Between: holocaust

Showing posts with label holocaust. 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.

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.

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.

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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Bruce Cockburn - You've Never Seen Everything.

Monday, 27 February 2017

Georg Mayer-Marton: work in churches has considerable religious significance

George Mayer-Marton (1897-1960) was born in Gyor, Hungary and served in the Austro-Hungarian Army during the First World War. From 1919 to 1924 he studied art in Vienna and Munich. He immigrated to England in 1938 to escape the threat of Nazi Germany.

Mayer-Marton studied the art of Byzantine (face) mosaic at Ravenna between the wars. Following his appointment at Liverpool College of Art in 1952, he received commissions from the Roman Catholic Church to carry out mosaic works at a number of churches in the area, as well as a commission for a font at the Anglican Church of St Michael and All Angels in Tettenhall, West Midlands.

His abiding interest in music was reflected in his painting and mosaics, not only in subject matter but also in the chromatic use of colour, and the feeling for structure and form which characterize his landscapes. In 1957 all the different strands came together with the Pentecost Mosaic, amongst his finest work, now displayed at the Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral.

The Pentecost mosaic was originally installed at the Church of the Holy Ghost in Ford, Liverpool and when the church was faced with demolition, a campaign was undertaken by the artist’s niece, Johanna Braithwaite, Robin Riley, Gordon Millar, Brian Drury and Sister Anthony Wilson of the Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral to save it. The process, supervised by Robin Riley, was technically challenging. The mosaic was transferred to the Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral in 1989.

The mosaic at the Church of the Holy Rosary is currently under threat following the decision of the Diocese of Salford to close the church. Catherine Pepinster, writing in The Observer, says, 'The arts heritage body, the Public Monuments and Sculpture Association, has warned the bishop, the Right Rev John Arnold, that the mosaic’s destruction would be “a very regrettable loss, if not an act of iconoclasm”.

According to the association’s chairman, John Lewis, the émigré artists of postwar Britain, of whom Mayer-Marton was a leading figure, are only now being appreciated by art historians. In a letter to Arnold, Lewis cited the Oldham mosaic as “an unusual commission … which must be preserved. Mayer-Marton’s work in churches during this period has considerable historic and religious significance.”

The eight-metre-high mosaic was installed in the church in the 1950s and is made of natural stone and glass tesserae, giving it a striking sheen, typical of Byzantine work. The original piece had frescoes depicting St John to Jesus’s left and his mother Mary to his right, but these were covered over with white emulsion in 1980.'

His great-nephew, Nick Braithwaite, who is campaigning to save the Oldham mosaic, said: “The mosaic is inspiring and beautiful and it dominates the church. It would be disastrous if it were lost, and would signal a dreadful failure to understand its unique value. We are urging the diocese to think again.

“My great-uncle, who was of Hungarian-Jewish descent, worked on this mosaic just 10 years after the war and losing his parents and brother in the Holocaust. It must have been very poignant for him to work on an image of the suffering Jesus.”'

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Woven Hand - The Speaking Hands.

Wednesday, 27 April 2016

Jan Vanriet: The Music Boy

Photograph, photograph, photograph, photograph. Jan Vanriet, like Gerhard Richter and Marlene Dumas, among others, often uses photographs as source material for his paintings. The Music Boy is a quadripytch based on a photograph of Vanriet's Grandmother and Uncle prior to the Second World War. Vanriet paints the same innocent image - a mother and child, folk music in a family setting - four times in varying degrees of detail and focus, as well as different colour combinations. These different renditions of the same image serve to engender a variety of emotional responses to an autobiographical image which is in some sense universalized through its varied repetition.

Repetition of the image also brings an element of uncertainty to a seemingly innocent image laden with a multiplicity of artistic and literary associations. Use of different degrees of focus and detail - the image fading in and out of focus - raise questions of memory in family and oral histories together with issues of endurance both personally - Vanriet's Uncle died of tuberculosis developed in Dachau - and in terms of the media we use to tell our stories and retain our images - in this cases images based on a photograph (a medium with built-in fade and frailty).

Vanriet repeats the trick in The Contract, a polyptych of the artist’s parents together on the dance floor having survived a concentration camp. He draws out the combination of happiness and hope with suffering and grief which is contained in this image and its history through the variation in his treatment of it. Focusing on particular details, changing backgrounds and colours, using silhouettes and patterns, he evokes nuances and perspectives of memory and consequence. Mauthausen, the concentration camp in Austria where his parents first met, is referenced by a panel where the couple’s feet are superimposed on a red triangle, the badge worn by political prisoners in the camps. The combined effect of the eleven panels is to evoke and explore the nature of the contract entered into by this traumatized yet freed couple.

Vanriet is “a pivotal figure in the world of contemporary narrative painting” (Jan Vanriet, The Music Boy Press Release - http://www.thenewartgallerywalsall.org.uk/info/press/press-releases). Narrative, however, has been a major 'no, no' in much modern art. As a reaction against historical, mythical and religious painting, the literary and the linear were anathematized. As a painter who is also a poet and who collaborates with his novelist wife, Simone Lenaerts, Vanriet is clearly a counter-reaction to this anathematization of narrative in modern art. However, in his art, this not primarily expressed in terms of the linear and literary.

Modernist narratives are multi-layered with contradictory voices creating polyphony. That phrase from a musical concept is relevant to the diversity of voices found in many modernist novels and to the multiple panels of works like The Music Boy and The Contract. Simultaneity, contradiction, polyphonic fragmentation, paradox; these are modernist techniques revealing transcendental negativity; that is, what cannot be spoken and the existence of worlds beyond limits. This world of contemporary narrative painting, inhabited by Vanriet, Richter, Dumas and Luc Tuymans, among others, is one in which “events and ideas are not expressed explicitly, but implied through subtle hints and allusions, creating an ambiguous collage of disconnected fragments and details” (http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/luc-tuymans); a world of modernist narratives visualised.

Vanriet’s contribution to this world is an art which makes significant reference to autobiography, history and memory as they feature in the mythical, political and religious stories we tell. Lenaerts is also closely involved and both create using Vanriet’s family history including that of the Uncle who was arrested in Antwerp and transported to Dachau; a “descent into hell which he, once back home, wrote down with his last remaining strength as his life flickered out silently on the flowered sofa, in his mother's arms.” (S. Lenaerts, ‘A Scrap of Time’ in De Morgan, July 2012 - http://www.citybooks.eu/en/cities/citybooks/p/detail/a-scrap-of-time)

Martin Herbert writes that Vanriet’s work reveals “a world that glimmers with significance” but, in which, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, we cannot “connect signifier and signified.” We can’t “hold onto the past for lessons,” as we are fragile, “as fragile and fallible as our memories” (M. Herbert, ‘Hide and Seek’ in Jan Vanriet: The Music Boy, The New Art Gallery Walsall, 2016).

This sense is, perhaps, most clear in Vanriet’s Horse series. These paintings update The Contract by featuring a husband and wife - Vanriet and Lenaerts - together in a shared activity; in this case, that of playing a pantomime horse. However, Vanriet removes the costume that would make comic sense of their shared activity leaving just the awkwardness of their unusual posture in settings which reference Edvard Munch’s Moonlight or Piero della Francesca’s Madonna del Parto. Vanriet and Lenaerts play out their shared activity in a role and settings which no longer make sense.

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James Horner - Remembrance, Remembrance.

Saturday, 25 April 2015

Windows on the world (339)

Yad Vashem, 2014

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Sufjan Stevens - Fourth Of July.

Saturday, 7 February 2015

Stations of The Cross and Holocaust

Work by Christopher Clack features again in the second Stations of The Cross exhibition to be held at St Marylebone Parish Church. Art Below presents an exhibition of 16 artists’ representations of the Passion of Christ in London’s St. Marylebone Parish church to coincide with Lent, in support of the Missing Tom Fund.

Stations of the Holocaust is an exhibition of hand carved and painted sculptures on the theme of Jesus’ last hours juxtaposed with scenes of the Jewish Holocaust by another commission4mission member, Jean Lamb, which can be seen at Coventry Cathedral from Monday 16th February to Good Friday 3rd April 2015. There will be a preview of the exhibition from 5.00pm with the official opening at 6.00pm after Evening Prayer on Monday 16th February.

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Tribe of Judah - Sublime.

Tuesday, 27 January 2015

Holocaust Memorial Day

Here is the speech I gave today at the Holocaust Memorial Day event in Redbridge:

Last year I was fortunate, through my sabbatical visits and through the Tour of the Holy Land organised by the East London Three Faiths Forum, to see a wide variety of artwork in churches and synagogues by the Russian Jewish artist Marc Chagall. Chagall was controversial as a Jewish artist for painting images of Christ’s crucifixion.

Chagall’s church commissions were created, ‘In the name of the freedom of all religions’ while, for him, ‘Christ ... always symbolized the true type of the Jewish martyr.’ He depicted this perception most famously in White Crucifixion painted in 1938 in response to the persecution of Jews by the Nazis, including Kristallnacht. Central to this painting, among scenes of anti-Jewish violence which included the torching of a synagogue, is Jesus on the cross with a tallit, the Jewish prayer shawl, draped around him as a loin cloth. For Chagall, ‘Jesus on the cross represented the painful predicament of all Jews, harried, branded, and violently victimized in an apparently God-forsaken world.’

A similar perception is described by Elie Wiesel, an Auschwitz survivor, in his book Night. There he writes: ‘The SS hanged two Jewish men and a youth in front of the whole camp. The men died quickly, but the death throes of the youth lasted for half an hour. "Where is God? Where is he?" someone asked behind me. As the youth still hung in torment in the noose after a long time, I heard the man call again, "Where is God now?" And I heard a voice in myself answer: "Where is he? He is here. He is hanging there on the gallows.’

Seen by Elie Wiesel in the context of Judaism and of the humiliation of God in going with Israel into exile and suffering, for Christians this moving story has a striking resonance because of the crucifixion. For Jews and Christians alike, the face of desolation wears another aspect, that of the presence and providence of God.

In Christian vocabulary this could be described as the prayer of incarnation. This is a prayer of presence; a prayer which recognizes that God shares our pain, frailty and brokenness. We pray acknowledging that God suffers with us. From Christ’s life, Christians also recognise two other types of prayer: the prayer of resurrection in which we pray for a miracle; and the prayer of transfiguration where, as Samuel Wells has written, ‘we see a whole reality within and beneath and beyond what we thought we understood.’ In times of bewilderment and confusion we pray that God might reshape our reality, to give us a new and right spirit to trust that even in the midst of suffering and hardship, truth can still be experienced and shared.

At Yad Yashem, on the East London Three Faiths Forum Tour of the Holy Land, I saw examples of this prayer in the words of Aharon Appelfeld who said, ‘From among the horror grew another morality, another love, another compassion. These grew wild – no one gave them a name.’ Similarly, on the Yad Vashem website I read of survivors, ‘dazed, emaciated, bereaved beyond measure,’ who ‘gathered the remnants of their vitality and the remaining sparks of their humanity, and rebuilt.’ ‘They never meted out justice to their tormentors – for what justice could ever be achieved after such a crime? Rather, they turned to rebuilding: new families forever under the shadow of those absent; new life stories, forever warped by the wounds; new communities, forever haunted by the loss.’

I also saw pages from the illustrated Bible which self-taught artist Carol Deutsch loving crafted in 1941 in Antwerp, during the turmoil of the Second World War, as a gift for his daughter’s second birthday. Carol Deutsch and his wife Fela were informed upon and murdered in the extermination camps. However, their daughter Ingrid, who was hidden with a Catholic family in the countryside, survived, as did the Bible, which miraculously remained intact. Deutsch, who died in Buchenwald, left behind a vital estate - a stalwart resistance to everything the Nazis had attempted to obliterate.

Finally, for those who are Christians, Karen Sue Smith has noted that ‘Chagall’s genius was to use Jesus’ crucifixion to address Christians, to alert them by means of their own symbol system to the systematic cruelty taking place in the Holocaust.’ For Christians then, our response should, I think, be in line with the words of Pope Francis from an interview in 2013. There he spoke of his admiration for White Crucifixion praising Jews for keeping their faith despite the Holocaust and other “terrible trials” throughout history (by implication, including those for which the Church is cupable), reaffirmed Judaism as the “holy root” of Christianity saying that, where this understood and affirmed, a Christian should not ever be an anti-Semite because “to be a good Christian it is necessary to understand Jewish history and traditions.”

I pray that this will be so for my own faith community and that God might reshape our reality, to give us a new and right spirit to trust that even in the midst of suffering and hardship, truth can still be experienced and shared.

See here and here for reports and photographs from the Redbridge event.

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Azamra - Shuvi Nafshi.

Wednesday, 21 January 2015

commission4mission's January Newsletter

commission4mission's latest newsletter includes several exciting announcements and new partnerships:

New Day Dawning by Colin Joseph Burns

"The whole earth is filled with awe at your wonders; where morning dawns, where evening fades, you call forth songs of joy." Psalm 65:8

'This month we announce three new developments which we believe will serve to enhance the work of commission4mission in the coming year.

Good news! The Charity Commission has approved commission4mission’s application to become a registered charity. In order to complete the process, we need to hold a general meeting at which we agree our charitable objects with members.

We plan to do this as part of a wider Arts Event and Service to take place at St Stephen’s Church, 39 Walbrook, London EC4N 8BN on Saturday 14 March from 1pm to 4.30 pm. All are warmly invited.

The programme will include drawing workshops using various media, a series of on-screen meditations to dip into, and conclude with a service of thanksgiving celebrating the arts. Please rsvp if you would like to attend.

This year presents a new challenge for c4m’s secretary Rev’d Jonathan Evens, who is to become Priest for Partnership Development at two central London churches. He will be Priest-in-Charge at St Stephen Walbrook and also an Associate Minister at St Martin-in-the-Fields.

While Jonathan has said it will be a wrench to leave his post at St John’s Seven Kings and his friends in the Redbridge Deanery, he recognises that this new role offers a unique opportunity which involves all of his key interests in ministry: ‘This will include forming partnerships between the two churches as well as with businesses in the City of London and cultural organisations around Trafalgar Square. Both churches have significant cultural programmes and a history of artistic commissions, and I hope to play a part in promoting and developing their artistic engagement,’ he says.

We congratulate Jonathan on his new appointment, and hope his experience and continuing involvement with commission4mission will assist him in this aim.

Oasis Trust to be c4m’s chosen charity for the next three years, subject to annual review. Since 2009 we have donated ten per cent of the proceedings from commissions and sales to a different charity each year, usually one that supports work with children and young people. This year we were able to make a gift to Oasis Trust, and we now look forward to developing an ongoing relationship which will be of mutual benefit. While supporting Oasis, we believe this partnership will help to broaden the scope of commission4mission and open up further opportunities for our artist members.

St ations of the Holocaust by Jean Lamb at Coventry Cathedral.

Hand carved and painted sculptures on the theme of Jesus’ last hours juxtaposed with scenes of the Jewish Holocaust
more...

Monday 16th February to Good Friday 3rd April 2015. Preview from 5pm with official opening at 6pm after Evening Prayer.

Coventry Cathedral, 1 Hill Top, Coventry, CV1 5AB. Tel 024 7652 1200

We hope many Artist Members and Associates will be able to make the event highlighted above at St Stephen Walbrook on Saturday 14 March, when we will revisit c4m’s aims and purpose as agreed by the Charity Commission. It is a great opportunity to get together, and promises to be a good afternoon.

We would like to hear from Members who may be interested in organising a c4m event in their locality – in a cathedral, a church, gallery or elsewhere. In particular we are looking for a church willing to host a Big Draw event in October, and for Members to volunteer to take part.'

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Colin Burns - Linger Here.

Friday, 16 January 2015

Icons of Loss: Samuel Bak

'Viewers joining the six-decade-long journey of Samuel Bak’s works, as presented in this exhibition, are presented with a multi-faceted experience – an encounter with an artist dealing head-on with the basic question of “how” underlying the language of art, with an artist debating with himself about the abstract, the figurative and the gamut between them. His varying stylistic periods reveal an artist capable of producing fine pencil drawings in the classical tradition, on the one hand, and thick, layered oil brushstrokes of pasticcio color on large canvasses. Every period reveals a little – the configurative response of the artist’s journey in a sea of expressive artistic possibilities – but conceals twice as much about the inner burden. Thus until the decisive juncture, where artistic expression and inner truth meet. The journey and burden are shaped into a single identity, which, while it may be paradigmatic, is nevertheless unique and private - the arduous road of Samuel Bak spanning sixty years of creativity.'

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Zbigniew Preisner - Labirynt.

Small pebbles on the graves of the dead

Francine Mayran has been exhibiting her paintings and sculptures since 1999. Her artistic work of memory on the Holocaust has developed in parallel since 2008:

'She thinks that painting imposed itself as an imperative, to serve the transmission of an intransmissible genocide, the one of men, women and children, whose only crime was to be Jewish or Gypsy, or in 1915 Armenian, or in 1975 Cambodian or Tutsi in Rwanda in 1994.

She says, as the American painter Samuel Bak, "I didn’t choose the Shoah, but the Shoah chose me to become one of its bearers of testimony".

Her aim is to connect photos and objective evidence of the past, and to link them through a personal pictorial creation, as in a line of descent, so that these images remain and live on and so that through painting, they become moments of the present.

She tries as a bearer of memory, to take over from the memory of the last direct witnesses, who little by little pass away.

Her creations also try to be echo of other memories, those of the Gypsies, those of the homosexuals, those of the resistants deported because of their ideas,as well as those of the handicapped persons.

As the artist says: “To speak, to write, to paint are small pebbles on the graves of the dead, words of support to survivors to allow them to leave their burden of guilt and responsibility and pass on their message.”'

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Yaakov Shwekel - Shema Yisroel.