Stendhal Meets Rossini / Who Crows for You?

Above Bantam, comic shadow caricature by British artist Charles Henry Bennett, Victorian illustrator.

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Stendhal (Marie Henri Beyle), author of The Red and the Black, describing an incident in a visit to Italy in 1817—

We halted in Terracina, and there…we were invited to take supper with a party of travellers newly arrived out of Naples. Gathered about the table, I observed some seven or eight persons, amongst whom, in particular, my eyes lighted upon a fair-haired young man, of some five or six-and-twenty years of age, astonishingly handsome in spite of a slight touch of baldness. I pressed him for news of Naples, and in particular, of music in that city: he answered my curiosity with answers that were clear-cut, brilliant and humorous. I enquired of him whether, when I reach Naples, I might still hope to see [Gioachino] Rossini’s Otello. I pursued the topic, asserting that, in my opinion, Rossini was the bright hope of the Italian school; that he was the only living composer who had true genius as his birthright. At this point I noticed that my man seemed faintly embarrassed, while his companions were grinning openly. To cut a long story short, this was Rossini.

standing straddle-legged, balancing as it rattled

from a plant photograph by Karl Blossfeldt

OIL PAINT AND GREASE PAINT: Autobiography of Laura Knight. New York: MacMillan, 1936. p. 173—

Sally Hicks the fish-buyer, Mrs. Porritt's friend, was big, red-faced and as strong as a man. She always drove her cart at a furious pace, standing straddle-legged and balancing it as it rattled and bumped over the cobbles. One night Sally was driving home along the cliff road with the money from the sale of her fish in her pocket. Suddenly two men sprang out of the hedge, one seizing the horse's head and one hanging on the tail of the cart. Sally had the whip in her hand and with it slashed the man off in front, then she dived back at the other with her fishgutting knife, and drove on as fast as she could lick.

When she went to clean her cart in the morning she found four fingers lying inside.

penny whistle popular tunes and Scottish airs

Above Image based on the plant photography of Karl Blossfeldt

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OIL PAINT AND GREASE PAINT: Autobiography of Laura Knight. New York: MacMillan, 1936. p. 173—

The Beer house might well have been called the “Bear Garden.” We led poor old Mrs. Beer a dance and she loved it. She used to scream at us and we screamed at her—the noise was terrible every morning when she put a wet sponge down Joey Carter-Wood's neck to wake him and make him get up. She was always glad when we came back after an absence, and once she said, “I've felt that miserable all the time you've been away. It's that quiet and I miss the music!” Up till then we had been conscience-stricken about our nightly band.

Joey Carter-Wood played Scotch airs and popular tunes on the penny whistle. He had both good ear and voice. Thompson used paint brushes as drumsticks to play on two empty biscuit-tins, kettledrums to us. Harold [Knight] provided the big drum by beating his fist on the canvas of a big life study left behind by a former lodger, which picture was used in summer to hide the empty fire-grate. I hummed through a tissue-covered comb. We rehearsed our orchestra nearly every night, and generally stopped at two o'clock in the morning out of consideration for Mrs. Beer, who slept in the adjoining room. Apparently we need not have bothered!

There were two [Augustus] “John” drawings in our room left by their owner in lieu of rent. Most of Mrs. Beer's treasures were piled up underneath her bed; they included boxes full of books, which were no good to her, for she could not read. We always laughed to see her on Sunday afternoon, washed and shining, with her hair slicked back tighter than ever, dressed in her best black, sitting in the kitchen with a Bible in her hands; like as not it was upside down she did not know the difference.

Mary Snyder Behrens | Gape

Gape (2005) © Mary Snyder Behrens

Above Selected work from a series of intricate handmade bundles (called Trammels), with undisclosed contents, about palm size, made in 2004-2005 by Iowa artist Mary Snyder Behrens. Copyright © the artist.

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Virginia Nicholson, Among the Bohemians: Experiments in Living 1900-1939. New York: HarperCollins, 2002, p. 73—

…Quentin and Julian Bell [sons of Bloomsbury writers and artists Clive Bell and Vanessa Bell, sister of Virginia Woolf] had one special London Game that titillated them more than all the others, and which gave them early lessons in human psychology. They would manufacture a small tightly wrapped parcel, and drop it on to the Gordon Square pavement below; from their upper-floor window they would then watch with fascination the reactions of passers-by to the potential "treasure." Would they ignore it? Would they immediately pick it up and pocket it? Or would they edge it into the gutter with their foot before sidling across to "accidentally" appropriate it? A very few might even seize the package and rip it open, only to find that it contained—nothing.

A Farewell to Artist Les Coleman

Les Coleman / RIP

Our friend of many years has died.

British artist Les Coleman liked to say that he was born "one day before peace broke out," making him one of the last World War II "war babies." He died peacefully on January 17, 2013, at Trinity Hospice in Clapham. I recall that we were introduced by another friend, Patrick Hughes. We never met, but for many years he sent me a torrent of "unthunks." In one of them, for example, he simply printed up a card (blank on the verso) that on the recto reads like this: THIS CARD IS TEMPORARILY OUT OF STOCK.

At the conclusion of one of his books, titled Meet the Art Students (1997), he added a brilliantly absurd author's note. Here it is—

Les Coleman moved to Clapham Junction in 1967. During the summer of that year, The Summer of Love, he lost his wallet on Dartmoor containing two pound notes. A doctor found the wallet and handed it in to the police. It took until the autumn to trace Coleman to his new address. He collected the wallet from the Lavender Hill Police Station to discover the money was still inside. In the autumn of 1996 he painted the walls of his front room Sunbeam with Moonshine on the woodwork. In keeping with this color scheme the room has a blue fitted carpet (80% wool) and yellow venetian blinds (made to measure). Among his possessions Coleman owns a small African sculpture which stands on his mantelpiece despite having one leg shorter than the other. 

Over the years, I republished many of his unthunks and his drawings, some in Ballast Quarterly Review, and more recently on this blog. I "thunk" he would have chuckled at the gravestone that I've made for him (see above). His humor lives on—

The three letters of the alphabet I most dislike are D, I and Y.

One day America will turn into one big gun.

Why do rabbit droppings look like currants and taste like shit?

Once dead the artist falls into a rut.

He put on his dark glasses and rode off into the sunset.

Is turvy-topsy the same as topsy-turvy?

Priestly Curators

Mary Snyder Behrens, American Canvas Series, mixed media, 4" w x 5.5" h

British artist-writer Patrick Hughes, from the essay "A Bit of Artobiography," in the catalog of his recent exhibition at Flowers Galleries in London, titled Patrick Hughes: Fifty Years in Show Business 1961-2011—

"The museum of art has replaced the church for popular devotion, and so the curator is the new priest. The priestly curator's job is to introduce new mysteries and moralities to the impressionable public, backed up by spectacle and verbiage.

My art has always appealed directly to the people, calling out over the heads of the priests straight to the congregation, doing the vicars and bishops of official art out of a job. I am an unbeliever. I do not speak in tongues. Thus officialdom ignores me. I like to think that art is a lingua franca which can be understood by all the inhabitants of the planet. The idea of Korean art or New Zealand art or Polish art or Nicaraguan art or Californian art or Kenyan art is anathema to me. Writers may be stuck in their languages, but we artists can be seen and understood by all."

Les Coleman | Just Thunking

Whatever can be said about British artist and writer Les Coleman (whose work we have followed for decades), he is not thoughtless.

He thunks, he unthunks—and now in his latest book, he's been having afterthunks. It's called (appropriately) Afterthunks (Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Boekie Woekie, 2011. ISBN 978-90-78191-25-4). Above is a scan of the cover, as beautifully designed as are the interior pages by Colin Sackett. Some of Coleman's other books are available here at the same publisher's website (scroll down the page to find his name). Like many of his earlier publications, this is a book of his puzzling aphorisms (his thunks), ever so wonderfully interspersed with his equally "doubletake" drawings (one of which is shown below). As for the verbal thunks themselves, here are some teasing samples of those:

A triple-edged sword.

What is it about rag that makes a bull see red?

Houdini spent his life escaping from himself.

Terrified of shooting himself in the foot, he had both feet amputated.

"How the Electric Chair Saved Me From the Firing Squad"

As I have myself have always said, Les is more.