Golgonooza

David Jones, 'Nativity with Shepherds and Beasts Rejoicing' 1929-1930 All four hooves, Welsh as a pony on hill are inches off the frosted ground. They skip for a fish tight saviour who is swathed in stillness between apple breast and pillow of hair. Come to look at it, all are off the ground: cow and ladle, shepherdess and lute, bits of floating Latin, but all stock still, as if playing statues. I am waiting for the cockerel to spill its redness on the page to Botticelli up the colour and set the world in motion, from out of winter into summer. Then the snow will melt and who knows what the sun might loose them into. A David Jones Nativity (Gentilis animetur) by David Scott When the wonderful Irish artist, Patrick Pye, and his equally, if not more wonderful wife, Noirin, visited me in Macedonia we went on a Church crawl, punctured by leisurely lunches and dinners, in search of the striking frescoes that populate many of its churches, especially at St. Panteleimon outside Skopje...

  'What a Human Being Is' 1910 Hilma af Klint Hilma af Klint, posthumously, has become the artistic equivalent of a 'rock star' and one who appears to be permanently on tour. Wherever she goes, she can break box office records, as she did at the Guggenheim in New York in 2018-19. You can even buy Hilma af Klint scarves and socks - the height of art gallery shop acclaim!  When she died in 1944 in relative obscurity, she had bequeathed her artwork to her nephew with instruction not to show it for at least twenty years, imagining that a future audience would be more receptive, which has turned out to be deeply prescient; and, since she appeared at 'The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890–1985' show in Los Angeles in 1988 her reputation has gathered pace. This has primarily rested on the fact that her pioneering of abstraction pre-dates that of Kandinsky and that, being a woman, the reality of her pioneering was obscured from view. Would her paintings' rece...