A letter to an unknown friend....

The colour of art....

Dear Friend,

I am at the Albert Hall, as you suggested, listening to the 85 year old/young Martha Argerich play Beethoven's Piano Concerto No 2 with the Munich Philharmonic and conductor Lahav Shani. It is fresh, it is light, it is beautiful, and, as Joanna MacGregor says, she brings colour to the performance.....

Turning Form (Atlantic) - Barbara Hepworth, 1961

30 years ago Martha Argerich decided she would not play solo again, preferring to play with orchestras, chamber groups, or in duets. But she is remarkable – agile, intelligent, strong – and, despite always being afflicted with nerves before any performance, she is still a much-loved star of the classical concert circuit.

Eidos - Barbara Hepworth, 1947

I realise that it is something of a leap to connect Martha Argerich with Barbara Hepworth, but I was at the Courtauld Gallery the other day to see Hepworth in Colour, The first exhibition to consider colour in the sculptures and drawings of Barbara Hepworth.....

Intersection - Barbara Hepworth, 1946

But how can you liken a pianist to a sculptor? Or, rather, how can you compare modern visual art to the musical compositions of someone born in 1770?

You and I perhaps might have different answers to this, but as I listen to the strong but delicate finger-dancing of the Argentine pianist I can imagine the powerful but controlled sculpting of Barbara Hepworth’s hands, and something about the nature of art belongs to both.

Sculpture with Colour (Eos) - Barbara Hepworth, 1946

 

Dismiss my rambling as you like.  But who has ever conclusively defined ‘art?’  Is art the difference between Ariel and Caliban?  Is it what makes life tasteful, or beautiful? Is it what distracts us from the mundane, the awful, the wastewater that flows through Trump and Farage? (Apologies – but what is the worst of humanity?)

 

Sea Form (Porthmeor) - Barbara Hepworth, 1958

So, perhaps Beethoven’s trills and flowing notescapes are really not so very different from the harmonious shapes that Barbara Hepworth hewed or made from the seascapes around St Ives, like this bronze (above) with a mottled green patina and flecks of white, as if salted from long immersion in seawater.....

Wave - Barbara Hepworth, 1943-44

And then there are those that she coloured (though the cobalt blue has since faded) and embellished with taught lines like hawsers on fishing boats.

Pelagos - Barbara Hepworth, 1946
 

Hepworth was admired for her employment of natural materials, and for the way she smoothed and crafted forms, and most of her works that are in the public domain are monochrome, or use the polychromatic nature of their material, be it wood or bronze or stone.  But when she left London for Cornwall in 1939, taking her family to a safer haven, she became inspired by the colours and shapes of the Cornish landscape and coast.  And, I would say, with tenuous connection to Beethoven and Argerich, she would have been moved by the sounds of the sea, the sometimes rhythmic, sometimes dangerous, rush and surge, beat and ebb of the sea on her doorstep.  Chipping and sanding, smoothing and carving, the work of a sculptor needs to echo natural rhythms and what is more defining to us that the swell and fall of the waters on the face of the earth?

Pelagos - Barbara Hepworth, 1946
Elm, paint and strings

I am in the Albert Hall.  Martha Argerich, her grey hair drifting over her collar, is absorbed by her music, bent over the piano that almost hides her, matching the compound harmonies of the orchestra, as if it is her own composition, but knowing that she is reconstructing Beethoven’s imagination, spelling out to us, the dull streetwalking mass of society, just how sounds can overcome the flat swamp of life.  

Curved Form with Green - Barbara Hepworth, 1943
Pencil and gouache on paper

 

And, perhaps, to a degree, that is also what Barbara Hepworth achieved, shaping forms from shapeless masses, threading strings across gaps, so that things connect and have symmetry and strength?

Circle (Forms in Movement) - Barbara Hepworth, 1942

 

I write this as people in black tee shirts, trousers and masks disrupt the traffic outside Dover, threaten innocent by-passers in my home town of Portsmouth, and scare shoppers outside the Daily Mail office in London, and do so with impunity, while at the same time gentle people who sat holding placards carrying the words, I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action, are dragged off to trial and potential prison sentences in overcrowded prisons.

 

Two Opposing Forms (Grey and Green) - Barbara Hepworth, 1969
Irish marble and paint

How does that fit with Beethoven and Martha Argerich and Barbara Hepworth?  Could it be that art is the defining difference between brute ignorance and imaginative intelligence?   The gulf between hate and love?  

 

Spring (Project for Sculpture) - Barbara Hepworth, 1957
Oil paint on board

My life is nothing in the grand scheme of things, in the rich wealth of the world, but, though my abilities are nothing compared to the great artists of humanity, I think I can tell the difference between a hawk and a handsaw.....

 

I thank you again for directing me to this promenade concert, to a wonderful evening. I only wish you could have been with me to share it, but, perhaps, by writing this, I may draw closer to linking thoughts and experience with you, and with others.....  

The diversity of music, and of all forms of art, means that while we may share experiences, our responses may be different. Just as colour is something we perceive individually (the blues and greens of the sea and the weeds on the rocks in my photographs of St Ives are not exactly as they were in daylight, nor will they ever be exactly the same to you and me) we can still share the appreciation. Just as the soughing of air amongst the leaves of trees is a kind of music, so is the erosion of material a kind of sculpture.....  Let us be grateful that there is a world around us and that there are artists to guide us to its wonders.

 

We live in hope.....  We have to.....

 

With love,
 
Richard  

Winged Figure - Barbara Hepworth, 1961-62
Aluminium with steel rods

*****

And, if you would like to see more about Barbara Hepworth and St Ives, please visit:

https://www.richardpgibbs.org/2023/03/a-brief-trip-to-st-ives-cornwall.html

and

https://www.richardpgibbs.org/2026/07/south-by-south-west-part-2.html

Spring - Barbara Hepworth, 1966

*****

Weighed in the Water

Stormy Weather.....

Wells, Wells, Wells.......  It actually isn't too wet.  Here, at Wells-next-the-sea, North Norfolk, I am about to sail away.....  courtesy of Coastal Exploration Co.  

This isn't masochism....  I booked two different days out when we were suffering from the mediterranean delights of sunshine and heat.....  So I imagined that both these days on the water would be warm and easy....

So, last Sunday, on the twenty foot lug-rigged crab boat 'My Girls' built in Sheringham in 1965, Penny and I entrust ourselves to skipper Nick and set sail at dawn from the port of Wells....

It is a shining morning.  August has gone, and this is, to my dismay, September.  Cloudy.  Cool.  

A gleam across the salt marshes means that the day is waking up, but little stirs.....

It is quiet.  The tide is hurrying in, but no one else is up and about. Except for the young swallows, getting ready for their amazing migration to Africa. Here they are swooping and feeding on the early flies above the waters, and resting on a silent, empty boat.....

I think, uncertainly, that this is what I love.  I love to see the natural world at ease with itself.  I love to observe birds and animals showing us, unselfconsciously, how they live.  The scissoring flight (pace Ted Hughes) is spell binding:

The swallow of summer, the seamstress of summer,

She scissors the blue into shapes and she sews it,

She draws a long thread and she knots it at the corners.

Work and Play

Ted Hughes

Anyway.  This is not everything.  We sail out through the salt marshes,.  The light is low, and I haven't brought my big camera with the 500 mm lens, so we listen and watch and let be.  Sandpipers, oystercatchers, egrets, marsh harriers, redshanks, curlews and even whimbrel chatter and spin about, quick and fleeting across the dark levels of the marsh lands.  Sea blight, sea purslane, asters and lavenders, merge with samphire and wormwood, rooted in the thick mud banks.  The channels are scoured by the tides, but they are shallow, and we have to hug the outside of curves to stay afloat.....

On this, my second outing, we are in a 16 foot lug rigged mussel flat, built in about 1960.  

It is easy in the creeks and shallows, and we sail gently with the wind:

Ahead of us, almost a John Craske picture, My Girls tacks toward Blakeney Point to see the seals.....

And, despite our lack of keel and shallow draught, we attempt to catch up.....  To see the curious seals.....

And then, shore enuff, there they are, beached [Like Whales?  Ed] 

Stretched, virtually limbless, they are monstrous as they roll on the beach, but in the water they are peerless, able to disappear for long minutes, but bobbing up to question our place in the order of things:

Our sister ship has anchored, with the sail down, as they photograph the scene.  

We eye the weather, clouds gathering:

Battleship grey on the horizon:

Heavy clouds weighing down across the salt marshes.  I feel compressed, weighted down, the thick grey mass of wet sackcloth hanging above my head.....

There's a ragged clown out there, with heavy blue rain triggering feelings for the fishermen who daily wrestle with the elements to bring oily protein to our tables.....

And, even when the sky lightens, it is still a relief to be cruising home:

We shelter in a muddy inlet in the salt marsh to restore ourselves on Baron Bigod and whelks, soup and pork pie.....

And then it is time to slip back to our moorings in Wells.....

Where industrial shadows still hang over us, and some things somehow don't seem quite right:

But the crowds still love their crabbing:

It has been an adventure, and I am grateful to Nick and Alfie and all at Coastal Exploration Co. who made this possible. But also thanks to my companions on these brief explorations of the North Norfolk Coast.  It is an inspiring world, so different from that we see from the land, so quiet and so natural.  

And love to the seals......

I am watching you.....

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Dover Beach

Matthew Arnold

Goodbye, Dolly.....

Down with the Blue Sheep (Blaue Schafe)

Alle sind gleich - jeder ist wichtig
[Everyone is equal - everyone is important]

There are so many things to see in this world, but where do we start? And where do we finish? As Dolly Parton smiles goodbye, I am cruising on the River Main, in Germany, and, while the world is filled with clichés and tears, I also feel bereft.....

She would have loved these sheep, and their message..... Someone from Locust Ridge in the Great Smoky Mountains would have known full well what it was like to be one of twelve children in a cabin in the woods, and how each individual had a value, whatever their strengths or weaknesses. 

Then, overhead, there sails a Steinadler, (Golden Eagle), the broad-winged apotheosis of Germany, ragged and careworn, and (probably) lacking in state support.....

Gentle as the sweet magnolia
Strong as steel, her faith and pride
She's an everlasting shoulder
She's the leaning post of life
She hurts deep and when she weeps
She's just as fragile as a child
And she's a sparrow when she's broken
But she's an eagle when she flies

Eagle When She Flies
Dolly Parton

Let us face it. The world is not always as we would wish it.  There are differences of opinion:

Communist youth, forward!  Fight fascism

There are myths and misunderstandings:

There are plenty of legends and appropriated stories, sometimes appropriated to fit someone else's narrative:

St George/Heiliger Georg

And there are baroque ceilings to crane your neck to which may or may not make sense.....

Of course there are treats like organ lofts in cathedrals:

And pastel shades in alleyways:

And palaces that go on for ever:

The Würzburg Residenz

With ceilings in vast stairwells:

The world's largest continuous ceiling fresco, in the Würzburg Residenz,
painted by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo between 1752 and 1753

 

And chandeliers in ballrooms:

To crane your neck to:

And windows that frame your view:

Or which concentrate your vision:

Or which tease your imagination:

I am on a River Cruise through (a largely reconstructed) medieval Germany..... For a while I thought I was going on the Rhine (again) and, with news of drought and record lows on both the Rhine and the Danube, I expected to be cancelled (as most, if not all, river cruises on those rivers in August were this summer), but, I was mainly (?) on the Main and as luck would have it, the Main was not affected.....

The River Main is a 525-kilometre-long (326 mile) waterway entirely in Germany and the longest tributary of the Rhine. It has two sources: the White Main (Weißer Main) which rises in the Fichtel Mountains in northeastern Bavaria and the Red Main (Roter Main) which rises on the eastern slope of the Franconian Jura (Fränkische Alb). Apparently the rainfall (and perhaps snow melt) up there has been sufficient this year to keep the water levels up, but the river is also controlled by a series of locks (with recycling systems which preserve 60% of the water).....  On this cruise we actually touched four 'rivers' - the Danube, the Danube/Main Canal for over 100 kms, the River Main for 384 kms and then finally the Rhine where we disembarked; in total we  covered 590 kms and went through 52 locks:

Our itinerary started in Regensberg, then near Kelheim we visit Weltenberg Abbey, the oldest monastery in Bavaria, where we drink a delicious (well I thought it was) black beer (Weltenburger Kloster Barock Dunkel) brewed in the Weltenburger Klosterbrauerei, the oldest monastic brewery in the world......

The Abbey sits just by a dramatic limestone gorge through which the Danube squeezes:

The next stop is Bamberg, where some years ago I lost my hat in a rainstorm. I search for it in vain, then seek solace in a glass of Rauchbier (smoked beer), another enjoyable example of why it is always stimulating to travel....

 

Then we stop in Nuremberg, infamous for Hitler's rallies and then later for the trials:

Here I visit Albrecht Dürer, the inventor of the logo:

Whose medieval house (he lived here from 1509 until his death twenty years later) was slightly damaged by aggressive aerial behaviour in October 1944:

Though it has since been patched up and was reopened in 1971 to celebrate the artist's 500th birthday:

I am shown round by Agnes, Albrecht's wife, and feel quite at home. She tells me that her husband was the greatest Northern European renaissance artist, that he revolutionised printmaking and that he was also a formidable entrepreneur and a polymath to rival Leonardo.

Dürer undertook three long journeys to Italy and the Netherlands, and became famous in his lifetime throughout Europe. He produced between 4,000 and 5,000 prints of his 1515 woodcut of a Rhinoceros (an animal he never saw), which was a veritable money-spinner (a rare surviving example of it was sold at Christie's New York in 2013 for $866,500).....

We cruise on. It is tranquil on the water, the banks green, though the surrounding fields and woods show the dry browns of thirst.  We pass agricultural villages, sleepy places where people fish, or nurse their babies, waving to the passing foreigners:

We pass industrial towns, where barges quietly disgorge or pick up bulk cargoes:

We glimpse onion-domed churches and dominant monasteries:

Then, as evening falls, 

The river seems to fall asleep:

Then a new day breaks, and the river gently stretches and steams under the banks:

Part of the fun of travelling is people-watching.  Observing customs and costumes:

Würzburg is the centre of the Franconian wine country, and it is traditional to drink white wine (preferably Sylvaner) on the Old Bridge:

Though some may prefer spritzers:

Or just smiling:

Or perhaps not:

This voyage is nearing its end, but we stop briefly in Wertheim, at the confluence of the Tauber and the Main, and I climb to the top of the ruined castle for the fine views:

Then we moor at Aschaffenburg, an uninspiring town with a massive fortress (but an excellent Bierkeller) before completing the itinerary at Mainz, one time home of Johannes Gutenberg, who, in the mid fifteenth century, made a breakthrough that puts all subsequent Information Technology into the shade.....

Though Gutenberg was by no means the first printer in the world, he revolutionised printing by inventing movable metal type and by developing oil-based inks. He also benefited from the local wine trade employing an existing wine press to stamp the images of his reversed letters onto parchment or paper. His printed bible - the first of its kind - could be reproduced 180 times in the space of time that it took to create one in manuscript....

And so with that touch of religion, the news breaks that Dolly Parton has passed away.  

From here to the moon and back

Who else in this world will love you like that?

Forever and always, I'll be where you're at

From here to the moon and back

From here to the moon and back

I'd blow you a kiss as I wish on a star

Counting my blessings for all that you are

Thank heaven for you and to God, tip my hat

From here to the moon and back

And I'll spend forever just proving that fact

From here to the moon and back, 

Who will love you like that, 

From here to the moon and back

From Here to the Moon and Back

Dolly Parton

Juliusspital, Würzburg

Oh All this blue it ain't sky and sea

Some of that blue's gonna fall on me

Oh, the future's looking bright

There's a better day!

Look away, look away

Better Day

Dolly Parton

*******

With many thanks to Jorge and Zara of Riviera Travel, Captain Balint, and particularly Vladimir and Okan

But, whatever  the relevance, this is especially for Dolly:

Look around and see what's going on

Everything just seems to be so wrong

If we'd just open up our eyes

We could see a better life

I still believe.

There's a place for all of us

If we'd reach out

And touch the love

Nothing's gonna ever change it much

...if we don't

If I don't, if you don't,

If we don't, if I don't.

If you won't, if we don't.

If We Don't

Dolly Parton/Linda Perry