Chiaroscuro

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January 09, 2004

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Chronicles

Written by John Howe

The vastest things are those we may not learn.

We are not taught to die, nor to be born,
Nor how to burn
With love.
How pitiful is our enforced return
To those small things we are the masters of.
Mervyn Peake, 1950

MERVYN PEAKE (1911 – 1968)

I am totally under the spell. (With a little luck, I will never recover.) Biographies are common reading fare in our house, the bookshelves are full of them. Especially monographies on artists; I mentioned the latest purchase last week: My Eyes Mint Gold, the life of Mervyn Peake.
Peake’s life seems to so ressemble his drawing and writing, with a hint of tragic levity in every penstroke and paragraph; darkness in the light, fey and hectic light in the darkness.

He seems to have lived his life fording a raging river not always of his own making, carefully draughting and painting stepping stones and placing them one after another in the torrent, and leaping from one to the next, his family in tow, only to finally slip and fall in excruciatingly slow motion into the waiting white water.

When I met his son Sebastian Peake a year ago, I was so flustered that I could barely mumble a few words. Isn’t it truly awful meeting people in some way connected to something you admire? You have in front of you a usually pleasant and admittedly affable human being (probably contemplating in secret mirth your clumsiness verbal and social) but facing you is an absolute molehill-made-mountain of your own emotion and experience, from the foothills of which you can barely glimpse the person you’ve just met. So, you have to scramble up scree slopes of mundanity (“I love your work” is the fatal phrase which will trigger the landslide of embarassment, from under which you dig yourself out only days later), clamber past the precarious faux-pas boulders just poised to squash you, to finally reach the summit. I can never do it without oxygen. And generally, when I get to the top, I forget I am standing on the brink of a precipice and plummet to my doom (generally accelerated in my fall by a totally stupid remark, a spilled drink, a treacherous carpet, not to mention the weighty backpack of regret, crammed with things-I-should-have-said) all the while hoping I DIDN’T leave my card afer all…

This biography still has me all shook up, but, I’ll soon be the proud owner of “Vast Alchemies”, another Peake biography, which is apparently even better… and what’s more, the author lives just across the lake from here. Where did I stow that rubber dingy?

Drawing for land
Brush every storm
Adrift on tempera waves.

With paper for sails
And pencils for oars
Tossed on a rectangular sea…

WHERE I GO ON E-BAY

Years and years ago, I had a show in Annapolis, Maryland, at a place called the Pendragon Gallery. After the opening, I imprudently left a number of pictures with the gallery to stay on display. Not long after, the gallery went chapter eleven, and despite mellifluous reassurances from the owners that no artists would suffer, they suddenly disappeared from circulation, along with a whole lot of my originals.
Well, they have started to resurface. This one was legitimately purchased (it’s not the current owner’s fault if the gallery probably never paid me) and is now up for sale.
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=35865&item=2215912607
Alas, I am beyond my means these days…
WHERE I GET SOME SOUND ADVICE

And in no uncertain terms at that…
From a recent review of the Art of the Two Towers book: “…though whomever designed (and approved) the clumsy rectangular swords of the Uruk-hai swords be sent back to design school.” Darn. I’ll never get that diploma now.
WHERE I GET A MOVE ON

Opening Friday the 9th of the Tolkien exhibition in Annecy. What!? That’s today! Thank goodness it’s at 6 p.m., I can still get there on time. Where DID I put those car keys?
For more information:
Bibliothèque Bonlieu – 1 rue Jean-Jaurès
BP 291 – 74007 ANNECY Cedex
Tél. : 33 4 50 33 87 04
Fax : 33 4 50 33 87 22
mail : bibanim@agglo-annecy.fr
WHERE I AM THE PRIZE IN A LOTTERY

Friday the 16th of January, I’ll be back in Paris, to give a guided tour of the show at the BNF. The FNAC sponsored a contest (love the tough questions in these things) and the 30 winners get… me! (Actually, I’m a bargain: low upkeep, easy-going, cheap to feed, stimulating conversationalist on the subject of your choice…) Should be fun.
Saturday afternoon, I’ll be signing my life away at the FNAC Forum (wherever that is, Forum des Halles I imagine. One of the great things about trips like this being I don’t need to think at all, just go where I’m told. “This way. Sit here. Sign books.”) I think it’s at 3:30 p.m. I will check.