Own work: Bethania Chapel

     A busy few days: Sunday - 'Stir-up Sunday' - was spent making a Christmas cake and yesterday a trip to that attractive market town of Ledbury to meet the brother. We stopped off in Monmouth on the way home. A return visit for me, finding I had forgotten much since that previous visit. The place is rather attractive, and busy. A return visit is a must. Today I managed to finish my latest collage, another, small, depiction of the Bethania Chapel, Morriston, Swansea.

Llansteffan Castle

     A busy weekend we've had of it. Saturday was spent at the 'Festival of Senses' in Llandeilo doing a bit of Christmas shopping, while yesterday we drove over to Llansteffan on the beautiful Towy estuary. Good weather on both days was a welcome bonus after all the rain of late.
     Llansteffan is a village clustering between the foot of steep wooded hills and the beach. A small, discreet seaside resort, a bit higgledy-piggledy really, but none the worse for that. Mainly Victorian by the look of it and all colourwashed including the church but not its tower. The church is mainly Perpendicular.
     High on a headland south of the village and at the very mouth of the river stands the castle. All dark grey and hoary rubble. Most of the finer stone, which would have been used for the details such as windows and doors, has been robbed out. Some details remain on the upper floors of the great gatehouse, which in the later Middle Ages was converted into the main lodgings. A donjon. Judging by those remaining details it must have been a pretty fine place to dwell. 

     The site is ancient - the castle defences utilise the earthen ramparts of an Iron Age hill fort - and strategic - controlling the mouth of the Towy and hence access up stream to Carmarthen and the upper Towy valley. The views  in themselves are worth the climb from the village: east over the estuary to Ferryside and south out across the mouths of the Gwendraeth and Loughor estuaries to the western tip of Gower. Quite haunting, that view south, on a cold winter's day.

Own work: Life Drawing LVI

     After a long gap (over a year) I have finally returned to the life-drawing studio.  Here are my efforts - not too bad considering. It was a two hour session with a number of poses of increasing duration as the morning went on. Apologies for the photography. I find the photography of life drawing difficult.

Own work: 'Rocks and Cave, Pennard'

     Latest painting, after a short-ish hiatus: 'Rocks and Cave, Pennard'. Mixed media on 300gsm watercolour 30x26cms. What more can I say?

Dune I: The Discontents of Modernity

'I had this idea that charismatic leaders ought to come with a warning label on the forehead: 'May be dangerous to your health.''

'When religion and politics ride the same cart when that cart is driven by a living holy man, nothing can stand in their path.'

I Introduction: The Discontents of Modernity

     I've been reading around Jung for several weeks now. He is endlessly fascinating. That mix of the intellectual, the spiritual and the artistic. One way of understanding the rise of Jordan Peterson is to see it as part of a larger Jungian revival. Perhaps Jungian thought is a way through the crisis of Liberalism, of Late and Post-Modernity, that is laid upon us.  It is certain that we have culturally, spiritually and possibly politically driven ourselves up a dead end.

     So discovering that Frank Herbert (1920-1986) had read Jung, as well as Nietzsche, I decided to re-read Dune (which I had first read in the early Eighties when the David Lynch film came out), and - as a long-term project - all the sequels Herbert wrote. From doing a little research into them things get pretty weird. Not that 'Dune' isn't pretty weird of itself. There are some rather strange things going on. I should add here that Science Fiction (and fantasy fiction) is something I don't normally read, perhaps, I have to admit, out of literary snobbery. It is certainly something that serious literary types look down upon. There are a small number of exceptions to this general rule: H G Wells, J G Ballard, George Orwell, for '1984' and Aldous Huxley for 'Brave New World' - but then who reads Huxley's early works now, and who, save the New Agers, the later quasi-mystical works such as 'Island' and 'The Doors of Perception'? I suspect Herbert may have read them, or at least been aware of them and of Huxley himself down the coast in Southern California and a user of mescaline. Both men had various degrees of interest in Vedanta. One feels that Huxley's influence is close in this book, perhaps most obviously in the similarities between the Seitch Tau Orgy and the 'Solidarity Service' in 'Brave New World'.

      (I feel the influence of the Jungian psychologist Erich Neuman (1905-1960) is close at hand too, especially his book 'The Great Mother - An Analysis of the Archetype' of 1955, but more of that later. I would also add, 19.10.22, the French philosopher and mystic Henri Corbin, but I'm not sure how Herbert would have come across Corbin's work as only two of Corbin's books had been published before 1965 when Dune was published, and only one of those in English. Were Corbin's ideas already in circulation in certain proto-New Age Groups on the American West Coast?)

     Dune, then, is an exception to the rule, and I have to admit I find it fascinating. Compelling, even. Perhaps not for the quality of the writing as such (it hasn't changed my opinion about the literary quality of sci-fi to be honest) but for the ideas and imaginative vision. It is the use of Jungian ideas, archetypes and so on, that gives this story its heft, its continuing resonance. Their presence, via Campbell, helps explain why the first Star Wars film succeeded and their absence why the subsequent films waxed in failure until they reached the bathetic 'Rise of Skywalker'.

     The Lord of the Rings, which is without doubt better written, falls into that same category; and having said that I've been struck with a number of similarities between the two works. Not an obvious parallel perhaps, though both authors could be described as conservatives, though of somewhat different stripes - Herbert being a sort of Thoreau-esque frontiersman, doughty and independent. Be that as it may, both books are an attempt to address, and come to terms with, through the use of mythological metaphor, the gargantuan horrors of the twentieth century, depicting societies that are poised at the point of monumental change - a change that is only achieved by the shedding of blood in war, and in the case of the Dune sequence much blood. Untold amounts. In both books the main character undergoes a series of trials and initiations that lead to an altered (higher) consciousness. Being burdened with a power beyond their comprehension, (and that of their companions and the wider society around them), and that makes living in the real, mundane world ultimately unbearable, they are compelled in that process of change to make a bitter renunciation, rather like the knights in the Grail legends. Perhaps you can see the Ring in the LOTR as an inversion of the Grail. Another link between both books is the almost inordinate length of vision; thousands of years are traversed in which the events described are set against a vast panoramic view of history. Both books explore ideas of destiny, fate and agency. Tolkein, Herbert, and Huxley for that matter, were all concerned with where Modernity has gone wrong and in particular with the disenchanting of the world, and its effect on the individual, society and environment as humanity waxes in alienation. 'Dune' however contains themes such as religious and political fanaticism, terrorism and the rise of dictatorship that are alien to Middle Earth. It is a novel, too, saturated with the emerging drugs culture of the 1960s. 

     A novel about the opening of the 'Doors of Perception'. A rich, complex and multi-layered work then, of almost infinite interest, that reflects not only Herbert's wide field of reading but also his autodidactism - for good and ill.

Own work: Lettering

     Continuing my series of lettering as gift here's the one I finished only this morning for the bf's mum - it's her birthday today. Perhaps not quite a successful as the others mainly because the right hand serifs are, perhaps, too long.

London II: David Inshaw at The Redfern Gallery

     Another artist that stands in the long and continuing tradition of English 'spiritual' art is David Inshaw, though of a different more pastoral vein. Paul Nash seems to be the great influence. Inshaw is one of those artists largely ignored by the media - not modern enough and not controversial in a sort of shark in formaldehyde sort of way - but is popular with the public. (The BBC in particular seen only content to parrot the art establishment line.)  Inshaw's most famous painting is the painting originally called, quoting Thomas Hardy, 'Remembering mine the loss is, not the blame" and now 'The Badminton game".

     Inshaw started out as a Pop-artist but in the Late Sixties, at, I suppose, the same time as David Hockney, Inshaw eschewed the fashionable and changed to the lyrical and figurative. Though, of course at that time Hockney was not that interested in nature and the rural. In 1972, along with the Pop-artist Peter Blake and others he was a founding member of the 'Brotherhood of Ruralists', and although the Brotherhood is now defunct Inshaw continues to paint in the figurative tradition, which, let's be honest, has been central to the story of British art in the 20th century. His brushwork freer than it used to be. As with the work of David Hockney of that Late Sixties/Seventies period there is a element of distance, even disengagement, between the painting and the viewer in Inshaw's work. In Hockney's work that is partly a result of practice - he worked very often from photographs - and the intellectual (he was heavily influenced by the work of the French film maker Alain Resnais in particular the strange and mesmeric 'L'Annee derniere a Marienbad'). I do not know the influences working on Inshaw's work. His work though has a quiet, slightly haunted quality. An emptiness at times. Meaning perhaps is just over the hill or round the corner. But it is there none the less.

     Before meeting an old friend for lunch at Brasserie Zedel (my first visit) I had a wander along Cork St taking in another couple of exhibitions - both figurative. I have to say I was not at all disappointed with Zedel. Eating as a near theatrical experience, the restaurant being housed in what was once the vast ballroom of the Regent's Palace Hotel. A terrific opulent space built between the Wars in the best Beaux Art Tradition that seems to ennoble the most ordinary of things - having lunch - and transforming it into an occasion.  I feel the need to return.  Afterwards we ambled up to Nordic Bakery for coffee stopping off at a gallery to look at something that was a sort of installation/action piece. The contrast could not have been greater, or telling, with the intensity and vision of what I had experienced that morning.