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Showing posts with label auschwitz. Show all posts
Showing posts with label auschwitz. Show all posts

Saturday, 26 October 2024

International Times: From Auschwitz to Africa

My latest book review to be published by International Times is entitled 'From Auschwitz to Africa' and is about 'Nolan's Africa' by Andrew Turley:

'Turley, by rejecting the easy shorthand with which many write about Nolan, has succeeded in bringing the African Journey images out of the shadows and into the light. Through his extensive research, Turley succeeds in shining new light on Nolan’s examination of nature, human nature and the nature of modern civilisation. He revives Nolan’s warning to society by urging his readers to consider the effect that the Holocaust, animal extinctions, colonial disenfranchisement and human conflict has had not just on the artist but also on society.'

For more of my writings on Sidney Nolan see my Artlyst interview with Andrew Turley and my review of Sidney Nolan: Colour of the Sky – Auschwitz Paintings.

My earlier pieces for IT are an interview with the poet Chris Emery, an interview with Jago Cooper, Director of the the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, plus reviews of: Mavis Staples in concert at Union Chapel; T Bone Burnett's 'The Other Side' and Peter Case live in Leytonstone; Helaine Blumenfeld's Together exhibition, What Is and Might Be and then Otherwise by David Miller; 'Giacometti in Paris' by Michael Peppiatt, the first Pissabed Prophet album - 'Zany in parts, moving in others, you’ll be hard pressed to find a more unusual, inspired & profound album this year. ‘Pissabed Prophet’ will thrill, intrigue, amuse & inspire' - and 'Religion and Contemporary Art: A Curious Accord', a book which derives from a 2017 symposium organised by the Association of Scholars of Christianity in the History of Art.

Several of my short stories have been published by IT including three about Nicola Ravenscroft's EarthAngel sculptures (then called mudcubs), which we exhibited at St Andrew's Wickford in 2022. The first story in the series is 'The Mudcubs and the O Zone holes'. The second is 'The Mudcubs and the Clean-Up King', and the third is 'The mudcubs and the Wall'. My other short stories to have been published by International Times are 'The Black Rain', a story about the impact of violence in our media, 'The New Dark Ages', a story about principles and understandings that are gradually fading away from our modern societies, and 'The curious glasses', a story based on the butterfly effect.

IT have also published a poem, The ABC of creativity, which covers attention, beginning and creation, and 'Broomfield', which is part of a series of poems on thin places and sacred spaces in Essex called 'Four Essex Trios'.

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The Alarm - Protect And Survive.
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Sunday, 3 October 2021

Sidney Nolan’s Africa: Interview With Andrew Turley

My latest interview for Artlyst is with Andrew Turley about his forthcoming book 'Nolan's Africa'. 

'Nolan’s Africa' will be the first book on Sidney Nolan written with access to the newly opened Sidney Nolan archives at the National Library of Australia, containing never-before-seen diaries, photographs and personal notes. These will be revealed by Andrew Turley – a former Army Captain and UN Peacekeeper deployed in Cambodia – who has walked in Nolan’s footsteps across Ethiopia, Uganda, Tanzania and Zanzibar. In Turley’s forthcoming book, influences and artistic process are laid bare – from the UN Headquarters in New York to the crematoria of Auschwitz and the plains of the Serengeti – a previously unrecorded history of Nolan’s art, themes, travels, experiences and relationships with thought leaders and politicians in a world at its most vulnerable.

'Nolan’s Africa' shines new light on Nolan and his examination of nature, human nature and the nature of mid-century Europe. For the first time, his responses are revealed to genocide, racial disenfranchisement, the decline of the West, the environment and our own existence threatened by nuclear war, changes in climate and the collapse of biodiversity.

'What did he make of those ideas? Art! His Italian crucifixes of 1955, crucifixions of 1957, then 1961 right through into the 1970s. The crucifixion motif was caustic in his Auschwitz paintings – graphic works of nailed figures, skeletons in wheelbarrows under smoking crosses and bodies laid out in neat rows. But these were works seen only by Nolan himself. In his African work, it became a spiritual image, but no one saw the whole picture. Did you know he had an ornate old wooden crucifix in his studio? It is still there on display.

Clark had written about the role religion played in a landscape of symbols and the art historical concept of paradise, the enclosed garden as a place to escape worldly fears and the Garden of Eden as a vision of hope. Sidney saw the enclosed ‘garden’ on the Serengeti Plains and Eden in Uganda. And there are few civilisations more connected to Christ and the crucifixion than Ethiopia, where he climbed barefoot and bloodied up rawhide ropes to explore a centuries-old monastery built into the cliff. He walked ancient churches whose walls were painted with scenes of the flight into Egypt and the Descent from the Cross; he took photos of rocky hillsides sown with old Coptic crosses and saw, high on a dusty hill, a man in a tattered robe silhouetted against the sky, standing still, arms horizontal along with staff across his shoulders. Sidney called him “A walking crucifixion."'

My other pieces for Artlyst are:

Interviews -
Articles -

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Die Heuwels Fantasties ft. The Soweto Gospel Choir, HHP & JR - Our Heritage.
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Sunday, 8 August 2021

Sidney Nolan Trust: The Rodd














 
Sir Sidney Nolan was a leading artist of the 20th century. His Ned Kelly paintings became iconic, and today the Sidney Nolan Trust, which he founded in 1985, celebrates his life-long experimentation and passion for creativity, as well as his love for the environment.

Located at The Rodd, the Trust cares for his former home, studio, and 250-acre estate, together with a large collection of Nolan’s artworks, his library and personal archive.

The Rodd is located in NW Herefordshire, a stone’s throw from the England Wales border. It encompasses Rodd Court, a Jacobean manor house, which was the last home of Sidney and his wife Mary, an outstanding group of 17th century farm buildings that house our gallery, workshops, and offices and is surrounded by beautiful gardens and orchards. Rodd Farm and estate extend to 250 acres of farmland, semi-ancient natural woodland and the Hindwell brook. A changing display of works from the Nolan collection can be seen at The Rodd.

The Rodd is also home to Nolan’s last studio, the only to survive, and remains largely untouched. The studio provides visitors with a rare insight into Nolan’s materials and processes and is an important resource for continued research.

Situated in one of the 17th century barns, the studio contains over 1,000 items including cans of Nolan's favourite spray paints; stocks of dry pigment waiting to be mixed with the ‘new’ white glue, PVA; alkyd gel medium; and tins of household enamel. The flat bench that he worked on is covered in paintbrushes, spatulas, and paints, as if poised for another painting session. Nolan would often work in this space with the large wooden doors pulled closed, lit only by a powerful single halogen lamp hanging high above, as if to mimic the direct Australian sunlight.

When I visited the exhibition in the Gallery was 'Nolan à l’Atelier 17'. Nolan's etching experiments from his time at the famous Paris print workshop were presented alongside magnificent artworks by leading surrealists of the day.

Also on display in the grounds and house were sculptures by Daniel Pryde-Jarman and Simon Dorell's 'Jackdaws for company'. The latter being the result of Dorrell's solitary ramblings at The Rodd during lockdown. His ink and gouache paintings of the house and historic farm buildings present a unique record of The Rodd resting dormant.

The next exhibition in the Gallery is one I have previewed for Artlyst - 'Sidney Nolan: Colour of the Sky - Auschwitz Paintings'. "I do not see how the question of the camps can be forever shelved. Perhaps they will never be the material of art, it is impossible to tell. How can a disease be painted?" Read my preview here.

'Passion (1940-45): Representing the Holocaust', 21 August, 2 pm, The Rodd is an illustrated lecture by London-based art historian Monica Bohm-Duchen that will set the powerful works by Sidney Nolan on view at The Rodd in a broader cultural and theological context by considering those artists - most but not all of them Jewish - who from the late nineteenth century onwards, but above all in the shadow of World War Two and the Holocaust, chose to represent Jesus as the Jew he historically was, and as an emblem of Jewish suffering in the present. For more on this theme, see my Church Times article here.

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Midnight Oil - Forgotten Years.

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Sunday, 11 July 2021

Artlyst: Sidney Nolan: Colour of the Sky – Auschwitz Paintings

My latest article for Artlyst is a preview of 'Sidney Nolan: Colour of the Sky - Auschwitz Paintings' at Sidney Nolan Trust:

'The emotions of Auschwitz were so deep and so strong, however, that they essentially overwhelmed him with the visit triggering ‘an unexpected and lasting retreat from any direct Auschwitz imagery.’

Yet, for that brief period between the Eichmann portraits and his leaving for Poland, Nolan joined Francis Bacon, Romare Bearden, Marc Chagall, Abraham Rattner, Graham Sutherland, and others in finding the image of the crucifixion to be a visual and emotional equivalent to the suffering imposed and endured in the Holocaust.

Nolan had first worked with religious imagery in the summer of 1951 and 1952 when he created a series of seven religious paintings, including Flight into Egypt and St Francis receiving the stigmata, all intended for a future exhibition that was never realised and some for the Blake Prize exhibition of 1952. The series was inspired by a European trip on which he realised ‘that the painters who moved me most (El Greco & Giotto) seemed men primarily of faith.’ Nolan, therefore, joined artists such as Arthur Boyd, Bernard Buffet, Eric Gill, David Jones, Colin McCahon, Georges Rouault, F.N. Souza, Stanley Spencer, and others in expressing a modernist preoccupation with religion and spirituality in this period. Nolan’s Auschwitz paintings are among the rawest expressions of the unredeemable horror that was the Holocaust.’

My other pieces for Artlyst are:

Interviews -
Articles -
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