ART AND POPULAR CULTURE

     A  long time ago I gave a paper at a conference on Popular Culture on the way the word  "lady" is used nowadays.It used to be used to describe a woman of the upper class  who was well behaved  and had good manners.  She was entitled to respect and had to be treated with the same good manners she showed to others.  She was unquestionably superior to the working class and expected deference from her social inferiors.  No special talent or skill was expected from her to justify this deference -- simply the accident of birth  and a certain inculcated code of behaviour.  Talent and skill, if she had them, were supposed to be limited to drawing room entertainment such as playing the piano. For instance, Jane  Austen was known both  in life and in death as a lady rather than as  an author.
     A lady's social role  was largely decorative.  In so far as she was useful, it was in the social arts and in household management.  She was expected to be attractive without being explicitly sexual in looks, dress and manner.  A lady was a person with  whom a gentleman  could find respite and solace when he relaxed from the onerous demands of his necessary duties.  What was considered serious work was incumbent on him, not on her.  All this  set her apart like a luxury article and made her superior without necessarily bestowing on her any further wealth or prestige.
     This view of the role of a particular kind of woman was expressed very eloquently in a Pears soap advertisement of the Edwardian era.  It showed a little girl washing herself to the accompaniment of the slogan "Preparing To Be A Beautiful  Lady."  Physical Beauty was part of the lady's role and had to be worked towards like all her other assets. At this point, I  should add, gentle birth was becoming less of a requisite  for a woman to be called a lady. Talent and skill were beginning to be recognised and becoming a lady was something one could acquire by merit.
     Pears soap advertisements were attractive and even inspiring  and my sisters and I were happy to have them decorating our bedroom.  But there were many other advertisements surrounding us, most of which were equally attractive and ingenious.  For instance our Tate and Lyle Golden Syrup tin bore,  as I think it  still does, the Biblical motto "Out of the strong came forth sweetness." This allusion to one of the feats of the Biblical hero Samson carried  a very loaded message. By devouring Tate and Lyle Golden Syrup, it suggested, we would not only  be acquiring strength of a legendary nature by enjoying its sweetness; we would be performing an outstandingly morally worthy act.  I was born in 1933  and I enjoyed all the advertisements with which I was surrounded as I grew up. The art of the advertiser was sufficiently  recognised in the skill it took that Dorothy Sayers used an advertising company as background for her detective story,  "Murder Must Advertise."
     As Melanie MacDonald has shown in her artistic reinterpretation of the advertising of the twentieth century, advertising took considerable artistic skill. Respected and successful  artists were often  commissioned as was Georgia O'Keeffe by Dole to paint a pineapple. The company paid for her to travel to Hawaii to do it.  She had respect as a working woman rather than for  birth and breeding, but respect was still involved --respect for the artist and respect for the general public. One series of advertisements I appreciated for  its wit and humour appeared on billboards for Guiness. It showed a zoo with a prominently displayed zookeeper. In each poster in the series a different animal was snatching his drink away from him as he exclaimed "My Goodness!  My Guiness!"  I looked forward to those posters although I was much too young to drink.
     Respect for the general public seems to be disappearing and when some attempt at respect is made it is pretty superficial, as when one says "cleaning lady", which is quite meaningless, rather than cleaning woman, and refers to all the women one knows as ladies and all  the men as gentlemen. The African Americans are not the only ones to feel that more respect is needed in our society generally.

ART AND HEALTH

    I am 85 years old and as is only natural at my age I have been having problems with my health. In fact if it had not been for medical intervention, I would be dead by now. Not that I even wanted the medical intervention all that much. I was not suicidal, but as a result of remembering previous lives I am quite convinced that death is neither final nor permanent but we just go on from life to life, learning all the lessons we have to learn before being released to a state of bliss. Not that the prospect of all these future lives is necessarily a pleasant one. Some orthodox believers think that believing that God is loving  means that all we have to do is be reasonably good -- not even perfect --  and we only have to ask God to hear our prayers and He will make  life easy for us.  Our own memories of personal experience can tell us that this is not the case.  A loving God does not necessarily want to make life easy for us any more than loving parents choose to give in to  their children's every whim. Expecting life to be easy is simply not realistic.

     So when I had a heart attack in New Year 2016, I knew that I only had to wait for death and it would come. I was  not at all afraid  of anything about it except the fact that  I was living alone and consequently would have to die alone. I did not want to die in hospital where the natural process of death would be interfered  with.  I wanted to die at home in the presence of  a good friend. So I called a really good friend who is very protective of me, but, since he is such  a good friend he refused to do any such thing but  called Emergency.  The ambulance came and I was shipped off to the St, Catharines General Hospital  and fitted with a pacemaker, which saved my life.

     A change that came about as a result is that a neighbor who  was living  in the rooming house next door and who had seen the ambulance come and go offered to move in with me and look after me as he had looked after his mother in her last years. He is still with me. He is a real expert on the subject of physical health since he once trained for the  Olympics.  He has helped me so much  with my exercise and nutrition, which are both really essential for health, that in spite of the fact that I had surgery for colon cancer in 2017 -- of course because of it as well -- my health is actually getting better. When I  last saw my cardiologist he said I was in great shape.

     But there is an additional reason for my improved health, both physical and  mental, and that is that I am constantly doing art. I always loved to do art ever since I was a child.  There is a longstanding tradition of artistic talent and interest in my father's family although my mother could only draw stick figures. My father could sketch quite well but   preferred to  treat it only as a hobby  and quite actively tried to discourage us from taking to art as a career because he said there was no money in it.  His father used  his  own interest in decoration as a silversmith and was successful at it, so my father really had no reason to be  so disparaging.  He actually had three children who were actively interested in art: myself, my younger brother and my youngest sister.  He succeeded in diverting me into an academic career, since this was also something in which I was deeply interested. and the teachers at my high school were strongly encouraging me to pursue it.  But my brother and sister both managed to get into art school. My sister went on to a respectable career as an art therapist for mentally ill patients until she married and was able to pursue art as a hobby. She has ended up giving art classes to tourists on Hawaii. My brother was absolutely determined to be a great artist and with the help of his wife, who supported him, he has achieved that goal, painting under the name of Malcolm Bucknall and showing his art on Facebook. He makes a lot more money in his old age than our father ended up doing, but of course that is quite an exceptional outcome.
     Until I retired I did not spend much time doing art, although I did find time for it on two occasions: in my last year at the University of Illinois and when I went on sabbatical from Brock to Paris in the l970's. I'll tell you about these two occasions later on. But ever since I retired in 1993 I have dedicated myself t artistic creation of various kinds and been deeply fulfilled and blissfully happy. I have been doing some writing but most of my creativity has gone into visual art. My Brock pension supplies me with ample means to do so.
     Part of my joy in art comes from the sheer application of color. I started out with watercolor and would just take a big brushfull of color and draw it across the paper in different directions. This was not a particularly  sophisticated technique, pretty naive and rudimentary, and I took no great pride in the results. Some people give up on art because they feel they are not  producing great art from the start and have little prospect  of   ever doing so,  but I did not even want to produce great art.  I left that to my brother, from whom I was actually buying his art because I admired  it. (I bought from other artists too). I just wanted to have fun and I got it by the application of color and the free and easy movement of my hand and arm across the paper.  It was quite as much therapy as what my sister had been doing with her patients and I felt completely relaxed.  I am sure this simple happiness was good for my mental and physical health and aided the good effects of exercise and nutrition. There was no struggle or striving, no competition as there had been in academic work, just the simple satisfaction of  doing this thing for the sheer sake of doing it and for no other reason.

     I have tried other media, such as gouache and oils and marker, and have continued to have fun trying these different techniques. I get quite a rush of inspiration every time  I try a  new medium. It is genuinely exciting. As I  get more proficient  with constant practice I take increased pleasure in the effects I am producing and like to show off the results. I took a course from Linda Hankin, another Niagara artist, in how to use the right or intuitive side of my brain in my art and the result is increased skill and joy as I apply my watercolor markers, which have become my preferred medium, to the paper , with no preconceived plan about what I am doing, and astonish myself about what takes place on the paper. I hardly need to watch television or read  as I have such an endless source of entertainment at my disposal. Strength through joy, as Hitler said,  But I think I have a far better way of obtaining it than Hitler ever did. I had times of being happy and productive in my academic career but also times of being completely miserable. I suppose there were things I had to learn from my distress. But now I am learning to be completely happy as an artist and something tells me that that is what I will be doing in my next existence. I am already looking forward to it.

 

EPIPHANIES

     I am starting this blog again, not with the immediate intention of reviewing any of the shows at N.A.C, but rather  with the intention of holding forth about Art and  Beauty as  I have  felt their impact at various moments in my life.

     I can clearly remember that first moment of revelation. It was a vision of colour which I have never forgotten. I must have been about four years old and my mother had taken it into her head to take me to a dance class in a studio near our home. I don't know if she had any particular reason for doing this, but she was always keen for me to acquire elegant accomplishments,  to make me into a lady.  She came from a poor, country family  herself, but she had ambitions for her children.  I remember that I was walking along,  holding her hand, full of trust and  confidence, when I suddenly caught sight of an empty Milk of Magnesia bottle lying in the gutter. I was instantly transported by the sight. It was such a beautiful blue, of the shade of blue  I  later learned to call Cobalt, that I felt I had never seen anything so heavenly.  I was far too young to think of an empty  bottle as trash. I was willing to accept everything I encountered as potentially wonderful. But this was an experience beyond anything I had come  across before.

     I was already past middle age when I  came across Abraham Maslow and learned what he had to say about peak experiences and their importance in forming a creative personality, but this was definitely my first peak  experience. So far as I have any conscious memories, at any rate. But before I came across Maslow, my studies in English literature taught me to call it an epiphany.

     For the benefit of those readers who do not know what an epiphany is, I turn to the Oxford English Dictionary.  It gives two definitions.  One is ecclesiastical:  "The festival commemorating the manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles  in the persons of the Magi, observed on Jan. 6th, the 12th day after Christmas." The second one is more general: "A manifestation or appearance of some divine or superhuman being."  In English literature it is frequently used figuratively, which is the sense in which I am using it. The blue of my Milk of Magnesia bottle struck me as so truly glorious that it seemed almost divine, entering our ordinary world from some higher sphere. Not that I could have used those words to describe it at four years old, but it was what I experienced emotionally and only now can I find the words to describe it.

     Epiphanies do not come too often, and I can only think of one other one, although I do experience a more human, natural kind of joy every time I encounter Art or Beauty and particularly when I practice art myself.  This other epiphany came when I went abroad for the first time, to the South of France,  I had received a good grade in French on my School Certificate  examination, a test which all English high school students had to pass at the age of sixteen before going on to pass a more advanced one at the age of eighteen.  To reward and encourage me for this achievement, my father had arranged for me to go on an exchange visit with the daughter of a prefect, that is the man in charge of one of the administrative units into which France is divided. His prefecture, in the Southwest of France, was a handsome old building but the full glory of the South of France did not burst upon me until the prefect took us to their summer cabin on the beach by the Mediterranean.

     Before that I had only swum in the chilly waters off the coast of Devon, and the Mediterranean was so smooth and warm and calm and welcoming and such a beautiful blue. Furthermore I had come equipped with a shabby one piece bathing suit whereas the prefect's daughters sported bikinis, which has just come into fashion, and I did not want to be seen sitting around on the beach with them. So I was hardly ever out of the water, to the  alarm of the prefect who thought I was so much more immature than his daughters that I was hardly safe to be left on my own. He kept watching me from the beach, afraid  I would drown. But I did not let his fears stop me.

     I emerged from the water one  morning in such a state of bliss, it was another epiphany. In fact I felt even closer to the Divine than I had done on  the previous occasion. It was a true mystical experience  and just as unexpected as my first epiphany had been.  No one had  told me that such a thing was possible. Apart from getting lectures from a tiresome, Calvinistic  aunt, my only spiritual training had consisted of reading the Psalms as part pf my exploration of the  Old Testament, which my mother had told me to read but had not attempted to explain to me.  The chief thing I got out of the  Old Testament was respect for a lot of impressive characters who led very exciting, sexy lives. But no one had suggested that my own experiences might  be anything like theirs.

      My mystical experience was one of joy and love -- universal love. I felt I had fallen in love with the whole world and with everyone in it. I had heard a lot about falling in love since I came to France, especially from the prefect's daughters, but  I had been attending a single sex school  and had never experienced anything like this before. I thought "What is this? What is happening to me? Can this be love? Yes, I must have fallen in love. But  who with?  It must  be Maurice Doucet, the  prefect's secretary, who has been so kind to me."  And I did make sheep's eyes at Maurice for a while, but without embarking on much of a romance. In fact it felt like a bit of a disappointment to  be reduced to one man after  having been in love with the whole world. But the memory of that pinnacle of bliss as a reaction to natural beauty remains with me as a lasting memory and does not fade away.