After Impressionism

August 4, 2023

At the National Gallery, an exhibition that re-examines the innovative period that followed Impressionism, in both sculpture and painting. The focus is on the influence of three artists: Cezanne, Gauguin, and Van Gogh. Putting it simplistically there’s a suggestion that Cubism flowed from Cezanne’s work, Fauvism from Gauguin, and German Expressionism from Van Gogh.

Though it’s an enlightening framework, things are obviously more complex than that. To my untutored eye it all looks like a general explosion of originality, drawing on many influences as well as brand new thinking.

The exhibition, full of great stuff, is notably strong on pointillism, reminding us it isn’t just Seurat and Signac. I was also surprised yet again by more evidence of Picasso’s ability to produce brilliant work in every style, including of course, some that he helped invent.

St Francis at the National Gallery

August 2, 2023

This free exhibition features works by outstanding artists from many centuries, from a puzzlingly conservative Botticelli through Caravaggio, El Greco and Spencer to Zurbaran, taking in the Marvel comic Francis, Brother of the Universe. The notes gently mock the comic’s version of how St Francis received the stigmata through laser beams, but really it is no more dramatic than several paintings of the same crucial event, or Brother Leo’s actual first-hand account of a six-winged seraph.

The exhibition also features one of Francis’s own habits, presented in a golden frame. I suppose there is a suggestion that the habit can also be viewed as art, and indeed the exhibition offers a modern work using sacking. However, the habit also emphasises Francis’s historicity. Some of his feats (taming a wolf, walking through fire) resemble those attributed to older saints who are legendary bordering on mythical, but Francis is indisputably a real man. That raises the question of whether an exhibition organised around a theme tells us about the art or just about attitudes to the subject.

I suppose the message might ultimately be that artists use a theme to illuminate the concerns that mean most to them and their audience – Stanley Spencer using his own (strangely rotund) father to represent the saint. But whatever the rationale, it’s a great chance to see some fantastic paintings.

Dying Teddies

August 2, 2023

My story ‘Dying Teddy Bears’ ultimately got sixth place in the literary category of the Writer’s Digest competition. Writer’s Digest gives a generous number of prizes, so I’m getting a $25 voucher and a year’s free subscription. This bumps my sagging average back up to the historic level of one story recognised for every eight entered, so that’s encouraging.

Hilma af Klint and Mondrian

July 19, 2023

This exhibition, at Tate Modern, is a curious pairing. The Tate says both artists started from nature and developed a new abstract language: but they never met and did not influence each other, and their motives seem very different. They both used coloured squares sometimes, but that’s about it.

Mondrian painted flowers and landscapes in a conventional style as well as the rectilinear images with primary coloured blocks for which he is known. For me these push abstraction too far, but they are popular (Katharine likes them).

Klint is problematic in some respects. Most of her works were meant to illustrate her Spiritualist beliefs, and they are heavy with obscure meaning. She said that some were done with spirit guidance (which recalls some of Blake’s pictures, and there is a just a hint of his muscular symbolic figures in Klint’s stuff). She didn’t generally exhibit them, and it’s possible she wouldn’t have wanted them shown. I suppose the curators nevertheless see her as a significant gap in the story of art, but she seems well out of the mainstream. I must say that if her work had been shown in the sixties it might have found a following, and prints of her works might now be selling well alongside esoteric Tarot illustrations and mandalas in that kind of shop.

Dr Semmelweis

July 19, 2023

This play, starring and partly written by Mark Rylance, tells the story of how Dr Ignaz Semmelweis discovered that fatal puerperal fever could be almost eliminated just by getting doctors to wash their hands. This radical innovation was not accepted by the profession (and the play makes clear that Semmelweis was, well, somewhat lacking in diplomacy, which didn’t help) and the doctor himself, whose behaviour became increasingly unacceptable, died in a lunatic asylum.

It’s a great production, which includes a group of women who play violins and dance around or with the actors. That sounds weird, but it mostly works, only seeming intrusive a couple of times.

It seems odd now that the simple notion of bacterial infection should have been so difficult to grasp. Part of the problem was that Semmelweis had only sketchy, inaccurate ideas about the mechanism: he just knew, and demonstrated, that washing worked. Sadly it was a long time before the practice was universally accepted.

August 2023 competitions

July 17, 2023

Here’s my regular look at writing competitions I might enter during the coming month.. 

  • The Scottish Association of Writers has the Westerwood competition for stories of 2-3,000 words. Entry is £7 with a parsimonious prize of £100. The deadline is 5 August.
  • Uncharted Magazine wants 1,001 to 5,000 words. Entry is $20 and the prize a more generous $2,000. Stories must be on the theme ‘The Aftermath’, and in one of the three genres they publish: SF/F, Thriller/Horror and Mystery/Crime. The deadline is 6 August.
  • Gival’s regular contest is with us again: 5-15,000 words, entry $25, top prize $1,000, enter by 8 August.
  • Periscope wants briefer stories, up to 1,500 words, on the theme ‘Identity’. £10 entry, first prize £1,000 and the deadline is 15 August.
  • Louise Walters is back with the competition based on page 100 of your novel. It’s £5 to enter: no money prize but a full editorial report and a box of books. Deadline 20 August.
  • The Summer version of the Masters Review competition is back – up to 6,000 words, $20 to enter and a prize of $3,000. The deadline is 27 August.

All the rest have a deadline of 31 August.

  • Creative Writing Ink wants up to 3,000 words, entry is £9 and the prize £1,000.
  • Bit of a fanfare for the University of New Orleans’s Publishing Laboratory, who are offering a prize of $10,000 plus publication. For that they want a full-length novel or collection (no word or page limit) and an entry fee of $28.
  • On a more modest scale, Anthology wants a maximum of 1,500 words, for an entry fee of £18 and a prize of £1,000.
  • Letter Review looks for up to 5,000 words. Your £20 entry fee gets you access to a £1,000 prize pot to be split three ways – so £333.33, I suppose.
  • Aesthetica Magazine puzzles me slightly, because it seems to be an avant-garde publication about art and design rather than a literary one. But the competition claims former winners have gone on to great success. It’s £18 to enter, with a prize of £2,500. Up to 2,000 words. 
  • The Kenneth Patchen award is for an innnovative, experimental novel of any length. $25 to enter, win $1,000 and publication.
  • St Lawrence look for a collection of 120-280 pages. $28 gets you a shot at $1,000.

Good luck if you enter any of these, and do let me know if you get anywhere!

Karen McLeod

July 11, 2023

Interesting talk from Karen McLeod at Croydon Writers last night. For a long time she worked as cabin crew for an airline, but managed to write a novel In Search of the Missing Eyelash which was published and did very well. Then she found it was hard to write the follow-up her agent pressed her for.
Instead she developed a comedy act based on the character Barabara Brownskirt, the laureate of Penge, which she still performs. But, having parted company with her agent, she is now writer in residence at the Bookseller Crow Bookshop and has a memoir of her flying days coming out next year.

Picasso

June 23, 2023

To mark the 50th anniversary of Picasso’s death, the Musée National Picasso-Paris commissioned Sir Paul Smith to direct a special exhibition, which selects works from their huge collection. We went over to see it.

Many of the pictures have been hung on walls specially decorated with bold motifs taken from the painting itself: I’m afraid this mostly just seems like a distraction. But it is an astonishing collection of works.

There is a connection here with Degas. Picasso admired his stuff and produced a series of works inspired by Le déjeuner sur l’herbe.

The exhibition presents this final picture of the young artist, done in Picasso’s last year, as his cheerful farewell.

Manet/Degas

June 22, 2023

In Paris to see the exhibition of Manet and Degas at the Musée D’Orsay.

This follows well from the Morisot exhibition and indeed includes many portraits of her by Manet…

The exhibition explores the relationship between Degas and Manet, who according to legend met while copying the same painting in the Louvre. Both were from fairly well-off families who intended them for other careers, both served as soldiers in Paris, and both (in different ways) had a complex relationship with Impressionism. Manet, however, was sociable and had a lively romantic life, while Degas was solitary, easy to quarrel with, and quite probably never had sex with anyone. After Manet’s death Degas collected many of his painting and gathered together the surviving fragments of The Execution of Emperor Maximilian.

Some of my pictures seem to have got deleted, but here are some random highlights.

The exhibition is constructed to make a point, and does not include some of the famous works by both artists that are actually on display just upstairs in another part of the gallery!

July 2023 Competitions

June 19, 2023

Here’s my regular look at writing competitions I might enter during the coming month (so no poetry or competitions that arenot open to UK writers, for example).

  • Leicester Writes wants up to 3,500 words, with an entry fee of £7.00 and a prize of £175. The deadline is 2 July.
  • Liminisa offers a week’s writing holiday at their retreat in Greece: entry is free, but you must follow them on social media. The maximum word count  is 1,500 and the theme is ‘A Room of One’s Own’, Deadline 2 July.
  • Story Quarterly (from Rutgers) will take pieces up to 6,250 words: entry is $15 and the top prize £500. The deadline is 9 July.
  • The H.G.Wells competition is back, with a theme of ‘Motion’. Up to 5,000 words, with a deadline of 10 July. The top prize is £1,000, while entry is £10.
  • Wrekin Writers are again running the Doris Gooderson competition, with a deadline of 12 July. They want up to 1,200 words, entry is £5 and the top prize is £200: at least half the funds raised will go to the Severn Hospice.
  • Hastings Book Festival has a word limit of 2,500, and entry fee of £7.50 and a prize of £250: deadline 14 July.
  • LISP wants up to 3,000, with a deadline of 15 July.  Prizes have been shrinking recently, but I have to say this one does not look generous: £100 against an entry fee of £15.50. Earlier in the year, I must acknowledge, the fee would have been lower, but still – a prize that’s less than seven times the entry cost?
  • The Adrift competition from Driftwood magazine will take pieces of up to 6,000 words: entry is $11, the prize is $500 and the deadline is again 15 July.
  • With the same deadline, the Petrichor prize from Regal House looks for 100-350 pages of ‘finely crafted’ fiction. Entry is $25 and the prize $1,000.
  • Hawk Mountain looks for a book-length collection of short stories: entry is $20 and the prize $1,000 plus publication. Deadline 15 July.
  • One more with the same deadline: the Francine Ringold Award from Nimrod, open to pieces of up to 5,000 words, entry $12 and prize $500.
  • The Aurora Prize, from the writers of the East Midlands, seeks up to 2,000 words. Entry is £9 and the prize is £500 plus a year’s membership of the Society of Authors: enter by 19 July.
  • Munster Lit is back with the annual Séan Ó Faoláin competition. Entry is  €19 and the prize €2,000 plus a writing residency. The closing date is 31 July, as it is for all the remaining competitions.
  • Creative Writing Ink want 3,000 words max, with a fee of £9 and a prize of £1,000.
  • The Olga Sinclair prize, from Norwich, looks for up to 2,000 on the theme ‘The Sea’. Entry is £9 and the prize is £500.
  • The Global Novel Writing Competition is free to enter, but there is no cash prize. Instead, you get free entry on to a course at the Writers’ College. They want first chapters up to 6,000 words plus a synopsis

Good luck if you enter any of these; if you get anywhere, please do let me know!