Art
Back in the summer I experienced real happiness, and realised I was doing it, and finally learnt how to let it flow over and through me (it’s actually easy – you just let it happen), and enjoyed the sensation of feeling happy – no drugs – and finally learnt a trick in life. Just enjoy the happiness that you have. And then enjoy the enjoyment. Accept that you will always have to work, one way or the other, whatever you do.
Today I walked along the beach to a world class art gallery, 5 minutes from my door - along the beach. World class in the sense that it puts on exhibitions on world tours before they go to Tokyo – in July there was a major Matisse and Bonnard retrospective drawn from major galleries across the planet. Today was the last day of a retrospective to celebrate the centenary of the birth of Akino Fuku, and I almost fell in love again. It was the first time that I have felt the need to cry my way through an art gallery, overwhelmed by their beauty, and by some deep connection with a lovely lady, who died in her 90s 5 years ago. The blurb, describing a woman born in the Taisho (Edwardian) era at the beginning of the last century, who lived through the war in her 30s and then found herself drawn to India, Africa and Arabia in particular, where she painted the people, their buildings and landscapes in rich earthy tones and muscular tenderness, along with a photo of her in her 80s among a group of young rural Indian women outside their simple houses, was enough to get me going. The very first painting was a large diptych screen, roughly 2 metres by 2, of a young woman holding her baby facing a trellis of Morning Glory. I was stopped in my tracks immediately. She was in her mid-twenties when she painted it, and I suppose it could have been a self-portrait. The woman’s back is to us, dressed in a dark kimono, while the baby’s head is facing us over her shoulder but turned to one side, and not especially happy. There was something about the love and tenderness, of the delicate blue flowers, the multiple leaves, the tendrils reaching out to the corners of the canvas, and the way the mother cradles her son, with her head to one side, as if listening, clearly sensing, feeling, and yet at the same time a sadness or fear or disquiet, that was so touching. I could not pull myself away. Do Morning Glory flowers only last a day? (This was 1938 – the height of Japanese military imperialism, xenophobic hysteria, fascist indoctrination and mass murder of civilians (in China) on an unprecedented scale.)
What an emotional experience it was – the first time I have felt that way in an art gallery – like watching a great film, or reading a beautiful novel or poem, or listening to a sublime piece of music. I don’t know what it was exactly – at first it felt like she was painting what I would like to paint, singing my song, reading my thoughts. Or allowing me to read hers. From the somewhat mournful, wistful yet beautiful early portraits, her work becomes perhaps simpler, less defined, but immensely rich and joyous – a real celebration of life. She shows us that she loved the simple complexities of life on earth, and the complex simplicities – the beauty of nature and our natural place in it, if we want it. Some of her last works, painted in her 90s, are perfect, as far as I’m concerned. I noticed this with Matisse, that the two of them became more abstract over their lifetimes, until some of their works appear almost entirely abstract, requiring the title or other explanation to fill out the picture. My favourite is of some cattle swimming across the Ganges river. It’s roughly 2 metres by one, and almost entirely a mix of yellows, (the photo gives a little idea) with a patch of white sky – one imagines it is sunset, and a dark cloud is coming up from the left.
The cattle are swimming away from it, to the right – we can’t see their bodies of course, just their heads, nose up, trying to breathe, their legs struggling away, we imagine, beneath them, unsuited to swimming, inefficient. Why are they swimming? The current so strong, the river so wide – why are they determined to cross, to reach the other side? What is there over there that they are willing to risk their lives for? The promise of something better?
And the group is so touching – the main group together, purposeful, sorted, while the two lovers got a little waylaid, distracted earlier on, but over-lapping, so they are lagging behind; while further back is the loner, the dreamer, the one who missed the starting gun – but they are nonetheless a group, determined to survive and stay together, united in fear but also hope. And somehow we know that they are going to make it – they are almost there, the end is in sight, they can see the other side, although we can’t, yet.
Anyway, I enjoyed it immensely, and found myself stuck in front of one or two paintings for quite a while, and then not being able to leave the room – just one more time round. The last room I think I went round 5 or 6 times.
It was about touching souls – she was touching mine through her work, her view of life, and I was touching hers through my eyes.
Spent the afternoon in a late semi-abstract Akino Fuku painting in the middle of Sagami Bay - the sea and sky merged into one silvery-blue wash with only the shearwater gliding low across to let us know which was which.
There's a sea wall at the end of my street, where I can sit and watch one of the greatest shows on Earth, every night, for free.
