Art Sunday; John Duncan

Today I have decided to revisit and slightly expand upon my very first contribution to Art Sunday. Unbelievably that was just 5 months ago, it was on May 3rd this year and it was almost my first entry to this site………..can’t believe its only 5 months ago seems like I have been here for ever. John Duncan is such an important Scottish Artist I wanted to show more, bigger and better images of his paintings, and for those who didn’t read it first time round, I’ve copied and added to the write up too. Hope you enjoy this, he is still one of my favourite Scottish Celtic Revivalists.

 

John Duncan (1866-1945)

John Duncan (1866-1945) was born and educated in Dundee. His father was a cattleman, but unlike his father he showed  a total disinterest in the family business and a growing propensity for visual art. By the age of 11 he was already a working student at the Dundee School of Art.  He was called a madman by some contemporaries but a spiritual mystic by others. He admitted to, even boasted of hearing "faerie music" whilst he painted. After a couple of years working as an illustrator in London, he traveled abroad and studied art in Belgium and Germany he then returned to his Celtic roots in Scotland. His work is strongly rooted in the Pre-Raphaelite movement, but there are noticeable graphical quality which sets it apart from his contemporaries, unlike them his work sits well with the Art Nouveau movement. Eventually he settled in Edinburgh and became one of THE artists in the “Celtic Revival”.  Patrick Geddes commissioned him to work in the Ramsey Gardens project, Edinburgh, an experimental and very forward thinking housing project.   Duncan created Celtic paintings such as ‘The Riders of the Sidhe’ (1912, McManus Galleries, Dundee) during this period which is the painting I originally featured back in May.  He sought to reinvent and re-present Celtic imagery through borrowing subjects from myths, legends and decorative devices from early Celtic art.  His subject matter is steeped in Celtic Revival but he is generally referred to as a "symbolist" by art critics. His exotic choice of subject matter overflowed into his personal life and he fell in love with a woman whom he believed to have discovered the Holy Grail in a well in Glastonbury and who later divorced him. He never remarried and died in 1945.

FURTHER READING

John Kemplay, The Paintings of John Duncan. A Scottish Symbolist (Pomegranate 1994)

 

The Fairies

John Duncan's The Riders of the Sidhe from 1911 depicts the Sidhe, or the Celtic Fairies, a divine race who inhabit the Otherworld of the dead; perceived only in visionary states of mind and usually at liminal places such as stone circles, sacred groves, wells and 'fairy hills' or 'fairy glens'.
In the introduction to her drama The Immortal Hour; Fiona Macleod emphasises that the Sidhe, or 'Hidden People… were great and potent, not small and insignificant beings'; as Duncan's portrayal of them reinforces. Macleod's re-telling of the ancient poem The March of the Faërie Host which she includes in her anthology of celtic poetry Lyra Celtica almost reads as a description of Duncan's painting:

 

'…Sons of kings and queens are one and all.
On all their heads are
Beautiful golden-yellow manes:

With smooth, comely bodies,
With bright blue-starred eyes,
With pure crystal teeth,
With thin red lips…'

The Sidhe are 'setting out on the eve of Beltane… bearing symbols as follows: the tree of life and of knowledge, the cup of the heart of abundance and healing, the sword of the will on the active side, and the crystal of the will on its passive side;' symbols which Lindsay Errington perceives as 'betraying in their type of symbolism the still lingering influence of Patrick Geddes.'
Experiences of the Sidhe are usually accompanied by sonorous phenomena; Duncan claimed to have heard 'fairy music' whilst painting; and seems naturally inclined towards trance-like states; as John Kemplay writes in his book on Duncan:
'he saw with the "inner eye" of his imagination forms more beautiful than any he had ever seen with the "outer eye". But these were not forms alone; they were "living people with quick eyes and strange solemn gestures who move as if in some ritual."

 

THE LEGEND OF THE SIDHE

This is the legend of the Sidhe, the Celtic Fairie folk from way back in the mists of time. The Celtic names are a little difficult but the stories are wonderful

The people known as "The Sidhe" or people of the mounds, or "The Lordly Ones" or "The Good People" were descended from the "Tuatha de Danann" who settled in Ireland millennia ago and in being defeated by the Milesians they retreated to a different dimension of space and time than our own, believed to be living under mounds and fairy raths and cairns,  and also the land of "Tír na nÓg" a mythical island to the west of Ireland.  Placenames in Ireland with the pre-nouns Lis, Rath, and Shee are associated with these people for example Lismore, Lisdoonvarna, Sheemore, Rathfarnham etc.

Down through the ages the Sidhe have been in contact with mortals giving protection, healing and even teaching some of their skills to mortals - Smithcraft or the working of metals being one such skill.  Cuillen (Culann) is one such sidhe smith who has been told of in the legends of Cúchulainn and the later legends of Fionn mac Cumhail.

The Gaelic word sí or síog refers to these otherworldly beings now called fairies.  The Irish fairy is not like the diminutive fairies of other European countries, the Sidhe are described as tall and handsome in all accounts, also they are dressed very richly and accounts of their halls are of richly decorated places with sumptuous foods and drinks.

The Sidhe are generally benign until angered by some foolish action of a mortal.  Many trees and mounds are considered under their protection and if a mortal destroys or damages these then a curse is put upon himself and his family.  In some parts of the countryside people would not build their houses over certain "fairy paths" because of the type of disturbances which would ensue.

Whenever a host of the Sidhe appears there is a strange sound like the humming of thousands of bees also a whirlwind or shee-gaoithe is caused.

 

 

the Ledgend of  Danu,

mother, queen, life giver,
your sweetness is the salt kiss
where ocean meets land.
You are the wellspring of fertility,
Queen of all Sidhe,
shining jewel of Ireland.
I am enveloped in your mist,
your loving embrace,
a child come happily home
Katrin Auch

Danu is the oldest Celtic Goddess, known also as Don and Anu. Her influence spread far across the British Isles and Europe, where the Danube river was named for her. Few stories about Danu have survived, and yet the reverence in which she was held still remains. It is told that those who worshipped her, the Tuatha de Danaan (the children of Danu), retreated into the hollow hills of Ireland when Christianity overcame the old ways. There, they became immortal, the Sidhe or faery folk, and Danu's legend lives on as the Goddess of faery ways. Danu is the power that is in the land, never to be overcome by mortals. And Her power is in the imagination of those who see magic in the twilight mist between the worlds.

http://forgetmenot525.multiply.com/photos/album/187/art_Sunday_John_Duncan_Illustrations

art Sunday, John Duncan Illustrations

This is the painting i featured in my very first Art Sunday May 5th this year

The paintings of John Duncan, Scottish artist, Celtic revivalist.

read the blog here
http://forgetmenot525.multiply.com/journal/item/175/Art_Sunday_John_Duncan

Picture Perfect, Rhyme Time

Picture Perfect; Rhyme Time

 

One fine day I took a walk’

Along the cliffs and beaches

Occasionally I’d stop to talk’

Above the seagull screeches

 

Through fields like swaying seas of gold’

The sun was high and getting hotter

Suddenly, the air turned cold

BEFORE ME…..THE CASTLE OF DUNNOTTAR

 

Recycling Joke.......LOL

I have just found this in my emails, someone obviously knows I'm obsessed with recycling!!

If you had purchased £1000 of Northern Rock shares one year ago it would now be worth £4.95,  with HBOS, earlier this week your £1000 would have been worth £16.50,  £1000 invested in XL Leisure would now be worth less than £5, but  ....  if you bought £1000 worth of  Lager one year ago, drank it all, then took the empty cans to an aluminium re-cycling plant, you would get £214.

So based on the above statistics the best current investment advice is to drink heavily and re-cycle

Poetry Wednesday, William Blake

William Blake 1757-1827, Artist, Painter and Poet.

This man spent almost his entire life in the black hole that was London of the eighteenth century. This was a London where the Thames was foul with rotting sewage and approximately 30 poor souls died of starvation every week. Not the elegant eighteenth century usually depicted in books and films. This was a London where a mere handful of wealthy residents enjoyed the fresh air and the pleasant spacious homes of the west, a region that is now Regent Street. The rest of the wretched poverty stricken people existed on the edge of brothels, sewers, gin houses and burial grounds.

The Tyger, (1794) is a powerful piece of writing, very different to ‘The Little Black Boy,(1789) but both are storied aimed mostly for children from Blake’s  ‘Songs of Innocence ‘ series.  

The Poem ‘The Little Black Boy’ leaves you feeling so sorry for the poor child who believes (in the Poem) one day he will be white and every one will love him. How much of this child’s pain was actually observed and empathised by Blake; and how much was his own interpretation of the situation, an interpretation necessarily coloured by his own time and place in history, we cannot possibly know. But we can know, from the way this is written, that even if his interpretation of the child’s emotional response to the world is inaccurate, it is well intended and kindly.

If you read ‘The Tyger’ after reading ‘The Little Black Boy’ you feel a transition of emotion. The little Black Boy leaves a feeling of compassionate naivety but follow that with The Tyger and the soft compassionate naivety disappears and in replaced by the reality of the fearless Tyger tracking and attacking its helpless prey. A brave, beautiful, fearless but cruel tiger.

William Blake, Poet and Artist; how nice to be able to illustrate a poem with the authors own original illustrations.

William Blake (1757-1827)

The Little Black Boy

 

              1 My mother bore me in the southern wild,

              2 And I am black, but O! my soul is white;

              3 White as an angel is the English child,

              4 But I am black, as if bereav'd of light.

 

              5 My mother taught me underneath a tree,

              6 And sitting down before the heat of day,

              7 She took me on her lap and kissed me,

              8 And pointing to the east, began to say:

 

              9 Look on the rising sun: there God does live,

            10 And gives his light, and gives his heat away;

            11 And flowers and trees and beasts and men receive

            12 Comfort in morning, joy in the noonday.

            13 And we are put on earth a little space,

            14 That we may learn to bear the beams of love;

            15 And these black bodies and this sunburnt face

            16 Is but a cloud, and like a shady grove.

 

            17 For when our souls have learn'd the heat to bear,

            18 The cloud will vanish; we shall hear his voice,

            19 Saying: 'Come out from the grove, my love and care,

            20 And round my golden tent like lambs rejoice.' "

            21 Thus did my mother say, and kissed me;

            22 And thus I say to little English boy,

            23 When I from black and he from white cloud free,

            24 And round the tent of God like lambs we joy,

 

            25 I'll shade him from the heat, till he can bear

            26 To lean in joy upon our father's knee;

            27 And then I'll stand and stroke his silver hair,

            28 And be like him, and he will then love me.

 

 

 

 

 The Tiger

       

1 Tyger! Tyger! burning bright

2 In the forest of the night

3 What immortal hand or eye

4 Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

5 In what distant deeps or skies

6 Burnt the fire of thine eyes?

7 On what wings dare he aspire?

8 What the hand dare seize the fire?

 

9 And What shoulder, and what art,

10 Could twist the sinews of thy heart?

11 And when thy heart began to beat,

12 What dread hand? and what dread feet?

 

13 What the hammer? what the chain?

14 In what furnace was thy brain?

15 What the anvil? what dread grasp

16 Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

 

17 When the stars threw down their spears,

18 And watered heaven with their tears,

19 Did he smile his work to see?

20 Did he who made the lamb make thee?

 

21 Tyger! Tyger! burning bright

22 In the forests of the night,

23 What immortal hand or eye

24 Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

 

http://forgetmenot525.multiply.com/photos/album/186/Poetry_Wednesday_William_Blake_illustrations

Poetry Wednesday, William Blake, illustrations

read the Blog here

http://forgetmenot525.multiply.com/journal/item/172/Poetry_Wednesday_William_Blake

Herb Thursday; CARROTS, CARROTS AND MORE CARROTS

We’ve had carrot soup followed by carrot cake and, feeling on a bit of a roll, I went back looking for more carrot stuff. And you would not believe what I found;

 

A CARROT MUSEUM!!!!

 

I didn’t believe it either but here it is, any thing and every thing any one could ever hope to know about carrots. This museum even has a floor plan with every thing in sections,

oh I love it, you HAVE to check this out.

http://www.carrotmuseum.co.uk