloured acrylic paint fabric and we saw a range of items on display. I felt that there was an authentic congruence between the extrovert character of these items and the warm and out-going personality of their creator. It was a most pleasant visit with much laughter and warm hearted sharing of work and experience. It was satisfying to meet this couple who have created a lifestyle around their art and their spiritual commitment and developed a range of ways in which to integrate and cross-fertilise the two. The work that they have done and continue to do on renovating the buildings in a manner that exploits their original features is pleasing and the decoration of their space with works of Marie-Noelle’s own art enhances the final effect. They have also produced a range of postcards bearing Marie-Noelle’s designs and on the back short poems by Sherab and I took away a small collection at their behest, together with other gifts which they charming pressed upon us. I am sure we shall return to see them again before long. Marie-Noelle Guyot has a web site at http://www.mng-la-galerie.net p
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CATHY SAVELS, painter 16 July 2008
Yesterday, my wife Caroline and I drove from our retreat in central France two and a half hours south into the hills of the Massif Central in order to visit Cathy Savels and her husband Joe in the house that they are renovating there. It was a lovely meeting with talented yet completely unpretentious people. In fact we stayed much longer than we had intended. In addition to her art, Cathy is interested in gardening and is a creative cook. Joe is a computer programmer and musician who is also substantially occupied with remaking the two storey stone house that they have taken on. We saw photographs of various stages of house renovation and were reminded of some of our own efforts of the kind. It was a fine day and we sat on the lawn eating and talking as time slipped away unnoticed. We arrived at noon. Suddenly we realised that it was already past three o’clock and Cathy and Joe bundled us into their vehicle and took us into Giat where Cathy’s art is on public display. We had a fascinating hour discussing it. Cathy creates images of natural subjects, mostly vegetables. Some are paintings, but in most cases texture is added by working materials other than paint into the design. Often the images are larger than life. The two factors that struck me most forcefully were the voluptuousness of the vegetative life portrayed and the way that many of her designs lie on the edge of abstraction. I felt that these two dimensions also indicated directions in the development of her work and it will be interesting to see if, in the future, she move further along these tracks. Vegetables may seem prosaic but the fact is that fruit and flowers are all about sex. Looking at the larger than life aperture of the iris flower one can get a sense of what it must be like to be a bee entering; but beyond this the flower evokes a sense of voluptuous female energy. Iris, voluptuary of the marshland, open your portal of violet sweetness and take me into your cavern whence I shall not return unwhetted. Nature’s approach to reproduction can be blatant and gross and there is certainly nothing 9
flaccid about the full, bulbousness of red tomato flesh. Yet the internal structure of a kiwi fruit, depicted with cord and paint, reveals a design that is not totally dissimilar to the kinds of intriguing abstraction that one associates with aboriginal art from Australia or the Pacific. Some of these designs, I thought, actually present more effectively in print than in the original, but maybe that is a male prejudice, we speculated. Back at the homestead we consumed more tea and excellent banana cake and conversation flowed on. We shared our experiences of using the internet as a medium, of the difficulties these days of generating the sense of creative community that seems to be necessary to sustain the artist and generate the culture within which art can reach higher level and fulfilment. There are many factors in this - economic, geographical, communicative and, not least, the individualistic, competitive, commercial spirit of our age which makes it difficult to bring about the kind of milieu within which a ferment of sharing and mutual stimulation can go on. So often in history great art of many kinds has come out of a single city in a matter of a couple of decades generated by artists (painters, writers, poets, architects, musicians etc.) who all knew each other and were stimulated and challenged by the contact. The internet should, in principle, make it possible for creativity to be more dispersed, but there still seems to be no real substitute for face to face contact. I certainly appreciated aspects of Cathy’s art while standing before it and alongside her that I could never have felt with the same force by communication at a distance. It certainly seemed that our visit was stimulating for all parties and it came to me that these issues about creative community apply not just to artists of worldly form but also to artists of the spirit. In spirituality one certainly needs times of solitude, b u t a l s o community and that community should not be the community of people trying all to be replicas on one another or of some ideal model but rather the creative community of a number of people all diversely stimulating one another’s spiritual awareness and sensitivity.
Website: http://www.cathysavels.com/
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