THE MUSE

We've been living in Doha for five months now after moving from Dubai. One of the most intriguing things I have had happen to me since arriving is an unexpected connection with the editor of Woman Today, a Qatar magazine for women. Here is the piece I wrote for the June issue which describes how part of the settling in process has gone.

Our search for a villa was over. We'd finally found a place in Doha with large glass doors looking out onto a colourful garden. Tall, leafy trees lined the back wall. Magenta bougainvillea interlaced between them and jasmine entwined thickly around the terrace pillars. A beautiful garden was almost more important to me than the design of the villa and this one was beautiful. I knew how lucky I was to find an oasis like this in a hot desert country. I knew that having this to encounter every day would give me sustenance and inspiration.

I paint, although far be it for me to call myself an artist. I have always been fascinated with the historical role of the muse. Originating from the Greek word mousa, in Greek mythology the word “muse” refers to any one of the nine daughters of Mnemosyne and Zeus, each of whom presided over a different art or science. The muse has traditionally been a female source of inspiration for men, inspiring poetry since the time of Chaucer.

But what about we women? It seems to me that in these modern times, any form of extreme beauty can operate as a muse. When beauty is such that we fall into reverie, the mind surrenders to the senses. Suspended in a state of wonderment and even awe, we transcend momentarily the mundane aspects of life. In this engaged, more expansive state the space exists for insight, illumination and vision. We find ourselves fully present in the “now” - and that is a much-needed thing in our fast-lane, left-brain world.

My garden and the beauty of nature in general has always been my muse. The garden is of itself a work of art, a living, ever-changing and sculptural work in progress, its play of light and colour combining with waves of movement to create a visual symphony for the eyes.

There are no words to describe how I felt the day I arrived at our new villa, a couple of weeks before moving in, to check on maintenance work, only to find every single tree canopy gone, savagely lopped off. Years of verdant growth had been chopped down in a few ghastly seconds. The decapitated trunks were now level with the top of the wall. The bougainvillea and jasmine had been pruned to within an inch of their lives.

My muse was gone. Without the surrounding protective green buffer, the frenetic urban life beyond the walls crashed loudly in. This was not the villa I had chosen to live in.

The experience was highly stressful and left me extremely anxious to find a new muse, a new source of inspiration, to jump-start each day and to provide a focus of beauty that would stimulate my creativity to spring forth anew.

Beauty generally, not only in my life but in everybody's brings pleasure, replenishment, and enrichment. It represents what we feel is good in life. In my mind there exists a kind of continuum by which beauty can be quantified, with the skin-deep and pretty on one hand and deep beauty on the other. The location of something on my personal continuum is dependant upon the impact it has upon me. My fascination is with the deep end of this range. To experience something beautiful at this end of the continuum is profound. This is where I find my muse.

Nature provides an experience of beauty that is shared universally. A beautiful sunset, the ocean, green forests, blue lakes, snow capped mountain ranges, vast sweeping planes, curvaceous sand dunes can all induce reverie and a sense of the sublime, as can great works of art.

An example of this was the recent magnificent performance of the Carmina Burana by the Qatar Philharmonic Orchestra. With a double choir, celebrated opera singers and the superb direction of Nadder Abbassi, the flamboyant piece was so powerful that the entire audience was on it's feet for a standing ovation that seemed endless. I left the auditorium elated, refreshed and feeling like a different person. It was cathartic and on the scale of my continuum very “deep end”, absolutely sublime. Such is the power of good art.

Still mourning my lost foliage, I have immersed myself immediately into a new and urgent creative endeavour, the planting of a new garden. My face is well known at the plant market now. I fear I have become the eccentric lady who buys up to thirty of the same plant a time. “Yes three, zero”, I reiterated to the raised eyebrows I received (yet again) at my last visit.

My musings have resulted in my concluding that we should all become beauty activists, to consciously seek out more beauty in our lives. And as I cultivate the emergence of a new muse in my garden, I wish you all well in finding yours.

Yawn!

Time to wake up this very sleepy old blog.

Deranged Veggie Man

Well if we are what we eat then this guy must be incredibly healthy and the yet he has the grotesque air of a carnival sideshow and I think that is why this painting and the ones below have always held a bizarre fascination for me. The works of Italian artist Guiseppe Arcimboldo are arguably the product of a deranged mind but I find them arrestingly thought provoking. They provide a poignant visual reminder that we are what we eat and what we eat is surely one of the most important decisions we can make in this day and age.

With the enormous challenge of global warming, ethical eating is a subject that I believe will increasingly demand the attention of all those who choose to live in an environmentally friendly way, as the decision about what we eat has bigger environmental repercussions that any other we make. The food choices we currently make are responsible for contributing to 37% of our greenhouse gas emissions.

These facts come from Shane Heaton, organic researcher in Australia –

- 18% of greenhouse emissions come from the livestock industry.

- We eat five times more meat than we did in 1950.

- If every single household in the US ate one meat free meal a week it would be the equivalent of taking 20 million cars off the road a year.

- A days worth of food for a meat eater takes three times as much water to produce as does that for a vegetarian.

- The average Australian household spends more on alcohol a week than they do on fresh vegetables.

I have been pleased to see Michelle Obama setting the example of incorporating a meatless meal in the Whitehouse every week. She has also planted a veggie garden in the Whitehouse sending a simple but effective message.

As Michael Pollan, author of Ominvores Dilemna puts it, "At a time of economic crisis, a garden can provide a surprisingly large amount of fresh, healthy produce but just as important, it teaches important habits of mind - helping people to reconnect with their food, eat more healthily on a budget and recognize that we're less dependent on the industrial food chain, and cheap fossil fuel, than we assume."

While not all of us have a place to plant a veggie garden we can bring our minds to further important questions about our food. Is it being produced in a sustainable way? Is it organic? Can I even afford to pay for organic produce which is mostly so very expensive? Can I afford not to? Is it better to buy local non organic produce or organic which has been flown in from half way across the world? The current thought apparently is that buying local non organic is a better environmental choice.

And then there is the current world food crisis. While farming in the West is controlled by big conglomerates, farmers in some places are actually paid not to grow food. In developing countries most of the world's poor are found in rural communities. According to Shane Heaton, the small farmer will play a big role in meeting future needs for food both in these communities and those of the West as the need to avoid the fuel emissions and the costs of transportation increases. Helping farmers in these communities to adopt sustainable farming practices and biodiversity will ensure a better future supply of food for these countries and we can add our support by purchasing products with fair trade labels. Shopping for fresh fruit and veggies at local farmer's markets supports the local farmers.

As for biodiversity, the very fact that we have needed to build a place such as Svalbard, the doomsday vault for seeds on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen says it all.

So while I leave you to ponder over the question of whether ethical eating is a luxury or a necessity I ready myself for a trip to Spinney’s my local supermarket where my apples come from China, potatoes from Saudi, onions from Spain or India, lemons from South Africa, Strawberries from the USA, grapes from Chile, lentils from Canada, cheese from Australia, etc etc. Such is life here in Dubai.

Ah Guiseppe, if you were here would you be inspired to make a new painting I wonder? I'm thinking it could be a person made of a collage of all the maps of the world pushing the "we are what we eat" concept one step further to reflect geography. The cells of my body are nourished by the produce of so many countries of the earth. I am truly Chinese American Syrian Indian Australian Filipino etc. What an environmentally nightmarish cocktail!

Mujaddara

Recently I have had loads of fun helping M, a friend of mine reposition furniture in her home to make it more appealing for potential short term tourist rentals. The results have been pleasing and only required the addition of a few select decorative pieces to finish it off. After a successful trawl through Mall of the Emirates the items were purchased and we sat down for a healthy, satisfying and delicious lunch of lentils and rice otherwise known as mujaddara with salad.



Mujaddara is a Middle Eastern staple. It is found in one form or another throughout the Levant, Iran and Arab Gulf countries. In India the dish is known as Kitchari. The Middle East offers a tempting selection of good vegetarian dishes some of which have become staples for us and as M and I enjoyed our meal I decided it was time to incorporate mujaddara into my newly emerging vegetarian cooking repertoire.

While the Indian version commonly uses red lentils, the Middle Eastern one found in Dubai uses brown lentils, a seemingly simple enough ingredient to find one would think but on perusal of the legume section at the supermarket I was surprised to find that the humble brown lentil comes in many forms. With further research I discovered the kind I have at home which looks like the French puy is actually a whole red lentil with the skin on. These cook much faster than your regular brown or green lentils and turn to mush very quickly, so it is important to know which type you are dealing with.

The ingredients are basically just oil, onions, cummin and cinnamon, lentils, rice and water and they are all cooked together. My first attempt has worked quite well although could do with a little more spicing. Mujaddara is usually accompanied with labnah salad and pita bread.

Glorious Wild Madder

“Hello, I am Mr.Kadoo, would you like to buy a Persian carpet?” a thickly accented voice asked at the other end of the phone. Back then we were living in Hong Kong which seemed to be a destination for many of the beautiful rugs from the East. I always abruptly terminated these calls however this time I paused. Perhaps we could do with another rug or two.

The next day at the appointed time a truck pulled up at the bottom of our apartment block and two men pulled out an assortment of rolled carpets piling them into the lift. They were soon in our apartment and my daughter Rosie and I exclaimed with delight as rug after rug was unfurled. What clever marketing tactics these Indian salesmen had devised. They were happy to bring the rugs to my home and even offered to leave my favourite ones with me for a few days to see how they felt to live with before making a final acquisition. I couldn’t allow that though as I knew that inevitably by the time the salesmen returned to remove the unwanted carpets I would have been thoroughly seduced by them all.

As good architecture adds incalculably to the quality of a living environment so can these rugs equally enhance living spaces. A wise old aristocratic Danish woman I once knew used to say that really you don’t need anything else but Persian rugs and nice paintings on the walls to create a beautiful, harmonious living environment. A total lack of furniture just cushions on the floor and it all still feels and looks wonderful. Of course with such an intriguing history, spiced with “…imperial kings, swordsmen, folktales and cauldrons of steaming colors, lumbering caravans and scheming merchants” as Brian Murphy describes in his book In Search of Wild Madder, how can they fail to provide a Bohemian flourish to any home.


I’ve always been most attracted to the tribal hand woven rugs of Iran and Afghanistan. Traditionally these are dyed with the warm rich muted colours of vegetable dyes extracted from plants such as indigofera, chamomile and wild madder root from which comes the most gloriously perfect reds through to softest delicate pinks. Murphy tells us that the madder root was used by master artists such a Vermeer as in his famous painting Girl in a Red Hat below, to provide glowing red glazes and by alchemists to empower their spells.



At this point I must seize the opportunity to share a little more of the spellbinding account of Azhar Abidi in The Secret History of the Flying Carpet (more of which is written about in the post below) It seems the power to fly inherent in a these carpets was not imbued through special weaving techniques or sorcery but from the dying process using a special clay ‘procured from mountain springs and untouched by human hand which, when superheated at temperatures that exceeded those of the seventh ring of hell in a cauldron of boiling Grecian oil, acquired magnetic properties’. Abidi explains that the earth is overlaid with trillions of magnetic lines and that as the carpets were completed they would be magnetically pulled away from the earth along these ley lines, hovering a few feet or hundreds of feet in the air.

And one more juice morsel - according to Ben Shira, “…the great library of Alexandria, founded by Ptolemy 1, kept a large stock of these flying carpets for readers. They could borrow these carpets in exchange for their slippers and glide back and forth, up and down, among the shelves of papyrus manuscripts. Housed in a ziggurat that contained forty thousand scrolls… the ceiling of this building was so high that readers often preferred to read while hovering in the air”. Ah dear, what heady stuff!

Anyway back in Hong Kong on that day of the unfurling of the rugs in our apartment Rosie and I chose three beautiful small rugs from Afghanistan and Persia, which is far less romantically and less evocatively named Iran these days. After the men left I overheard my daughter making a phone call, her wicked sense of humour getting the better of her. It was a crank call to some poor unsuspecting person. When they picked up the phone Rosie said in an unnaturally deep thickly accented voice, “ Hello, I’m Mr Kadoo, would you like to buy a Persian rug?” followed by smothered giggles. Here is a detail of one of the rugs. As usual, Archie managed to squeeze a piece of himself in.



NB So enamored have I been with the gorgeousness of the reds in madder I was inspired to do a painting to simply explore them further. Here is a small slice of it.

Flying Carpets

I have always had a penchant for Persian rugs. The thought of anything from Persia conjures up associations with Shahrazad, the magical, the mystical, exquisite art works and sensuous exotica, as D.W.Ellwanger writes in The Oriental Rug

The very word Persian is a synonym for opulence, splendour, gorgeousness: and Oriental means beauty and wonder and magic of the Arabian Nights. From the Aladdin’s cave of the mystical East, therefore we may still hope to gather treasures and spoil.



Arabian Nights and Aladdin's Cave hmm… the humble rug suddenly assumes an aura of magic. As a child I marvelled at tales of magic rugs. I relished dreams of flying, especially when this ability snatched me from situations of dire peril. There is nothing like soaring upwards into the ethers making a speedy escape. Magic rugs offered a host of possibilities including similarly quick exits, so you may appreciate my excitement when I recently happened upon an extraordinary document by Azhar Abidi titled The Secret History of the Flying Carpet. In his own words Abidi tells us,

"Long before the broomstick became popular with witches in medieval Europe, the flying carpet was being used by thieves and madmen in the Orient. Factual evidence for what was a long-standing myth has now been found by a French explorer, Henri Baq, in Iran. Baq has discovered scrolls of well-preserved manuscripts in underground cellars of an old Assassin's castle at Alamut, near the Caspian Sea. Written in the early thirteenth century by a Jewish scholar named Isaac Ben Sherira,' these manuscripts shed new light on the real story behind the flying carpet of the Arabian Nights.

The discovery of these artifacts has thrown the scientific world into the most outrageous strife. Following their translation from Persian into English by Professor G.D. Septimus, the renowned linguist, a hastily organized conference of eminent scholars from all over the world was called at the London School of Oriental and African Studies. Baq's discovery came under flak from many historians who insisted that the manuscripts were forgeries.

M. Baq, who could not attend the conference because of the birth of his child, was defended by Professor Septimus, who argued that the new findings should be properly investigated. The manuscripts are now being carbon dated at the Istituto Leonardo da Vinci, Trieste."

What scintillating news! This story is getting long but I have to continue. Adihi explains that Muslim rulers regarded the carpets as contraptions of the devil, denying their existence, suppressing their science and their manufacture. They finally received some acceptance around AD 1213, "... when a Toranian prince demonstrated their use in attacking an enemy castle by positioning a squadron of archers on them, so as to form a kind of airborne cavalry; the art otherwise floundered, and eventually perished in the onslaught of the Mongols."

The earliest reference to flying rugs comes from two ancient texts telling a story not told any where else of the Queen of Sheba and King Solomon.

"Located at the southern tip of Arabia, the land of Sheba occupied the area of present-day Yemen, although. This country was ruled by a beautiful and powerful queen who is remembered in history as the Sheba of the Bible, the Saba or Makeda of the Ethiopian epic Kebra Negast, and the Bilqis of Islam.

At the inauguration of the queen in 977 BC, her alchemist-royal demonstrated small brown rugs that could hover a few feet above the ground. Many years later she sent a magnificent flying carpet to King Solomon. A token of love, it was of green sendal embroidered with gold and silver and studded with precious stones, and its length and breadth were such that all the king's host could stand upon it.

The king, who was preoccupied with building his temple in Jerusalem, could not receive the gift and gave it to his courtiers. When news of this cool reception reached the queen, she was heartbroken. She dismissed her artisans and never had anything to do with flying carpets again. The king and the queen eventually reconciled, but the wandering artisans found no abode for many years, and eventually had to settle near the town of Baghdad in Mesopotamia in c. 934 BC."

A carpet embroidered with gold and silver, studded with precious stones and able to fly to boot? Wonders never cease! I could never have imagined a jewel incrusted carpet. Who could picture such a thing? I certainly couldn’t until today when yet another article of news regarding carpets came to my attention.

On March 19 in Doha, Sotherby’s will auction The Pearl Carpet of Baroda. An extraordinary piece and supposedly the most expensive carpet in the world, it is embroidered with one and a half million pearls from the Gulf region, embellished with diamonds, sapphires, rubies and pearls. It was commissioned by the Maharaja of Baroda circa 1865.



Sotherby’s says, "Instantly legendary, this work of art is mentioned by foreign travellers as early as 1880. The exquisite execution, the remarkable state of preservation, the unquestionable rarity, and the highly unusual combination of form and material make this piece undeniably one of the most remarkable objects ever created.



The starting price at auction will be US 5 million. Certainly such a creation is evocative of Alladin’s cave, but at that price how disappointing that it doesn’t fly.

More of Abidhi’s Secret History at later.

Fear of Black

A dear friend and fellow painter once commented that canvases that had been painted over in order to be used again, contained the ghosts of the images hidden beneath. I have to say I agree with her. This recent piece has many ghosts hidden within. This is a large canvas and has dominated the space in my studio for years now, as one idea after another went awry to be primed again in fresh white gesso. I always wondered if the increasing numbers of ghosts from the old images were creating subconscious blocks in my mind. With the last misadventure I decided it was time to take the bull by the horns and find a way to embrace my shadows. I couldn't possibly let this big canvas languish around gathering years more dust. To turn things around I decided to prime in black, an act that took supreme courage on my part.

As a painter, I have always shied away from using black even in the tiniest quantities. You could say I have been almost phobic about it. The sight of this huge black canvas was so daunting that it sat there for months as I procrastinated like mad in coming to terms with it. I'd met my Waterloo.

Then one day, while sitting in my huge deep pink arm chair staring at the lovely deep pink bougainvilleas in our garden I suddenly knew what to do. The idea just arrived in an instant and I leapt out of the armchair and rushed to paint. Although more correctly, the desire to paint these blue squares had been with me for a number of years, but I hadn't managed to resolve the right way to represent them, much less dealing with a black canvas at the same time. Suddenly I had hit two birds with the one stone or three actually. The third was the aim to limit my palette as much as possible, getting as monochromatic as I could.

I started with the small blue square in the centre and worked my way out, moving from tiny brush strokes in French Ultramarine in various tints and tones to bigger brush strokes in the successive outer squares along with reduced tinting and increased toning of colour. The completed piece is the last photo.

Archie naturally contributed to the work. He began by swiping at a full brush of blue paint and ended up with a paint sodden paw which I had to drop everything to clean. His favourite activity then became to sit behind the canvas and punch back at me with his paw as I placed brush strokes that bulged through to the back.

The painting is 180cm X 117cm and was completed on Valentines Day, hence it's name Blue Valentine. I'm reasonably happy with it mostly because of I've finally started coming to grips with my ghosts.