March 2009
Monthly Archive
March 31, 2009
Posted by jameswoodward under
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The Shredder
Sorry to bore you with the ongoing saga of moving – but the process has uncovered all kinds of delights! In a cuboard long since forgotton I uncovered historical documents of mind blowing insignificance! Here are some examples:
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Details of all the cars I have ever owned – six in total – including my first one which was a bight blue mini.
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a box of papers relating to holidays with enough sun cream to cover Jersey.
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every pay slip I ever got from the Church Commissioners. My first in July 1986 paid me the amazing sum of £390 after tax!
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Cheque book stubbs in glorious abundance.
Well – sad I hear you shout – but I wonder what is lurking in your loft?
Solution – to the shredder and the therapeutic delights of watching all that paper tear into strips ready for the recycling.
Stressed? Get a shredder – it will change your life…….
March 30, 2009
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Birmingham
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My parents arrives this weekend to say good bye to good old Brum and especially dear old Temple Balsall. I decided to park their bag safely in the car and go for a wander. My attempt to buy a copy of Pesvner failed and I couldnt spot anything else interesting on the New shlves of Borders. Do people ever use all those cookery books I wonder? The book entitled Grow your own drugs is a BBC Two series – what next I thought especially as the lad on the front cover looked hardly old enough to drive! Now this is a sign of old age.
While in the Bull Ring we went to see Selfridges. My mother was shocked at the price if jumpers and Dad just irritated by the endless procession of young assistants asking if if needed any help. We escaped to the foodhall to see the piles of chocolate eggs and other array of goodies.
Then to the outside to see the extraordinary shape of this building reflecting he sunshine. I think of the transformation of this city over these past two decades….. and wonder what else will emerge?
March 29, 2009
a lion of courage
When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse
to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox:
when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,
I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?
And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,
and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,
and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,
and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.
When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.
I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.
Mary Oliver, When death comes.
March 28, 2009
Posted by jameswoodward under
Art
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Regular readers of my blog will know of my interest and enthusiasm for art! One of the tasks of the removals people will be to safe guard a number of images that have become life enhancing for me on my spiritual journey.
In St Mary’s Church some years ago we embarked on the hanging of a piece of work by Nigel Dwyer which has power, wisdom and fraglity. It speaks of love and pain, of sacrifice and possiblity.
In all my time at St marys over the past ten years this is something that I take some pride and pleasure in. Come and see it for yourself and I hope that the image will shcok you into thinking again about what this most central of images to faith might mean for you.
And if you want to learn more about Nigel and his work visit his web site:
www.artbynigel.co.uk
and enjoy!!
March 27, 2009
Amidst the perplexing world of economics I came across this piece which is worth reflecting on.
The past months have seen the most chaotic and severe malfunction of the banking system since the 1920s, writes Sabina Alkire as she offers a Christian perspective on the economic climate.
Billions of pounds have been wiped off stock markets worldwide, and Governments throughout the world acknowledge that the financial system is on the verge of meltdown.
The dismay of the media has been evident in their language. The Wall Street Journal spoke of ‘financial carnage’ and derivatives as ‘weapons of mass destruction’; The Financial Times of ‘hurricanes’ and ‘shifting tectonic plates’. As people who read the papers and watch the news in the presence of the living God, we are now in a position to reflect on money, and our attitudes towards it as Christians.
And the fundamental point is that we need not be terrified; as people of faith we need never be terrified ‘for nothing can separate us from the love of God’.
Objectively, there are legitimate causes for concern. We genuinely do not know the impact that the crash will have on the economy and our lives. It may pass us by, or it may re-chart our days. Terror comes from that uncertainty and fear blended with a loss of control. We don’t even know if we will understand what has happened. So we pause to listen beyond the media, into the stillness. The dominant view, portrayed by the media is that the crash is totally unrelated to matters of faith and prayer, and to the habits of God. It is a malfunction of a human system because of human error. Is this accurate? If true, we would have one part of our life in which we could live as persons of faith – family, justice, church – and a different part, not lived under the shadow of the living God, where we would make necessary decisions on savings and investments, pensions and mortgages. We have fallen into this habit of interior division as a society – but do we need to?
All of you will know of the buses and taxis in developing countries decorated with Jesus or a cross to remind the driver and passengers that the vehicle remains under divine review. That may seem superstitious, but underlying it is an important acknowledgement. For our faith does not recognise a total divide; it teaches that God’s will and purpose and wisdom extends with piercing relevance across all our lives, relational and financial. In Proverbs we are urged to seek wisdom and understanding ‘for her income is better than silver, and her revenue better than gold’. The psalmist echoes the priority of God’s wisdom: ‘The law of your mouth is better to me than thousands of gold and silver pieces.’
So the first point is that if the economy is not cut off from the living God, then we need not be afraid, for the wisdom we have known is and will be true. A second point is rather more mundane: even if the economy is coming down around our ears, we will still come to church. It’s what people do in crises. We come because at church we still have one another, and we help and hope and pray together and find a way through. We will remember too those who are not merely worried, but perched on the margins of survival. We know we are not alone, and together we are strengthened and encouraged to reach out in faith and love and service – not close down in terror and dismay.
The third point is that if wisdom is true, then it may have some insights into this situation we can draw upon. Some Christians are interpreting the financial downturn as a divine tantrum about greed and materialism by an emotionally unstable God. I do not agree, but I think we have some serious correcting to do, and that human excess has directly created the present situation.
At the heart of the problems is not greed but denial. Financiers wanted to believe the numbers; but the numbers were wrong. The system failed because in the end truth prevailed. Going forward, we need to encourage and reward truth rather than denial. Paul’s letter to the Corinthians describes how he hides nothing: ‘We refuse to practise cunning or to falsify God’s word; but by the open statement of the truth we commend ourselves to the conscience of everyone in the sight of God.’
One of the reasons that people believe the economy was distanced from God is that it appeared that a different set of rules operated there, where lies were acceptable, ambition was required, and cunning alone deserved reward.
But it was not so; there is one wisdom, stretching across the whole of life. And there is life in such wisdom.
The Revd Sabina Alkire is Director of the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative, an economist and an associate priest.
March 26, 2009
Posted by jameswoodward under
Art
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On Monday I wrote about Terry Frost – and then came across this excellent Obit which is worth reading:
From The Times
September 3, 2003
Sir Terry Frost
Exuberant artist whose decades-long adventure in abstraction remained firmly grounded in a love of natural forms
One of the best loved of British artists, Terry Frost enriched the lives of all who came into his orbit of ebullience and generosity. A social creature, approachable, earthy, good natured and direct, he put a personal celebration of being human at the centre of his work and of his life. He came quite late to painting, but his faith in the adventure of abstract art remained undimmed for more than half a century, and the exhilarating and prolific results convey the expansive joy that was the essence of his character.Although he rejected the religious aspect of the visionary landscape tradition in British art, saying that any religious belief had been destroyed for him by the war, he shared an extraordinary intensity of vision with Samuel Palmer and William Blake and in many ways can be seen as their successor.
His inspiration came from nature and included something of the pagan, as he himself said. The sun, the moon and glittering water, as well as boats and the female form, all figured prominently, abstracted into sensuous circles and curves and coloured in dramatic blues, reds, oranges, yellows and blacks. In his very best work, produced over perhaps half a dozen years in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Frost showed that he could hold his own against any abstract painter then alive. The explorations and discoveries of those years became the constants of his long career, worked and reworked in different forms with endless invention and zest.
Terence Ernest Manitou Frost was born into a working-class family in Leamington Spa in 1915. Throughout his childhood he lived with his grandparents Edith and Thomas Lines (the last bath-chair proprietor in the town). He never knew his father but believed that he might once have met him as a child. He was educated first at the Rugby Road School and then, between the ages of 11 and 14, attended the Leamington Spa Central School, where he was art editor of the school magazine.
In 1930 he got his first job at Curry’s cycle shop in the town. Then, from 1932 to 1939, having joined the Territorial Army, he worked at Armstrong Whitworth in Coventry, painting red, white and blue roundels on to the wings of fighter planes and bombers.
His early war years saw him serving in France, Palestine and Lebanon. After joining the Commandos he fought in Crete, where he was captured in June 1941. As a prisoner of war he was interned in camps in Salonika and Poland, ending up in 1943 in Stalag 383 in Bavaria, where he remained until the end of the war.
Frost was later to say: “In prisoner-of-war camp I got tremendous spiritual experience, a more aware or heightened perception during starvation, and I honestly do not think that that awakening has ever left me.” He began to draw and paint, mainly portraits of his fellow PoWs, encouraged by the young artist Adrian Heath. They made brushes from horsehair, canvases from their pillows, and mixed what pigments they could get with the oil from sardine tins. “Prison camp was my university,” Frost said.
It was Heath who suggested that Frost go to art school when the war came to an end, and who helped him to get an ex-serviceman’s grant and, in 1947, a place at Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts. It was Heath, too, who encouraged him to make his home at St Ives in Cornwall.
On reaching Britain in 1945, Frost had first returned to the Midlands and married Kathleen May Clarke. He attended evening classes at Birmingham Art College for a time, but the strain of his war experiences and of returning to civilian work when his heart was in painting brought him close to a breakdown. In 1946 he moved with his wife and first child down to Cornwall.
They lived first in a caravan at Carbis Bay, then moved to a cottage in Quay Street, St Ives, in 1947, where they stayed until 1964 and where the rest of their six children were born.
Frost began studies at Leonard Fuller’s St Ives School of Painting. Equally important was the artistic company he found at St Ives, in that happy time “when no reputations had been made and we shared everything”. It included Naum Gabo (who left for America a few months afterwards, but whose vision of space and movement in art had a profound impact on St Ives artists), Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson, Adrian Stokes and his wife Margaret Mellis, the potter Bernard Leach, Sven Berlin, John Wells, Guido Morris, Brian Wynter, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, Peter Lanyon, Patrick Heron and John Tunnard — with summer visits from London-based artists such as Heath and Victor Pasmore.
Frost exhibited with the St Ives Society of Artists in the deconsecrated Mariners’ Church (known locally as the New Gallery), in the “advanced” group of artists, tucked away in a corner by the font; also in the saloon bar of the Castle Inn on Fore Street; at the back of Downing’s Bookshop on Fore Street; and in his studio at No 4 Piazza, which he shared with Wing Commander C. A. A. “Bunny” Stone, an aeronautical artist. Body and soul were kept together by a succession of occasional jobs such as waiter — with his wife as waitress — and by the classic Bohemian exchange of paintings for meals.
From 1947 to 1950 Frost commuted between St Ives and London in order to attend the Camberwell School. William Coldstream was then head of painting, assisted by Claude Rogers, Pasmore and Lawrence Gowing.
Camberwell gave Frost a firm grounding in traditional skills, but Pasmore, something of a maverick among what were known in St Ives as “the Coldstream Guards”, also urged him to skip the rigours of the Camberwell life class in favour of spending time in the National Gallery. There, in front of Rubens’s
Judgment of Paris, Piero della Francesca’s
Baptism of Christ, or Antonello da Messina’s
St Jerome in his Study, he learnt lessons in rhythm and colour and formal organisation that stayed with him all his life.
With Pasmore’s encouragement — the older artist was moving decisively towards abstraction in his own work at this time — Frost painted his first successful abstract in 1949, based on the poem Madrigal by W. H. Auden. A year later, with Walk Along the Quay, painted in the Porthmeor Beach studio at St Ives, that he shared with Adrian Heath, Frost found his feet as an artist. He recalled that Ben Nicholson, who had the studio next to his, came and looked at that painting for two hours and later said: “You’ve got on to something that can last you the rest of your life.”
Through the experience of repeatedly walking along the quay (pushing one of his children in the pram) and looking down at the boats in the harbour, Frost had discovered how to flatten space and combine structure with colour. Using the Golden Section as a framework, he turned the sky, boats, sea and the harbour wall into the abstract shapes that became his artistic language.
In the late Forties and Fifties, St Ives was a vibrant artistic community pioneering abstraction in a Britain that was generally hostile to non-figurative art. In 1950 Frost went to work for Hepworth on Contrapuntal Forms, the large limestone sculpture commissioned for the Festival of Britain. This experience of three-dimensionality shook his faith in painting for a time and he used small constructions and collages to bridge the gap back to the flat illusion of the canvas. He contined to use these ways of making throughout his life: a recent exhibition of his work at Tate St Ives contained several constructions made only last year.
From 1952 to 1954 he taught at the Bath Academy of Art at Corsham Court, where William Scott was head of painting and where Heath, Wynter and Lanyon also taught. In 1953 the artist and critic Patrick Heron included Frost, Hilton, Lanyon and Pasmore in the exhibition Space in Colour at the Hanover Gallery, London, and in 1954 Frost featured in Lawrence Alloway’s influential book Nine Abstract Artists.
In the same year he was awarded a Gregory Fellowship at Leeds University. He moved his family to Leeds, where they stayed until 1957, Frost additionally teaching at Leeds School of Art. It was in that city, through an exercise that he set the university architectural students, that he discovered the combination of red, white and black that gave rise to some of his strongest paintings.
However schematic it might sometimes seem, Frost’s abstraction was always rooted in the world. Combining strict formal discipline with great expressive freedom and a natural sureness of touch, he sought objective visual equivalents for the sensations, the memories, the sense of wonder, that experience brings. The process was a complex one; there might be months or even years between a moment lived and its realisation in art.
Yorkshire gave Frost new impetus, a new relationship with nature and a fresh, expansive approach to colour and scale. Walking the Yorkshire moors, being dwarfed by the vertical planes of Gordale Scar, the surprising colours and forms of a landscape transformed by snow: these are the things that fed into his art at this time. The Leeds paintings — Blue Winter; Winter 1956, Yorkshire; Red, Black and White, Leeds — are among the very best works of his career.
By the late 1950s Frost was established as a leading figure in London and St Ives (to which he moved back in 1958).
His first one-man exhibition in London had been at the Leicester Galleries in 1952, but he subsequently moved to Waddington’s, where he was to show for more than 20 years. (The experience, however, would put him off dealers, and he preferred to the end of his life not to be attached exclusively to any one gallery.) An important experience came in 1960, when he had the first of two one-man shows at Bertha Schaefer’s gallery in New York. Frost in these years was at the peak of his powers, and his best paintings had much in common (and could stand comparison) with important work being made across the Atlantic at the time.
Through the all-powerful critic Clement Greenberg, and in visits to the Cedar Bar, Frost met some of the leading American painters, among them Helen Frankenthaler, Willem De Kooning, Barnett Newman, Robert Motherwell and Larry Rivers. They invited him to their studios, confirmed a belief that painting was an act, an action (“thinking is before and after, not during it”), and Frost came back to England inspired to paint on a much bigger scale. He also resolved to destroy those of his paintings that were not up to scratch, but was notably less successful with this second ambition.
In 1962 Frost and his family moved to Banbury, and he taught part-time at Coventry School of Art. There he began to find inspiration for his own work in traffic signs, which he related to the chevrons and other shapes on the standards used in the Civil War battle of Edge Hill. Having bought a job lot of bootlaces he also created a series of painting-collages of laced-up, bosomy corsets.
In 1963 Frost was in the group show British Painting in the Sixties at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, and in 1964 he was invited to teach a summer course at the University of California at San José. There he was overwhelmed by the colours of the desert and, being supplied with acrylics, painted in that medium for the first time. After that he rarely painted in oils, finding it much easier to cover large canvases in acrylic and liking the immediacy of the quick drying.
After a year as artist in residence at the fine art department of Newcastle University, Frost was appointed in 1965 as a full-time lecturer at Reading University, later becoming Professor of Painting there. He was a gifted teacher and had a devoted following among his students from all periods of his career.
Also in 1965, Frost won the John Moore’s painting prize. In 1971, following hard on the heels of an exhibition of his work at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, he was given a solo exhibition at the ICA. In 1974 he moved back to Cornwall, buying a house above Newlyn looking across the bay to St Michael’s Mount. Teaching visits to Canada in 1975 and 1976 led to a series of white paintings of snowfalls and into a series of “White Brides”.
Visits to Ronda, in Spain, in the 1980s brought Frost into the Andalusia of the Spanish playwright and poet Lorca, whose poems he had always loved. Frost responded to the passion of the duende, the generative catalyst of death and love, witnessing it visually in a fish market where a great silver fish was cut up in front of a crowd of people dressed all in black. Such moments of visual revelation were his artistic inspiration, and from his Spanish experiences came an outstanding series of etchings titled the Lorca Portfolio in 1989.
Much of the best work of Frost’s last 20 years was on paper, in the form of etchings, lithographs and woodcuts. Individual examples ended up in collections as distinguished as those of the Tate (which also owns several paintings) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. But countless others found their way into people’s homes, their warmth and boldness — and comparatively modest prices — making them accessible, in every sense, to many who might never have considered themselves collectors of modern art.
Terry Frost was elected to the Royal Academy in 1992, and given a small retrospective there in 2000. He was knighted in 1998. He was in his studio almost to the end, producing new work for an exhibition at Tate St Ives, the opening of which he was too ill to attend in February this year. His best work will endure. So, too, will the vivid recollections of his many friends: of Terry Frost in his bright red beret, green glasses perched on his nose, sitting, perhaps, in Mulligan’s bar in Cork Street, diluting a pint of Guinness with a bottle of champagne, and talking the while, with undiluted passion, of nature and art.
He is survived by his wife, Kathleen, and their five sons and a daughter.
Sir Terry Frost, RA, artist, was born on October 13, 1915. He died on September 1, 2003, aged 87.
March 24, 2009
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Spiritual Musings
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I beg you…. to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart
and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or
books written in a very foriegn language. Don’t search for the answers
which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to
live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now.
Perhaps the someday far in the future you will gradually, without ever
noticing it, live your way into the future.
Rainer Maria Rilke
March 23, 2009
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Art
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Packing up home is always an interesting combination of hell and liberation – amongst my clutter are soem lovely Frost images – do you know his work?
Sir Terry Frost R.A (born Terence Ernest Manitou Frost) was an English artist noted for his abstracts.
Born in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire England, in 1915, he did not become an artist until he was in his 30s. During his army service in World War II, he met and was taught by Adrian Heath while a prisoner of war. Subsequently, he attended Camberwell School of Art and the St. Ives School of Art. In 1951, he worked as an assistant to the sculptor Barbara Hepworth. His career included teaching at the Bath Academy of Art, serving as Gregory Fellow at the University of Leeds, and teaching at the Cyprus College of Art. Later he became the artist in residence and Professor of Painting at the Department of Fine Art of the University of Reading.
In 1992, he was elected a Royal Academician and he was knighted in 1998.
Wonderful colour and freedom and eye.
March 20, 2009
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Books
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A View from the Foothills:
Diaries of Chris Mullen,
Profile Books
I thought twice about purchasing this book, but two things clinched the deal with Waterstones – you hardly need any more of my money!
The first was the inevitable tease of £5 off the retail price and the second was that Chris Mullen simply has a rather kind, sensible and intelligent face. His photograph is on the cover of the book but please don’t press me to define ‘kind, sensible or intelligent’ as they relate to facial features – you just get a feeling about some faces, don’t you?!
One of the reasons why this is such a delight is that Chris Mullin was a writer who became and MP rather than an MP who attempts to write. The diaries are a wonderful insight into what government life from the inside is really about. Mullin does not hold back- he’s quick to express and opinion or judgement and often even quicker to admit that he was wrong and changes his mind.
Some parts of the book are inevitably less exciting than others- but that reflects the sheer grind of the life of a Junior Minister – huge amounts of correspondence, very little opportunity to shape or influence the life of government and a punishing schedule of meetings and ministerial speeches.
There is an integrity and an honesty about Mullin – he caused consternation by refusing to have a ministerial car or to take red boxes home at night and at weekends. He also refused a pager and mobile; and one wonders how he managed to survive in today’s 24, news driven political world. At one level Mullin belongs to an earlier era.
Well, a number of things emerge for this avid reader of political trivia – the first and overwhelming sense is that politics is a tricky and dirty business! The jostling for power and the sheer overwhelming tasks that face politicians in today’s rather more complex and busy world surely mean that we might have more sympathy and understanding for their work than we actually do. One of the things that is so attractive about Mullin is his honesty about his own weaknesses: he’s incapable of hating anyone for more than half an hour. Add to that a lack of personal ambition and he’s doomed to rise no higher than what he calls ‘Undersecretary for folding deck-chairs’.
It is the goodness and honesty of such a man that we need more of in all kinds of places within public and professional life. Amidst the self-deprecation is a funny and shrewd man that many should listen to.
I don’t expect readers of my blog to share my enthusiasm for the endless adventure in and around the political world – but if you did pick this book up in the library or elsewhere I can assure you that you would not be disappointed.
March 18, 2009
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The old man comes out on the hill
and looks down to recall earlier days
in the valley. He sees the stream shine,
the church stand, hears the litter of
children’s voices. A chill in the flesh
tells him that death is not far off
now: it is the shadow under the great boughs
of life. His garden has herbs growing.
The kestrel goes by with fresh prey
in its claws. The wind scatters the scent
of wild beans. The tractor operates
on the earth’s body. His grandson is there
ploughing; his young wife fetches him
cakes and tea and a dark smile. It is well.
R. S. Thomas
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