Blackpaint 481- Posy and John, Flowers and Bees, Michelangelo and the Easter Bunny

Posy Simmonds

Just picked up her “Literary Life” in Quinto Bookshop, Charing Cross Road, for a fiver – best investment I’ve made for some time.  For me, she is far and away Britain’s best cartoonist and she writes a mean story too; her envious, embittered authors, lusting after the waitresses at the book launches….

I think her cartoons stand comparison with John Cooper Clarke’s poetry, although admittedly, they  chronicle different social milieus…

Angela Flowers Gallery, Old Street – Seven from the Seventies

A rather sparse exhibition of huge abstract paintings – one from each artist, with smaller works upstairs – that eschew expressionism and mostly follow an ordered, geometric (but highly colourful) aesthetic.  The painters are Colin Cina, Bernard Cohen, Noel Forster, Richard Smith, Derek Hirst, Michael Kidner and Jack Smith.  Few paintings, but some are great; they stay in the mind.

Colin Cina 

The Beekeeper, Angelopoulos

The great Marcello Mastroianni as an elderly beekeeper who goes on a road trip with his bees (in crates in the back of a white van), leaving his wife and newly-married daughter.  Improbably, he gets picked up by a young woman hitch hiker, a free spirit, who travels with him and sponges off him, while picking up young men for sex when she fancies it, once bringing one back to the room she and MM are sharing (they’re not sleeping together yet – when they finally do, the relationship founders).  In the end, he gets stung to death by his bees on a lonely hillside in the end.  Even in an unlikely story like this, Marcello manages to shine – and his co-star, Nadia Mourouzi, certainly has the most staggeringly beautiful body I’ve seen recently.  Apart from yours of course, darling… and of course, I’m speaking as an artist…

 

The “Michelangelo” Bronzes

 

I saw the big Bronzes exhibition at the RA in 2012, and I have to say I don’t remember these statuettes at all.  If they’d been exhibited as Michelangelos, of course, it would be a different story; the name makes you look and remember.  Without the attribution, you edit them out unless they are really striking.  So, either they are not that striking, or my taste and judgement are crap.  Not that striking, then.

The arguments in favour seem pretty convincing – but what happened to that other putative Mick, “St. John the Baptist Bearing Witness”, proposed by Everett Fahy a couple of years ago (see Blackpaint 111 and 112)?  I dismissed the claim of course, on the basis of Blackpaint’s First Law relating to Michelangelo, which states “Michelangelo doesn’t do trees”; there are lots in the St.John.

 

Blackpaint

Easter Bunny 

7.02.15 

 

Blackpaint 448 – Theory, Violence, Horror, and Nature

Theory and Non – Theory (cont.)

Since last week’s blog and my (defensively) sarcastic comments about the French and French/Algerian masters of critical theory, I have discovered Paul Strathern and his potted guides, “Derrida in an hour” etc.  Fantastic.  I’ve done Derrida, Foucault, Wittgenstein and have Heidegger lined up; what Strathern needs to do is to get his finger out and do Barthes, Baudrillard, Lyotard, Deleuze and one or two others, then I’ll be OK for my book group next time.  Trouble with the group is that if you want to hold your end up, you have to read not only the scheduled book, but every other book in the world that has any bearing on the subject.  I can’t hope to do that but maybe can fake it with Strathern’s help.

Comics Unmasked, British Library

(Not the Jonah on show, but gives you an idea)

The best work on display in my view is a Beano spread from the early 60s, I guess, of Ken Reid’s fantastic ” Jonah”.  This is so busy and full of energy that it practically moves on the page as you peer at it.  Also very striking was “Gwendoline”, and the Rupert Bear and the Gypsy Grandma  from the International Times, or maybe Oz – delicacy prevents me from description.  For some reason, R Crumb was omitted altogether??? and there was only one Posy Simmonds, a page of  “Tamara Drewe”.  Despite the graphic sex, the most shocking cartoon for me (although I have the book in which it was published) was Reg Smythe’s Andy Capp, reproduced below:

This was presumably first published in the Daily Mirror, before inclusion in the collection I own.  Private Eye, I remember, used to run a strip by Bill Tidy, The Cloggies, in which there was a character called  “The Blagdon Amateur Rapist.”  Can’t remember when, but I guess well into the 70s, maybe later.

There are many other treasures and I strongly recommend the exhibition. I got a great compendium of early 50s US horror comics too; “The Horror, the Horror!” by Jim Trombetta, £20 and well worth it.

DH Lawrence, The White Peacock

Lawrence’s first novel, in which the action is beset throughout by great wodges of nature description; we know at all times what the lapwings, clouds, forget-me-nots, brooks and grasses are doing.  This seems a common syndrome with first novels; Almayer’s Folly by Conrad and Orwell’s Burmese Days both have the same characteristic, not necessarily a fault, in my view; I think Orwell brings it off well.

The Lawrence has a more amusing fault; the narrator is one of the characters, yet he is “all-knowing”.  He tells us what his sister Lettie says and does explains that with her suitor George when they are off alone in the woods, for instance.  I wonder how common this error is in literature; I can’t offhand think of any other examples, yet it struck me immediately in “Peacock”.

Clark at Tate Britain

Here are the Seurats in the Clark exhibition:

I think the first one is usually in the National Gallery – but the second is new to me.

Asger Jorn – Restless Rebel

New book on Jorn, essays on various periods.  It’s great of course – below, Jorn in his studio.

 

And here’s my latest effort, which turned into a landscape when I put it on its side.  I hate it and will vandalise it with green and blue paint as soon as I publish this.

 

 Blackpaint

29.05.14