Back to School
We've still got another week to go, but I know a lot of you are back to school today, so I hope it goes well. Do you ever dream about your old homes and schools? I've never physically returned to any of them, but it's amazing how deeply entrenched in your psyche these places are. My prep school was housed in a whitewashed terrace of tall Georgian buildings in Exeter - the interior was a maze of ever narrowing polished wood staircases. My favourite rooms - the art studios - were up in the eaves of one of the houses, up six creaking flights of stairs. Every detail is fresh - dust motes dancing in the clear winter light, the warm smoky scent of my art teacher's pot of Lapsang Souchong and the crackle of the needle on the gently rotating copy of Schubert's 'Trout'. My teachers gave me so many valuable lessons but the one that has really stuck with me is how difficult it is to make something look effortless. Abstraction, simplicity, is very hard to pull off.
The image is of Barbara Hepworth's 'Pelagos' - one of the sculptures I go back to again and again. The simplicity is deceptive, the balance perfect. This is what I was aiming for with the sketches and maquettes my art teacher critiqued. I learnt my lesson - I wasn't good enough yet, and I'm still learning. Hepworth famously juggled young children and her work - apparently they played at her feet in the studio as she sculpted. I wonder if that is true - young children, sharp chisels, chemicals ... sounds like a recipe for disaster if her children were anything like as inquisitive as mine.
One of my favourite places in Cambridge was Kettle's Yard. The house is a beautiful tranquil space full of modern art and carefully selected natural objects. In its time it played 'open house' to students wanting to learn about art and literature. Jim Ede placed circles of stones like this around the house and they are every bit as beautiful and potent as the 'official' sculptures around them. Getting out of the house and into nature is one of the best lessons in the elusive beauty of simplicity - and at this time of year with the leaves turning, it is a great excuse to make a nature table with your kids, or emulate Ede and his beautiful stone circles.
In my current 'day job' curating art collections, you can almost time to the second how long it takes some wise-guy to say 'My kid could do that!' as we uncrate the paintings. It's normally a security guard or delivery guy - good natured and amused by the modern art being installed. There's a memorable story about the photographer and Surrealist muse Lee Miller hosting a dinner party where she showed her guests a new Picasso she had bought. Inevitably someone said 'Rubbish! I could do that!' Miller was prepared, and flung open the doors to the next room to reveal canvases and paints awaiting her guests. Sounds fun. She proved her point - it looks easy, but it's not. One of my favourite all time pieces that we have installed was a Picasso dove quite similar to the one below. Maybe you've heard the story about the woman who asked him for a doodle on a napkin? He rocked off an exquisite sketch and said 'that will be x0000s Francs'. She said 'What? For that? It took you a few seconds!' He replied 'No Madam, it took me a lifetime.'
I read an interview in the Times with Zoe Heller last night. She wrote 'Notes on a Scandal', and apparently her new book is even better. I really admire her ability to get inside the mind of her characters. Her agent told the interviewer she has never known someone work so hard to make it seem effortless. Similarly, someone once congratulated Flaubert on a particular passage in Madame Bovary, said it flowed naturally, effortlessly. Flaubert replied that it was the most rewritten passage in the entire book. Do you think that is what we are all aiming for, is this what all this learning and grafting is for - to make it look easy?
TODAY'S PROMPT: Someone has decorated the wall of our bookstore coffeeshop with this quote from Jane Austen: 'we have all a better guide in ourselves than any other person can be'. Why not take some time out this evening and simply listen - give yourself the mental space you need, mull over your work, take a walk, have a candlelit bath, or listen to a beautiful piece of music. Or maybe there's a work of art whose simplicity you find inspiring - look it up, print a copy out and stick it up somewhere you can see it while you work. Take it easy.
