Archives for posts with tag: Artist

‘A Cancer Landscape’

February 27, 2015 //
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I recently travelled to Brighton to see this exhibition, a collaborative project led by Sussex NHS Community Trust http://onca.org.uk/currentexhibition/

A Cancer Landscape presents works by the artist Michele Angelo Petrone, who died as a result of Hodgkin’s disease in 2007, as well as those by others personally affected by cancer that had been created during a series of workshops at ONCA in 2014. Images from the Wellcome Medical Photographic Library are also on display.

Petrone’s paintings are “images of the emotions and feelings experienced during the cancer journey”. The companion book, The Emotional Cancer Journey, includes the images on display as well as accompanying reflections and quotes from the artist. Petrone’s lymphoma diagnosis was made in 1994. Many years of intensive treatment and relapses ensued until his death 13 years later. The book, completed in 2003 when a relapse had just been confirmed, is an expression of Petrone’s experience of living with cancer:

“I have to tell you all about my journey of illness.”

“Illness and death may be familiar to you, But what is it really like when its your own illness? What is it really like when your life feels as if it’s being taken from you?”

The journey to where?

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“I don’t know where my life will take me”

Two intersecting elements dominate Petrone’s journey: the medical component and Petrone’s emotional response to his illness. His distinctive art movingly encapsulates this intertwining, for example the piece titled The pain of it all, which does indeed visually say it all:

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Sorrow, loss, love, life’s fragility are amongst the themes covered by Petrone. The alienation that accompanies serious illness, when those affected are isolated from diagnosis in the kingdom of the ill, is dealt with in Life goes on:

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“Having treatment, my life is fossilised. Everyone else’s life progresses, goes forward. I just watch as life goes on for everybody except me.”

The other works on display, also inspired by the experience of cancer, are equally moving and haunting.

Much lingers to consider and to reflect on in the aftermath of visiting this exhibition.

CQ

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Categories Art, Cancer, Death and Dying, Suffering

Bucket lists…

October 20, 2013 //
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The BBC foreign correspondent Helen Fawkes has ovarian cancer. She was first diagnosed 12 years ago and had been in remission until recently. She has now been told that she has incurable disease (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01j9ghq).

Twelve years ago, once chemotherapy had been completed, Fawkes wrote a list of 10 things she wanted to do on the back of an envelope. One of the items was to become a BBC foreign correspondent, which she duly achieved. When she was told the diagnosis of recurrent and incurable cancer, she initially focused on the unfairness of it all. Yet, alongside the upset and the anger, she also became determined to live her life that remained to the full. She has written a 50 item to do list, which she prefers to call a list for living rather than a bucket list…

As she ticks off the items – things that celebrate being alive, mostly experiences shared with those dear to her – Fawkes finds that the list has made her excited about life. Now finding herself in a situation where control and structure have largely been eroded, she sees the list as a way of prioritising her time, of minimising regrets, and of helping to ensure that the time she has left is spent truly ‘alive’ rather than on autopilot.

Fawkes questions whether such an approach to life, as in living it ‘to the full’, is inherently selfish, or whether it might in fact be spiritual. There is no simple answer, but I do concur with the psychotherapist Philippa Perry, who suggests that there is something of the shopping list about bucket lists, a sort of consumerist approach to buying one’s way out of feeling what one is feeling…

The artist and senior TED fellow Candy Chang created a thought-provoking visual piece of work around the notion of what we really want to do and to achieve with our lives (http://www.ted.com/talks/candy_chang_before_i_die_i_want_to.html).
Chang turned the exterior of a derelict house in her neighbourhood in New Orleans into a giant chalkboard, where passersby were invited to complete the line, ‘Before I die I want to…’
Within 24 hours, the board was filled with hundreds of messages. The idea has now moved to many other countries, where it has been just as popular. Clearly, people do stop to consider what they would like to do, or perhaps what they dream of doing ‘someday’. Whether this translates into an actual ‘doing’, particularly before one becomes aware that death is much closer than anticipated, is another important and as yet unanswered question.
Chang sees life as ‘brief and tender’. She sees death as an intrinsic part of how we live, and believes that preparing for this inevitable event can not only be empowering, but can also serve to clarify our lives as we live through them.

CQ

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Categories Art, Cancer, Illness, Loss, Spirituality

Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry…

August 27, 2012 //
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Alison Klayman’s film follows the artist Ai Weiwei as he prepares for autumn shows at the Sao Paulo Biennale and Tate Modern. Throughout the documentary, however, it is Ai Weiwei the political activist rather that the artist that is the dominant force.

Ai Weiwei’s absolute commitment to challenging injustice in China is extraordinary and humbling, particularly as he perseveres today, despite his 81 day detention in 2011.

His upbringing first acquainted him with repression. His father, the poet and political activist Ai Qing, was subjected to imprisonment for his beliefs.

Ai Weiwei was first celebrated as an artist outside of his native country. However, as his worldwide fame grew, the political regime in China decided to embrace this success and commissioned him to create the Bird’s Nest Stadium for the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

The artist’s relationship with Chinese authorities soon turned sour. The main catalyst for this was the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan. Thousands died, yet there were no officials figures, nor any official statements on what caused the earthquake and the deaths, which included many children. Ai Weiwei, with the help of volunteers, redressed this silence by painstakingly gathering and listing the names of those who died. His fellow activist Tan Zuoren also tried to get more information on the earthquake but was arrested for doing so. Ai Weiwei was due to testify at his trial, but was detained and assaulted by the police, which thus prevented him from appearing in court. The artist took legal action against the police, which predictably fails. But this very point seem to emphasise the motives behind Ai Weiwei’s actions –  it is not just about the outcome, but of challenging injustice whenever and wherever possible. Action outplays inaction.

The film includes interviews with fellow artists, who acknowledge and admire Ai Weiwei’s refusal to compromise, to comply with towing the only line permitted by the Chinese authorities.

The film briefly touches on the artist’s private life. We see his mother, who both admires and is fearful for her son. Ai Weiwei has been married to a fellow artist for many years, and has a young son by another woman, all of whom appear significant and important in his life. The artist has turned the internet, particularly Twitter, to his, and the Chinese people’s advantage, as he doggedly shares his views on the injustices he witnesses in his native country, to which he is deeply committed.

The film is captivating and unobtrusively gives some insight into the man, the artist, and most especially the political activist.

But, and this is a small but for an impressive and must-see film, I did leave the auditorium wanting more…

CQ

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Categories Art & Suffering, Suffering

Keith Vaughan – A Melancholic Artist…

June 17, 2012 //
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Sunday, June 17, 2011

The artist Keith Vaughan wrote his last diary entry on November 4, 1977, the day he committed suicide. He had just taken the capsules and whisky:

‘I am ready for death though I fear it.’

’65 was long enough for me’

When he commenced the diary, at the age of 27 in 1939, he felt alone and with ‘no great liking for life’, yet with a ‘mule-like persistence in continuing the struggle.’

The diary entries over the next 38 years or so document this personal struggle, the written record growing out of a sense of ‘failure to live my life.’

Vaughan’s eventual suicide is perhaps not so unexpected, as death is a prominent and recurring theme in his writings. Throughout, he feels under the sentence of death, his heart ‘beating like a metronome in a coffin.’ His role in life, he judged, was to survive, belonging to the Survivors group, whose energy has been exhausted by the struggle of surviving, leaving in its wake an ‘apathetic existence’. Even before he entered the ‘Cancer Era’ in 1975, he mused on voluntary extermination camps, for those who have just had enough…Yet, with the cancer diagnosis, the proximity of death seems to take on a calmer, less threatening significance for Vaughan.

Though death and mortality feature prominently in Vaughan’s writings, there is also much more. Particularly in the earlier postwar years, up to 1965, Vaughan’s poetic prose allows the reader to see the art, even before it happened. His exquisite descriptions of both (male) strangers and of landscape shows what an observer he was, perhaps proving his own view of himself as one of life’s spectators rather than participants. He describes wartime London, and the arrival of sand, imagining how it must increase the weight of the city…and Hampstead Heath, near where he lived all his life, ‘blighted by a plaque of bull-dozers, their grinning steel faces burrowing into the sand like diabolical ostriches.’

Art, to some extent, equilibrated his life. It commenced as an escape from life itself, then functioned to sublimate ‘sexual energy.’ Later, as he struggled to create and to paint, he blamed his decreasing libido, which left nothing any longer to sublimate…He mused on what art does to its creator. Does it destroy him? Or is creating an alternative for those who are otherwise disqualified from life?

Vaughan has much to say about war. He was a conscientious objector, joined the St John Ambulance, and later was a translator in a POW camp. For him, war was an abomination, a tragedy:

‘Just call at the office and sign your name and immediately you’re somebody instead of nobody. The diabolical deception of war.’

He was profoundly affected by war, and it left him with a deep sense of death’s decay, amongst many other emotions. It also left him with the sadness of partings, the many friends he made during the war, and also the death of his brother Dick.

Vaughan read widely, and deliberated much on what affected him. Thus, his diaries share his thoughts on Rimbaud, Freud, Laing, and many others.

He was also aware that he was repeating himself. He re-read his diaries, and was struck mainly by two recurring themes: firstly, the mismatch between his creative outpourings and ‘success’, and his overwhelming and persistent sense of personal frustration, emptiness and creative lethargy; and secondly, the ‘blanket of depression and boredom’ that enveloped him and that featured so prominently throughout.

Life, to Vaughan, at least in a biological sense, was overvalued. It was also a cheat, and a game that was impossible to win: as you climbed further up the ladder of success, you look down and see how much you have lost.

Keith Vaughan, Journals, 1939-1977. London: Faber & Faber, 2010 (Kindle edition 2012).

Next, the art…

CQ

Tags , , ,
Categories Art & Suffering, Melancholy