Taking Lines for a Walk

Today's tour stop is at the blog of Dundee-born artist Douglas Robertson. Doug has turned our chat via Facebook messages into a fine post about my sequence of "Hebridean Thumbnails", incorporating the poems themselves and beautiful, deft sketches he has created to accompany them. I say it's about the sequence, but that's really only the jumping-off point for a discussion of monostiches and minimalism in art more generally, exploring some of the connections between writing and visual art.

Next week also sees two tour stops: on Monday, Dumbfoundry hosts Ivy Alvarez's interview with me; on Thursday, I'll be getting slightly political and theological over at Mark Calder's Boxologies blog. Owing to the London gig and some redecorating at home, I might not get the chance to link to Ivy's post until Thursday. Should be quicker off the mark with Mark's, though.

One Day Late

Whoops! I've got a day behind myself in posting the links to my Cylone virtual book tour. Thankfully, Claire Askew is on the ball and posted her interview with me on her One Night Stanzas blog yesterday as advertised. Drop by and read about how I became a writer, how I got from my first poem to my first collection, why I think literary blogs are a good thing and more.

If you're following the tour, you're in for a treat on Friday, when we stop by the blog of Scottish artist Douglas Robertson. Words and pictures ...

Phantom Purchase

The Herald reports today that the title painting from Alison Watt's recent National Gallery exhibition, which I saw during my trip to London in May, has been bought by the Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow. I'm delighted it'll be on permanent display reasonably close to home.

Artist on a Quest Again

Time once again to highlight the blog of my good friend and sometime collaborator, the painter David Martin. Two years ago, he embarked on an epic tour of the middle east to gather material for his Salvesen award exhibition, following the trail of Hermes Trismegistus. His blog of that adventure proved him to be a distinctive and entertaining writer as well as a fine artist.

Dave is on his travels once again. This year, he's wandering through Ethiopia and Eritrea. As with the previous occasion, his blog is proving to be fascinating, lively reading. Photos and sketches are already appearing.

This is one of my favourite shots so far. I love the way he's just playing table football out the open with a bunch of guys as if he was in the side room of some Edinburgh pub.

Dave also has a new website. Check out his work if you don't already know it. If you do, reacquaint yourself.

A Note on Joy and Sorrow

"The joy of the Lord is your strength." (Nehemiah 8:10)

It's a verse often used in certain quarters, under the rubric of encouragement, to bludgeon the hurting for a failure to demonstrate happiness in pain. No thought given to the harm this misapplication does or what it implies, namely that God is not to be found in the pit. Not only is this scriptural illiteracy ("De profundis", anyone?), but it seems to me tantamount to a denial of the incarnation.

No thought is given either to what "the joy of the Lord" might be beyond grinning through grief. But we have here a possessive--"the joy of the Lord"--therefore, it's God's joy, not the believer's joy in him, that is the source of strength. What is God's joy? Perhaps it is the ceaseless adoration of each person of the Trinity by the others, the joy that Rowan Williams explores in relation to Rublev's icon of the hospitality of Abraham, also known as the Old Testament Trinity. We glimpse it at Jesus's baptism and again at the transfiguration in the voice of the Father coming out of the cloud. God's joy breaking through into a broken and fallen world, a world of sorrow and grief. Joy in the Man of Sorrows. That joy is in the background of Jesus howl from the Cross, "Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?", perhaps (depending on how you view it) the only time when this ceaseless adoration was interrupted.

This is not, is never, a joy that ignores, denies or glosses over suffering. It is a joy that enters pain and grief, comes alongside it and redeems it because the suffering of the Man of Sorrows, the Son of Joy, is eternally part of the life of the Trinity. ("Those wounds, yet visible above ... .") Holding joy in one hand and and grief in the other, this is the life the Body of Christ is meant to model to its members and to the rest of the world. Which is why lament and worship should always be found under the one spire.

(((( comfort ))))

Last year, I exhibited three poems at an exhibition at the offices of our church here in Linlithgow, organised by my wife. This year, the exhibition has moved to the bigger space of the church building, expanding its range of media--already wide last year--and the reach of its contributors to include several people from outside the congregation. The blank space space of the sanctuary has been transformed by a batik installation that manages the tricky balance of bringing a strong central focus to the room without distracting from the pieces exhibited around it.

This year's theme is, as the title makes clear, comfort. The image in the flyer above shows one of the exhibits: "A Holding Place", by our friend Raine Clarke, who has worked on some Essence Press publications. It's pure Raine: beautifully delicate, seemingly simple and unassuming yet full of emotional and spiritual depth.

Instead of a poem, my piece for the exhibition is a certain book wrapped in a blue blanket on which are written phrases from the book. One phrase--"I will not look away"--is visible on the outside, but viewers have to unfold the blanket to read the others. In other words, they are actively invited to engage with the piece physically as well as visually and to discover the comfort inside.

(((( comfort )))) is open 12-2pm and 7-9pm daily today until Friday and 10am - 4pm on Saturday (15th). Admission is free, refreshments are provided and children are welcome.

Picasso on Paper

One of the pleasures of living near Edinburgh is being able to see the major Festival-time exhibitions once the biggest crowds have gone. Although family circumstances are not the most conducive, I had the opportunity yesterday to see "Picasso on Paper" at the Dean Gallery. And I'm extremely glad I went.

As the title implies, the exhbition consists of works on paper: drawings, etchings, lithographs and linocuts from throughout Picasso's career*. It is simply stunning. I knew that Picasso changed style and approach with similar alacrity and innovation to Miles Davis in jazz, but to be presented with the development so clearly and richly was a revelation.

Some people think Picasso overrated. Personally, I found the work by turns beautiful, intriguing, vulgar, moving, funny, tender, disturbing and exciting. One can dislike the style and even the content, but there is no question about the man's astonishing creative imagination and technical ability--he was almost constantly innovating techniques, even in processes he'd only just learnt. Such emotional, stylistic and technical range is surely one of the things that makes for greatness in art.

Picasso's combination of endless reinvention and technical genius must be a challenge to any creative artist who encounters it. It could be enervating--you might think "How can I ever match that creativity in my field?"--but I came away from the show exhilarated and fired up. Of course, it remains to be seen whether that comes out in my writing. Discernable effect or no, I'm glad of the stimulus.

Incidentally, "Picasso on Paper" is apprently the first major Picasso show in Scotland. Let's have more! There is an accompanying exhibition, "Picasso: Fired with Passion", at the National Museum of Scotland. I haven't yet seen it, but it's on a bit longer. I hear it consists mainly of ceramics, as the title might lead you to think.

*I really mean throughout: the earliest piece was made when he was 17, the latest when he was 90.

A Little Respect

If you missed David Martin's recent exhibition at the RSA, don't despair, because there are images of the work from the show (including the "studio wall" collage) on his blog.

I managed to get along to the RSA for a quick visit just before the exhibition ended. What struck me about the work was its depth of colour and depth of seeing, by which I mean not least the respect I sense towards the people and places Dave encountered on his journey. That deep respect is not new in his painting--I remember it from his degree show about seven or eight years ago--but, by the time it came to his last but one show, it seemed to have dissipated somewhat. It was there in his previous exhibition, but the slightly alegorical nature of the work diluted it, so it's good to see it back in full force. That respect made it seem a timely, even essential, exhibition because there is too little visible in our culture that treats the middle east in such a manner.

Dark Matters

I managed to scoot up to the Ingleby Gallery on Thursday to catch Alison Watt's installation "Dark Light" on its last day. Her shift from white canvases to black is logical: a further step in the stripping down that is represented by her progression from full-blown portraits to paintings of fabric to paintings of purely white fabric. White is a combination of all the colours of the spectrum, so a move to black marks a removal of that underlying richness.

Thursday was, of course, Maundy Thursday, one of the days on which it is traditional in some Christian demoninations to hold a tenebrae service, in which the light in the church is gradually extinguished--another stripping back to black. The churches in Linlithgow held a joint tenebrae service on Good Friday, but experiencing Watt's piece was a tenebrae for one: standing in the cube waiting for the paintings to emerge from the dimness was highly contemplative, not unlike waiting for God to emerge from the gloom of prayer. It put me in mind of the closing stanza of Henry Vaughan's poem "The Night":

There is in God (some say)
A deep, but dazzling darkness; As men here
Say it is late and dusky, because they
See not all clear;
O for that night! where I in him
Might live invisible and dim.

Ecce Choco

David Taylor at Diary of an Arts Pastor has a very good post on the stoushie about the

The Cusp of Fame

Something else I had to miss because of Eilish's sense of timing was the opening of the new show by painter David Martin: "The Cusp of Change: A Journey Through the Middle East". This is Dave's RSA show of work arising out of his Salvesen scholarship. There's a lot of stuff from it appearing daily on his blog, so take a look. I hope to get down to the RSA before it finishes. I missed his last show entirely, even though I'd written poems to accompany some of the work.

Dark Light

I've mentioned the painter Alison Watt before. There's an interview with her in today's Sunday Herald, which is worth reading. I've been entranced by her work since I saw her solo exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in 2000, and her new piece at the Ingleby Gallery in Edinburgh certainly sounds interesting. Watt is currently associate artist at the National Gallery in London.

Poetry Association of Scotland: Spring 2007

The Spring programme for the Poetry Association of Scotland came through the door this morning. The blurb for my reading with Gerrie Fellows on 7 February proclaims us:

"Two poets who describe the modern world with an ironic yet lyrical voice."

Other events in the season include a reading by Robert Crawford, Douglas Dunn lecturing on Edwin Muir and a photographic exploration of the Poetry Path near Kirkby Stephen.

Oh Do Desist, Dear Boy

Not that I'm given to watching Sunday morning TV, but I happened to see the art historian Brian Sewell pontificating disdainfully about modern art in churches on BBC 1 this morning. I assume the item, which was part of the Heaven & Earth show, was a brief televisual extension of his BBC Radio 3 show for Christmas week, the rather pompously entitled "Divine Art", which I missed, at least partly by design.

Sewell maintained that "we must insist" on a "spiritual" quality to religious art. The latter term seemed to mean visual art associated directly with Christian worship, which seems a remarkably narrow conception in today's society. However, although the rallying cry might not seem particularly controversial at first sight, it is hopelessly vague. Sewell did not define the "spiritual quality", but as far as I could gather, it is something to do with a sense of mysticism (a term Sewell used), transendence or the ethereal. From his reaction to the Henry Moore piece he lambasted, it certainly seemed to rule out any strong physiciality.

This is one of the most irritating things about Sewell's approach. Christianity in its orthodox forms--and remember, all the pieces he considered were for Christian places of worship--is founded on the belief that God became human in Christ or, to express it slightly differently, that Christ was fully human as well as fully pine. Therefore, the physical is as essential to the faith as the spiritual and ought be as strong an element in Christian art as the spiritual. God's transendence and immanence must be held in tension, if not necessarily in any single artwork then at least across the totality of Christian art.

The other irritatant was that Sewell didn't have anything positive at all to say about the modern and contemporary art he examined, except the grudging acceptance that Moore had at least considered the architectural setting of his altar, unlike another artist he critiqued. Granted, some of his criticisms were justified, but if he had lifted his head above his prejudices and ventured north, he might have found something to shake his disdain in Alison Watt's wonderful, award-winning painting Still in Old St Pauls Episcopal Church in Edinburgh. In this piece, presence and absence, the physical and the spiritual, death and resurrection meet naturally and powerfully. Surely even Brian Sewell could not fail to be moved.

Opening

Yesterday's opening of illuminate went well. Just about the right number of people came to make it feel busy without being crowded. The mulled wine, mince pies and lebkuchen went down a treat and everyone enjoyed the exhibts (some of the children who came particularly enjoyed standing in front of the video projector). Photographs were taken, so I'll have to see whether I can grab any of them to post here.

Switching on the Lights

We spent most of today setting up the illuminate exhibition I plugged in the previous post. Tiring work, but it's looking good. There are still a couple of things to install before tomorrow's opening, but I think everyone involved is very pleased with how it looks and hangs together.

illuminate

This Christmas exhibition will include three poems of mine presented as a triptych. Readers of Tonguefire will be familiar with two of them--"His Wading Light" and "A Voice is Heard in Ramah"--but the third, which is called "Down Darkness Wide", is new and takes a different view of the story.

Interestingly, although the word triptych is usually applied to paintings, the first sense given in The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary is "A set of three writing-tablets hinged or tied together." So it seems I'm taking it back to an earlier usage.

illuminate will also include, among other pieces: a video installation, paintings, stained glass work, a hanging photo-montage, a shadowbox/calligraphy installation and a sound recording of some of Douglas Briton's poems. You can view the details of where and when by clicking on the poster to the left.

If you pop by, post a comment on the blog and let me know what you thought of the show.

Artist on a Quest

Dave Martin, who's mentioned in this post, is about to embark on a year-long art project beginning with a trip from Egypt, through the Levant and into Eastern Europe and culminating in a show at the Royal Scottish Academy in 2007. You can follow his progress here.

Gaun yersel, Dave!

My friend and collaborator, the painter David Martin, has recently won a major Scottish art prize: the Alastair Salvesen travel scholarship. You can the work for his most recent exhibition at his sketchblog along with poems I wrote to accompany it.