Painter and Poet- Spring to Sea- Bob Aldous and Myra Schneider

PAINTER AND POET Spring to SeaPaintings by Bob Aldous Poetry by Myra Schneider CIRCLE Contemporary Gallery Hawksfield, A39 Nr Padstow Cornwall PL27 7LR From April 13th to May 14th

2019

Painting and poetry make good bedfellows. Here we see the poet Myra Schneider respond to the paintings of artist Bob Aldous.

Collaborations between poets and painters are not new. In fact there is a fashionable movement of responding to painting through poetry. The late art writer John Berger, in his seminal book ‘Ways of Seeing’ reminded us that images come first, then words – but when a poet creates a poem in response to a work of art then the words become another way of seeing’.

Bob Aldous There are many artists from the canon of art history that Bob Aldous eloquently cites in relation to his work. Some are influences, other artists mirror his own psyche and preoccupations. Tiepolo and Turner, Tapies and Tillyer all hold sway but lets look at the intrinsic nature of the paintings, performance and poetry of the man himself.

Air and water – breathing through water – walking on air. The elements earth and fire are nowhere to be seen – Bobs poetry and performance pieces exude ethereality; his silk paintings and watercolours do the same. The quality of lightness, as in ‘lightness of being’ is clearly not thinness. Bobs paintings flow with a deceptive ease of making which is far removed from the vague mark-making of a ‘thin’ painter; Aldous is a meticulous practitioner of his craft and well versed in both art theory and metaphor.

CIRCLE is showing the large silk paintings – silk being the surface of choice for its luminosity and staining qualities. The Chinese and Tibetans have been painting on silk for a thousand years. Silk cloth naturally absorbs infinite hues and gradient washes therefore it is the perfect medium for Bobs romantic vision of the world. The paintings draw us into the milky scape-lands of the imagination – an arcadian idyll, or the legendary lands of Shangri-La (Tibet) and Cornwall’s Lyonesse – whatever these works suggest, essentially they are places for reverie.

Myra Schneider Myra Schneider started writing as a young girl when living in the Moors of Scotland. She wrote entertaining plays for her sister and their friends. As a teenager she read the romantic poems, admired Keats and Wordsworth, studied literature at London university and has lived in London ever since. Myra’s first poetry collection was published in 1984 by the Littlewood Press in Yorkshire. Since then she has had nine more collections, most recently The Door to Colour (Enitharmon Press) and Lifting the Sky (Ward Wood Publishing). She was shortlisted for the Forward prize in 2007. Her work has appeared in a large number of anthologies and been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in Poetry Please.

POEMS AND PAINTING

Spring to Sea It begins deep down, wombed in darkness – so many beginnings take place in darkness.

It emerges from a mountain cleft, is embraced by light and slithers downwards over stones and grass in runlets which seem random but soon it’s a purposeful stream, a river.

Boats dream on it, bridges arch their backs to span it. At last meaning singles to opening out.

It gives itself to the measureless blue of ocean.

STREAM It emerges slowly from the fog of unknowing, widens in this place of quiet and mirrors all the twiggeries straggling from a flock of shorn trees. Pause here for a while and you’ll find too the water reflects grass, the black line of the bank, a silent bird dipping for food. And as shafts of light penetrate darks in the thicket, you’ll see how wildness seeks for pattern.

SALT MARSH A somewhere of land and water as far the eye can see. Look at the reeds bedded in silt, how their upward canes strive to stripe the sky. Follow the darks of those long liquid lanes into the drifting uncertainties of mist.

The melancholy of distant bird cries will tug at your feelings and always there is the searching for mother sea.

TEMPLE UNDER THE SEA Under the sea, in terrain where little light penetrates, sharks and spider crabs roam.

If you look, you’ll find, among rocks clothed in sargassum and seagrass, a scattering of columns, some proudly upright, some toppled.

Once this ruin was a temple. It stood on dry land and rose into the blue of sky but the ocean has bestowed on it a strange beauty and is urging you to dive into the world below.

THE BLACK WAVE Look, ocean indigo with anger, ocean rising up into huge crests which spew fury, ocean bellowing at the thin-lipped land crouched behind it. Look, clouds sweeping through sky eager to marry these waters.

The black wave threatens annihilation but in the fathomless dark something is stirring and it fills you with wonder as you gaze at the ceaseless seagull-white layers.

BLUE The sea has been dreaming of blue for days and at last the weighty clouds have parted. Azure is pooling in the sky.

Look how the deeps and shallows lap it up. Already blue has infused these waters with enough light to quench the grey uncertainty below the surface. How the sea rejoices in glittering blue life.