Burra illuminated

Skeletal figures in a bare, unfeeling yet sacred building stare into the grey ground in which rests a stripped skeleton like themselves yet without animation. Death as actor peers down at death as end.

This extraordinary dual painting by Edward Burra was completed in 1940. It speaks of its time when death stalked the world meeting its products everywhere. Both paintings are in Tate Britain's new 'Watercolour' show that wishes (and successfully) shows that watercolour is a diverse medium of great versatility from the particular clarity of illustration (with beautiful examples of flora and fauna painting) to the visionary haunting creations of Burra.

Looking at Burra this time (there are three more: Soldiers at Rye, Mexican Church and a landscape of Northumberland of a simple calm and beauty), I was struck again at what a fine painter he is and for all his refusal to discuss his art (or talk fart as he would put it), he is a painter of uncompromising intelligence, within the language of his paint, he knows precisely what he is saying. He can be both politically and religiously astute. Wake captures the reality of what the world had embarked: we had given ourselves over to death and its simple brutalities and to our imaginative wrappings of it. Both are made clear here.

I had not before truly seen the landscape or flower paintings, having been arrested by the figurative, but they are beautiful and celebratory.

Comments

The Buddha meets Christ in embrace

Reading Lama Anagarika Govinda is proving nostalgic on a number of fronts. I recall my first reading of it in my first year at university, bought at Watkins, the famous 'esoteric' bookshop in Cecil Court in London. I sat in my hall of residence room transfixed by a world made familiar; and, it was deepening of a commitment to contemplation (which has been observed fitfully)! I remember returning, at the time, to my school to give a talk to the combined fifth form on Buddhism and using Govinda as the backbone of my delivery (both this book, and his equally wonderful, the Foundations of Tibetan Buddhism). I was voted (I immodestly remember) their best invited speaker of the year. I had even bought a recording of Tibetan music as opener and closer! He reminded me of how important Buddhism was (and is) to my own thinking and comprehension of my experience. The Buddha's First Sermon in the Deer Park was the first religious text I read (of my own volition) at the tender age

Luminous Spaces - the poetry of Olav H. Hauge

Don't give me the whole truth, don't give me the sea for my thirst, don't give me the sky when I ask for light, but give me a glint, a dewy wisp, a mote as the birds bear water-drops from their bathing and the wind a grain of salt. It began with a poem, this poem, in Mark Oakley's 'The Splash of Words: Believing in Poetry' - a wonderful series of meditations on particular poems, one each chapter. The poet is the Norwegian, Olav H. Hague (1908-1994). I immediately ordered, 'Luminous Spaces: Selected Poems & Journals' and was enjoying dipping until, at the weekend, recovering from a stomach bug, I decided to read them through and fell wholeheartedly for a new friend. Hague was born on a farm. His formal education was brought short by a combination of restricted means, an inability to conquer mathematics: and, a voracious diet of reading ranging beyond the confines of any confining curriculum. He went to a horticultural college instead an

Searching for paradise in the hidden Himalayas

At moments of dislocation and intense social uncertainty people will appear offering the possibility of another land where people will be blessed, liberated and genuinely at home. In this case, it was not 'Brexit' but a hidden land of actual immortality, enfolded within the mountain ranges around Mt Kanchenjunga on the Nepalese/Sikkim border. Unlike Shangri-la, Beyul Demoshong was not simply a physical space, carefully hidden (as imagined in Hilton's Lost Horizon) but an occulted place spiritually hidden. The person offering this journey and opening the way to it was the 'crazy lama', Tulshuk Lingpa. Lingpa was a 'terton' a finder of 'terma' which were texts magically hidden until discovered at the right moment for them to be of maximum usefulness to people's spiritual development. They were often hidden by Padmasambhava, the robust wonder-working bringer of Buddhism to Tibet; and, Tibetan Buddhism is alive with such discoveries (though und

Golgonooza

Search This Blog