Crossing the Snowline

'Crossing the Snowline' is the evocative poem from Pauline Stainer's same-titled anthology of 2008. Recreated here in Photoshop by me, it was an attempt to lend extra emphasis to the words by re-rendering them typographically. Stainer's reference to 'the Sculptors of Kilpeck' relates to the church of Saints Mary and David's in the village of the same name in Herefordshire. Built around 1190, the church is notable for its extraordinary corbel carvings of human faces, animals, fish and mythological creatures. Eighty five of the original ninety one corbels astonishingly survive, including a spectacular example of a sheela-na-gig. The visual impact of Stainer's stanza 'the jubilation of wolves spilling into the cloister' is equally spectacular, as is the notion of a statue of 'the sleeping Christ' 'chiseled from the living tree'. Stainer opined that the collection of poems was 'the record of [a] journey out of a long fallow following the death of [her] daughter'. In a contemporaneous review of the book, it is said that the poems 'cast a blue light, the light of mourning, and that the collection is 'poised between these insistent blues and the yellows of the sun prayers with which it closes, enacting the long journey from death to rebirth, grief to hope, out of the 'solstice on its hinge/of salt and fire' and back into the light'.

Broadstairs Gothick

All Saints

This beautiful book was given to me by my friend and former colleague Rowland Thomas. Whilst the beautiful cloth binding is striking of itself, the contents are equally wonderful. Published in 1946 by the Department of Anthropology, Santa Fe, New Mexico, the text is by one E. Boyd, and the book was designed by Merle Armitage. Fine collotype plates illustrate 24 examples of bultos, santos and retablos of the principal holy figures of the New Mexican religious canon, and include the Holy Child of Atocha, Our Lady of Guadalupe, San Ramon Nonato and San Isidro. Such depictions of religious figures, be they carved from wood or depicted on skin or gesso panels, were considered at the time that the book was written as purely folk-art; 'at one end of the a scale of church art', yet the author mentions at the opposite extreme, the magnificent retablos of the high Spanish Baroque, by way of stressing the powerfully primitive nature of their creation. The book cites principal santeros (the makers of such religious art), and there is a comprehensive appendix of holy figures and their locations throughout New Mexico. This is an ex-library copy, and retains the stamps of London University and the American Library in London. It also contains the original acccession card, still attached to the rear endpaper; it is interesting to note that the date of its last borrowing was December 4th, 1959 - the day I became four years old. With one and two-colour line drawings on the title and end colophon by P.G. Napolitano, this is a wonderful example of a very particular type of American book; one which retains its appeal for its subject-matter and its period of publication, yet also somehow succeeds in feeling as modern as tomorrow.

Ravilious and the Wilmington Giant

Of all his enduring images, Eric Ravilious' 'Wilmington Giant' of 1939 remains perhaps my favourite of the series of watercolours he executed during the decade before the outbreak of the Second World war. The giant figure, reputed to be the largest representation of the human form on earth, is one of a series of prehistoric chalk figures cut into the turf of chalk hillsides in Southern England, notable in Dorset and, in this instance, on Windover Hill near Eastbourne in Sussex. The image of the Long Man of Wilmington first appeared in Ravilious; work in a 1929 engraving, and initially conceived it as a female figure opening the doors of death. In later works on the Wilmington Giant, it has been suggested rather that the male figure is a representation of Saturn opening the Gates of Day, the uprights that we popularly construe as twin staffs, originally intended by his creators to represent the perimeters of the doors of Heaven.

Ravilious initially intended his series to form the basis of a children's book on Chalk FIgures for the Puffin series; once can only imagine how striking an addition such a book would have proved. The painted series also included The Cerne Giant, the Wiltshire Westbury Horse (which he painted on two occasions, one where it is glimpsed through the window of an expertly-rendered train carriage, the other from the top of Westbury Hill, immediately below the Iron Age hill fort of Bratton Camp, a diminutive train in the distance) and also the Weymouth and Osmington horses, all three of 18th-century in origin. He he also undertook a hugely atmospheric depiction of the Uffington Horse in Berkshire, where the figure is depicted at a distance through fields of waving grassland, which somehow renders the reality of its true scale as almost illusionary, yet no less powerful.

Having been brought up in Eastbourne, and so closely associated with the town, Ravilious remains perhaps the most consumate portrayer of the surrounding Downland landscape, and- in the twentieth century at least- is the artist most closely associated with it. Instinctively-attuned to its contours, his dry, economical brushwork tangibly rendered the enormity of the Sussex landscape in a manner in which no other artist has successfully achieved, and solely devoid of humanity (one is at odds to discover any signs of population in these images), the very paucity of paint, and the relative expanse of visible paper on which the work was made, gives Ravilious; downland series the quality that Christopher Neve terms as 'irrisistable dryness'. In his essay 'Ravilious and Lightheartedness', which appears in his masterful collection of essays 'The Unquiet Landscape (Faber & Faber, 1990), Neve particularly cites Ravilious' image of the Wilmington Giant, and suggests that there are elements within the painting which cold be construed as a presaging of the conflict to come, particularly in terms of the heavy cumulus clouds that swirl around the apex of Windover Hill, the dark and shadowy rendering of the dip in which the figure is situated and- perhaps most of all in the string of barbed wire which cuts dramatically across the picture plane as a portent of the oncoming war. Given this, there is somehow a strong sense of defiance present in Ravilious' entire series of Hill Figure paintings, whilst elements contained within them serve to remind us all-too acutely of the artist's own eventual fate, disappearing as he did over the storm-laden skies of Iceland in his role of Official War Artist. Let it be noted, however, that there is a patch of hopeful blue in the sky above the Long Man, and undoubtedly, Ravilious would have intended this to be understood and interpreted as such.

Jones the Word

Of all his prodigious artistic and literary output, the painted inscriptions of David Jones (1895-1974) remain my most favourite. One of the most significant first-generation of British modernist poets, his work was informed by his Welsh heritage and by his Catholicism. T.S. Eliot considered Jones to be a poet of major importance, and Anathemata (1952) was said by W.H. Auden to be the most important poem to have been written in English in the 20th century.

Model Behaviour

Released in 1991, 'Behaviour', the fourth studio album by the Pet Shop Boys somehow became an instant elegy for a generation. The collection of songs were deemed by Entertainment Weekly to be 'heartfelt expressions of romantic distress, plus their best tunes yet'. Elsewhere, epithets such as 'sublime', 'unforgettable' and 'magnificent' were bandied about the popular music press of the time. In his blog 'A Film Canon', Billy Stevenson echoes the sentiments of all for whom the album remains firmly lodged within the heart and mind as ' pop music's answer to Proust's madeleine', and so it proves (and continues so to do) with the passing of the years, despite what has continued to be the PSBs burgeoning pop canon. The video for 'Being Boring'. the album's opening salvo (and arguably, it's most unforgettable song) was shot by Bruce Weber and, watching again with the sober benefit of experience, it appears somehow akin to a Golden Age before the Deluge, with it's seductive images of sublimely beautiful young people at play in a perfect world; somehow, as though the Jeunesse D'ore of Alain-Fournier's 'Le Grand Meaulnes' have been beamed to the suns of California, and suffused with the perceived perfection of an Abercrombie and Fitch universe. Stevenson continues that 'Behaviour' 'deals more with mnemosexuality than homosexuality; that is, sexuality as a search for sexuality, a journey limited by its own vocabulary, and so only accessible in terms of more general, ostensibly asexual, expressions of yearning. It feels as though the Boys only invoke betrayal- and more generally, the confessional mode- as a pretext for wider reflections on the passage of betrayal and time', and so it proves for me, all these years later, a bringing to mind (as it specifically did with Tennant) all of those who have been swept away by the ravages of time and circumstance- yet remain in memory as sharply as do these songs. As 'Court and Spark', Joni Mitchell's sublime, LA-infused album of 1974 similarly attests, there are collections of songs which simply fuse us irrevocably to our time, and can never set us free. 'Behaviour', therefore, is the touchstone for a generation of gay men, in particular- which fixes us to period when our world was less grave, but which still somehow allows us that breath of memory, the joys of love and friendship- and a recollection of a time before the Fall.

When Tennant was interviewed for the South Bank Show in 1991, he spoke eloquently about 'Being Boring'. 'A lot of our songs come about through personal experience. 'Being Boring, which I think is one of our best songs,..I was reminded of a party we had when I was living in Newcastle as a teenager' - and where the invitation purportedly contained a quote from Zelda Fitzgerald; 'She was never bored, mainly because she was never boring'.

Tennant went on to say that 'a very good friend of mine from that era had died of AIDS, so [the song] was a kind of an elegy for him, for the part of myself in Newcastle, all my friends in Newcastle, when I went to London, what I was doing then, but he wasn't there. And so it became a really elegiac song'. He also states that 'Being Boring' was 'also an attempt to do a Stock, Aitken and Waterman thing, believe it or not'. At it's essence, 'Being Boring' describes three distinct forms of remembrance; personal, familial and communal and, to quote Billy Stevenson once again 'conflates them in such a way as to characterize Neil Tennant's subjectivity as a mere function of his inescapable memory, and love as a mere memory in the making'. Elsewhere on the album, is the sweeping, magnificent 'This must be the Place I Waited Years to Leave', a song-testimony to the rigors of a Catholic school upbringing, and which, if memory serves, during the concert performances of their second tour, saw Chris Lowe in short trousers and a school cap. It could equally be the clarion for all of us who endured the bullying and privations of a Secondary education. 'My October Symphony' continued Tennant's fascination with Russian history, but also succeeded (as do so many other PSB songs- witness 'Go West' on 1993's 'Very', in referencing a sub-text way beyond the Village People original, a love-lament for all of those who leave their home to seek a fabled 'promised land' elsewhere). Stevenson speaks of 'Jealousy', the album's ultimate track, as set in a London apartment 'in which the past is almost architectural, so concrete is its presence'.

For me, 'Behaviour' is forever the windswept majesty of Dungeness, and the animated trips into Rye with Derek Jarman, It is also the rooms of Streatham Hill, and of my dear friend David Kirkup, and my seventh-floor flat on the Old Kent Road. Listening again from the vantage-point of some twenty years, I am immediately transported back to these places and these people, and am more than glad to linger there for the duration; 'Behaviour' then, as a threnody for all that has gone before -and just maybe- for a domain now lost to us forever. A small photograph on the rear page of the CD boooklet shows the empty Arts and Crafts chair that Lowe has occupied on its front cover, the roses they cradle now strewn on the floor. If ever there was a metaphor for loss, the remembrance of time past (to plunder the Proustian epithet once more) this is it. One thing is for certain; it is with 'Behaviour' that the fabled chance-meeting of Tennant and Lowe in a King's Road hi-fi store truly reaches its apotheosis, and we, for all our gratitude, will never be the same again.

Heaven and Earth; A Eulogy for William Dyce's 'Pegwell Bay'

Pegwell Bay, situated on the estuary of the River Stour between Ramsgate and Sandwich, is the setting for one of the most evocative images of the Pre-Raphaelite era. Subtitled 'A Recollection of October 5th 1858', William Dyce's painting was the result of a trip made in the autumn of that year, and depicts members of his family searching for shells and fossils on the beach of the then-popular holiday resort. The meticulous rendering of the cliff-face reflected Dyce's keen interest in geology, as did his careful treatment of the flint-encrusted strata of the beach below them. The barely-visible tail of Donati's comet in the sky above places the activities of the human figures below within the broader scheme of time and space, and its inclusion as a fundamental facet of Dyce's composition, mirrored his fascination with astronomy and with the workings of the heavens. The plein air feel to the painting is due the fact that, following Ruskin's precepts, Dyce made his initial studies in-situ, and the entire mood of the image is charged with questions about man and his place in nature. The location is also significant, as it was believed to be the first site of early Christian activity in the British Isles and was also a famous location for fossil hunters, particularly during the Victorian era, when the fascination for all things paleontological reached its zenith.

So expertly rendered, the chalk-cliffs of Dyce's painting are still clearly discernible to the contemporary onlooker. The car-park that overlooks the painting's viewpoint now lays in the vast shadow of 'Hugin', a viking longboat which was a gift from the people of Denmark to the population of the region in 1949 and which underwent extensive restoration in 2004. Hoverlloyd's 1960's cross-chanel port was located here, the vestiges of which have been almost entirely reclaimed by nature, particularly the concrete launch ramp that now trails off amid swathes of sedge and salt-flats now home to wading birds and willow warblers. Dominating the skyline is the mad, jugenstijl tower of the Belle Vue hotel which dwarfs the Victorian flint-built cottages that surround it, whilst in the sky, a continuous stream of freight aircraft fly low over the beach into Manston airport, forever replacing the mysterious comet which, like Breugel's 'Icarus', goes unnoticed by Dyce's crinolined subjects as they search the beach for their geological treasures.