The Beginning of a New List

With thanks to Katherine May for the prompt

I love making lists. I don’t mean shopping lists, which I am notoriously bad at and always leave behind in a location furthest from the shop it is meant to be in. I mean the good stuff. I am on about the twentieth iteration of my Off Menu dinner choices for example. I compile endless lists of books I have read, will read, will avoid like the plague and get a salacious thrill from ticking off books I have read in lists that other people make. I have lists of Desert Island Discs ideas and other musical shenanigans that always make me think about

Nick Hornby

and High Fidelity.

On my phone I currently have lists of cat names:

• Rumbartus

• Daniel Daggers

• Mr Onions

• Squeezy

To name but a few. I also have names for imaginary bands:

• Super Duper Yes

• Pocket Normans

• Stiff Mouse

• Islington Pigeon

etc. These are being collected for an art project that I will get around to one day. I intend to create a website with bios and discographies for them. It will also have a shop where you can buy the band merchandise made by me. My dream is that one day I will meet someone wearing one of my band t-shirts and they will tell me that they saw Islington Pigeon at the Roundhouse in 1987 and I will be quiet but deeply satisfied to know they’re lying because it’s my made up band. Other people dream of swimming with dolphins but I think I’m getting the better deal here.

Another list consists of terrible/great names for shops I see on my travels. I have a particular fondness for hairdressers. My all time favourite is Cornelius Superhair in Finchley which I used to pass every day on my way to work. I also love shops that use ‘World’ in their title. I love the ambition that World of Fruit implies.

So many lists, so little time, but they are catnip to me and I embrace any opportunity to create them that comes my way.

Katherine May

created a journaling prompt on Sunday that invited you to really spend time looking at an art work and find a way into a thoughtful response to it.

She said:

A big part of my job was to give people permission. No wrong answers, I would say. What do you see here? I would often have to share my own silly perceptions (‘I always think that this bit looks like an angry seagull’) first, and then everyone would start telling me what they saw. I would ask what emotions a painting triggered, or how it might smell or taste. If I was feeling particularly impish, I would ask them if they liked it. Ignore the fact that it’s hanging in a gallery, I would say. If you saw it in Habitat, would you notice it? Would you hang it on your wall?

It’s such a great question. Some of what Katherine was thinking about we touched on in my Slade Summer School course with the tongue in cheek invitation to explore the difference between good and bad art. As Katherine says, you can still recognise an art work as good without wanting to hang it on your wall. You can, conversely, love something that may not be hanging in the Tate, but which gives you extraordinary pleasure when you look at it. This goes for all art forms. I would rather stick my head in a toilet bowl than listen to Frank Zappa for example, but I can respect his contribution to music as long as I’m not trapped in a lift with it.

From Katherine’s writing prompt she led us to today’s question which was: ‘If you could choose any piece of art to hang on your wall, what would it be?’

One of the biggest draws is that for me, there is no definitive answer. It is really an invitation to create another exciting list.

To make it more interesting, I decided that I wouldn’t be allowed to choose anything by an artist whose work I already own. This explains why there is nothing in the following list by Tracey Emin, Maggi Hambling or Grayson Perry, despite my deep and abiding love for them. On the discussion thread I chose the following:

Totes Meer by Paul Nash

I have been to visit this painting more times than I can count. I never get bored of it. I find it hauntingly beautiful. The title translates as Dead Sea. It was painted during Nash’s time as a war artist in 1940-41. He is best known as a landscape artist who was all over psychogeography before Ian Sinclair even got a whiff of it. I love that this is still a landscape painting, but what a landscape. For me its desolate, wildness is a perfect evocation of the transformative power of violence. The utter shock of what you think you see and know being undercut by what war has done to irrevocably alter the world you took for granted and thought of as unchanging is startling. The lack of human figures makes its inhumanity more profound and unsettling. Every time I look at it, I feel overwhelmingly sad in that beautiful way that stirs your soul when you hear a perfect melody.

Next up is a painting that gives me absolute joy. Bigger Trees Near Warter by David Hockney. The Nash painting always makes me want to cry. This painting actually did make me cry when I first saw it, but for completely different reasons.

Painted in 2007, it was part of a huge body of work that Hockney painted of the Yorkshire Wolds, which were exhibited en masse at a show he did at the Royal Academy and which I was lucky enough to visit. I vividly recall walking into the room where this hung, sitting down to look at it and promptly bursting into tears. I had ALL the feelings. It’s a vast painting at 4.6 by 12 metres. Clearly a big painting demands big emotions and I had them.

What I love about this painting is the quality of looking. Hockney is brilliant at looking at things but he is also brilliant at translating that into paintings which invite us to look too. To do what Katherine describes in her writing prompt. He invites you to conspire with him to pay attention to what you are seeing. It’s why no matter what wild colours he uses or how bold and graphic his brush strokes, his paintings always have such an air of accuracy. To me, they always look ‘right’ and he makes it easy for you to see that. This is a painting of great joy and generosity.

My next choice is a sculpture. It’s Jacob and the Angel by Jacob Epstein:

Jacob Epstein is a difficult figure. I say difficult. His sex life was disturbing and deeply problematic to the extent that I wish I didn’t love his work so much, but I do. It raises all sorts of questions about creators and what they create and how we deal with monstrous people, but for now I will park it in favour of talking about his work.

This was made in 1940-41 and depicts the biblical story of Jacob, who spent a night tussling with an unknown attacker only to find that they were actually an angel. He had unwittingly passed some weird, wrestling based test of faith that probably needs recreating by WWF stars in sequinned lycra and mullets for a contemporary audience. I love this because it is such an unwieldy, uncomfortable piece. It’s chunky and uncompromising and as strange as the story it depicts. The angel is so massive, it can’t possibly fly with those huge, heavy wings. Although maybe it can. As we know, God moves in mysterious ways.

Later in his career, Epstein recreated another, biblical fight for the newly built, Coventry Cathedral. This time it’s St Michael, kicking seven bells out of the Devil.

The angel here is much more agile than his chunky predecessor. This is probably some kind of metaphor for Epstein’s life. I’m not looking into that too deeply, although I do enjoy the raw sex appeal of the Devil here, who looks like he should be getting all the hits on Grindr.

That’s as far as I got in the thread, but between posting my answer and writing this I have, as I suspected I might, had a few more ideas. This post is already far too long, so I’ll stop here, but expect another post on the same theme shortly.