someone else has described RICHARD AVEDON's work as "problematic" ... he might better have said "occasionally challenging" ... i would say that Avedon knew beauty and ugliness better than most of us ... and i proudly declare that he helped me to see humanity more clearly ... both in beauty, and otherwise ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Avedon

 

one of the daftest bits of ancient mythology concerns the death of orpheus ... killed and dismembered by the MAENADS, some French 19thC painters show his head falling into a river, and some show it being retrieved by ??? i'm not sure who ??? ... GUSTAVE MOREAU painted a lady treasuring the head of Orpheus ... but why are there two tortoises in the bottom corner ?

 

OVID tell this story differently ...

https://www.theoi.com/Text/OvidMetamorphoses11.html

wimmin in white ... part xxii ...

... another scrapbook, to be continued, as & when ... 

DRAWING LESSON NUMBER ONE ... MINIMALISM ... you don't need to draw every detail... you don't need to draw every detail exactly ... if your lines are near enough then the people who look at your your drawing already have brains that evolved to fill in the gaps back in the mists of time ...

 

Academic painter PUVIS DE CHAVANNES made the MUSES look rarther dull in what might have been a livelier composition had any of the ladies shown signs of feminine vitality ... TOULOUSE-LAUTREC, the naughty boy, immediately shot him down ... both paintings date from 1884

 

GOLTZIUS ... "Sine cerere et Baccho friget Venus"

drawn in maybe 1588 to 1592

https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/collection/object/Venus-en-Cupido--ea88b42139f540bcb7f096924d711142?tab=data

drawn in 1593

https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/P_1861-0608-174?selectedImageId=37318001

 

https://www.philamuseum.org/collection/object/85733

drawn around 1600 to 1603

https://www.pubhist.com/w20128

drawn around 1606

self-portrait, c.1593

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hendrick_Goltzius

IRIS painted by John Atkinson GRIMSHAW ...

Christie's Auction Notes

Fairies and fairy tales presented Victorian artists with an accepted vehicle to explore taboo subjects such as sex, nudity, violence and even drug addiction, and in return the Victorian audience was a ready consumer of these fantastical images. This specific imagery provided the Victorian sensibility with an escape from the materialistic realities of the ever-growing industrialist society in which they lived. As Christopher Wood states, we ‘tend to think of the Victorians as stern and moralistic, staring grimly out at us from early photographs, in their black top hats and frock coats. But Dickens was right in his perception that underneath that deceptively utilitarian surface, the Victorians yearned for some ‘great romance.’ In their art, their literature and their architecture, they were arch romantics and dreamers, the true heirs to the Romantic Movement. In art they gave us Pre-Raphaelitism, the greatest and most long-lasting romantic movement in English art. They also gave us some of the most extraordinary fairy paintings ever produced in any country at any time’ (C. Wood, Fairies in Victorian Art, Woodbridge, Suffolk, 2000, p. 8).

Midsummer Night or Iris is a study in iridescence, the effect of light the artist loved best. He loved to experiment with prisms to catch the effect of seeing colored light, and used such effects in this series of pictures. His daughter, Elaine, wrote, ‘My father was always fascinated by colour-iridescence. He would study the prismatic range in the beveled mirrors of candelabra; and if we children found in the big garden a bit of old glass, oxidized by age and weather, we would proudly take it to him, to add to his collection a box which lay open on a table beside his easel (Quoted in J. Sellars, ed., Atkinson Grimshaw. Painter of Moonlight, exh. cat., Harrogate, Mercer Art Gallery, 2011, p. 64).

Grimshaw produced several versions of this subject, one of which is currently in the Leeds City Art Gallery. Iris was a messenger of the gods sent to wither flowers in the autumn but when she hesitated in her appointed duty to admire a pool of waterlilies, she was turned into a rainbow for her disobedience. Iris depicts the moment she pauses to hover over the flickering pool at dusk and is absorbed by the beauty of the flowers covering the shimmering water. She appears to be lit from within, with her body covered with a very thin veil emitting its own a silvery glow and her opalescent wings containing all the colors of the rainbow that she eventually becomes. Wood states that Grimshaw’s few fairy pictures are ‘remarkably effective and haunting…, and one can only wish Grimshaw had painted more of these, and fewer versions of the Liverpool docks’ (Wood, ibid., p. 129).

Grimshaw also loved to experiment with technique and in Midsummer Night or Iris the artist uses the opportunities presented by the subject matter to joyfully exhibit his mastery of new and innovative ways to apply paint to canvas. The cross-hatchings and use of the back of the brush to add texture and interest to the dead and dying marshy reeds in the foreground are in direct contrast to the misty, layered tones with hints of leafless trees and the surface of the pond itself. This layering of thin washes of color in the sky and middle distance resemble the effects achieved by Turner and the interaction of differing techniques of oil and watercolor with layers of pigment generalized and thinly applied in some areas and more precise in others, brings to mind the works of James Whistler.

The model for the fairy is Agnes Leefe, who was an actress at the Leeds Grand Theatre. She was the model for a significant number of paintings in the artist’s oeuvre, and the only model for his nudes, which were all painted at a time when Miss Leefe was living with and modeling for Grimshaw in London. The young woman seems to have been an accepted part of the Grimshaw household, more a ward, with the nickname ‘Little Orphan Annie’, and she died young of consumption in the care of Grimshaw’s wife at their home in Leeds.

The Victorian Leeds curator, George Birkett, eulogized the composition in 1899 thus: ‘Iris, though there is a suspicion of gauze about her, is practically nude, flits gracefully over the surface of a woodland pool. She bends towards some waterlilies, and seems to hesitate about destroying them. Round her head and in a less degree around her whole body is a bright golden halo, and her wings reflect all the gorgeous colors of the rainbow….The weeds, flowers and grasses on the inner pool are already dried up and dead. On the further bank is a wood, through the branches of which one gets glimpses of a sparkling sky of blue and green and gold, contrasted with burning specks of orange in the foliage. The picture is a characteristic specimen of the artist’s best work – strongly individual, and unlike that of any other artist…Iris is perhaps in every way his masterpiece’ (Leeds City Art Gallery Catalogue, 1899).

the HACK ... El Vino ... Geoffrey Van Hay and Stuart KUTTNER

January the 8th, 2010 ... Saint Katherine's Church at Merstham in Surrey ... i was driving my little truck back into london on a very cold and snowy morning when i spotted Saint Katherine's Church at Merstham looking rarther picturesque ... the old A23 was plenty wide enough to park on the unswept margin and i walked along the crunchy snowy path behind the dark trees to see if there might be a picture worth taking ... 

 

the outside of the church lacks grace and ornament so i tried the door because you often find something of interest ... and i did ... leaving behind the noise of the world and entering the stillness, i found this ...

i'd visited a lot of churches, but this was one of the best and unlikeliest discoveries ... yet there was no clue, apart from the flowers, to suggest a context or an identity ... i set my tripod low and quickly framed this shot ... the original image was lost in a disk crash long since, but i've rescued these images from the blog archive for that day ...

the church's silence was broken by echo of the door latch and i turned to find a pale man in a big woolly hat who might just have easily been photographed by roman vishniac in a polish synagogue before the german occupation ...

he approached me directly and inquired if i was here for the funeral ... i explained that i just happened to be a passing truck driver with a camera and was looking for a good photograph of the church

he then introduced himself as STUART KUTTNER of the NEWS OF THE WORLD

he explained that the man in the wonderful photograph was GEOFFREY VAN HAY, who ran a famous bar in Fleet Street, beloved by newspaper men, EL VINO'S ... and he told me it might be worth hanging around for an interesting occasion that was about to happen ... 

so i surmised that they must have been friends across several decades and OUT OF MISPLACED EMPATHY asked if he might like me to take the picture again, with him standing by the image of his old friend ... he declined, saying ...

"OH NO !  I am a VERY PRIVATE PERSON !"

the funeral was packed, the vicar said a few nice things about a man he'd hardly known

some journalists told some nice ( but self-congratulatory ) stories illustrating Geoffrey's wit and boldness

we went outside but i stood apart, having resented their smug self confidence, and having had just enough time to realize that Stuart Kuttner was the EMINENCE GRISE in a national scandal and that he appeared to lack ( at that time ) both humanity and humility

but i left wishing i had known Geoffrey forty years earlier

here is wally fawkes' little portrait that was re-printed on my order-of-service card

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-25435194