Midwinterhoorn Zuidhorn 2010

Midwinterhoorn-vervolg

Vandaag de "happe" gemaakt van vlierhout


De twee helften zijn gelijmd met watervaste(!) houtlijm en tijdens het drogen met tie-wraps vastgezet

Voskuil en de Midwinterhoorn

"...van een hoogleraar in de psychologie, godbetert, die bij een aantal proefpersonen de klank van een midwinterhoorn heeft laten horen om te bewijzen dat die een algemeen menselijk oergevoel oproept!"

Het was even stil.

'Waarom zou dat niet kunnen?' vroeg Ad.




Hoe?
http://midwinterhoornblazenlosser.come2me.nl/


www.gafpa.nl

Henry Moore

Henry Moore, Mother and Child, 1921


Another coalminer's son. A different one.
Compare his treatment of life and procreation to Lawrence's.
Lawrence has the drift towards death. Moore shows real vitality.
Apollinic on the surface, there are much darker sides to his work than most people will realize.

Gassed in World War I
Worked as a bayonet fighting instructor
The horror of the trenches
The London Blitz Shelters
The child wish - (and loss of hope?)


I came to realize this on reading Sir Herbert Read's book (in German, incidentally):
D.H. Lawrence grew up in exactly the same environment [as Moore] and has described it for all time in books like The White Peacock and Sons and Lovers and some of his essays [...] Moore was never to experience the resentment and humiliation that Lawrence felt. Lawrence projects an unhappy family life into his environment; his surroundings are ugly because his life is ugly.

Herbert Read (Henry Moore, New York, 1965)


www.gafpa.nl

Eliot on Lawrence - best criticism ever

"L'oeuvre de M. Lawrence n'est jamais troublée par l'humour, la gaîté ou le persiflage; aucune diversion politique, theologique ou artistique ne vient nous distraire. Dans la suite de ses romans splendides et extrêmement mal écrits - les presses vomissant chacun d'eux avant que nous ayons eu le temps de terminer le précédent - rien ne vient égayer la monotonie des "passions sombres" qui font que ses Mâles et ses Femelles se déchirent eux-mêmes et les uns les autres. Rien ne nous soutient, sauf l'évidente sincérité de l'auteur.

T.S. Eliot Le Roman anglais contemporain 1927

African art

This might be the model of the West African Statuette in Women in Love, by D.H. Lawrence

From Chapter VI. Creme de Menthe
Gerald looked round the room. It was an ordinary London sitting-room in a flat, evidently taken furnished, rather common and ugly. But there were several negro statues, wood-carvings from West Africa, strange and disturbing, the carved negroes looked almost like the foetus of a human being. One was a woman sitting naked in a strange posture, and looking tortured, her abdomen stuck out. The young Russian explained that she was sitting in child-birth, clutching the ends of the band that hung from her neck, one in each hand, so that she could bear down, and help labour. The strange, transfixed, rudimentary face of the woman again reminded Gerald of a foetus, it was also rather wonderful, conveying the suggestion of the extreme of physical sensation, beyond the limits of mental consciousness.

`Aren't they rather obscene?' he asked, disapproving.

`I don't know,' murmured the other rapidly. `I have never defined the obscene. I think they are very good.'


From Chapter VII. Fetish

Birkin suddenly appeared in the doorway, in white pyjamas and wet hair, and a towel over his arm. He was aloof and white, and somehow evanescent.

`There's the bath-room now, if you want it,' he said generally, and was going away again, when Gerald called:

`I say, Rupert!'

`What?' The single white figure appeared again, a presence in the room.

`What do you think of that figure there? I want to know,' Gerald asked.

Birkin, white and strangely ghostly, went over to the carved figure of the negro woman in labour. Her nude, protuberant body crouched in a strange, clutching posture, her hands gripping the ends of the band, above her breast.

`It is art,' said Birkin.

`Very beautiful, it's very beautiful,' said the Russian.

They all drew near to look. Gerald looked at the group of men, the Russian golden and like a water-plant, Halliday tall and heavily, brokenly beautiful, Birkin very white and indefinite, not to be assigned, as he looked closely at the carven woman. Strangely elated, Gerald also lifted his eyes to the face of the wooden figure. And his heart contracted.

He saw vividly with his spirit the grey, forward-stretching face of the negro woman, African and tense, abstracted in utter physical stress. It was a terrible face, void, peaked, abstracted almost into meaninglessness by the weight of sensation beneath. He saw the Pussum in it. As in a dream, he knew her.

`Why is it art?' Gerald asked, shocked, resentful.

`It conveys a complete truth,' said Birkin. `It contains the whole truth of that state, whatever you feel about it.'

`But you can't call it high art,' said Gerald.

`High! There are centuries and hundreds of centuries of development in a straight line, behind that carving; it is an awful pitch of culture, of a definite sort.'

`What culture?' Gerald asked, in opposition. He hated the sheer African thing.


www.gafpa.nl

Loerke's statue

Joseph Moest Godiva 1906.
It may have inspired DH Lawrence to illustrate his Loerke character.
See JB Bullen, DH Lawrence, German Sculpture and Women in Love, 2005.

From Chapter XXIX. Continental
He paused a moment, then rose, and went out of the room. He returned almost immediately with a little roll of paper, which he handed to her. She unrolled it. It was a photogravure reproduction of a statuette, signed F. Loerke.

Psalm 79

EEn Psalm Asaphs: O Godt, Heydenen zijn gekomen in uwe erffenisse: sy hebben 3den Tempel uwer heylicheyt verontreynicht; sy hebben Ierusalem tot steenhoopen gestelt.

Als Christelijke partijen de Mammon gaan dienen dan past slechts het woord van de Psalmdichter.

Meer...


Psalm 79, King James Version

Reminiscences of childhood

It was a time when you could still park your car in front of the department store in the centre of town. No circular roads or circulation plans. Sunday afternoon, fivish, after dark. Return from a visit to our relatives in the southern part of town.
I used to look through the window of our Volkswagen Beetle. Neon signs, shop's windows, the church tower, statues.

Bronze statues.

The Big Nude Lass.

(My mother told me the locals called her so: t Grote Blote Wicht)

Their mother must be dead...

(I felt pity for them, every time we passed)

Is that a statue?

(It was, my dad told me)


But He looks so different there...

(a stern and grim Christ of the Sacred Heart, whitish sandstone)

Reminiscences of childhood. They have no order



www.gafpa.nl

If it's Optic White, it's the Right White

I was working in my shed the other day, it's crammed but cosy and light. And while I was busy gouging and sculpting, my new Charlie Parker CD just fitted in perfectly.
I want my Kple Kple mask painted black
So I had to paint it white first.




Keep America Pure with Liberty Paints.
The association just could not be avoided.
It's been more than twenty years since I read Invisible Man but my notions of 'black', 'white', 'visible' and 'invisible' have never been the same again.
So I had to hide the wood and paint it black all over.



www.gafpa.nl

Sad day - bad day

[text in progress]

They were playing Cinderella Rockefella in the department store, so I must have been about eight. My parents were probably buying a lamp or an electric hand mixer on the same floor. I was bored and I turned over the record sleeves. Matthäus Passion it read - but that was all foreign language to me. It was the painting that horrified me.

I still don't know what upset me more. The orange, poisonous colour of the blood, or the thorns all over the body, or the crossbeam bent under the weight of the dead body. He was dead, I could tell by the halfopen mouth. Was this really the same as the friendly young man in white, with his neat orange sash [orange it was, not red, on the stained glass window in our Lutheran church]? I could not believe it. And yet I felt it must be so. But he looked squalid and I sort of felt guilty noticing it. One could not tell where the thorns ended and the hair began. But long hair was squalid in those days anyway, at least when worn by men.


http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Crucifixion_Grunewald.jpg

One or two years before that, a slightly older boy living nearby, had told that God was Jesus' father. That did not really upset me. Jesus was the name of that baby which had something to do with Christmas Trees. Then another boy started discussing the death on the cross. And I imagined a little baby bundle tied to the midst of a cross. It was a concrete cross, the first boy said. And I imagined the washing line pole that my father got over his shin - he nearly fainted and my mother was almost in tears. Then they were talking about nails 'crossed' through the hands and I imagined a quincunx-like pattern. We were protestants and our part of the country was protestant. Crucifixes were a rarity.

My parents sent me to Sunday school, where I could ask all the questions that I wanted to ask. And the first visit was a hit. Jephta's daughter, but I did not fully understand why she was burned at the stake. Anyway I made a drawing of it.
We had to draw the pictures ourselves, we were not shown any.
Later, around Easter, I made a pencil drawing of the cross [cast in one piece, still concrete?] men holding Jesus, a hammer and a box of nails.

A children's anthology, published by the Dutch Labour Press, proved rather informative, with a crucifixion story after a combined version of the four gospels. And then there were Catholic families, with crucifixes in their living rooms. Since it was a strictly observed custom in the Netherlands to have all curtains opened [for honest people have nothing to hide], I could easily peep into some houses while on my way to school, to satisfy my curiosity.

What did Jesus look like?
I asked my mother how they knew.
She said that the artists had seen it with their inner eyes.
So.

[to be continued]

In 2012 I  went to see the Issenheim Altar in Colmar, France.
It was so huge and overwhelming.


www.gafpa.nl

When the Man comes around

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DhtcaRRngcw


Johnny Cash is net al te fleurich, pessimistysk, mar de Hel fan Dante is ek moaier as it Paradys.
Wat my der yn fassineart is de krêft wermei't er troch ienâldige wurden sterke bylden en visioenen oproppe lit. It docht my tinken oan The Second Coming fan Yeats, in oare favoryt, hoewol't dat ek net myn stanpunt werjout.
Miskyn is dat wol wat ik ek berikke wol. In sterk byld oproppe.

link

The Finnesburg Fragment in Frisian

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnesburg_Fragment

http://www.farsk.nl/temas/fskr01/fskr01westra.htm

Three in one

Absolute
unrealism
is impossible.

11 June 1995 -Trinity Sunday (Trinitatis)

Ephesians 2:18

King James Version (KJV)

¹⁸For through him we both have access by one Spirit unto the Father.

Today's Bach Cantata:

BWV 129 Gelobet sei der Herr, mein Gott