February 13th, 2010 Iain Sinclair
Shortly before JG Ballard's death last year, Iain Sinclair made a pilgrimage to the author's Shepperton semi, a shrine to his surreal tastes and happy family life. A new exhibition of his favourite paintings and of art work he has inspired honours this distinctive vision
Coming away from the official path, on a walk from the mouth of the Thames to Oxford in October 2008, I diverted through Shepperton. Light rain misted my spectacles. An uncertain detour was blocked by a two-tonne Jaguar saloon, white and racing green: XJ MOTOR SERVICES. The upstream settlement has evident 21st-century loot, as well as Edwardian weekend villas and chalets. There is a blue plaque to the literary giant they choose to commemorate: THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK LIVED HERE, 1823-1866. Modernist white cubes with big windows are attracted by reflections of light on water. Natural metaphors for unnatural liquidity in a time of recession.
I head for the station. That's where JG Ballard met me when I visited him. I never saw the inside of his house. We drove to a riverside pub and sat under whirring fans. I wondered why, after his great success with Empire of the Sun, he didn't relocate to one of those balconied, sharp-angled properties that were so attractive to the convalescing architects and blocked advertising men who populate his books. Foolish thought. Ballard was a working writer, first and last; the where of it was not to be disturbed. Fixed routines served him well; so many hours, so many words. Breakfast. Times crossword. Desk overlooking a natural garden. Stroll to the shops to observe the erotic rhythms of consumerism. Lunch standing up with The World at One on the radio. Back to the study. Forty-minute constitutional down to the river. TV chill-out meditation: Hawaii Five-O and The Rockford Files rather than Kenneth Clark.
The interior landscape of the suburban semi was a mirage. The more you studied it, the cannier the decision to settle the family in Shepperton, all those years ago, appeared. It was far enough out of London to limit the pests, the time-devourers. When journalists gained access they were mesmerised by the reproduction Delvaux canvases propped on the floor, the aluminium palm tree, the lounger in the front room; dutifully they repeated the standard questions about surrealism and how The Drowned World was saturated in Max Ernst. The house in Old Charlton Road was a premature installation; a stage set designed to confirm the expectations of awed pilgrims. But it was also a home in which the widowed author brought up three children who are always laughing in family snapshots.
Ballard may be the first serious novelist whose oeuvre is most widely represented in books of interviews. And whose future belongs as much in white-walled warehouse galleries as the diminishing shelves of public libraries. He was so generous to those who found his phone number, so direct: he rehearsed polished routines – and always agreed, with unfailing courtesy, that the world was indeed a pale Xerox made in homage to the manifold of his fiction. A late moralist, he practised undeceived reportage, not prophecy: closer to Orwell than HG Wells. Closer to Orson Welles than to either. Closer to Hitchcock. Take out the moving figures on staircases that go nowhere and stick with hollow architecture that co-authors subversive drama.
Spurning critical theory, Ballard joined his near-namesake Baudrillard as the hot topic for air-miles academics. Off-highway universities, indistinguishable from hospitals or hotels, approve infinite theses. A hall of mirrors in which students, who have lost the habit of literature, recognise, in the Shepperton master's exquisitely calibrated prose, intimations of a hybrid form capable of processing autopsy reports and invasion politics into accidental poetry. The incantatory manifesto, "What I Believe", deploys Ballard's favourite device, the list, as he curates a museum of affinities: "I believe in Max Ernst, Delvaux, Dalí, Titian, / Goya, Leonardo, Vermeer, Chirico, Magritte, / Redon, Dürer, Tanguy, the Facteur Cheval, / the Watts Towers, Böcklin, Francis Bacon, and all the invisible artists / within the psychiatric institutions of the planet."
It was almost dark when I got there, after walking down a street occupied by Indian restaurants, Chinese takeaways, charity and novelty shops. A man spotted me as I lined up the shot.
"A writer bloke is supposed to live in that house. We've been out here 25 years and I've never set eyes on him, tell the truth. But he's on the box."
The silver Ford Granada is tilted at a drunken angle, like a sinking cabin-cruiser, in the vestigial driveway. The privet hedge has been trimmed, the napkin of lawn made tidy. The Crittall window of the front room is overwhelmed by the sinister fecundity of a yucca. There is a cheerful yellow door with an inset panel of dark glass. The rear elevation is gritty with pebbledash. Perched on the wooden fence is a cutout Sylvester, the Loony Tunes cat, waiting to pounce.
It is easy to understand how Ballard, after he lost his driving licence in the 1970s, found everything he required within an hour's walk, in any direction, out from this house. The ford where Martian invaders from The War of the Worlds crossed the river. Film studios. Reservoirs. Airport perimeter roads. And the footpaths, playgrounds, woods and streams he never felt the need to describe. Territory in which his three children grew up and thrived. That is the particular magic of his final book, Miracles of Life: how, through minimal changes of emphasis, he revises his mythology to give readers the illusion of being guided, at last, close to the heart of the mystery. A mystery that is somehow incarnate in the hidden spaces of the bereaved Shepperton property.
Even now, when Ballard was unwell and removed to the care and comfort of his partner, Claire Walsh, in Shepherds Bush, the house seemed possessed by a form of illumination not on stream to the rest of Old Charlton Road. The afterglow of decades of scrupulous composition. Physical effects we impose, in default of sentiment, to compensate for the writer's troubling absence. Fay, Ballard's elder daughter, told me that in her childhood the house did indeed stand out from its shrouded neighbours.
"When I was young, the lights used to be on the whole time, even on bright summer days. Daddy loved the idea of brightness, intensity, as if we were living in the Med."
In too much pain to take the wheel, Ballard returned to the old house with Fay. It was strange now, this installation her father had created from the objects of his private obsessions: Ed Ruscha postcards, Paolozzi silkscreen prints, a lurid corduroy sofa. A domesticated Kurt Schwitters assemblage, in which the writer could actually live and work. And thrive.
"I hadn't visited Shepperton for many years, until the summer of 2008, when Daddy was quite ill," Fay said. "I remembered a dried-up orange sitting on the mantelpiece in the nursery. I walked through the door and it was still there. I said, 'Oh my goodness, you still have the orange.' He looked at me and he said, very quietly but seriously, 'It's a lemon'. It must have been there for at least 40 years. I don't see the lemon as something eccentric. It's not a relic. It's covered in dust. It hasn't been moved. It's obviously important to him. And it's very beautiful."
The front room, guarded by the spiky fronds of the yucca, was known, in an echo of colonial times, as the nursery. Fay presented Ballard with the plant, his Triffid-like co-tenant, in 1976; a Christmas present from Marks & Spencer. It was re-potted several times and addicted to regular hits of Baby Bio. Fay reckoned that, over the years, influenced by that story "Prima Belladonna", the yucca learned to sway and sing. The nursery was the family television room, where supper was taken. An unused exercise bike, now a junk sculpture, faced the substantial set.
When royalties and film rights rolled in, Ballard, modest and circumspect with consumer durables, commissioned copies of two Delvaux paintings destroyed in the second world war. Brigid Malin, who undertook this project, wanted to paint a Ballard portrait. He agreed, visiting the artist in her studio in Hemel Hempstead, and inviting her, in return, to recreate the lost works. One of which, The Violation, was placed in his study. Fay remembered how her father loved feeling "as if he could walk into the painting and be part of the landscape with these beautiful women". The propped-up Delvaux stood like a permanently occupied mirror to the left of the author's desk; with a long window, looking over the undisturbed garden, to the right.
Ballard was fascinated by technique, craftsmanship. When Fay, herself a painter, became a student of art history, he would discuss the anonymous interior spaces of Francis Bacon compositions and enthuse over the synthetic colours of carpets in hotel lobbies and airport lounges. As a young girl, Fay perched on the corduroy sofa in the study, fascinated by a Max Ernst poster, The Robing of the Bride, in which the fur-feather cloak of a naked birdwoman reprised the blood-orange tones of the ridged material on which she was sitting. She trawled through the shelves of reference books: Dalí, Warhol, Bacon, Helmut Newton. And other less obvious interests. Reviewing a Stanley Spencer biography in 1991, Ballard proclaimed the Cookham painter as the last representative of an "innocent world before the coming of the mass media". In a gesture of recognition, he said: "Small Thames-side towns have a special magic, each an island waiting for its Prospero."
Playing along with telephone interrogators, Ballard claimed that, like William Burroughs, he would have preferred to be a painter. Meaning that he lived by the discipline of the studio, infinite variations on a menu of established themes and motifs; that his books were sometimes collaged and cut-up like The Atrocity Exhibition, so that the texture of friable newsprint and degraded scene-of-the-crime photographs was palpable beneath the charged surface. He could move a narrative through time and space by a forensic cataloguing of objects, buildings, machines. Burroughs, in his final period in the red cabin in Lawrence, Kansas, did indeed become a painter and an elective surrealist, a recorder of dreams. He would tend the cats, pick up his prescription, and blast away at cans of paint. The house, through vanity portraits by visiting celebrities, remembers him.
"Daddy produced two sculptures in the garden," Fay said. "I was very young, four or five. Sculptures made with milk bottles, chicken-wire and concrete, slightly in the style of Henry Moore, but moving towards Paolozzi."
I imagine an accretion of convenient materials inspired by the eccentric Facteur Cheval with his free-form towers, the lime-mortar-cement Palais idéal, that suburban temple of quotations. The Shepperton sculptures have vanished, they will not be part of the Crash show, the "Homage to JG Ballard", at the Gagosian Gallery in London. It is the first major gathering after the writer's death in April last year of work by artists he admired and by younger contemporaries challenged or seduced by the microclimate of the novels, essays and interviews.
The only record of the sculptures is a family photograph, taken in the garden, and reproduced in cropped form on the jacket of Miracles of Life. The three children, school-blazered, hair-ribboned, are delighted by something out of shot. Ballard, in dark sweater, white shirt, neat tie, smiles indulgently. Behind the fat cigar dangling from his hand, a minor sculptural intervention can be located: three diminishing Dalí mouths stacked one above the other. The cement used in this work was also employed to make a monument for his son's pet rabbit.
There were Ballard oil paintings too, much later, with strong primary colours. And painstaking Dalí copies undertaken to find how it was done: the bread, the rocks, the clouds. These things have disappeared. But typographical collages, like ransom notes to an alien culture, will be shown, in reproduction, at the Gagosian show; along with the provocative advertisements Ballard contrived for Dr Martin Bax's Ambit magazine. The ads display oblique fragments of text against found images. Walsh, Ballard's conduit to the information super-highway, is presented in these pieces as an early muse. One of the photographs was taken by Ballard in his Ford Zephyr – he was loyal to Ford – after Walsh came close to drowning, when she plunged into the sea in Margate wearing a coat and wellington boots.
A grid of monochrome snaps, recording the after-effects of a rollover accident in the Zephyr, will feature in the exhibition. The younger Ballard had active contacts in the London subterranea of the 1960s. Michael Moorcock, collaborator in mischief, editor of New Worlds, joined Ballard on a whirling carousel that led them towards Burroughs, Borges and Paolozzi. But the two writers were never more than tourists on the skirts of the hive at Muriel Belcher's Colony Room. "There were a couple of drunken days around Bacon," Moorcock told me, "but Jimmy and I tended to make our excuses and leave, because we were really family men and wanted to get home in time to fetch the kids."
Anecdotes proliferate and overlap, but shows like the necessary Ballard tribute at the Gagosian are made from hard evidence. Kay Pallister, who curated the exhibition, drawing on Walsh's archival scholarship, was surprised when I pointed out that the handsome and informative catalogue, in shocking pink with stencil-effect block title, was a reprise of Wyndham Lewis's Blast from 1914-15. History, in the white-walled bunker, is pyramid-based: the closer to the present moment, the more we are permitted to know. The warehouses and factories of the metropolis, solid Victorian ghosts outside Ballard's remit, are processing tanks for securing his posthumous reputation. The Gagosian's Crash assemblage, while respecting genealogies of peer-group influence, is most assiduous in showcasing the range of practising artists who deploy Ballardian themes. A steady-stare at signature metaphors: Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, the colonnades of abandoned surrealist cities, acid-attacked hoardings of movie-star faces. Faithful to the perverse doctrine of the "What I Believe" manifesto, disciples hallucinate a spinal topography of death-roads, minatory power plants and the flesh-pink atolls of inner-space.
The Ballard of Brigid Malin's portrait is a St Jerome of Shepperton: bare table, pencil and manuscript. He undertook numerous European pilgrimages with Walsh, as they investigated the genius of Velásquez, Goya, Dürer, Manet. "He loved Netherlandish art," Walsh reported, "especially Van Eyck." In London, on Sunday afternoons, they haunted the National Gallery. When I followed their footsteps, to search out the Malin portrait, it was not on display. "We've left him in the dark," the man at the desk said. "Much better for preservation. We can only show writers the general public request. Like Jane Austen."
I looked for a lemon by Francisco de Zubarán to represent the decaying object on the nursery mantelpiece. The closest I came was a still life of oranges and walnuts by Luis Meléndez. It wouldn't do, Ballard was nothing if not precise. He said what he meant and he meant what he said. The lemon, according to Lucia Impelluso, is a potent antidote to poison and a symbol of "amorous fidelity".
Posted in Art, Books, Culture, Exhibitions, Features, JG Ballard, Painting, The Guardian | Comments Off
February 6th, 2010 Art and design: Art | guardian.co.uk
Joanna Carey talks to Inga Moore about her determination to illustrate a classic of children's literature
New children's books come and go like the wind these days, but the old classics, all safely out of copyright, get wheeled out year after year. Abridged, reillustrated and adapted for stage, screen and wallpaper, they tend to be familiar even to those who have never read them.
When The Wind in the Willows was first published in 1908, it came with nothing more than a frontispiece by Graham Roberts. Since then almost 50 artists have illustrated it, EH Shepard and Arthur Rackham being the best known. More recent names include Michael Foreman, Patrick Benson and John Burningham – so what is it about the book that continues to inspire?
Inga Moore's glorious interpretation of Kenneth Grahame's masterpiece (with almost 100 illustrations) has now sold more than a million copies worldwide. Was it really a "long-harboured ambition", as it says on the dust jacket? "Not exactly," she says, almost guiltily. "I'd been in the pub with an old boyfriend and he'd suggested it, quite out of the blue. I was rather shocked. I might have thought about it, but only as an impossible dream. Shepard's are the definitive illustrations."
Gradually she was seduced by the idea. She'd read the book first as a teenager in Australia, and loved it for its celebration of kindness and companionship. She was intrigued by the idea of illustrating – and abridging – it, and making it accessible to a younger readership. But above all, it was the very "Englishness" of it that appealed. And the countryside: "I felt I could go a little further than Shepard, and show more of that whole world the characters inhabit."
Born in Sussex but brought up in Australia from the age of eight, Moore feels a powerful attachment to the English countryside. Her school in Adelaide had an impressive library where all the children's books (mostly British) were uniformly leather bound. At 14 her favourite was Boswell's account of Dr Johnson's travels in the Hebrides.
An imaginative, somewhat subversive child, she drew constantly, illustrating not just her own stories but also her schoolbooks, her homework, tests and exam papers. "If you'd only stop all this silly drawing," said the Latin teacher, "you might one day amount to something." She did stop – "for a long time" – and is still resentful about that teacher's attitude. She regrets not going to art school, and endured "one boring job after another" before eventually getting back to the drawing board. Supporting herself making maps for a groundwater company, she embarked on a series of landscapes and happily rediscovered her passion for drawing.
Another turning point was Raymond Briggs's book Father Christmas (1973). "It was uplifting, life-enhancing, and I realised that making a picture book was one of the finest things one could aspire to." She got started as an illustrator and in the early 80s, inspired by childhood memories, returned to England.
Elegant and composed, Moore talks with a quiet, slightly guarded intensity. She found London "gritty and heavy", but Hampstead was "manageable", and she continued to make picture books. But then came the economic downturn. With a new sense of urgency she completed her award-winning Six Dinner Sid (1991), about a greedy black cat, in just six months.
But when her flat was repossessed, she decided to leave London, and found a rambling, upstairs apartment in a crumbling Palladian pile in rural Gloucestershire. And that's where we meet, buzzards wheeling overhead as Moore shows me round. "I knew immediately that with this position, the quality of the light in the studio and the abundance of wildlife, it was the perfect place to live and work on The Wind in the Willows," she says. "I could never have done it in London."
Like most classics from pre-television years, The Wind in the Willows can be daunting for many children, but Moore's pictures generously illuminate that forest of words at every opening. For many illustrators today "less is more", but she is no minimalist and her illustrations are "wall to wall". With its wit, charm and finesse, and its atmospheric use of colour, her work rewards endless exploration.
For each spread she photocopies her original drawings, then works on them with a mixture of pencil, ink, watercolour, crayon, pastel, even oil paint – "anything that works". With intricate textural variations and masses of engrossing detail, she achieves a realism that is unusual today, and those warm, underground kitchens have never been more invitingly portrayed. Landscape painting holds a particular fascination for Moore, and she has reproductions of impressionist paintings pinned up all over the place. "I'm hoping some of the genius will rub off on me."
She has an unusual ability to change her style to suit her feelings about each book. "It's useful, yes," she says, adding ruefully, "but I can't help thinking that's rather a serious fault."
The landscapes in this book reflect the nearby Windrush valley, capturing not just the infinite tonal variety in the hills but also the grace and individuality of the trees and the gentle luminosity of the river. She emphasises the hilly nature of the countryside by creating a "composite" photomontage and then, in the finished artwork, making it "more extreme", so you can explore the exaggerated "helter-skelter" effect in a satisfying way.
She draws animals with a confidence born of empathy. "If I want to draw a buzzard," she explains, "I just imagine myself up there, and I can feel myself flying. I simply put myself in the body of whatever creature I'm trying to draw – I used to think everyone did that."
This natural empathy is the key to her anthropomorphic wizardry. Like Beatrix Potter, she has an easy understanding of anatomy which allows her to give the animals human characteristics (and clothes) without sentimentalising or ridiculing them (except for Toad who, although always sensitively drawn, is never knowingly underplayed). Eloquent in stance and gesture, the animals express themselves physically as well as they do verbally.
Humour is ever-present – often a subtle humour, as in the wittily observed drawings of shoes. When creatures of impossibly disparate sizes meet on the page, there can be logistical problems, but with canny draughtsmanship and subtle manipulation of scale Moore makes it seem perfectly normal for a mole effortlessly to restrain a leaping horse. This suspension of disbelief is achieved with the same seamless blend of fantasy and reality that is central to Grahame's writing.
After The Wind in the Willows it made sense to use the same location for another classic – Frances Hodgson Burnett's 1911 novel The Secret Garden. I was spellbound by this book as a child, and always lingered over Charles Robinson's colour plates. Looking at that old book now I'm astonished to see that it had only nine illustrations. Moore has provided more than 100.
Again the old house provides inspiration with a real secret garden of its own, just like the one in the story which becomes a sanctuary for Mary, a lonely, unwanted orphan, and her sickly cousin Colin. Thanks to the garden, this story of loss, loneliness and ill-health soon becomes one of physical and spiritual regeneration.
Moore's great strength here is in her magical use of garden imagery. We see trees pruned, topiarised, espaliered and clipped to within an inch of their lives, while in the secret garden plants are left to their own devices, roses ramble unchecked, creepers run riot and wildlife flourishes. With high walls and occasional glimpses of the open moor, these illustrations are open to all kinds of imaginative interpretation.
But having spent over three years working on The Wind in the Willows, Moore hasn't stopped thinking about Rat, Mole and friends, and she frequently finds herself writing about them, with the result that she has now completed four chapters of a sequel. Locked away in a wooden trunk, it's "the next big thing on the horizon".
Posted in Art, Art and design, Books, Children and teenagers, Culture, Design, Features, The Guardian | Comments Off
February 5th, 2010 Art and design: Art | guardian.co.uk
Late author of Jurassic Park left £20m worth of paintings including works by Jasper Johns, Picasso and Lichtenstein
Artworks collected by the late Jurassic Park author Michael Crichton and valued at £20m are being showcased to the British public before going under the hammer. Among the items is one of Jasper Johns' Flag paintings, on public view in London for the first time in 20 years. The influential work is the highlight of a Christie's sale on 11 May.
The auction house is also unveiling Femme et Filettes by Pablo Picasso, Studio Painting (Combine) by Robert Rauschenberg, and Girl in Water by Roy Lichtenstein.
The public viewing will take place at Christie's, King Street, from tomorrow until Friday 12 February.
Crichton's novels have sold more than 150m copies worldwide, including The Andromeda Strain, Timeline, The Lost World and State of Fear. He wrote and directed classic films such as The First Great Train Robbery, starring Sir Sean Connery and Donald Sutherland.
Posted in Art, Books, Culture, Michael Crichton, News, UK news, guardian.co.uk | Comments Off
January 30th, 2010 Art and design: Art | guardian.co.uk
There are many good examples of poetry in movies (On film, Film & Music, 29 January). One that springs to mind is Argentinian director Eliseo Subiela's 1992 film El Lado Oscuro del Corazón (The Dark Side of the Heart), where the main character, Oliverio, is a young poet living in Buenos Aires and making ends meet by selling his ideas to advertising companies. In the movie Oliverio is constantly reciting poems by Juan Gelman, Mario Benedetti and his namesake Oliverio Girondo. Needless to say, the film was a success in Iberoamerica, where it introduced these important Latin American poets to a younger generation.
Mario Lopez-Goicoechea
London
• A native, I've just returned to London after 26 years in New York City. While still in wonderment at how much richer London is now, I am also very aware of the economic turmoil in which it finds itself, along with much of the world. The Guardian's response to this in publishing summaries of the great poets of the English canon (The Romantic poets, 23-29 January) is simply inspiring. There is no other word I can think of for this act of defiance and resilience in the face of upheaval and austerity. Please continue to spread the word that art and beauty are what matter most, all else is dreck.
Michael Joseph
Hounslow, Middlesex
• Does the Guardian know what it is doing in publishing the Romantic poets booklets? Have you considered that they might find their way into schools, and breed a generation of subversive and revolutionary young people? It is hardly likely that Peter Mandelson and Ed Balls would welcome their appearance in schools – not least the Shelley and Blake selections.
Lionel Burman
West Kirby, Wirral
Posted in Art, Art and design, Books, Business, Culture, Ed Balls, Film, Financial crisis, Letters, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Peter Mandelson, Poetry, The Guardian, William Blake | Comments Off