Most unlikely likeness…

The first thought I had today was “I am behind with life” and I am when you check my progress against my to do list…there certainly are things that I should be getting on with like sorting the spare room which is about 10 years overdue…but life is not a collection of to do lists! My happiness should not depend on ticking off items of the ‘to do’ list.

I may be behind the to do list but I’ve not been behind life…after the end of my ‘security period’ documented in the previous post, I’ve spent most of a week at an improvisation workshop, a week with back ache and hangover and another week working in Brussels (always a joy)…

Oh, and I’ve been to two exhibitions that are unexpectedly linked – in my mind anyway-: From Manet to Picasso at the National Gallery and Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s photographs at the Foyer of the National Theatre. Unfortunately, 3rd of March was the last day of the latter, but the former is going on till May 2007.

Manet to Picasso

I thought the exhibition would be full of paintings the posters of which adorn most living rooms of the houses of 20-something professionals. You know what I mean: the lilies, the sunset behind the Houses of Parliament, the umbrellas, the sunflowers and so on and so forth.

Well, they are there. But how ignorant of me it was to think that just because I’d seen several posters of a painting I would have found the original boring! This is especially true for Monet’s Houses of Parliament, Sunset (1902). The sky behind the Parliament is covered with grey clouds through which the pink rays of the sun are trying to come …not much changed in London since then basically. Actually it has: less of that luminous pink these days as there is less (or different type of?) pollution that caused it by then and also less greyness due to climate change. As for the original painting…the luminosity of the sun behind the clouds attracts your eye from the previous room…you see that light before you can even make out what the painting is….three weeks on I am still amazed by the moment it caught my eye, and how I walked towards it (and kept coming back) almost as in a trance.

Umbrellas by Renoir is another beauty…I was lucky enough to listened to a short lecture by an enthusiastic Gallery expert about it. There really are several pictures in one there: the umbrellas, the men, the little girl, the young woman out of place (or out of her place in society), the mother and so on. It’s also huge…probably 7 foot long.

There are also many pictures in the exhibition I’d never seen (original or poster) before (those by Seurat for example) and some I’d seen (Degas for example) but had not paid much attention to. Then, there is Van Gogh’s Long Grass with Butterflies. It’s a very simple picture…Apart from a promise of a tree-lined road along the top and a road sign only half of which we can see, there is nothing but long grass and butterflies. Maybe that half sign is itself a sign of Van Gogh’s helplessness and the feeling of getting more and more alinieated from the world and more and more lost in himself. It was one of his last paintings after all.

I saw this picture first in 1989 on a day visit to London from Kent. It was like seeing a long lost friend. Then I’d sat on the bench and looked at it for ages. I wanted to have at least a postcard of it but there were no prints. This time it was in the exhibition book and as a small poster.

What ties this exhibition with the next one is inspired by Degas. Like many other of his contemporaries he painted circus acts and ballerinas amongst others. Until visiting the exhibition I’d not realised that these people were amongst the lower classes at the time (until the early 20th century). And that his and others’ painting of such subjects would not have been classified as art and hence not allowed them into the National Gallery…Who would have thought the lily painting, brush stroke enthusiasts called the Impressionists (and those who followed immediately after) would have championed social equality by making the ordinary people the subject of art?

Oh, and, there is Manet and Monet by the way…

Nuri Bilge Ceylan Photographs: Climates

Making the ordinary, the down-trodden and the ignored the subject of art is what Ceylan does in his photographs: albeit a very different country and a different century. And that’s the most unlikely likeness that excited me recently.

He took the exhibited photographs, which you can see in his personal website linked above, while he was searching for locations for his latest film with the same title. I mentioned the film in the last entry. The photographs are at least as interesting.

The technique he uses is something like silk print but I cannot remember it right now. Whatever it is, it makes the photos so real that I had to stop my impulse to reach out and pull the fluff of a red jumper.

The photos are beautifully tragic – mostly of snow covered valleys and mountains of eastern Turkey. People in the photos are poorest of the poor, living in mud houses surrounded by several feet of snow for months on end, miles and miles from anywhere…Girls hang around by their homes, boys play football or ride their bikes. But there is still hope in their faces, perhaps just for that moment and simply because they were being photographed, perhaps because they are still young.

They may make you wonder when this dreadful poverty end and why do boys stick together and have fun when girls look like they are already carrying the burden of the world or feel guilty for focusing on the desperately lonely beauty of the landscape instead of the human tragedy that’s going on…. Do visit Ceylan's website.