Welcome to “SteveWeeks.Blog”. To browse contact details, music downloads, and blogging about music, art, family, and amateur theology, tap the three-bar menu icon at the top right.
My ID is “@WahWahWeeks” on Twitter, Instagram, and Chess.com. My professional curriculum vitae is on LinkedIn though I do less and less IT charity work now. The band Our Dad is on Twitter as @OurDadJazzFunk though we haven’t gigged for ages. These days I love to practice the oud, and play acoustic guitar and sing in the Proka bar in Aegina.
I want to paint every house I’ve lived in. It seems an appropriate retrospective especially as we are coming up for a 50th anniversary.
I have a book where I paint the arial view of each house we rent in Greece, copied from Google maps. Google also has its ‘street view’ feature which helps me select a thumbnail image of each house,.. except one which was secluded in protected woodland far from the prying eyes of the Google camera car.
Tracing a printed sheet with a light box. Starting to colour in and ink the outlinesIt got a good reaction on Facebook 🙂
I have become enchanted with the ‘Oud’; (See Wikipedia!) the ancient fretless short-necked fat-bodied antecedent of the lute and the guitar. Once I acquired a basic example, I was quickly pulled into its historic music and stories.
From Aleppo to Cairo, the Oud is designed, built, and played in a range of styles: Iraqi, Syrian, Turkish, Greek, Egyptian. The Arabic oud is larger than the Turkish oud, giving it a deeper sound and a tuning one tone lower. This includes the Syrian-Iraqi type that I aspire to own myself. Instead of the typical single sound hole ornamented by a decorative islamic rose, it features three plain elliptical soundholes.
I discovered these being made in Budapest. The Bashir family claim this style as the ‘Bashir Oud’ and it is made there in Hungary by descendants of the famous Iraqi Assyrian musician Munir Bashir who fled from the political turbulence of 1960s Iraq. Other oud players fleeing from Iraq include Naseer Shamma and the polymath Ziyrab who introduced the Oud to Europe (and probably invented the modern guitar!) at the court of Cordoba 1200 years ago.
I personally have never visited well-stocked suppliers outside Istanbul. So,.. Budapest seemed to be calling me back, However, it’s not so unusual to buy unusual instruments hand made to order from the luthier and avoid the difficulty of finding what you want. So, as we pass through Athens two or three times a year, I commissioned an Oud from the luthier Dimitris Rapakousios whose workshop is conveniently close to Athens’ ancient stadium.
Dimitris also happens to be a highly respected maker in his own right, making not only “outia” but all kinds of traditional eastern instruments. You will see many exotic examples in the background of the following pictures.
To begin, here is a Bashir-style Oud made by Dimitris Rapakousios on his bench. This picture shows the typical un-ornamented elliptical sound holes; the eleven ebony tuning pegs; and the yellow sapwood stripes of the bowl that he makes from cocobolo wood. This picture persuaded me to commission such an instrument from Dimitris.
On 18th November 2023 Dimitris begins work on my instrument by cutting and numbering the strips that will form the bowl:
By early December the bowl is constructed – we see the tapered strips glued together into form. It seems to me that there are two bowls, one inside the other, with the strips overlapping and glued between the two layers.
Reading the ‘Cocobolo’ entry in Wikipedia, we learn that the glue has to be carefully selected and deployed to work successfully with this unusual timber. Did you know, cocobolo wood will sink, not float, in water!
The bowl is assembled
When the glue sets securely the bowl is roughly sanded. Final sanding happens after the front is attached.
Roughly sanded bowlRoughly sanded bowl
Next step is ‘fine blade scraping’
Dec 20 2023 The neck end, smoothly filedThe heel end, smoothly filedThe inside of the bowl
The shape of the neck and its connecting joint is marked out on a square block and the top is braced ready for them both to be glued onto the bowl.
In January 2024 markings for the neck are madeFitting the shaped neck to the block in the bowlReady to be gluedBracing under the topThe assembly is glued and taped to setThe top and neck are ready for the tension bridge
The body is almost fully constructed and the surfaces are sanded for varnishing. One last look at the natural dry wood finish:
The tension bridge is visible at the bottomThe cocobolo wood glowing through the varnishThe symmetrical wood grain pattern
The body will have a ‘floating’ bridge, and the strings will also need a fingerboard and the tuning system with its eleven ebony pegs.
Jan 12 Construction of the “peg box”There are three (?) pieces with holes for eleven pegsPeg board attached to the neckAnd varnished to match the bodyWhile that is setting, a second layer of varnishJan 16 The top is sanded and the fingerboard area masked; ready for varnishing.The beautiful warm face of the Oûd is discovered
Wed 17 January 2024 Διμιτρις sends me 22 images and 3 videos. He is demonstrating and / or testing the completed Oud, and it sounds wonderful to me. I feel quite humbled to be the owner and caretaker of this instrument.
Everything is in placeThe nut looks perfectThe bridge looks perfectThe anchor and strings look perfectThe peg box is delightfully colouredThe scratch plate is authentic rather than transparent as requested. But Dimitris easily persuades me that this is better!
I feel impatient to hold the Oud in my own hands and hear it with my own ears. Soon I hope!
Once upon a time, we would travel whenever we had enough time and money. Sometimes near, sometimes far, always preferring new places to well known, always preferring to vist friends than merely follow the tourist trail. Things slowed to a stop with the pandemic, but last year was a revival for my marital travel agent who loves browsing the net for trains, boats, and planes to new places.
According to Google Maps, who remember everything for me, only half the cities we visited in 2023 had seen us before. It’s truly invigourating to be reminded, because these travel memories are not only of the typical tombs in gothic cathedrals, nor white sands and palm trees, nor ancient villages in dramatic hills. All these places were also steps along journeys to meet friends, old and new.
With these friends we have discovered new food and drinks. We have heard and played new music. We have walked streets where the dust remains unsettled from the stormy history of Europe. And precious luggage was lost and found, only after it visited far away places we ourselves didn’t see!
Our souvenirs are not digital photo albums or trinkets for the fireplace mantlepiece. They are new songs from Athens, Damascus, and Crete, learned in courtyards over black coffee and home bakery with friends. These memories are not of observation but of participation.
Trophies of travel include musical instruments, restored from the last century or formed from new wood and metal in Athens and England. With the help of three Luthiers, (new friends and old!) I am beginning relationships with a “Tsuras” (a small bouzouki) and two “Outia” (think ‘fretless lute’) and a Canadian mahogany folk guitar being restored after 60 years of “productive neglect”. New blogs are currently in draft to explain all!
In 2023 I did produce something useful (a book cover) but I try to illustrate my journal every day. Drawing, rather than photographing places is the best way to force oneself to look, and to look long and attentively, at every feature of a view, whether it’s to represent it in detail or to suggest it loosely. Occasionally one of the drawings comes out nicely, and I take the credit for that (!) but the value is that each drawing takes me back to the place, to the weather, the street smell and sound, and the people I was with. The knowledge of the details studied for a drawing make each memory more physically and emotionally evocative.
Afaiea Temple in inkliners and watercolour; enhanced by the “Prisma” app using the “Gothic” filter.
As well as temporarily losing a precious guiter (Aaaagh!) one journal got lost on a plane, and took weeks to be retrieved. Last seen in Copenhagen, where we hardly stopped, it went on (without me) to Nice France, and San Diego California, before making its way back to me via England to Aegina.
A waterbrush and a paintbox for quick sketches, wherever you go..
I performed two songs at the wedding of a dear friend in Cantabria. We shared tapas and flamenco in studios and courtyards of Herez Andalusia with new friends away from the tourist bars. I connected with orthodox priests in a remote Peleponisian mountain monastery and in the local school of Byzantine music. We attended ceramics workshops and concierged a mind bending ceramics exhibition. We compared the effects of the European 20th Century on the streets of Budapest, Vienna, Prague, Berlin, Delft; their streets tell quite different stories. We listened to the stories of friends from Syria, Spain, Egypt, Turkey, France, Netherlands,.. We absorbed negative and positive world views from Picasso’s Guenica and Eise Eisigina’s planetarium. We heard and held musical instruments and musical styles that we never knew existed. We extended our Christmas list with many more email addresses to follow up new friendships.
So, thank you Google for the map. But the map can’t tell the whole story. If we travel not to consume, but in search of friendship; open to listen, and learn, then something happens.. We become citizens of a bigger world.
We could start looking at the sequences of intervals that make eastern scales different from western scales, and it would be very interesting. However! We might have already overlooked a really important difference in that the tuning of individual notes is also different.
The reason for this? Western music adopted “Equal Temperament” about 250 years ago to enable music to be performed in the 12 keys. This required the 12 notes to be equally spaced, which was not previously the case. This raises two big questions.
Firstly, what is the correct pitch for our notes? It was Pythagoras who became famous for what was already discovered in the far east, that one could determine the ‘correct’ pitches by using the ratios of frequencies of natural harmonics. This is hugely appealing, and the idea has been unshakeable despite the inconvenient fact that the system doesn’t work!
Secondly, if we ignore the mathematical theories, and take the Aristotolean concept that, “If it sounds good, it must be right”, we still are left wondering how to understand, and notate, and perform, the music of the Byzantine and Ottomani world, that still exist today.
There is more to write about this, but meanwhile, in my diagram you can see three versions of the “Dorian” scale which has a pattern of intervals that begins with a “big-small-big”, and then after the “big” interval that separates the 4th and 5th notes, ends with another “big-small-big” pattern.
The western scale at the bottom is divided into 12 intervals of equal semitones. A semitone is size 1 and a tone is size 2. The 7 intervals of the scale are tone, semitone, tone, tone, tone, semitone, tone.
The Byzantine scale in the middle is used today in the chanting in Greek Orthodox churches. The first big interval is size 10, the second small interval is size 8, the third big interval is size 12. We can immediately see this is iregular. The total size of the octave is not 12 but 72 units allowing for what the 12-tone world calls, “microtonal“.
The Arabic scale at the top is more regular. At least the “big” intervals are all the same size (9) and the “small” intervals are the same size (4). The total size of the octave is 53!
The Byzantine and Arabic scales will use the same notes as western scales for the 1st, 4th, and 5th notes. The others will vary more, being slightly flat, or very flat, effectively dividing a big-and-small or a small-and-big interval equally in half.
Are these notes used in reality today? They are taught in a vocal tradition, and they sound ‘different’ to the western ear, so yes, they could be used as described, and they can be played on instruments such as the voice, the violin, and the oud, or theoretically on a western trombone. Like the voice, these instruments do not produce fixed pitches, but allow the musician to pitch anywhere “in between”.
It’s good to remember that these definitions are all very recently imposed on an ancient aural tradition. For the first 200,000 years of music, it was passed on without notation. The sound of the notes, the scales, and the tunes were all memorised by ear. The reproduction of those sounds was taught in hand movements, without theory books. For only the last couple of centuries has anyone cared to apply a mathematical system to define these notes.
Also, these mathematical divisions of the octave were probably an approximation of the notes that sounded right to the ears of the author of these systems, and were an attempt to bridge between that old aural system and the new western notation.
It’s also good to remember that while variations in pitch are merely “incorrect” in western music, they are a means of delicate expression and emotional intention in eastern music.
Today there are ways of combining eastern and western instruments to play together, but that’s another subject.
If you visit “Sin”, the single room exhibition at the Winchester ARC, you’ll see classical paintings including a Rembrandt, and a single modern hyper-realistic half-size statue by Ron Mueck.
Curated by the National Gallery this is a small but top rate show that could make you think deeply. The depictions of biblical stories are so familiar we hardly notice they are beautified characters depicted in courtly dress in classical Greco-Roman scenes. And heart wrenching stories such as The Prodigal Son lose their power and complexity unless they’re told afresh with understanding.
I drew a detail of Mueck’s challenging piece.
Pencil (6B) & Prisma (iOS)
Personally Mueck’s work reminded me of Ian McKewen’s meta-fiction, “Atonement” which seems to shout, What is the reality of our so-called Atonement? As with ‘Justice’ it’s delusional to pretend that anything can be put right by a subsequent act. The damage can perhaps be compensated but never undone.
Travelling home from Aegina Greece and drawing every day would be easier in balmy weather but it’s hard to sit outside when it’s freezing. So I set out hoping to find a couple of hours each day for drawing, but expecting to draw a few cosy cafés as well as the ideal architectural landmarks.
I find that my soft 6B pencil drawings look lovely in the real book, but not when photographed on an iPhone screen. But I do like them when the ‘Gothic’ filter is applied lightly in the ‘Prisma’ app. And that’s what you see here.
So. From 6th to 17th February 2023;
here we go:
Flight A3601 to Athens
Actually flying in to Greece
Port of Piraeus
Unfinished before the boat set sail
Four Seasons Hotel, Budapest
Now we know why everyone loves Budapest; the cafés!
Gorecsky Hotel, Budapest
iPhone after Breakfast
St. Stephen Basilica, Budapest
Budapest Station
Bye bye Budapest
Art of Painting, Vermeer, Wien
Copied directly from Vermeer’s original
Opposite Belvedere 21, Wien
View from café of Vienna’s modern art gallery
Cognac at Hotel Daniel, Wien
Ultra modern hotel has funky Muzak and its own honey bees 🐝 🐝
It’s only three hours to Prague from Vienna, and soon we’re in Prague’s quaint streets where one could draw for hours, for days, except it’s too cold outside. So..
A Café in Prague
It’s too cold to draw buildings outside so,..
Prague Station Concourse
A 5m sketch standing, oversize book in hand.
Train at Prague Station
10m to do a carriage door of a train that was, in fact, not our train.
Café in Berlin Hauptbahnhof
Fellow diners in the “Hans Im Glück”
Including the 2 hour stop in Berlin, where we ate amongst birch trunks with funky music (cool!) 11 or 12 hours of your life elapse between Prague and Amsterdam to the west.
Amsterdam Window View
Only time for a quick sketch before breakfast
Visiting Leeuwarden
Relaxing after a long walk with friends
Eise Eisinga’s Planetarium in Franeker
250 year old (working) model of the solar system
Stadthuis Delft
In INK for a change
Delft Canal
Canal view. Pencil. With reflection!
From Delft we took trains all the way back to Alton without further stops for drawing. It was a long way to return home from the Greek island of Aegina but we felt very happy to be seeing new places and meeting strangers and friends along the way.
It’s a request. The Old Post Office where an old friend lives. I have no idea how to make this ‘work’. There’s a load of trees, a load of bricks and tiles. A hazy sky. What can you do? We’ll see. First of all select a picture and trace an outline with a fountain pen with Japanese black ink.
Image supplied for commissionTraced in ink over an LED Light Pad
I run the original photo through Prisma and print it. This gives me some clues as to how I might simplify the painting into blocks of colour. An experienced painter would know how to approach this properly, but I have no idea! Here’s the rough B&W photo that I traced, on the light pad, with the Prisma colour version and the inked watercolour paper taped down to a board for further inking and painting. Extra masking tape for testing each brush load before finally committing the mixed paint to paper!
Setting up the reference and the paper
Here’s the Prisma version of the colour photo. I can’t help wondering sometimes if it’s exactly what the client wants, but hopefully some accidental magic will occur to infuse my hand painted version with expression and life!
Suddenly I have one of those moments when you wonder if it’s time to stop. And after a briefly searching for my inner intuition, ..
…I decide that it is, indeed, time to stop.
Yes. I think I like it like that. In a frame. Good.
When I’m in Greece I draw every day and paint on some days. When I’m in England, I hardly paint at all. Though nearly all of my effort in drawing is to place everything on the page correctly, especially with regard to scale and perspective which is for my mathematical mind the most motivating aspect of drawing.
To get myself drawing again I bought a light box. Being a flat sheet of Perspex with LED lights embedded in it, I suppose it should be called a “light pad”.
Here are the first two pieces I’ve made using the light pad for tracing before drawing, and the Prisma app for texture afterwards.
First, my Stratocaster in ink. I’d like you to know that Leo Fender invented the Stratocaster in the same year I was born!
After that I tried something in 6B pencil (& Prisma) that would take hours and probably would not be perfectly formed; the ‘rotunda’ of The Radcliffe Camera in Oxford, seen from Catte Street.
There ensued a heavy discussion with an encouraging friend who loves my drawing but was appalled by my “cheating”. Personally I’m very relaxed that the quality of the work is in the ‘mark making’ which is by my own hand. Even though Prisma enhances that in an inimitable way. But Hockney uses an iPad to make marks that he couldn’t make ‘manually’, and as for tracing, if it’s good enough for Vermeer, then it’s good enough for me.
For two weeks the huge blank canvas sat in the living room. An IT project and some badly timed plumbing work (in a record breaking cold spell) gave me a false justification for the delay in choosing a subject for painting. As the IT and plumbing work subsided, the sun came out and painted the canvas in strikingly beautiful warm geometric shadows. And an idea struck me.
A photo of the blank canvas beautifully back lit with a real shadow of the easel. This I wanted to capture!
I had watched an online Zoom gallery opening and was struck at the variety of mark making techniques. My cousin had made her painting with brush marks that look like brush marks. Clear separate hand drawn lines of single colour, taking 30 minutes. By contrast another hyper-realistic artists used miles of masking tape and a tiny roller, taking 30 days. Oooh!
Soon I had collected some things from around the house. A leftover tin of “Ecru” by Fired Earth; some rolls of masking tape, and a tiny sponge paint roller for getting to the wall behind a radiator without removing it.
A photo of the canvas now painted to look like an unpainted canvas. I know what you’re thinking,..
Having got a base colour for the illuminated parts of the canvas, the time came to apply masking tape to delineate the edges of the shadows. It proved a brain-taxing exercise to add tape around the area you aren’t going to paint to create the shapes formed by light not landing. But soon it was mostly applied, though narrow areas will have to be done one edge at a time.
This finished late at night, and I worried that the tape might peel off with the paint if it was left in place too long. Oh Dear!
Masking tape meticulously applied; canvas awaiting the flat wash of shadow tone to be added with a roller
To get a darker shade of the same colour (is that how you do shadows? there are different approaches!) I decided to mix some dark ochre or umber earthy colour into the same (household emulsion) paint used for the sunlit areas. By the way, the famous American modern artist Cy Twomby used mixed media including emulsion for his extremely modern works on classical themes, so please let me not be accused of doing anything improper, or original.
So, I found a large tube of acrylic and set out on a journey of discovery. Mixed media? I’m actually mixing colours with mixed paint – acrylic and emulsion. There’s only one way to find out what happens, and I need to mix enough to avoid needing another batch that will never be the same colour, so there might soon be a terrible waste of paint.
A brush worked better. Basic outlines in place, but I’ll have to wait until it dries and move the tape around to get the details. Final masking applied, and applying the final watered down painting area
Off comes the masking tape and everything is as hoped for. On with the final masking and then the final area of watered down paint to represent the softer shadow.
Oh no! The watered down paint has flooded under the masking tape, ignoring the sharply defined edges the artist wanted,..
As soon as I start applying the final wash of paint I know it’s flooding under the masking tape. Too wet. And I reused the tape I just removed. Double error. Removing the masking tape proves the catastrophe has indeed occurred. Doh! My sharp edges have disappeared into a misty mess. Now what?
When I go back to look at it, I wonder if the fuzzy edge is actually appropriate? After the lighter, less distinct shadow, the one cast by a more distant interruption of the light, should have a weaker tone, but also it should have less defined edges.
There’s nothing to do while it dries. Nothing to do until it dries. So I wait while it dries. Well, I actually lift some of the excess, clean up the darker shadows, and smooth the new wash with the roller. Then I wait while it dries.
I out it on the wall to see if I still think it’s unfinished after a few days. It’s not always obvious when a painting is finished.
After a little break I regret the colour combination and that’s enough to help me decide; so I apply a couple of coats of glaze using a squirt of lemon yellow acrylic into a satin glazing liquid. Immediately this creates a unity of reflection and colour that was missing.
Second coat of glaze is dryingGlaze has a physical effect on the room light that is never apparent in any photograph.
Soon I found time for Easel Mk2 which uses a spare pot of #FarrowAndBall instead of the previous #FiredEarth.
My school annual prize giving day of 1972 was addressed by Professor Eric Laithwaite. Disregarding the paradox, I accepted without contest his advice to us all, to disbelieve everything we were taught. At least until we have proved it for ourselves. But this requires thinking, which is so hard..
( July 1925 “The Observer”: “Most people would die sooner than think: in fact, they do so” — Mr. Bertrand Russell.)
Now I still test every lesson I receive, which is tiring for myself, and sometimes for others (for which I apologise). And one of those untrustworthy lessons was that language is, words are, the tools of thought. On one hand I have come to believe that creative problem solving can only be expressed and communicated via language, though pictures can help a lot. On the other hand, I’m convinced that mankind has been creatively solving problems since long before the evolution and adoption of language.
Today, language is a problem, because using it seems to add to the problems we were trying to fix. Sometimes this is deliberate. For example, in the conflict over abortion ethics the term “pro-life” was coined not only to give a less morbid and more positive impression than “anti-murder”, but also to trump the protagonists’ label of “pro-choice”, which was in turn chosen to avoid the negativity of “anti-law” or “anti-coercion”. Neither label identifies an objector, both “pro-choice” and “pro-life” sound like campaigns to achieve something good. This language did more to close the conversation than to resolve the issue.
Other linguistic problems come from deceit or laziness. President Trump deceitfully and repeatedly described impeachment attempts as a “Witch hunt”, deliberately confusing the sense of the word. A witch hunt is where a non-specific person is blamed for a specific (and actually non-existent) crime. He wanted us to imagine a specific person being blamed for a non-specific (and non-existent) crime.
Describing wealth distribution between boroughs as a “Postcode lottery” is an example of laziness, or at least succumbing to the poetic rhythm of the soundbite. A lottery ticket is the exact opposite of a guarantee. Instead of promising that the same person wins every time, the lottery promise is that a different person wins every time. If you think that quality of public services is a “lottery”, akin to guessing whether the best kept streets might be found in Kensington next year, or in Merthyr Tydfil, then I’d very much like to know where you buy your lottery tickets.
“Identity theft” is a current and complex issue whose language only adds to the confusion. You are a person and you have a name. One of those two things is your identity. In fact a few others might use the same name you do, but don’t they all have a separate identity? You can change your name, but does your identity change?. The self described acosmic panentheist Philip K Dick spent a short life writing paranoid fiction to investigate the nature of identity, but let’s short-cut to “Name and identity are two different things”
I’d say that if you did unfortunately fall victim to identity theft, your identity might be the only thing you had left. The thief can assume illegal use of your reputation, privilege, and possessions, even your body, if that is a possession, but he cannot become you. He cannot acquire your identity. Identity cannot be stolen. Identity theft is an oxymoron, or at best it refers to something highly obscure such as the criminal act of Alzheimer’s disease, where the nature of a person becomes lost to all including perhaps themselves.
So, here’s a thinking challenge, and I won’t attempt it here. Let’s all try some thinking. Let’s say X uses your credentials to enact transactions where third parties believe wrongly that X is you. What has been actually stolen? What phrase could we offer the English speaking world to improve on “Identity theft”?
I don’t remember having made a successful watercolour portrait, but I’m going to try a double. I begin with a pencil sketch of a Prisma-filtered image, on watercolour paper, and start ‘colouring in’.
I’m working from this photo..Start with a pencil sketch..Add a pale background, and some timber..
At this point disaster strikes. I’m adding the palest skin tones over which I’m planning to add the darker tones later, wet on dry. I accidentally wipe the white area of Mary’s teeth, which also drags in the dark sepia pencil marks! It’s not liftable, and I doubt that white gouache will cover it. Anyway, it’s time to let everything go dry before continuing.
IT projects took over my life for a month and I realise that actually both computer programming and painting involve a similar process and reward. There is vision followed by planning how to implement the vision using known skills and a bit of luck for the items that don’t appear easily doable.
Finally I realise I’m going to have to accept my limitations, and stop before I wipe away all signs of original confident mark making.
I was kindly invited, and also delighted to paint this building as a leaving present.
The photo has a dynamic perspective which attracted me of course. The concrete angels in the photo have been removed by someone who perhaps didn’t relate to the sculpture of ‘brutalist’ architecture. I still had to ‘mix concrete’. Well, mix the colour of concrete!
I used a Cardboard Projector to trace a few outlines into watercolour paper. First pencil, then ink. The scale and weight of the building are critical.
The colour was Payne’s Grey (acrylic! Because we had some!) mixed with yellow though I had been advised to go blue.
First time trying painting with a plastic card instead of a brush
I used acrylic paints including black, white, red, ultramarine and Phthalo blues, sap green, and yellow ochre and Burnt ochre. I mixed them and applied them with a Credit Card. I’m pleased that I instantly have something strong and rich in texture. The colours are complex and give depth to the abstract scene.
I started writing about how a doctrine can change over many years, using atonement as an example, became diverted into a discussion of whether atonement might be a secondary theme of the gospels, regardless of it being the central theme of the creed, and of what we call the gospel message.
My essay still doesn’t say what I want it to say, and your comments are welcome.
Edmund de Waal explains in the latest Art Society magazine his new exhibition in Venice on the theme of the lost library. Alongside collectable artifacts which of course include his exquisitely simple ceramic pieces, the main focus for our meditation is a collection of books by exiled authors, all translated from their original language.
On reflection, if you are capable of reflection and a little empathy, we should find that moving. Imagining exile is hard enough; imagine wanting to be remembered, to be known and even loved, and to tell your story, especially a story of being dispossessed of your home and possessions, friends and family, culture and the gift of belonging. Such books are an invitation to a special hospitality; can we invite these foreigners’ stories into our own memories? Can we volunteer to be the ones who matter to the exiles, as being the carriers of their stories, to be substitutes for the audience that would ideally heard these stories in their natural language? The books were translated by and translated for readers for whom simple words like food, meal, hill, and town, all convey nothing of the cultural wealth and peculiarity of the original words used by the native people of the authors’ home.
Looking up at our room, I see our own “library”, including bookshelves, but also everything else that tells our story. You too might wonder what people would make of you from the collections in your own space? There’s art on our walls, much of it our own, and the rest by friends and family. It tells a story of inheritance of art from our parents, and the story of the slow and hard won journey into that craft. There’s two huge hifi speakers making a statement! and the statement is something to do with our values. It’s not just that we love listening to the soundtrack we’ve made for our lives, but also we’ve made a lot of music, and 3/4 of our children are professional musicians. Some furniture has been given, some bought, and some refurbished from junk. We are happy with our journey from having nothing, and providing comfort without excess to our family. Above all, I am struck by the amount of open space in our rooms, obtained by moving out of London to be able to accommodate our friends and large family. We have 10 grandchildren, and everybody loves to be together. Our “library” has sofas for all (!) and that itself tells a story.
Your story is all around you, told in the library you have accumulated around you. What story is told?
To photograph one’s coffee for Instagram has become a cliché but to paint it is still cool I hope. I’m keeping up a habit of putting a graphic design or watercolour on every page of my journal.
I annotate my sketchbook, and I illustrate my journal. Having just started a brand new journal (aren’t we all inspired by new stationery?) I set out to make the layout of the journal pages more “graphic” and hopefully add more beautiful illustrations.
Of course my writings are too personal and poetic for sharing (!) but here’s a few illustrations:
View up the hall to the kitchenView from my chair at breakfastView of my breakfast chair from the garden Decorations in the hall
Steve Weeks 