Monday, May 4, 2009
Sunday, May 3, 2009
Delmira Augustini ...
Serpentina
En mis sueños de amor ¡yo soy serpiente!
gliso y undulo como una corriente;
dos píldoras de insomnio y de hipnotismo
son mis ojos; la punta del encanto
es mi lengua… ¡y atraigo como el llanto!
soy un pomo de abismo.
Mi cuerpo es una cinta de delicia,
glisa y ondula como una caricia….
Y en mis sueños de odio ¡soy serpiente!
mi lengua es una venenosa fuente;
mi testa es la luzbélica diadema,
haz de la muerte, en un fatal soslayo
con mis pupilas; y mi cuerpo en gema
¡es la vaina del rayo!
Si así sueño mi carne, así es mi mente:
un cuerpo largo, largo, de serpiente,
vibrando eterna, ¡voluptuosamente!
Serpentina
In my dreams of love, I am a serpent
I slide and twist like a current;
My eyes are two pills of insomnia and hypnotism;
The centre of my charms is my tongue…
And I lure like the sound of weeping
I am an infernal fruit.
My body is a ribbon of delight,
It slides and twists like a caress
And in my dreams of hate I am a serpent
My tongue is a poisonous fountain;
My head is a brilliant crown
Shedding rays of death, in fatal symmetry with my eyes;
My jewelled body is a sheath of lightning.
If this is the flesh I dream of, then so is my mind
A long, long serpent’s body
Pulsating eternally, sensually.
Translated by Candida Taylor
Friday, May 1, 2009
Robert Oskar Lenkiewicz...
Self Portrait
Robert Oskar Lenkiewicz was born in London on 31 December, 1941. His parents were Jewish refugees and ran a hotel in Kilburn for fellow refugees, some of whom were survivors of Nazi concentration camps.
Lenkiewicz began painting at an early age, often using hotel residents as his subjects. At the age of sixteen he began studying at St. Martin’s College of Art and Design and later at the Royal Academy.
Lenkiewicz moved to Plymouth in 1969 and was drawn to vagrants and alcoholics. He helped them to commandeer old warehouses for shelter and they in return would sit for him and be the subjects for his paintings.
Lenkiewicz embarked on a series of ‘Projects’, the first of which was Vagrancy. These ‘Projects’ would combine paintings with observations and notes written by both the painter and the subject, sometimes together with notes from the people involved with their care.
For the residents of Plymouth Lenkiewicz was becoming a familiar figure. He painted a large mural onto the façade of a building near to his studio on The Barbican. The mural portrayed famous historical figures such as Francis Drake and Walter Raleigh. At one point Lenkiewicz painted over this magnificent mural, a couple of migrating ducks, in removable paint. A box for coins was placed at the foot of the wall and the public were invited to vote for the painting that they preferred by placing a coin in the relevant slot. This was typical of Lenkiewicz.
He also came to attention in 1981 when he faked his own death to publicize an upcoming Project. He was in fact alive and well.
Lenkiewicz was an avid collector of books, building up a collection of some 25,000 volumes on subjects which included art, psychology, sexuality and magic. Many of his paintings were sold to fund the purchase of a ‘must have’ book which was in the hands of a London dealer.
Robert Lenkiewicz died from a serious heart condition on 5 August 2002. He was buried, according to his wishes, in the garden of his home in Lower Compton.
The Mary Notebook
Magdalena & Mary, 3 June 1978
'Addictive state serious', 24 Feb 1978
Robert & Mary - pen & ink
The Mary Notebook is the fullest realisation of the artist's thought-provoking and unconventional ideas about the nature of human relationships: especially what Lenkiewicz termed "the falling in love scenario". Lenkiewicz had previously presented a variety of 'Projects' (exhibitions of paintings and drawings accompanied by research notes) with titles such as Love & Romance, Love & Mediocrity, and Jealousy in which he explored the idea of romance as an aesthetic relationship, as opposed to an emotional or spiritual connection, with overtones of addictive behaviour. He strongly held the view that any erotic relationship did not occur between oneself and the other person, but between oneself and one's own 'aesthetic package' of private fantasies and predilections, indulged in the other's presence.
The entire assemblage intensively recorded the artist's thoughts and sensations during four years of his relationship with the enigmatic Mary, from its beginnings in 1978 to their honeymoon in Rome.
"Lenkiewicz would record their every encounter in minute detail, meticulously noting each emotional shiver and physical tremor with almost clinical detachment and illustrating each page in hallucinatorily vivid watercolours. The Mary Notebook, as it would become known, is a disturbingly compelling document..."
Mick Brown, Telegraph Magazine, 9 Oct 2004
Lenkiewicz: The Book Collector
The Book Collector
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
EUGÈNE GRASSET... illustration...
Les petites faunesses.
watercolour over pen and ink, depiting two young fauns gambolling by a wooded lakeside
circa 1896
originally an illustration for the poem by Pierre Loüys, Les Petites Faunesses (The Young Girl Fauns) which appeared in the first edition of 'L'Image'. It was later printed in colour using six blocks by Eugène Froment.
Monday, April 27, 2009
Sunday, April 26, 2009
Saturday, April 25, 2009
LYSISTRATA..Illustrations by Norman Lindsay
Aristophanes' Lysistrata
translated from the Greek and with a
foreword by Jack Lindsay
"Lysistrata" is the greatest work by Aristophanes. This blank and rash statement is made that it may be rejected. But first let it be understood that I do not mean it is a better written work than the "Birds" or the "Frogs", or that (to descend to the scale of values that will be naturally imputed to me) it has any more appeal to the collectors of "curious literature" than the "Ecclesiazusae" or the "Thesmophoriazusae". On the mere grounds of taste I can see an at least equally good case made out for the "Birds". That brightly plumaged fantasy has an aerial wit and colour all its own. But there are certain works in which a man finds himself at an angle of vision where there is an especially felicitous union of the aesthetic and emotional elements which constitute the basic qualities of his uniqueness. We recognize these works as being welded into a strange unity, as having a homogeneous texture of ecstasy over them that surpasses any aesthetic surface of harmonic colour, though that harmony also is understood by the deeper welling of imagery from the core of creative exaltation. And I think that this occurs in "Lysistrata". The intellectual and spiritual tendrils of the poem are more truly interwoven, the operation of their centres more nearly unified; and so the work goes deeper into life. It is his greatest play because of this, because it holds an intimate perfume of femininity and gives the finest sense of the charm of a cluster of girls, the sweet sense of their chatter, and the contact of their bodies, that is to be found before Shakespeare, because that mocking gaiety we call Aristophanies reaches here its most positive acclamation of life, vitalizing sex with a deep delight, a rare happiness of the spirit.
Thursday, April 23, 2009
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