An art critic's memoir;

Hi! This is newsletter number 2, and you’re receiving it because you signed up for it here. (Possibly quite some time ago. Sorry about that.) Feel free to unsubscribe if you’d rather not get these missives!

But before you do that (or, hey, INSTEAD of doing that!), let’s get to that roundup of what’s going on.

News

I’m putting together a shoot for work - I can’t talk about it yet (oooh that’s annoying, I KNOW, I’m sorry) but IF it all comes off, it will be great. It’s all part of the job, but for me, this type of organisation - juggling dates and flights and options within a very short time frame - is so hard. Fingers crossed we pull it off! In not unrelated news, I discovered my first grey hairs. They’re silver, in fact, and shimmer in a rather lovely way. I’m quite proud of them.

What I’m reading

Laura Cumming’s On Chapel Sands. It has SUCH an amazing premise: it’s a memoir by an art critic whose mother went missing for three days from a Lincolnshire beach. It happened in 1929 when her mum, Betty, was three - Betty has no memories of this event, and wasn’t even told about it until she was in her fifties. What happened?

As she unravels the mystery, Cumming drops jewels of art criticism, like her description of Sussex artist Eric Ravilious’s work, in which she detects “a kind of surprise that the plain, scrubbed world could be quite so beautiful”.

And she creates an entirely new kind of memoir, using her professional skills to interpret family photos - a shot of her grandmother when young is like a Vermeer, light streaming in through the kitchen window onto the serenely beautiful woman peeling apples into an enamel pie dish. She describes the beach of Chapel Sands as like a Seurat in some moods; a Turner in others - “What is the sea”, she asks, “but a perfect abstraction?” Of the print of Brueghel’s Fall of Icarus that decorated her childhood home, she writes: “No other painting has ever made me feel so keenly alive to the idea that this high round world, lit by the sun, is the very same place where our ancestors once trudged and ploughed and fished the very same seas, in their queer medieval costumes; that we may change but the scenery does not.”

“Life reproves the imagination: look closer,” Cumming writes. And she does… click here for more.

What I’m listening to

Gardens, Weeds and Words episode with Sara Tasker of @me_and_orla.

I discovered this lovely podcast because Sara Tasker (whose own podcast, Hashtag Authentic, I really enjoy) tweeted about her appearance on it. It’s such a lovely setup: an intro from the velvet-voiced host, Andrew, a reading from a garden-related book, then a conversation on the theme of nature and a solo closing meditation from Andrew. This episode covered the role technology can play in the outdoors (hello - highly relevant to my interests). He always has his phone to hand while gardening, and he says although that might seem strange, 10 years ago he’d take his transistor radio out to keep him company while he weeded. So the more things change, the more they stay the same. And Sara pointed out that creativity always finds a way to express itself, whatever new tech comes along. This was just a gorgeous listen.

What I’ve been thinking

That excellent podcast ep reminded me of Jenny Odell’s brilliant book How to Do Nothing, which I praised briefly here.

In Odell’s mission to free herself from the attention economy, she talks about getting to know your bioregion (the ecological area you live in). She recounts how she learned about birds using a bird identification app - which again is perhaps a bit counterintuitive. Don’t we get out into nature to get AWAY from technology? Well, not always. When I’m out walking, I often stop in my tracks and grab my phone to identify plants and animals I notice - on a quiet solo walk along the Manly-Spit a few months ago, I startled a tiny bird with a turquoise head. As it flew away I noticed a bronze flash on its wings. I pulled out my phone, searched “blue bird brown wings Sydney harbour” and within seconds discovered that it was a variegated fairy wren (see pic below - isn’t it sweet?). This was simple but hugely satisfying. We live in an age where information is gloriously accessible. I resolve to take more advantage of that!

"IMG_0322" by jackoscage is licensed under CC BY 2.0 

Where I’m walking

Smoke is wreathing much of the bushland I would otherwise be exploring. So this week I’ve limited myself to the harbourside walk to Manly. It’s not exactly a hardship.

Photo: Hannah James

See you next week!