A successful day today. I have a title, I have (oddly, as it turns out) reasonably complete drafts of chapters 1,3,5 and 7. I was able to get some work done, plotting in the cafe at Foyles, before prowling around looking for books about water (I think I can understand the attraction of sharks to the author of The Rawshark Texts (which I haven't yet read, though reviews suggest it is also about memory) after seeing a shelf of marine biology books that was populated with toothy images.
And then a walk down Charing Cross Road, where I only fell over and dropped my shopping once (though I once thought Londoners would laugh, I now suspect someone could spontaneously combust without provoking interest, so that was no big deal) and, after getting some ideas from a magazine (how memories are laid down -- what could be more important to a first person narrative about what we remember, and why we forget, could there be?) over a salmon roll for lunch, I was into the National Gallery looking for paintings that feature water. It's a much easier place to look around once I'm looking for something in particular. Of course, I still got lost but that's half the fun.I wish I could paint. Or even draw. The visual arts bring artist and audience more closely together than the literary, because brushstrokes reveal the hand of the artist at work. The printing press is brilliant, of course, but removes this closeness from readers. The properties of water seem more poignantly revealed in the impressionist paintings than in earlier artwork although early naval battle scenes are frighteningly impressive in sheer scale, reminders of the difference in size and power betweeen what we can build and what forces the ocean can throw at it. Other paintings show water being bridged, forded, fought over, identified, measured. All those temptations to imagine it is under control! To gaze at certain of the Dutch paintings is, as the text beside them claims, to feel as though standing beside a river. I love rivers. Despite the delights of writing the strength of the ocean in its tides and surges, there is something so purposeful in the winding and the coursing of a river. The ocean simply is, vast and pulled by the moon, but you feel like you can understand a river. (I have already written a river story, however, and must move on.).
Again it is the genius (I do believe in genius, however unfashionable) of Van Gogh that struck me more forciably than any other artist. I won't post any images here because there are already too many copies of them. The museum gift shop seems likely to collapse beneath the weight of sunflower-painted mugs, and collapsible wooden sunflowers, and sunflower-decorated pens and notebooks and magnets. Some of the aura must preserved! Though the banal chatter around the originals was even more striking. Why do so few people have anything interesting to say? Has it all been said? The dullness of others made me glad I had no one to talk to. Although there has to be something original under the sun, to say about these works of genius that are all originality themselves. Half the people there prefer their guidebooks to the actual art, many of the others simply stare blankly into the crowd, or at their feet. Then I left the gallery, walking down to the real river, crossing the Thames (dark swirling water, various vesssels churning thickly through it, connected to the floods not far from here.) If I'd been travelling with someone else, I might have had a better visual record of mysef being a part of my day than this,
1 comment:
Hmm. Not sure I agree with you about the visual artist (by which you seem to mean painter) bringing artist and audience more closely together than the literary. (Well not for me anyway.) For one thing painting is, generally, at least an Arms Length operation. (Miro in his later days turned it into a weird arm plus huge long stick operation.) Writing has always seemed to me the closest thing to telepathy we are ever going to achieve. Ideas from my head go into yours with minimum outside interference and interpretation. Paintings - unless you are looking at the original are always pale copies, wrong size, no guarantee that they are printed in the right colour balance, or even that they are presented the right way up! (Though that happens in galleries too.) And viewing the original in a gallery is to see the painting in a foreign environment. Only relatively recently have painting been made to be hung in galleries like most are now. They were made for the most part to be hung in specific places (churches, houses and other rich people places) to be seen in specific lights. Very few books were written with such a prescriptive restrictions on accessing them.
Maybe it's just me, but paintings don't get into my dreams, books do.
Post a Comment