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