Own work - Life drawing II

   Thursday and life drawing class.  Two poses today.  Here are the results.

The Cabinet of Dr Caligari

     To the bf's at the weekend and another classic film - he must think I am in sore need of a cinematic education.  And perhaps I am.
     This time it was 'The Cabinet of Dr Caligari'.  Funny, but the cultural ripples of this film, one of the most important examples of Expressionist Cinema, have been present in my life, (and probably all our lives) for years.  In particular I remember seeing a still of the film as a child/teenager when looking through our newly acquired edition of the 'Encyclopedia Britannica': an old man (turns out it was Dr Caligari himself) walking down some crazily angled corridor, the walls daubed with what looked like fragments of musical staves.  Like so many things in my life they have passed for years without me giving them due acknowledgement.  The price, perhaps, of being a carer.
      Apparently this was one of the first films to frame the main action with scenes, a bit, I suppose, like a play or novel may have a prologue and epilogue.  In the prologue we meet the main protagonist - Francis, played by Friedrich Feher - and the woman, Jane, (Lil Dagover) who he claims to be her fiancee.  We are immediately intrigued because of the expression of mental exhaustion on her face. Francis then offers to tell his companion (and thereby us, the audience) the extraordinary events that have lead them to this present circumstance; and with that we are plunged into a distorted, claustrophobic world.  A painted world, and very painterly at that.  We are in no doubt of its artificiality.  The town is a heap of a late Medieval German city on a hill.  (The framing scenes however have a look of Symbolism.)  It is fair time in the city, and sinister Dr Caligari (Werner Krauss) has arrived with his 'act' to delight, bewilder and disturb the populace.  Dr Caligari has with him a somnambulist - a cadaverous young man called Cesare (Konrad Weit) who is an almost permanent catatonic state but whom Dr Caligari can momentarily rouse and get to utter predictions.  Slowly Francis and Jane are drawn into a spiral of horror and murder as their lives unravel at the instigation of Dr Caligari.
     The film, which somehow crosses definitions - it is both horror and a detective thriller - explores the thin membrane between the occult and mental illness.  Sanity and insanity.  Who precisely is what? There are themes, also, shared with other contemporary German horror films - 'Nosferatu' and 'Der Golem'.  Interestingly the somnambulist, Cesare, is a paradoxical figure being both victim and perpetrator, a vampiric figure who stalks the night at the behest of his master, but can still provoke sympathy in the audience.
     I am very pleased to have seen this film - I've always been drawn to the exaggerated lighting effects such as you can find in Film Noir, or some of the films of David Lean such as 'Oliver Twist'.  It must certainly must have had an effect on the whole Neo-Romantic scene here in the UK.  However I probably have enjoyed it more had there been a different score.

The Cabinet of Dr Caligari

1920

Producer               Rudolph Meinert & Erich Pommer
Director                 Robert  Wiene
Cinematography  Willy Hamiester

Own work - wrapping paper

    Something I created last week to wrap a little something for the bf.

ADDENDUM 25.09.2014

    I thought I'd quickly share with you a couple of images of the wrapped present.  The message is an allusion to a line in 'Houdini' by Kate Bush, from her Album 'The Dreaming'.

Own work - Life drawing

   I have returned this week to life drawing after a number of years absent from that discipline. The first session was yesterday.  I had forgotten was an intense thing it could be.  Here are my awful efforts.

Own work

     Day three's work.  I spent about an hour before the subject before continuing to work on it back home.  Still not happy with it.  I may leave it a couple of days before resuming work.

Own work

     Day two of my mixed media piece depicting the porch at the Red Hall, Bourne.  Not quite sure how its going....

Own work: The Rustiche of Sebastiano Serlio XXIIII

     I thought I'd share with you, dear reader, a couple of things: one I've just finished on Monday and another one I started yesterday afternoon.  The former is another in my sequence taken from Serlio's 'Extraordinario Libro di Architettura', the second is mixed media drawing of the porch at the Red Hall in Bourne.

The Usher Gallery, Lincoln

   To Lincoln yesterday on a rattletrap bus. A lovely late summer's day.  I thought I'd share these pictures of the Usher Gallery, Lincoln, and Lincolnshire's, most important gallery.  I think you could say that it holds the county's collection of art.

  There's a good collection of applied arts: porcelain, clocks and watches.  It holds one important Piper oil, an atmospheric watercolour by Andrew Wyeth and some lovely work by Clausen - his small oil of an orchard is particularly fine.  I surprised I should like that sort of thing - I usually find much of British Post-Impressionism sentimental. There is also a really good collection of Peter De Wints (1784 - 1849) and other 18th & 19th century watercolourists connected with county.
   The building was erected in 1924, a design of Sir Reginald Blomfield.  One of his better buildings, I think - I'm not great fan of his work - it is compact and well detailed, influenced both by English Baroque and early French Neo-classicism.

   From an Arts and Crafts beginning Blomfield, like Lutyens and many others, went on to design in the Grand Manner on a large scale, of which the Usher Gallery is a well-mannered and bijou example.  (I do love Victorian and Edwardian architecture, but I often find the overblown scale of some it, for instance in the work of Sir Richard Norman Shaw, really off-putting.  It's just too overpowering.)   Blomfield in his later career produced some really monstrous buildings like the Quadrant, Regent St (albeit he did have to incorporate the rear façade of Shaw's elephantine Piccadilly Hotel) and the Headrow Leeds.  And there are his proposals for Carlton House Terrace overlooking the Mall, in London.  Thankfully the Nash Terraces survive...
   The odd thing is that architects like Blomfield, a Classicist, could be such a vandal, while early-Modernists like J M Richards such committed conservationists.  Another blot on Blomfield's copy-book is his partial responsibility for the (British) electricity pylon!  (Look closely at one; it's actually an obelisk...) 

   That said The Usher Gallery is a rather fine building. And he didn't like English Neo-Palladianism.  So he evidently got some things right.

Addendum

I forgot to mention that Blomfield was a prolific writer on architecture, producing a number of histories on English and French architecture.  He is perhaps, however, best remembered for his seminal book 'The Formal Garden' with its ravishing pen and ink illustrations by Francis Inigo Thomas.  I like them almost as much as I like the work of FL Griggs.  Thomas was no mean garden designer himself; he was designer of the exquisite Arts and Crafts gardens at Athelhampton.

Alvilde Lees-Milne & Rosemary Verey

   As readers of the this blog will know I have an interest in the twentieth century diarist, novelist and art historian James Lees Milne.  Reading the Bloch biography I was struck by the formidable character of his wife Alvilde.  Like her husband she was bisexual, indeed not too long after their marriage Alvilde embarked on a tempestuous relationship with Vita Sackville West.  What interested me, and let's be frank gave me a bit hope, was her late flowering career as both an author and garden designer.  In her seventies she collaborated with another renown gardener, Rosemary Verey (1918-2001), (her husband David Verey wrote a number of the Shell County Guides) on producing two books:  'The Englishwoman's Garden' and 'The Englishman's Garden'.  Not only that but she found herself designing a garden for Mick Jagger of all people.  

   Browsing through a well-known internet auction site I came across both books.  Although the quality of the photographs inside as printed is not up to today's standards both books do offer a snapshot of post-war English garden design.  The structure is the same in both books: there is a forward by a well-known gardener, followed by an introductory essay by Alvilde and Rosemary and then a collection of illustrated essays each on a particular garden written by the owner herself/himself.  The idea for the format belonged to the publisher Sebastian Walker and it works very well, giving, amongst other things, a real insight into the long process of creating a good garden.
   The cover of the English woman's garden, which shows part of Rosemary Verey's Cotswold garden was alone worth the cost of the book.  The laburnum walk looks magnificent, and I love the contrast between the hanging clusters yellow flowers hanging there like bunches of grapes and the purple globes of the alliums beneath, which seem quite happy in the partial shade, which I didn't expect. A bit disappointing, though, that all the gardens illustrated show a propensity to nasty concrete paving, but that was the times!

   The men featured tend to be more famous - Beverley Nichols, Sir Frederick Ashton, Nicholas Ridley, for instance - than the women gardeners, though emphasis is rightly placed upon the important role women played in the creation of the English Garden.  As James Lees Milne's biographer points out of the gardeners included in these books half the women were aristocrats and half the men were gay!

   The collaboration between Alvilde and Rosemary was not to last, but Alvilde working with the photographer Derry Moore went on to produce a number of books on both interior design and garden design, such as 'The Englishman's Room' which I have written about before in connection with the architectural historian and campaigner Gavin Stamp.

'Chameleon'

     I haven't really talked about my attempts to get published.  When I first finished 'Chameleon' 'back in the day' I sent it off to a bevy of agents, (to date more than twenty), but got nowhere.  It was a slow process taking a few years to work through so many.  I grew disillusioned, the number of agents left  dealing in 'literary fiction' seemed too meagre to bother about, and to be honest my attempts have languished since then, I think due also to my role as a carer.  My life became more and more pruned in those years; I can't believe looking back how pinched my life became.  However this summer, in June, I submitted the novel, 'Chameleon', to Jonathon Cape at Random House as part of their open submissions month.  I am yet to receive a response, so I guess it hasn't been liked.
Thanks to an article, on the radio I think, I have just uploaded the first four chapters of 'Chameleon' onto the Authonomy website run by Harper Collins.  It's free to use.  Link here  I hope you like it. I hope you feel you can give me your support.  Comments (constructive ones!) will be gratefully received.  You will see on my Authonomy page I have linked through to the bf's novel 'Murder They said', one of his detective novels that pay hommage to Agatha Christie  and feature his bickering amateur sleuths Miss Acres and Mrs Devine.  Enjoy that too.

     Remember there are other extracts from 'Chameleon' here on this blog!
     Also 'Murder They Said' and the other novel in the series: 'Miss Acres Greatest Challenge': are available for kindle readers on Amazon. Here

Work in Progress....

   A slow day here, while I recover from my operation, a septoplasty.  It happened Tuesday lunchtime, and it was one of the reasons why I decided not to go to Kent at the weekend.  I felt I needed a full day to prepare for the knife.  Today my nose is still a little sore and I feel as though I have a heavy cold, and I haven't slept properly for a few nights so I'm feeling a little light-headed too.  I thought, however, I'd share with you another of my series of watercolour drawings based on archways in Serlio's Extraordinario Libro di Architettura'.  I hope you like it.

This afternoon, I shall take it easy in front of 'Carry on Nurse', on Film4.  A small indulgence.

It Always Rains on Sundays

     With what almost, for me at least, amounted to spontaneity I went to the bf's on Saturday.  This visit I was regaled with 'It Always Rains on Sunday', though it would, I suppose, have been more appropriate to watch Powell & Pressburger's 'A Canterbury Tale'.  (The bf and I have talked about doing the tour of the locations of 'A Canterbury Tale' in the last week of August, and indeed we had the opportunity to do it this last weekend, but other events (more of that later) made it too difficult to pull off.)
     'It always Rains on Saturday' is a British film (1947) made by Ealing Studios.  It, however, is not a comedy but a tense, fraught mix of domestic drama and thriller, based on a novel of the same name by Arthur La Bern, set in the East End of London.  It stars Googie Withers, her soon to be husband the Australian actor John McCallum, and Jack Warner.  True to form (almost!) Warner plays a detective on the laconic hunt for a prison escapee, Tommy Swann (McCallum).  The stars, and indeed all the actors - it is a film that teems with urban life - supply some great acting, but that's what one comes to expect from British actors of that period isn't it?  Look out for Alfie Bass, Hermione Baddely and Jimmy Hanley amongst others.

     The crucial characters are that of Swann and Rose Sandigate (Withers) and both display an almost wild, primitive personality, that with Rose is quixotic and cruel.  She is an almost stereotypical stepmother whose docile husband seems (perhaps only seems) to be unaware of what is actually going on in his own family.  Perhaps Rose is in rebellion with all the sordid little compromises that amass in adult life.  Certainly Swann is the life she could have had, but rejected for security and the ennui of the everyday.  I can't help think it brave that the lead character should be quite so unsympathetic.  Her behaviour at times is reprehensible.
     This film was a surprise for me, not only because it was produced by Michael Balcon at Ealing, but because has a violence, complexity and is at times compelling in a way that on casual glance one doesn't associate with British Cinema of the time.  And although there are faults give it a go!  You may be surprised and intrigued by it too.

It Always Rains on Sunday

1947

Producer               Michael Balcon
Director                 Robert Hamer
Cinematography  Douglas Slocombe

The Colour of Pomegranates

     I found out this afternoon that one of my favourite films Parajanov's 'The Colour of Pomegranates' will be shown at this years London Film Festival (8th - 19th October).  It will be shown at the BFI Southbank on Friday October 10th at 3.15pm and at Hackney Picture House on Sunday 12th October at 1.00pm.  This is the restored original version.  I will certainly make an effort to see it.  Other highlights for me will be John Schlesinger's adaptation of Hardy's 'Far from the Madding Crowd' and Powell & Pressburger's 'The Tales of Hoffmann'.    

     The bf is looking forward to the early British film: 'The Battles of Coronel and Falkland Islands' - a gala performance with a new score, by Simon Dobson, performed by The Band of Her Majesty's Royal Marines.