The days roll on and we have been busy night and day on many and varied tasks of both artisitic and domestic natures. We have cut grass, cleared out the barn, assembled a giant trampoline, unloaded trailer fulls to återviningscenntral, painted the house (literally) a coat of grey from its rather charming pale yellow, and generally have been bringing our affairs to order. In the evenings we have worked on the ink while we still wait on our canvas to arrive. It is expected on the 6th of July and until it arrives I am rationing the canvases I do have and after last nights green1 study we have one size 30 left only. The new paint arrived some days ago and because my usual mid range Jacksons paint was unavailable I was forced to trying some other brands which I'm afraid I can't get on with due to the liquid consistency of both the Daler Rowney and Van Gogh varieties. I couldn't resist buying the Van Gogh and you know it even comes in a box with a lithograph of the the St Remy self portrait with the light blue swirls and thousand yard stare. What would he make of it all?
I found a gem of a volume on The Amazon Product Delivery Service of letters specifically to Bernard.2 An old book designed with wonderful simplicity with just the letters laid out one after another on large sheet with single column - we should consider copying that layout if we dane to publish this season. These letters though are fascinating because they reveal a different side of his character. We have only really read and re-read the Theo letters, of course one or two to other family members or artists but never a run of letters like we have in the Bernard letters where we see the nature of the relationship that exists and how it does indeed differ. The discussion is of work mainly, Bernards looming military service and various plots hatched to bring Bernard and/or Goghuin to the South. In most letters Van Gogh is critiquing Bernards drawings or verses and he is wonderfully honest and straight forward. Harsh often but fair it seems, Bernard is after all many years his junior. Much could be said about all this but suffice to say he comes across as intensely intelligent, wonderfully flippant, highly committed, every bit intimidating, inspiring and not a little kimbotian3 into the bargin.
Pleasant as it is to wallow in the urgent concerns of the 1880's we have been keeping an eye on the antiracist protests and particularly on the CHOP zone in Seattle. Indeed we only discovered this incredible sounding land grab a few days before its inevitable demise which occurred yesterday with a series of police raids. Had you heard about this? A whole area of the city was declared by protesters to be a police free autonomous zone, reminding me straight away of old Holloways writing on the the Zapatistas.4 The details escape me as to how this zone was established and how its borders were formed and with what legitimacy a 'police free' zone could be claimed but it seems that as the police backed away from the George Floyd protests, the protesters pitched tents and began an occupy style occupation not just of a park or square but of several blocks of the city. Again the details; how was this possible, how was it allowed, was the area derelict? Who if anyone inhabited it? How was it organised? Indeed a great many other questions to be sure but based just on the barest details we can see that a very important moment of anticapitalist resistance has taken place and in the same city that exploded in antiglobalisation protest some twenty years ago.5
Todays work then. Summer daiseys arranged in a earthenware pot and placed simply upon the grass. We have resolved to spend the summer doing the fields but this one I consider just a little practice to get back in the habit after a good few days on the ink while waiting for the order. The ink work incidently has proven to be well worth while for the drawings themselves but also for the practice of seeing. I could feel it today as we tackled what is for us quite a complex composition as we were a little quicker to reach the zone where we see 'in parrallel' to nature6 which is so essential and usually only occurrs for us after quite a while of fiddling in front of the motif, by which time we have robbed the picture of some of its energy. I simply mean that we attacked this one with vigour and directness and pushed on through without much second guessing and that it is not always possible to do that but with the drawing practice we could. The result has some energy and balance but perhaps a little military in colouring. It was our express purpose to achieve a harmony in greens in anticipation of our summer field work and we have that but it lacks that jewell-like quality that is the hall mark not only of a Van Gogh but of good post impressionist use of autonomous colour generally. It seems we will only find the right greens by their arrangement amongst other colours.
You know young Yates Makee,7 I am quite sure he will be deep in the thick of the action in the states and equally deep in thought regards his oft stated 'post occupy condition'. We share much of his sentiment regards occupy as some kind of break from the socially engaged art of the preceding decade and he shows us how this condition in the arts continued on after the tents were packed away, leading us into the first surge of the BLM movement but his book was written just before the Trump bombshell. What of the post occupy 'strike art' through the years of the Trump era, and the strategies of left baiting? I have no doubt that Mackee could share a thousand radical art stories but what about this nagging question of a strong radical left protest presence actually shoring up and strengthening the far right? Makee concludes that post occupy radical art is about movement creation but since then a new alt right movement has successfully fed upon these new left imaginaries turning them into widespread far right support. Each new left movement and imaginary is also more food to the alt right imaginary. We hinted at all this in our fisrt DS poem at this; "Woke peoples wail out-memed and outdone" but it is not a comfortable idea. Again to the boxing - do we fight harder or step back and pick the punches? These are the questions I would like to ask young Yates but since I don't know him from Eve I refrain even though in this strange era a of social distancing and general alienation it is not at all the case in the online where I could in theory just send him a line. No, we shelter and think and wait for his own written account.
To the fields tomorrow to break the green.
A handshake,
John
1 Reffers to the present still life.
2 Emile Bernard
3 Kimbotian: Obbsessive, scheming, fiercely intelligent, uncompromising, creepy. Derives from the character Charles Kinbote in Vladimir Nobokovs Pale Fire.
4. The Zapatista radical left social movement which inspired an uprising which involved the establishing of an autonomous probably read in John Holloways Crack Captalism which John has refferenced on several occasions.
5 Commonly known as the Seattle Riots.
6 A way of seeing described by Paul Cezanne as 'harmony in parralel with nature'.
7 Art theorist based in New York, author of Strike Art. Mentioned in work 22.