Author: bowlingatvincent

Points of departure

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The idea that Miro seems to have needed a ‘jolt’, a shock or an accident to begin making his art is perhaps no great surprise. Maybe all of us who do creative work rely on or gratefully latch onto a source. For Miro it may have been an imperfection, a stain on canvas ‘primed’ by cleaning his brushes upon it in order to stimulate such an inspirational event. He does speak at some length about this process and one of many things that resonate/jar/jolt is the affirmation that

A piece of thread, therefore, can unleash a world. I invent a world from a supposedly dead thing. And when I give it a title, it becomes even more alive. Miro, XXsiecle, interview with Yvon Taillandier, 1959.

We can most of us, in our turn, fly with this attractive notion. But before we do, let’s remind ourselves that the bulk of humanity, when informed of this cosmic spontaneity, might belch out a not unreasonable protest. Like what kind of painting is that? Beginning with a fucking splodge or a hole or a stain? That’s a fraud! We’ve all heard that stuff.

So what kind of painting is it?

Miro – who, let’s make clear did not always paint the same way (and therefore dear viewer, should you require of your artist the obvious ability to draw the obvious relatively obviously, please refer to… The Farm say, of 1921-2) – Miro I suspect came to depart from these flecks of dust in a heightened state of both confidence and susceptibility. Requiring of the immediate (physical?) impulse but trusting that this sprang from unspoken understandings.

There seems to be very little talk of fate, but an exquisite, a poetic appreciation of the journey from the automatic to the liberatingly real through the process of painting. Something is being found; something more wonderful than that which could have been found by knowing the destination beforehand. I think this may be Miro’s definition of human experience; this expression of faith in the life of the imagination.

I’m besotted with his contrary genius. Farmboy/cosmonaut; diligent mercurial-instinctive doodler. Sign-maker and allotment-holder. Man of principle/man of business. Surrealist and… farmboy. What seems constant however, is the graft, the integrity of the man. He detested dilettantes and those who abused the true calling – at one stage being highly critical of Picasso for his slavery to the franc and the dollar. He worked at it, for decades; quietly, but like a fighter too, in training. Earning the right to express himself, then calling out to the universal.

Miro did ordinary stuff – family stuff, being skint stuff – but dug for the sublime. He left ciphers and signs for all of us to gather, knowing surely that we would lack the confidence to allow them to work upon us or baulk at the work involved in getting them. Always he moved forward and on, in relative independence, in his exacting, exhilarating way.

I find my titles in the process of working, as one thing leads to another on my canvas. When I have found the title, I live in its atmosphere. The title then becomes completely real for me, in the same way that a model, a reclining woman for example, can become real for another painter. For me, the title is a very precise reality.                 Miro, interview as above.

These are not the words or the ways of a fraudster.  Please, go after him; follow.

Bottle

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Is the following a depressing notion, or a fascinating one, or an exciting one? The idea that ‘bottle’ – the possession of real confidence in the moment of real pressure – is the most critical factor in sporting success. Is it really that simple? And at every level? Well maybe today it feels like it.

1.  Having coached a cricket team this very afternoon to a losing draw where the difference was their batsmen’s prolonged exercise of controlled technique against (even) our threatening bowling

and

2.  Having watched the Japanese women cruise through penalties against the feeble, glassy-eyed Americans, it does feel like it.

The brutal truth appeared to be that in both cases the losers were offering their throats. By this I do not mean that they were in any sense cowardly. However, I think they were sick to their stomachs and they wanted an end – any end. So on the one hand they (we) flung the bat with a quiet wrecklessness; the ball, the real ball and the real fielders barely registering in our dreamlike acquiescence. Similarly, the Americans, who had generally performed with power and energy up until the moment of real asking, abandoned control at the awesome 12 yard mark, apparently transfixed by some dancing cobra. Escape – hoof! – over the bar by miles! Escape – stub it lamely near central, where any joker could save it.  Escape, from this terribly real moment, from the responsibility of all this, now.

This is why choosing an opening batsman and a penalty taker and a player to play in say… a World Cup is a job for a real manager, someone who feels the pulses of fear and comfort experienced by his players. (This does not at all mean someone who’s been there, necessarily). Surely one of the abiding memories of the last England World Cup campaign is the almost comically inept management of the player’s chronic unease. Rooney was a serial embarrassment – the same Rooney who had carried England for three years on his broad, shell-suited shoulders, in the flush of his unbridled youth. Glen Johnson –amongst others – was beyond hopeless with nerves. Neither, presumably can watch the videos without squirming… but ditto two-thirds of the squad.

And Capello failed utterly, in every respect, to act. He failed to put a metaphorical arm round the spreading fear. (Or he failed to flush out the weaklings?) He failed to make significant tactical changes, so that it felt that there were no ‘fresh legs’, no Plan B. He was petrified when leadership was called for and his substitutions were, in all seriousness, both a disgrace and arguably the single most compelling exhibit in the case against his continued incumbency. Beyond the ‘tiredness’, virtually to a man, the show ponies lacked bottle; they were pallid, they jogged around avoiding meaningful contact with the game.  Fans hate that more than anything.

Given that my cricket team are 10 years old I am not entirely equating their confidence issues with Lampard and Gerrard’s in the England shirt. But the latters relative failure to own their  jerseys, to fill their associated boots are connected to my youngsters; because sporting achievement is predicated upon common essentials. Technique and/or skill, comfort and/or composure and desire. And good players – men, women, boys and girls – at all levels, have to burst through the glass ceiling that is achievement by combining these essentials with a lusty or sanguine or precocious or forced or inspired or workaday dollop of bottle.

July 17th 2011.

Finding Miro

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I’ve recently been to ‘the Miro’, the stunning exhibition at Tate Modern. I’ve been to Barcelona too; once, briefly, like a tourist. I took my family on a near-depressingly hot slalom up to Montjuic – hotel map was garbage, honest. Traipsing through a treacly sun we were, sacrilegiously trading moans as the city and the Med emerged in the hushed, glorious haze behind us. Finally, a sweaty “Wow”, then on, down to the nearby Fundacio Joan Miro, which was and is a beautiful space, with beautiful art and a ver ver decent caff. (Go). It’s all got me thinking about… about figures, or ciphers, or being bothered.

Deep breath and a beginning, an opinion…

So let’s be clear about this, in my view we have to/need to shed some of the snaky certainties, the horny machismo, the intellectuality goddammit, shaping our approach; and then we really may find something. Understanding stuff like this might just be a combination of contrary engagements; relaxing as well as fine-tuning our focus; believing and discerning; really standing there. This then may be a way into the vocabulary of the thing – if there ever is a vocabulary – for abstracted art.

Joan Miro hated and was offended by the very notion of his art being ‘abstract’. He was a slowish, diligent painter all his life. He could barely have been more attached to his land, his family farm, his keenly felt Catalan roots. He could not associate his art, his concrete testaments, with abstraction, since they were surely and clearly and obviously the natural expression of his being. (Even if they were mythic or symbolic in ‘nature’ or ‘about’ going beyond the plastic facts). Miro tilled his canvas, and there’s a fabulous tension between his quietly belligerent modesty, this visceral simplicity on the one hand and his ambition for and poetic sense of the search for absolutes, for wonder, for truth.

All the pictorial problems resolved. We must explore all the golden sparks of our souls!          Letter to J F Rafols (Montroig, Oct 1923)

But he was an extraordinary man. On the one hand a proud and committed Catalan; on the other a serial abuser of the provincial “handful of imbeciles in Barcelona“. (Letter to J F Rafols 1919).

Almost shockingly clear about the two polarities; 1. The abundance, the dynamism, the cultural sweetness of Paris was essential; 2. His farm (Montroig) was essential, but Barcelona was suffocation and death.

Whilst it makes complete sense that Montroig was not Barcelona, and that Paris was mind-expanding, what continues to fizz – arguably for fifty years – is the HOW/WHY of Miro’s liberation from the shackles of (a prevailing) dogma or form. He was a surrealist who left surrealism emphatically behind. He was time after time a pioneer, somehow kindof quietly; perhaps he played a good game rather than talked it. Miro did, however, choose to involve himself in sometimes unavoidable causes – chiefly to do with his homeland and the civil war – but generally persisted as an outlier. Both Picasso and Breton came to respect his individuality, his importance even.

Often he would let nobody see work in progress; his studio was typically immaculate and private in comparison to many of his contemporaries. There is this real sense – reinforced by reading Selected Writings and Interviews/ Da Capo and Joan Miro/Tate – that he was conditioning himself throughout his extraordinary career, readying himself for the next ‘jolt’ which would imbue both spiritual force and method. And yet this itself was an organic if revelatory process; one which he had to let happen and believe in.

In 1940 Miro began working on a series of paintings called the Constellations. In a letter to his dealer Pierre Matisse you sense his quiet confidence that something “important” was happening. But what is also fascinating to me is the following

I can’t even send you the finished ones, since I have them all in front of me the whole time – to maintain the momentum and mental state I need to do the entire group.

(Selected Writings and Interviews, Da Capo.)

I imagine Miro serenely immersed in some contemplatory groove/purple patch through and during which he expresses an astonishing new force. One which would later lead Andre Breton to say – specifically concerning these paintings – that

No surrealist painter has shown greater capacity for renewal, nor moved further forward in the confirmation of his mastery, than Miro     (Interview in ‘Le Litteraire’, 1946).

These signature works are surely bewitching? To me they are. But do we take them as a challenge to our sense of (the order of) things, or… how?

Miro the populist would have no problem with this confrontation. Are they doodles, do they irritate us? In the current cheap colloquialism is this the kind of modern art cobblers that “any child could do?” Is somebody who can’t draw taking the piss? Is that the essence of this proposition? Would it be easier to feel cheated and metaphorically or literally walk away, muttering? The answer is clearly YES. After all, the man is pretty much basing his pictures on chances and accidents – marks on the paper, imperfections! It becomes then a matter of integrity.

So listen. Look. Read. Find Miro, or Pollock, or Rothko or… you name him/her. Because you will find without exception an intense and rather magnificent sense of real purpose which will exorcise the doubts. Will help you get it. (I know the following may sound preposterous but) often what these artists have said or written is almost as exciting and inspiring as the work itself. And I recommend you listen to it. Because the artist deserves your attention and you will benefit. My own extra-curricular work has turned out the following; Miro is unquestionably the quiet genius I hoped for. For his extraordinary faith in pursuing the golden sparks; for his low-burning graft towards freedoms; for his undemonstrative courage. Look at the work.

For many of us actively trying to engage there are difficulties – we are badly trained/lazy/typically at some level visually inarticulate. We can’t make sense, or enough sense of the ciphers/symbols/lines/dots. But what a fabulous challenge! When the artist is trying with such heart to find a new glory he believes common to all of us, how can we not want to follow him, to understand him, to appreciate him, to support him, to enjoy him?

Me, I am finding Miro an absolute wonder.

7th July 2011.

Electric dreams

~ bowlingatvincent ~ 1 Comment

…and cue the Inevitable Hot Water?

How great is this man?  On
a day when the bleary gaze of the sports journo’s is mebbes gonna  meander distractedly like between Sharapova’s
knicker-line and Hope Powell’s dug-out, it turns out (naturally like) that St James’
Park Geordieland is in hot wartah.  Or the
car park is.  Or hundreds of feet below
is.  Does the chairman know, ah wundah?  Does he have a plan?  Is it under control?  Or is Alan Pardew out there in ‘is wellies,
with a bucket, man?

But yeh, given this is Wimbledon Time… and therefore we are ‘dreaming of parses’ not Premier league points… what gives?  Apart from Sharapova?  And the annual uproar in respect of her
erm… her racket.  Surely good people, the
‘interest ‘  in her ‘screaming’ says
something more profound about our attitudes than it does about a perceived lack
of femininity – sorry, ‘femininity’ – in Sharapovaville.   This noise issue is hardly a significant
problem in the women’s game.  Lack of
movement and abundance of weight is,
however.

Against the spirited
but frankly shockingly slow Brit Laura Robson (yes I mean nowhere near fit or
sharp or fast enough Robson, like fifty flatout shuttles a day short slow
Robson) Sharapova – whilst no better than average herself – prevailed with
crane-like poise relatively untroubled.
Robson – ‘our’ prodigy – is 17 and a great, wristy hitter; but slow.  What the eff do her management think they
are doing?  Sharapova won a slam event at
the same age.  Ya need to be redd-ee.  And yip, it’s a cruel
world for prodigies.

All of which brings us back to coaching; and fitness; and awareness/self-awareness.  Knowing, actually, what’s necessary.  I may be wrong but whatever her difficulties
with reported growth spurts and injury, our most virile young force in the
female game should not have been allowed to get heavy and slow.  At 17.
Sorry. I’m just not sure there’s a way back from that.

Hey look the intensity and pace with which lots of the top women are hitting the
ball is little short of phenomenal.  There
are athletes out there playing at a high level and there may be no reason why
they should in any sense be compared to the blokes.  But it’s going to happen – it’s going to happen here, actually –  especially if the
perception (rightly or wrongly) is that the women’s game is relatively poor.  So
hang on a mo’ whilst I compose a fair sentence … if a provocative ferker.

There is no woman Djokovich.
Nobody with that focussed leanness, that stunning, merciless  gearing.
(I am unwisely forced to go so far as to say that) beyond this, the
level of fitness amongst even some of the top tier women players is
insufficiently high for elite sport.
This is (within the limitations of our good-natured sporting discussion
here) unacceptable.   Superb fitness must surely be
non-negotiable?

I’m sorry to have
picked on one of our best prospects but the teenage Robson needs to be bloody electric , at 17, to be a real contender;
and she is wooden.

More senior gals display a similar or more significant
weight/condition issue.  They are too
heavy; they have bellies and big backsides – too big for a sport which revolves
around pace, agility, athleticism.

Yes but does the fact of the Williams sisters’ utter domination
of the women’s game for a decade (playing, remember as near part-timers) reinforce
or completely disabuse my argument?  (I
am aware that their POWER GAME is inevitably at the core of our suddenly
convoluted debate here.) 

So does it make
sense, is it necessary to be massive?

Drawing upon all my extensive relevant experience, my
sporting intuition and my brutal instinct for the popular I can only answer

a) I bloody hope not; for the game, the spectacle etc etc  and

b) No; does it bollocks.
But we need to find some athletes – some gymnastic/electric/explosive
whirling dervishes.  Who can hit!

Thank god St Henin, bless’er cotton socks, anti-dotes the POWER
issue entirely.  Or would if she’d been an
ongoing, serial winner of slams.  But how
would she fare, now, against the American soul-sisters?

Given that one view of Serena might be that she is arguably
best part of a stone too heavy for a top level tennis athlete and that Venus
looks notably undertoned this year, Henin at her (careful with the adjectives!)
lithe (ooh) impish (aah) and mercurial (eeeshh!) best would surely wupp their
ample arses.  In her absence… who?   Sharapova?
And… is that good coaching or the lurv of a gargantuan
geezer doing that?   (Owtch!!)

27th June 2011.

Painting from withinside the head

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In my last missive I warbled on pseudo-stylee about ethereal connections between Ian Chapell and staccato dance and ready positions. Extraordinary – as David Coleman might have said – given my visceral nature. Today I am ready to move on to further, similarly abstracted considerations relating to art. Because – unbelievably – not only is bowlingatvincent fluent in ECB Coaching Directives, he is genetically predisposed to appreciate yer Miro and yer Vincent ; and wishes to share these things with you.

So bowlingatvincent will roam, sometimes dangerously over diverse terrain.
And
today where I’m pitching up – doctor who-like, though perhaps in a yurt aromatically muggy in (phworr!) a frankincense stylee – is in the over-populated midfield ‘twixt art and theory. Or does it feel more like the trenches? And the thrust of what is emerging is perched upon the following gambit: that everything beautiful now gets painted from withinside the head.

Simon Schama knows this and I gladly refer to him as an inspiration and a teacher. In particular his understanding of the searing magnificence of revolutionary art, for him and me the exhilarating pinnacle of human possibility. What I don’t know is… does he like cricket? But this is irrelevant. Unlike the notion that art’s power is lashed, Simon says, to the exercise of invincible boldness and i.n.s.p.i.r.a.t.i.o.n. – a phenomenon that may be independent of ‘traditional’ painting skills; that may piss all over any sense of the literal, the figurative as god. Because it sails beyond, it pierces existing possibilities, re-defining the wonderful.

I paraphrase, atmospherically, but if you are in any way attracted still to the notion that figurative art is highest and best, classical and irrefutable, you need to get real. And get a life. An abstracted one, a theoretical one, an emotional one; one where you feel the colour of natural human experience and you don’t have to recognise its shape.

On the mighty Vinny’s journey to greatness and excruciating revolutionary triumph, he made the Potato Eaters. It’s a sensational picture in which his workaday (one might say prosaic) appreciation of working peasants is described thus

I have tried to emphasize that those people, eating their potatoes in the lamplight, have dug the earth with those very hands they put in the dish and so it speaks of manual labour and how they have honestly earned their food.

But the picture smoulders darkly – brownly! – with a radical philosophical intent. And it looks like it speaks; a new level of sympathy, of understanding, having being spawned in the moment of choosing feeling before verisimilitude; or rather developing verisimilitude into a newer, richer realness. Van Gogh was making himself – had made himself -a great draughtsman – but the perspectives being dismembered here are (the existing) linear views of art and perception itself. The painting is that important, that wonderful. And I am close to tears every time I read that which I quote above.

Cleverly, I’ve proggled the ear of your half-interest with a rather unchallenging picture. It’s after all relatively figurative; any moron can see what it’s about. There are figures. But greater challenges lie ahead.                 June 25thth 2011.

Unweighting

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Hey look there’s no point in pretending life/business/relationships/quality of backhand are islands of independence from each other; no point. On the contrary, as I am about to prove, even if your nature is to quietly shriek pallid protest against activity in all its wondrous forms – ya wuss – you cannot deny the power of sport and the need to be ready.

Preparation? Everywhere. Man in sport there’s a spooky amount, an industry – an absolutely sexsational amount of ‘ready positions’ like, for starters. Tennis the currently obvious one; receiver with knees bent, weight slightly forward, hands in front, gusset slightly exposed. Rugby (backs); hands out in front, attracting the ball, offering a target, inviting that moment of caress, of possession.

The talk in coaching is deliciously loaded with this stuff. And the transferability of these sopping metaphors is meaning frankly Frankie, you ain’t got no escape; not in the office, not in ‘sales’, not in bed, much less out-on-the-park. And yet, amongst the daft-punk dribbles, the cod-psychology… there’s some really byoodifull stuff man.

Take fast bowling. It’s an admittedly staccato dance that grippingly, thrillingly transcends its technically-heavy brief. (Sheesh – did I nick that from Ronay?) Whatever, lately think Anderson ‘when it’s coming out nicely’. Jimmy – aka The Burnley Express – in his pomp, does deal in majestic simplicities; purring in, expressing repeatedly creamy smooth bursts; simples.

Simples but superceded surely, by the intoxicating Michael Holding at his peak, ‘pace’ being then at that perfect moment where something beyond words was, really, momentarily described. And during that alarmingly fluent Caribbean blur, amidst the ecstatic barrage from Marshall, Walsh, Garner et al, we strain for … sentences like that last one… where words transparently fail. Or maybe we simply concede, smiling, and not a little awestruck, (that) that was bloody unplayable.

And now we find ourselves marking out the run-up to some truth; particularly if we think of the batter .

Take my word for it here that when you face fast bowling you are shitting your pants. No question. For maybe only a few minutes, but parping like a good’un, nonetheless. So, with apologies to Jessica Oosit Parker in “Sex and The City” mode, if, say Michael Holding is that challenging, that much of an extreme test; How do you get ready for that?

Unweighting. Ian Chappell – yes! Aussie skipper and general arse.

Extraordinarily (and, sharing a birthday with I.T.Botham, I ask no forgiveness for the implied anti-antipodeanism here) Ian Chappell formulated the following really rather beautiful and insightful concept.

Simply put, unweighting is a process necessary for a batsman to enable ‘survival’ against quick bowling. So this usually happens most – and most obviously – at the beginning of an innings, or when the dreaded or lusted after new ball is taken. (See what I mean? Sopping). Pre-delivery or ‘trigger’ movements occur in the batsman, either consciously or not, in order to facilitate, to cope, to avoid getting hurt or out. Because the ball may come down fucking hard and fast. Batters may open their eyes wider/crouch intently whilst setting their neck/flex their knees/give up and dollop one.

Generally coaches identify two movements of the bat before hitting the ball, at that crucial heart-thumping moment when (godforbid), Holding is unleashing. There is bat-lift and then bat-swing; the former involving simply raising the bat from the ground, the latter the judgement and immediate subsequent execution of how much or little you’re going to swing the bat. The minutiae of both can naturally – and I use the word advisedly – vary from player to player but Chappell’s view has been that these ripples of the wrist or micro-steps or other habitual or rehearsed or coached movements are key. Likewise the momentum or freedom engendered by the transfer of weight from one foot to another. Unweighting.

Thus, sagacious reader, the batter’s ready position against extreme pace has to be an exquisitely timed and balanced and consistent and fluent and enabling stance for that which may be unplayable. So can you move instantly (in a balanced etc. etc. way) forward or back? Can you withdraw from the stroke? Can you duck? Can you look in control and not give the bowler and the infield signs of encouragement? Are you, in these milliseconds, rhythmical and composed and absolutely at the top of your game? Man it’s a wonderful, frightening test.

And how do we transfer its richness, its poetry and its latent dynamism to work… to life… to relations(hips)… to bed?!?

Can you find it, this unweighted state? Are you ready? Are you?

June 24th 2011.