Goddess or Witch?

   W hen I held a reception for my May 2019 art show at NAC, some young women artists came up to me and asked if I had any pictures of Goddesses because they were planning a group show of Goddesses and would like me to be in it. I said I had half a dozen, but then when I looked through my collection of my own work I found I had a whole  lot more. Getting quite carried away, I did several more and ended up with an entire show of my own. Not hearing any more about the projected group show, I decided to put mine on.

     I learned about the Greek and Roman divinities in high school and was quite moved by them, responding to them pretty much as if  I were an ancient Greek or Roman myself,  But we did not hear anything about any other religion or mythology  apart  from reading the Bible, which, according to British educational practice at the time, we read without any reference to denominational teaching ,  I do not have any Norse or Hindu divinities in my show. However, although it is very bad theology to call the Blessed Virgin Mary divine, I have included her because I think she is so important and I have such a strong attachment to her.  Taken altogether, my show is a tribute to many feminine aspects of the Divine. As the Kabbalah claims, all the different religions are attempts to reach the Divine, which, in itself, is beyond human comprehension.

     My Goddess show will be viewed in the Community Room of the Mahtay Cafe, September 1 to 15, with an opening reception in the same place in the afternoon  of Sunday, September 1, 2019, from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m.

      The Book Launch, which is part of the same event, is devoted to a second edition of "The Witch Poems", a book of humorous verse which I first wrote and published in 1995 to a fair degree of local success. In fact it sold out and people have been asking for more copies ever since, so I have set out to meet the demand. The Book Launch will take place in the Community Room of the Mahtay Cafe in the afternoon of Sunday, September 8, 2019,  from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m., together with a reception.

     For those who do not already know "The Witch Poems", I should explain that it is a book of poems that are both humorous and at the same time quite genuinely religious, written under the persona of a witch. In my original edition I made some attempt to explain this persona in a foreword in which I referred to certain feminists in Quebec who were calling themselves witches. In fact, a little later, W.I.T.C.H. became quite a popular acronym among feminists all over North America. But simply calling myself a feminist was not a complete explanation.

     Now that I am setting out to give the whole truth, I will say that I had actually been quite strongly influenced  by my friendship with a Gay male witch by the name of Basil Ivan Rakoczi. He is chiefly know for his work as an artist which after his death brought him quite a lot of fame. After running into him at an academic gathering through one of those coincidences which Carl Gustav Jung considers quite uncanny, I spent a great deal of time with him while on sabbatical in Paris many years ago. He took a friendly interest in my writing and painting and it is largely because of him that I have become so productive in retirement. In fact I might almost say that it is only now that, owing to his encouragement, I have embarked on my real career. Unfortunately we parted on bad terms shortly before his death because I was so shocked and frightened by some of his magical practices. I write about this relationship in the completely new foreword to my book.

     Another new feature consists of illustrations of charms and spells which I drew myself and which are much more personal than the otherwise good illustrations done by Lesley Bell for the first edition.

     I owe Basil, to whom I have become reconciled, a debt of gratitude for opening up to me a whole new area of creative independence. On this occasion I ask myself, am I good or bad, loving or hostile, creative or destructive, wise or psychotic, goddess or witch?  But I am really not too concerned about how I may be viewed  because basically I am happy and at peace with myself. I am constantly reminded of my Grandmother's state of depression in old age when she used to repeat "I'm an idle old woman, I might as well be dead." I am so much better off because I am not at all idle and I am glad to be alive, whatever anyone thinks. And so I ask my readers and viewers to accept both aspects of my show: the Goddess and the Witch, and not choose between them.




   

The Rite of Spring

Some people who know my work came to the show Lynne Mawson and I held at the Mahtay 

Café in March to celebrate International Women’s Day. It was such a tribute to women that the same people will probably be surprised to learn that I will be holding a show at NAC, May 25 - June 2, that will be almost as much a tribute to the male gender.

What accounts for this? I have resurrected some paintings I did in Paris in 1974-75 and have not shown before. The show also includes some new paintings, I did quite recently in the same vein. I left for Paris in 1974 to work on a sabbatical research project on Marcel Proust. This plan fell through because I discovered on reaching Paris that the information on which I’d based this project was inaccurate. Other Proust research took its place and did, fortunately, lead to publication because I was spending a lot of time with other Proust scholars.

Other people I met were the man I loved but was obliged to leave, and my artistic mentor, Basil Ivan-Rakoczi, who lived in Paris but whom I’d already met in Canada at a meeting of the Learned  Societies.

He had congratulated me there on the paper I gave on retellngs of the fairy tale The Sleeping Beauty, saying he was very interested in folklore and inviting me to look him up in Paris.

I was very keen to do so because he had offered to introduce me to Robert Graves and  Samuel Beckett. In fact, he never did do this.

I think the fact of the matter was that he had actually got to know both men by mixing in the same cultural circles but they had taken a dislike a to him upon finding he was gay. But I did meet people who know him, quite unexpectedly, by turning up at the Quaker  Meeting House in Paris and finding it full of his pictures.

When I got to know him better, I discovered that he had come to Paris from Ireland where he had worked as a Freudian lay analyst, a poet and a part-time painter.

In Paris, he painted full time, told fortunes and enrolled some young friends in a group for transactional analysis, which I joined,

Irish Quakers had invited him to join the Religious Society of Friends, which he did, although with some doubts about his own suitability.

His Hungarian father and his Irish mother, who was an heriditary witch and had introduced him to witchcraft mixed with Catholicism, had met while travelling in Ireland with the gypsies. He himself was an honorary gypsy and wrote a book on the Tarot, which he illustrated himself, as a means for gypsy initiation.

In English, the title was the Painted Caravan, and in French La Roulotte. Initiatique

He preferred to say Gypsy rather than Romany. I have this book in both versions and frequently use it.

I was not shocked or surprised to hear all this as my own mother had made me quite used to this kind of thing, although she would have been shocked to be called a witch. She considered herself a good Scottish Presbyterian.

The two of them read the same Occult magazine called Prediction.

On a typical weekend in Paris, I attended Basil’s “At Home” on Saturday afternoon, Quaker meeting on Sunday morning and the Louvre on Sunday afternoon. The love of my life visited me on Sunday evening. I also attended when I could a life drawing group led by Basil. He got me painting in watercolours on  very large sheets of paper.

I took these paintings home with me from Paris. Recently, I finished and polished them. And I painted some more pictures in the same size and style.

It is all these pictures I shall be showing at NAC in May.

Basil was known as a symbolist painter, going in for dreams, legends and fantasy. This is very much my own inclination. Recently, I had a visit from a couple of artistic friends who asked me if my own work had been influenced by the Tarot.

I said my first influence had been the illustrations in my children’s books but I showed them the Tarot books by Basil.

The paintings I did in Paris are mainly based on Greek, Roman and Norse mythology.

They represent Bacchus, Phoebus Apollo, Ganymede and the halls of Asgard. Also included are some semi-nudes of male figures.

There are just two examples from the Christian story. That is the Grail and the serpent in the garden of Eden. I have included one angel but angels are found in more than one religion.

I feel I’ve gone back to a time in my life where I was younger, more open to experience, and more poetic.

Basil died soon after I got back from Paris, but his influence is still with me. I think, though, I have finally shaken off the curse he put on me because I strongly disapproved of his using bad magic as  well as good. No wonder he had doubts about his suitability as a Quaker.

Greetings

Greetings to those who missed the Women's Day Art Show set up by Lynne Mawson and me! Lynne brought back all my unsold pictures to my house. If you want to see them, call me at 905 685 6709 any time between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m.

WOMEN'S DAY ART SHOW

     This Blog is being published by me, Barbara J. Bucknall, to advertise the art show that Lynne Mawson and I will be putting on in the Community Room of the Mahtay Cafe  to celebrate International Women's Day which will be taking place on March 8, 2019.  The show will run from March 8 to March 15  and will be sponsored by Bethlehem Housing and Support Services and its Housing Hero Fundraising Initiative.  Two of my original framed paintings will be raffled at the Bethlehem Fundraising "Empty Bowls" dinner on March 6, 2019 and two of Lynne's will be raffled on the last night of our art show.  Both raffles will be fundraisers for Bethlehem Housing.

     Lynne and I are putting on this show together because we share an interest in portraying female figures, whether human or divine. Our dedication to art is deep and sincere, playful and joyful, serious and humorous and might even be called religious in its total commitment.  Not that you need to genuflect when entering our show, but we have both portrayed some women who stand well above the ordinary human level.  Lynne will be putting some actual goddesses on show but not putting them up for sale because they are too precious to her.  My own divinities are much more accessible.  While including some pagan goddesses, I also bear witness to a devotion to the Virgin Mary which is quite unusual in a Quaker.   We also paint plenty of human women and Lynne's are quite humorous.  Mine tend to be more serious.  It was in fact Lynne's sense of humor that endeared her art to me.

     About her goddess pictures, she says: "The goddess image comes to me from time to time.  This is art I cannot force.  I lay down three colours, close my eyes and move my brush around the canvas. Then I walk away.  Once dry, the canvas is observed from many angles.  It is then left on my art table. Walking by from time to time, I give the canvas a quick glance.  At some point, but not always, an image begins to appear.  At that point, I drop what I am doing and put chalk to canvas.  She is revealed!  The goddess pictures are very special to me.  I am delighted that her images cannot be forced.  They form such a personal and powerful connection.  People have commissioned goddesses. Never have they been satisfactory in my eyes."

     Most of Lynne's pictures are very human portrayals of plump Bathing Belles.  They are saved from being repetitious by the intense joy she takes in varying colour, contrasting foreground and background and varying the patterns she uses on their swimsuits.  She tends to go in for circles and spirals.  She says the way she feels about spirals is quite visceral.  Of these bathers she says: "Having had body  issues for my entire life, I strive to present the zaftig human female form in a positive and powerful, yet playful  way.  Working on these images helps me overcome the shame I have felt on inhabiting this body, by making the rounded form vital, strong and beautiful. While working through my own issues, I hope my work brings joy to those who view it.  Most of the images are cropped: perhaps a good shrink could explain that, but for now just know that these cropped images are aesthetically pleasing to the artist.   Perhaps there are issues that are not yet ready to be revealed in my art."

     Lynne and I both paint from our deepest feelings and the inspiration for my own paintings is just as random and comes from just as deep and hidden a place as Lynne's goddesses.  I have been painting since I was introduced to art in grade school at the age of six.   My teacher, unlike Lynne's, gave me great encouragement.  My younger brother Malcolm did the same thing and our mother encouraged us by setting us to work painting Christmas cards.  My art class was the happiest part of the school week for me all the way through high school.  But when the time came for me to enter university and I won a place at Oxford, I was strongly discouraged from doing anything so unintellectual.   Embarking on an academic career, I still loved to view and collect art, but I treated my own art as a mere hobby.

     As we were growing  up, my siblings and I  all paid regular visits to the Museum and Art Gallery in our home town of Birmingham, England.   Our grandfather was something of an artist since he was a silversmith, painted as a hobby and bought original art.  Our father had a knack for drawing but treated it merely as a hobby, as he wished his children to do.  As a child I loved the illustrations in my children's books so much that  I wanted to become a book illustrator myself, but my father denied me the opportunity.  Nothing, however, could stop my brother Malcolm from becoming a full time artist, although our father tried to divert him into becoming an architect and ended up calling him a fool.  But Malcolm's artistic career has proved a tremendous success, little as our father liked  his art and tried  to persuade him to take up writing instead if he was going to be creative.  As it happened, all of us turned  out creative.  Our sister Ann had quite a gift for poetry, which I have worked on together with her, and our brother Bill took his own path, plunging into music and medicine.  Our father even managed as a scientist himself to disapprove of that, telling him that medicine was not an exact science.  Perhaps our mother was the really creative parent, although it was our father who taught us to debate when we were quite young.  She was an excellent letter writer and story teller, having emerged from the strong Celtic oral tradition of the ceilidh or folk festivity.

     I received a strong impulse towards what was later to become in retirement my full time dedication to art when  I was teaching at the University of Illinois  in the 1960's.  I had already discovered the great novel of Marcel Proust when I was a graduate student at the University of  Illinois and had been deeply impressed by what struck me as his truly religious approach to the various arts, especially since I had already picked up a similar attitude from the PreRaphaelites in the Birmingham Art Gallery.  I ended up writing my doctoral thesis for Northwestern University on this topic.  As another religious interest I started attending the local Quaker Meeting which appealed to me by its emphasis on contemplation and meditation and almost complete lack of dogma.  Although I also attend High Anglican services, I have stayed with the Quakers ever since.  Another benefit I got from them was that they afforded me access to the Art and Music Departments.  I actually sold one picture, a fantasy oil painting based on an actual dream, to the Head of the Art Department.  In the Music Department I met Ben Johnston who was a personal friend of John Cage and introduced me to him.  I also took art lessons from Ben's wife Betty.  John Cage came to have a very strong influence on me eventually, although to begin with I was quite shocked by his insistence on the path to musical composition being the creation of random noise.  His final effect on me was to get me to abandon any planning and preparation in my painting  and just paint by inspiration as the spirit moved me.  Of course this is also a very Quakerly thing to do.  What I chiefly got from John Cage was his insistence on what is random.

     Nowadays I work mainly with markers on paper, since I like to draw rather than paint.  Mainly I use Winsor and Newton watercolour markers, but sometimes I use Prismacolour or coloured ink brushes.  I make random strokes with various markers until finally a recognizable picture emerges. This picture frequently takes me by surprise by its faithfulness to my own feelings.  Then I contemplate it, looking for a meaning in it and give it a title.  This seems to me very close to the way Lynne creates her goddess paintings although I had not heard of them until quite recently.  But of course in my own case any subject can emerge. 

     In spite of this similarity we came to art in very different ways.  Let us listen to what Lynne says: "I have been making art since I was a child in Kindergarten, when my teacher informed me that I was not colouring "the right way."  The task was to colour a picture of Santa Claus.  Having been to see the man, I was well aware that his suit had a textured quality.  Happily I set to the task, making tiny, tiny circles that left bits of wax on the paper, creating the texture I wanted.  The teacher, seeing this, took my paper to present it to the class.  I was so proud...until she informed the class that this was the way NOT to colour: we should follow instructions.

     Grade 9 art: we were to use plaster to make a textured painting.  Again, I happily created texture on the board and painted a landscape.  Nope.  The texture was to have the scene within it.

     In university, taking a teachers's college training course on how to teach art.  The instructor was most arrogant and unpleasant.  We were to create a plaster wrapped wire sculpture.  My mistake was titling the piece "So you think you are an art critic."  C minus.  I have been colouring my own way ever since.

     Most of my recent work is oil pastel over  an acrylic paint base.  I've found that good quality oil pastels spread like butter.  I enjoy the tactile experience as much as the end product.  While having had no formal training  (not much luck with instructors) I've picked up many a fine technique from the pages of Pinterest.

     Much of my inspiration was found when teaching art at the primary and junior levels.   During my last two years of teaching not much attention was paid to curriculum.  Having had minimal interest or success with formal techniques, I was not much inclined to go past the basics.  It was more helpful to teach these things as they cropped up or were important to the student.  Spontaneous expression seemed more important.  This was grade 4.  They had years to learn the technical stuff.

     I ran into a student when he was in grade 7. He said art wasn't as much fun any more and had I ever heard of this thing called "perspective"?  I laughed and apologized.  I explained that I was at the end of my career and wasn't much worried about administrative repercussions.  My program consisted of teaching famous artists and creating works based on or inspired by their styles.  The Georgia O'Keeffe lessons?  They were just flowers!

     The enthusiasm and excitement when it came time to create their own pieces was marvelous.  I can still see their faces when they came in from lunch to find that their art paper was taped to the underside  of their desks.  Michelangelo would have been proud.  If he could paint on his back for ten years they could survive eighty minutes.  There is much to appreciate and try to emulate in the work of children: exuberant and unselfconscious self-expression!'

     There is much that Lynne expresses here that is true for all artists.  Of course we all have to learn from great art and I have been fortunate enough to spend a sabbatical year in Paris surrounded by museums and art galleries.  Every Sunday afternoon I spent in the Louvre and I also received personal help and encouragement from a gifted professional artist, Basil  Ivan Rakoczi, who enrolled me in his life drawing group.   But I am sure Lynne learned as much from her students as I did from him.  My brother Malcolm once said, "When you see what a little boy of ten can do, it just makes you sick.  The only thing that consoles you is knowing that he won't be able to do it in a few years."  He himself makes a practice of telling his admirers that he is able to paint as he does because he is in touch with the spirit of his childhood.  As the great French poet Baudelaire once said, "Genius is childhood recovered at will" and Marcel Proust begins his great novel with his narrator's involuntary memory of childhood.

     My sister Annabel has observed that her grandchildren create much more freely than her adult students, who are seriously hampered by fear of not doing "the right thing" and making mistakes.  I feel that I have been liberated from this fear by allowing myself to be completely free and random.  Not everything I paint is all that great, but this knowledge does not inhibit me and I feel that I too may be able one day to recover my childhood.  I have spent many years of my life studying Marcel Proust but the  time has now come to treat him as a source of inspiration. 

     Lynne and I hope you will enjoy our show.  Neither of us has exhibited a great deal.  I have had three shows and have shown in the Pumphouse gallery.  Lynne has shown in church arts and craft shows and in the Pumphouse gallery and also has a Facebook page, titled "Baubles and Babes."   I am not as good at handling technology as she is and I am indebted to her and Natasha at N.A.C. for their technical help. We are looking forward to meeting a wider audience.