Audrey Flack

 Audrey Flack ‘With  Darkness Came Stars’   a memoir  2024, Pennsylvania State University Press

This memoir is written with great verve and swept me along with a sense of how remarkable Audrey Flack’s experiences have been.
It’s presented as reflections on her life from a bench in the Bowery where she sat during over more than  a year of artistic block, in her fifties when she was a famous photo realist painter.

By good luck and determination she had obtained an art education despite her unencouraging  background and gambling addicted mother.
Remarkably her brother had brought home to his Jewish family from WW2 souvenirs of Hitler’s paintings  from the nazi Eagles’ Nest retreat.

Audrey drank in the Cedar bar with Jackson Pollock and the abstract expressionist men but kept apart from their alcoholism and sexual invitations.
She left abstraction and studied the Old Masters, chose modern life as her subject, worked with a therapist and sought a stable family life despite marrying in haste with the following repentance and eventual divorce.

There are a lot of memories of the famous which bring out their bad sides. Audrey claims she directed Ruth Kligman how to locate Pollock, which soon after lead to his death as he drunkenly drove Ruth and her friend into a tree.

I noticed all the factors that were usefully present in that area of New York then - the artists, the bars, the galleries, the wild lifestyle, new ideas and opportunities and critics writing.

Audrey had humdrum jobs, then worked in graphics, and remarkably turned from abstract expressionism to developing photo realism, learning a lot about photography but always painting from her images rather than exhibiting them as photography. She explains  that the sense of
 flat compositional surface of abstraction was important in her later paintings. She was criticised for using photos.

Audrey Flack had a difficult time as a young mother as her first daughter Melissa had severe autism and never learnt to speak. The condition was not understood and she and others
were called ‘refrigerator mothers’ and encouraged to leave their offspring in institutions.

Throughout her life art was a therapeutic help and she also performed on a banjo and formed two bands.

There was some good luck- when she was surprisingly given art opportunities and when her first, stable and calm boyfriend, Bob, got in touch and they were eventually happily married with him  being very supportive.

Audrey Flack was able to travel in Europe and painted after the Renaissance work of Luisa Roldan who made over the top baroque sculptures of female saints..
She joined a feminist consciousness raising group and did some paintings of still life deliberately featuring women’s feminine belongings in contrast to the cars and planes the male photo realists favoured.
She featured Marilyn Monroe and did a picture about the Kennedy assassination. Her ‘WW2’ about holocaust survivors  was much criticised but won an award from female survivors even though she had only depicted men in it.

In another remarkable change Flack gave up painting, withdrew from exhibiting for ten years and studied sculpture, looking  into creation myths. Her huge commission for a figure of the Portuguese Queen Catherine for Queens district was eventually rejected and destroyed as she had not been aware of that monarch’s involvement in the slave trade.

 Audrey Flack ends, ‘Art kept me alive and still helps me cope with the most heartbreaking situations in my life.
In the midst of all the darkness that life can bring, art reminds us that with darkness can come stars.’.
There are  similarities to this in my own life and through reading this memoir and examining  the many illustrations of her work I have come to know and respect Audrey Flack’s contribution to art.

Audrey Flack died 28 June 2024 aged 93

 

 

 

Photos are 'Flashback'

 

'World War 2 '

 

 'Queen Catherine'

 

  

Tate St Ives Beatriz Malhazes and Rothko

 Tate St Ives have a new show on until 29 September ‘Maresias’ meaning salty breezes, by Beatrix Malhazes who lives in Rio, a show coming from Margate and also a room of Rothko paintings from London.

To go from one to the other is like a trip to a tropical carnival full of colour and pattern hearing dancing salsa rhythms, seeing luscious vegetation around Beatriz Milhazes studio in Rio and tasting bubbly cocktails, moving through spacious light rooms and then being plunged into a narrow dark cave confronting death in the knowledge that Rothko killed himself, almost drowning in sorrow with Mahler as a suitable soundtrack in my mind.

 

Rothko

 

 Milhazes is a new name to me but Beatriz has had exhibitions in many places in the world. You can find her on YouTube explaining her various inspirations and her printing techniques. She mentions liking Bridget Riley but I also thought of the American Pattern and Decoration women artists of the 70’s.
The surfaces of her works are not slickly pristine as she allows marks made during their production to be left.
Also her collage methods make motifs stand out with three dimensional vitality.
Whist the imagery remains variations on the same highly patterned decoration there are different developments as Beatriz Milhazes surprises with her inventiveness.
She speaks online of how her place of work, her home in Brazil is important to her and I am so pleased to find an exhibitor not reacting to Cornwall in a superficial way but bringing us her visions from Brazil.

Then on the way out of Tate there are the Rothko paintings from London, made in New York.
 Years ago I used to walk through that room in Pimlico dismissing them until I heard a lecturer recommending visitors to give them time. I sat down then, and had to alter my opinion as the powerful fuzzy edged  colours vibrated and the rectangular forms affected me. Being in a smaller space in St Ives you are closer to the pictures, hemmed in by them, and if you have time to sit down and gaze for a while you may be surprised by your reactions.

Leaving, I found myself noticing colours- contrasting rubbish bins, bright children’s windmills on sticks and also my view of the Sandra Blow and Brian Wynter paintings in the gallery, which use bright colour and pattern, had been refreshed.

The Diamond

Carlyle

Beatriz Milhazes

Falmouth BA show 2024

 Sink at Belmont House

 

There are  about 100 artists in the show, most of them women.
Falmouth University doesn’t give this huge exhibition much publicity and in three hours I only see six other visitors. Several buildings are without any invigilators.
There is no information about what the course content is so we only see each student’s final project and we don’t know their degree results.
Hardly anyone presents anything for sale but quite a few have business cards to collect and a few have give away items. There is little invited participation and no performance.
It’s mostly introspective installations with lots of fabric used and assembled collected ready made things, videos and lots to read. Only the drawing BA has a printed catalogue - and drawing can mean anything.
There’s scarcely any use of wood or metal, stone or ceramics.

Trying to take an overview, mostly the students, who I presume are generally under 25, are preoccupied with their personal identity and problems. There are warnings about suicide as a topic and references to violence in war, to distress, illness, disability and sexual orientation.
A few refer to the outside world, what it looks like, ownership of land and industry, but there’s nothing definitely socialist or traditionally political - there’s mention of women, hints of feminism, portrayal  of vaginas, protest at Greenham, nature as wonderful and the need to conserve it, Dionysian intoxication, and postwar Germany,
It’s mostly about individuals but two artists feature meeting a range of friendly people and having conversations.

My prize for the most memorably meaninglessly horrible exhibit is the room containing two sordid toilets that smells heavily of urine. Elliot Millin gives no clues about it.

Most surprising is the piece that mentions god, by Rebekah Mohamed. There are elegantly written words drawn directly on the wall and gentle sounds and recorded spoken words  - it’s all pale, quiet, contemplative and refers to psalms in the  Bible. 

 part of R Mohamed's installation

 

I liked the drawings of a woman with birds and their twittering on overhead speakers - all about her loss of hearing, by Violet Hill

Violet Hills

I watched the video about a disfunctional family, my attention captured by the way it was constructed and performed.  Its the work of Diana-Maria Ghita, who references the book, ‘What is love?’ by feminist Bell Hooks and uses the same title.

 from Ghita's video

The installation extolling libraries made a change from the personal, with an unusual largedistorted  photograph of bookshelves and then an assemblage of bookcases at odd angles from which you could take a book. I took F.Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘Tender is the Night.’
Lily Tyrrell made this.

 Lily Tyrrell

Nowadays you have to be wealthy or willing to incurr a hefty debt to attend these courses.
I talked to a group who were invigilating who had enjoyed being on the BA although one was glad to stop having to explain everything.
Its not surprising that young students have a lot of personal angst to express but maybe it’s become more general?
Are there similar trends on other BA courses round the globe?

It was a stimulating foray into the minds of Falmouth’s class of ‘24

A relief also to leave this world of self absorbed reconnaissance that feels rather claustrophobic.

St Ives Society 'Spring Open' show

St.Ives Society ‘Spring Open’ 2024

The St Ives Society was the one Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson left  to form the Penwith Society in the height of St Ives’ fame when modernism flourished here and in America.

Now two open shows per year provide varied art and useful income for the society which exhibits in the Mariners’ Church.
The opening was crowded, 323 works had been submitted and most it seems were accepted.
Marie Keeling had arranged them, grouping by themes and types, grey- blue abstractions together, a wall of flower paintings, seascapes, geometrical arrangements, plus ceramic vessels and sculpture and a case of delicate jewelry. It’s  a giant installation of what is going on in the local scene. Much the same mix as last time with nothing controversial, nothing overtly political.
A lot of artists do much the same things repeatedly so if you like what they do it’s fine and if not it’s tedious. Many have exhibited here for years but I met a couple who submitted there for the first time and were delighted to be included.
Could any of these artists become famous beyond St Ives?
How does that happen?
Are these local shows similar globally?
Should clear pastiches of the famous such as Basquiat be either not accepted or at the least acknowledged?
Could innovation be encouraged?
Does the variety mirror that in the contemporary art world?
Is it just harmless fun and a welcome outlet for the many who belong to a loose knit community catering to the tourist trade?
As in football there are a few with genius status who are famous worldwide and become wealthy and then the others, in various leagues down to those kicking a ball about in a nearby cul de sac and all of it shows the importance of art and football at every level in our so hierarchied society.

 

Images are Jenny Beavan, .energised water' porcelain, glass and pebbles, £475

and El Matador Del Muerte, 'Hold Fast' concrete, paint and resin, £265

 

Harold Harvey at Penlee Gallery, Penzance

'A kitchen Interior' 1918

'Portrait of a Girl 1922'

 

 

The Exceptional Harold Harvey, May 1 to Sept 29 2024, Penlee Gallery,Penzance

Harold Harvey was born 1874 and died 1941

This exhibition is a real visual treat and also has panels giving useful background information on the artist’s life, plus there is a lovely book to accompany the show.

How simple his life seems compared with that of a contemporary artist today trying to find a career in a post modernist world of installations and concepts, grants and fellowships.

Harold studied art in Penzance and Paris and settled in Newlyn, teaching at his own school of art, sending paintings to the Royal Academy shows and living happily with his wife Gertrude within the artists’ colony.

He shows us the countryside in well observed detail and with colours that look as if they were painted yesterday. No doubt he used photography to supplement his knowledge.
We see young women going out for an evening, hikers, miners, flower-pickers and beach goers. There are delightful interiors and twenties and thirties fashion depicted with such care. His style develops through the years. The compositions use rhythm and complexity to evoke a whole era and you can feel you’ve met the people and been to their homes and surroundings.

I suppose everywhere there are artists carrying on this record of life in their own time which has a historical value as well as an aesthetic quality and Harold Harvey ’s paintings remain as such accomplished examples to inform and entertain us.
 

Danny Dyer on 'How to be a Man'

 Danny Dyer in ‘How to be a Man’ Channel 4, two one hour episodes.

Danny Dyer seems quite  likeable as he puts together a collection of rambles round this subject, from a kindly chat with his daughter about his grandson to looking at bondage gear and hearing about boundaries in a sex shop.
I read that he met his wife when she was 14 and they are still together so maybe he’s as nice as Paul Newman. He was discovered as an actor at a teenage acting club for disadvantaged children.

Danny  tells us the high suicide statistics for men and goes to a gym where men box and sometimes talk. He insists men and women are different- men not liking to talk on personal subjects face to face, being competitive, protective, physically stronger than women, but he also  finishes with an effective unpaid  advertisementent for cacao in a men’s retreat, dancing, venerating women and suggesting there are many ways to be a man outside the stereotypes.
Its good - hearted and might encourage both sexes to relax a bit about how they express their gender.

One thing bothered me in the first program so I made a tally in the second. One man other than Danny used the f word -  and in the presence of his small child. Danny however, in the 45 minutes if taking out the ads, and saying he spoke half the time, used ‘fuck’ or ‘fuckin’ 56 times - an average of about every 30 seconds. Once this referred to sex.
Now when he was on ‘Whose life is it anyway,’ investigating his ancestors, I do not remember this habit.
Is there a group for involuntary expletive addiction?

Bruce Parry travels up the Amazon, BBC4

 Amazon with Bruce Parry, BBC 4   April 2024 Dir. Rob Sullivan

I watched Bruce Parry for an hour as he spent time with two isolated tribes in the Amazon forest and some loggers.
I got some appreciation that it’s a vast region in which tribes can remain fairly isolated although their clothes and gadgets show contact with the outside world as does their vulnerability to hepatitis B, originating from contact with prostitutes in the nearest city.
Bruce goes along with whatever the people around him are doing, from balancing on logs in the river to ordeals for men by ant sting.
He does not offer medication for suffering children or suggest that hours chanting over them may not cure them.
It does occasionally cross his mind that the natives may be playing to the camera. He calls the way they laugh at his difficulties ‘having a good sense of humour.’
I don’t hear Bruce asking what about if there’s equality between the sexes, toleration of differences, or acceptance of same sex relationships. He doesn’t find out how decisions are made, or what childcare is like. How do people go out beyond the tribal society and do they ever return?
There’s a great deal of male camaraderie - in fact what it mostly reminds me of is an episode of Top Gear - competition, jeering and public school peculiarities.
 In this Bruce holds up ok, eats, sleeps and after hearty hugs, leaves.