WOMAN WITH FACELIFT

                                             Oil on canvas board, 7 x 9 1/2in (18 x 24cm)

This young woman had arranged herself demurely on a bench in Paris, but she was not at ease.  I'm no expert on body language but I thought she looked nervous.  I didn't get a good look at her face as I passed.

INNOCENT ORDEAL

    
Alison Hughes, the central character of this love story set in Britain and France between 1916 and 1918, gaily and thankfully leaves her Canadian prairie town for England and the ‘great adventure’ of the First World War; having been recruited by the officious and irresponsible Aunt Madge to ‘do her bit’ to help the Mother Country. In the exhilerating atmosphere of the London of thès dansants, Campagne-done-up-as lemonade, and Zeppelin raids, she becomes the protégée of her older flat-mate, the beguiling, jealous and unscrupulous Lenore Trevelyan, who points out what fun war can be on the home front and what opportunities it offers young women like themselves.  Lenore, a quasi-Suffragette, secretly plots with her cynical friend, Clive Wimbush, the loss of what she views as Alison’s antique and deplorable colonial innocence. Ulnderstanding of the implications of Lenore’s dictum of ‘entertaining the troops,’ and shock following forced proximity to the War, spark reflection and self-scrutiny: prompting Alison to train as a V.A.D. and undertake duties in a military hospital in France. She also comes to realise that Gavin Piers, of the Royal Flying Clorps, is not to be taken for granted simply because he is the childhood friend from the old home town.
Boulogne, the frenzied nerve centre and point of departure for Allied troops bound for the Front, is the setting for Alison’s ordeal of love and anguish in the second half of the novel.
Her passage from innocence to experience spans war’s brutal mix of glamour and excitement with suffering and death; and mirrors, to an extent, her nation’s baptism of fire.

  Available from Trafford Publishing, orders@trafford.com; or from Amazon, $19.69; or from the author.

Après Vuillard -- encore

Oil on Board, 40 x 22cm (14 x 8 3/4in)

P.S.  I've just been dining with my wife, at home on a rainy evening, and she has just looked at my blog. 'You stuck that there without saying anything about it? Just like that?' -- I count her an expert on blog etiquette, but I tried over the second glass of Côte de Bourg to defend myself.  'I painted that some years back,' I said, 'and really I had nothing to say about it.  And besides, I"d talked about Vuillard in my last.'  'It's egotistical, and impolite; you'll lose all your few followers. If you don't want to say anything about the painting (which I've alwasys loved; and I want to put it in the guest room) change the subject,' she drove on, quite fired up. ' Talk about other things -- anything; you're supposed to be a writer.' 'Well, but I've been painting walls and fixing things and getting the garden in shape, summer is a busy time. And besides I've been proccupied with what's going on in the wider world.'  'Ah,' she said with something approaching a snort, 'your fixation on Islam! Well, don't talk about that.'

And yet, why not?

This 'Freedom Flotilla' incident has had me fuming -- fuming at the skewed reporting in British newspapers and the BBC; interviews with the aid activists under captions like: 'We were unarmed,' etc. In the Washington Post I found the full Israeli account (04/06/2010). According to this, four hours were spent trying to persuade the ship to turn from Gaza, met by shouts of 'Go back to Auschwitz!' The Israelis did not expect an attack from humanitarian aid activists, but rather to see them chaining themselves to protect the engine room. They were set upon  by 30-40 men. Seven soldiers were wounded, two critically, with gunshot wounds; 3 were captured and their pistols taken. Two escaped by jumping into the sea. Found on the ship were 100 metal rods, 200 knives, 50 wooden clubs, 150 military vests, steel and concrete building supplies. Many of the attackers had 10,000€ on them, raising a suspicion of their being mercenaries.

Is this version credible? -- I think it is.  Question:  If the Israeli soldiers were the ones bent on attacking, how is it their take-overs of the other ships in the Flotilla went peacefully?

In truth, like a lot of others, I've been proccupied for a long time by the Islamist threat to our way of life in the West. (How much painting could we do, with an Imam watching over us?) And my reading reflects my worry. Try, for starters, Melanie Phillips's Londonistan and The World Turned Upside Down, and maybe Irshad Manji's The Trouble with Islam -- if you haven't read them.

But enough of this.  I'll get off my hobby horse. A copy of Oriana Fallaci's The Rage and the Pride arrived today from Amazon and I want to go to bed and start it.

Cheers.

'

April and May in Portugal

Just returned from two weeks in Portugal, a small country full of good things to see and do. Landing in the northern city of Porto on Ryanair -- ‘The airline that’s the cheapest in Europe and always on time’ (except when a volcano erupts), we hired a car and made our way down to the Algarve in easy stages; the Algarve being the southernmost region, the most favoured by ex-pats and tourists, but, we found, not at all congested in April and early May. A change of scene is always refreshing. What struck me most was the luxuriant and near-tropical vegetation, the variety of palm trees, fields of wildflowers, gardens dripping with vividly coloured exotic plants. Unlike some southern European countries, Portugal is generally very clean (the beaches impeccably so). On our last day’s driving we encountered hundreds of people trudging along at the sides of major highways, pilgrims bound for Fatima; an annual undertaking,  dangerous and often fatal, we were told. We spent most of our time in a quinta or villa b&b near Lagos. We were lucky with the weather, except in Marvao, a medieval village perched on a rocky promontory above the clouds, where it might have been January.
   Here is a photo of Praia da Rocha, Algarve, where there is a typically dramatic contrast between sand and high outcroppings of ochre limestone rocks:

'The world forgetting . . . '

                                      Oil on Canvas 7 x 4 3/4 in (18 x 12 cm)

   Alas, our unweeded garden, suddenly sprouting out in every undesirable direction, various appointments, and preparatiions for a two-week stay in Portugal, have interrupted my painting and my blogging.
   This little work was done after revisiting my book of Vuillard -- the 'intimist' painter par excellence; the portraitist of a private and nevertheless intense life, in which moments of domestic rituel, like the 'moments bien heureux' of Proust, transcend the course of time and are transfigured by the poetic memory.

Calypso

 

Oil on Canvas Board 14 x 10 1/2in (35 x 27cm)

‘On the islands there are fairy-goddesses who hold seamen captive in the toils of love; among them, the goddess Circe who, when about to yield herself to the men who desire her, strikes them with her wand and changes them into lions, wolves, or other animals. . . . Other goddesses, such as the nymph Calypso, dwell in the islands of the sea. Thrown on to the shore near her grotto, Odysseus falls in love with her as a sailor in the Southern Ocean might with a fair Polynesian. But he more quickly wearies of his conquest than the nymph herself who for seven years keeps in her bed every night the audacious mortal she loves and whom shipwreck has deprived of the means of leaving her. But every day Odysseus goes to sit upon a rock on the shore and gaze for hours over the ocean-wastes that separate him from his homeland, from his wife and son and the domain of vineyards and ollive-groves. In the end Calypso is commanded by Zeus to let him go. She gives him an axe, a hammer and nails, and with these, not without fear, he builds a simple raft on which to brave the boundless sea.’
-- André Bonnard, Greek Civilization from the Iliad to the Parthenon, 1958, pp.64-65.

Seine Night Scene Again

A night sky is no picnic, so to speak. Difficult. One can’t just take the tube of black and squirt. It was too busy before, a lot of fireworks exploding,but now perhaps it looks like a snow storm impending. Must give more thought to night skies. I think it’s marginally better, however.

I’ve been without fixed phone and Internet for the last three weeks, thanks to a power surge zonking my Freebox. Quite relaxing – amazing how much free time is suddenly available.  But I’m glad to be back all the same.