Ivan Kenneth Eyre (15 April 1935 – 5 November 2022)

  I finished school and moved to Calgary to join Helen in the summer of 1988. We were both at the U of C that summer just in time to see Personal Mythologies/Images of the Milieu a solo show by the Canadian artist Ivan Eyre at The Nickle Gallery. One day a week admission was free (we had little money) and I was there every lunch hour. Later the library I worked in in Calgary  held Eyre's large painting Floodwood, a strange merger of still life and landscape typical of the artist. Another library and I shared my office with a print of his landscape Red Hill. Since my first viewing of his work Eyre has not just shared my personal space through his works but also my imaginative space through his oft repeated images of wheeled horse, giants shapes in the sky and hornblowers. I have collected show catalogues, books and a few works. He has influenced how I view the cityscapes and the landscapes of the prairies in which I have spent most of my life. As Helen once said after seeing his cityscapes one learns to look up at the tops of the tall buildings to catch a glimpse of the Eyre hornblowers silhouetted against the prairie sky.

Obituary

https://www.dignitymemorial.com/obituaries/winnipeg-mb/ivan-eyre-11003438

Wikipedia entry.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Eyre

A lovely youtube clip of Eyre in his studio.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4URm0196QjM

When I look at a painting it isn't only the painting I see but the thing that I am. If there is more in the painting that I am, then I won't see it.

Ivan Eyre

Thank you Ivan.

The Ghost of a Flea by William Blake

"fleas were inhabited by the souls of such men 

as were by nature blood thirsty to excess."

William Blake

                                    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ghost_of_a_Flea

Sunday (London Trip 2018)

 

Literature is the irreplaceable human art. “A book,” wrote Franz Kafka, “must be the ax for the frozen sea inside us.” Reading not only illuminates our souls, it makes the lives of others more real to us — in all their diversity and complexity. Books enlarge, enhance and refine our humanity, and slowly transform our society to match our dreams.

from Literary L.A. with no apology 

http://danagioia.com/essays/literature-in-california/literary-l-a-with-no-apology/

Empire of Light by René Magritte, The Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice

"My streetllamp is so glacially alone in the night,

The small paving stones lay their heads down all around

where it holds up its lightumbrella over them

so that the wicked dark will not come near."

                                               Light Pole

                                                     Rolf Jacobsen

Florence Sept 2020

I am wondering what became of all those tall abstractions

that used to pose, robed and statuesque, in paintings

and parade about on the pages of the Renaissance

displaying their capital letters like license plates.

Truth cantering on a powerful horse,

Chastity, eyes downcast, fluttering with veils.

Each one was marble come to life, a thought in a coat,

Courtesy bowing with one hand always extended,

from The Death of Allegory by Billy Collins

Shawna Lemay has quoted some lovely poems here, 
The photos are stunning as well. 

http://transactionswithbeauty.com/home/questforquiet

Box in a Valise, Marcel Duchamp, The Peggy Guggenheim Collection Venice

Helen and I love art galleries, and we always find something new, 

something impressive, something unexpected, something to love.

"I don't believe in art. I believe in artists."

Marcel Duchamp

"When you get older, it is a bit like being an adolescent – every day is different. It is a strange thing. You are proceeding into the unknown, which is different from growing up and proceeding into the known."

Susan Hiller

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/nov/15/susan-hiller-interview-self-doubt-is-always-present

" We come into life with nothing and gradually we build 

up the vast, rich world of the self: language and knowledge 

and relationships and belongings and experience and 

memory and love. Above all, memory and love. "

from Words fail us: dementia and the arts

by Nicci Gerrard

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2015/jul/19/dementia-and-the-arts-fiction-films-drama-poetry-painting

Venice was very much a de Chirico moment, one of our favourite 

artists, with it's statues and plazas and vistas glimpsed between

lovely buildings coloured in muted earth tones.

"Art is the fatal net which catches these strange moments 

on the wing like mysterious butterflies, fleeing the innocence 

and distraction of common men."

by Giorgio de Chirico

“Before the real city could be seen it had to be imagined, the way rumours and tall tales were a kind of charting.” 

from In the Skin of a Lion

Michael Ondaatje

"The Patriarchal Cathedral Basilica of Saint Mark (officially known in Italian as the Basilica Cattedrale Patriarcale di San Marco and commonly known as Saint Mark's Basilica) is the cathedral church of the Roam Catholic Archdiocese of Venice, northern Italy. It is the most famous of the city's churches and one of the best known examples of Italo-Byzantine architecture It lies at the eastern end of the Piazza San Marco, adjacent and connected to the Doge's Palace. Originally it was the chapel of the Doge, and has only been the city's cathedral since 1807." 

from Wikipedia

Photos of the exterior of Saint Mark's 

"Which of the horses

we passed yesterday whinnied

all night in my dreams?

I want that one."

from Stories from Kansas

 by William Stafford

Venice

“Memory's images, once they are fixed in words, are erased," Polo said. "Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it, or perhaps, speaking of other cities, I have already lost it, little by little.”

from Invisible Cites 

By Italio Calvino

My wife and I spent 8 days at the beginning of Oct. in Venice a trip she has been planning for years. It exceeded our expectations and will be the subject of many posts. To start, we saw

Grand Canals

lovely but less grand canals

Winged Lions, Helen loves winged lions.

Venice from the tower at San Giorgio Maggiore.

The Doge's Palace, truly amazing.

The last evening of this trip, The Campo San Polo.

 And Polo said: 'Every time I describe a city I am saying 

something about Venice.” 

from Invisible Cites 

By Italio Calvino

I am finally going thru my DC pictures.

Four " Guardian of the West " figures

at the Smithsonian's Freer | Sackler

Museums of Asian Art

Japan

Kamakura period

I has always enjoyed Japanese carvings

especially netsuke and inros and I loved

these figures

"A thicket of summer grass

Is all that remains

Of the dreams of ancient warriors."

Basho

"As if to say the land will prosper

With its Otomos-the mighty clan

Of warriors bearing quivers---

The bright moon shines."

 from

1000 Poems from the Manyoshu

Another post of my DC photos. It is always interesting

to see an actual work of art rather than a reproduction.

Certainly looking at this painting you realized what

a great artist da Vinci was and how far ahead of most

of the other artists he was at depicting people.

Because the gallery was arranged chronologically

we could see it would be 100's of years, in our minds,

before people were depicted as people and not the

rather chubby personifications of classical myths or

biblical stories.

 Ginevra de" Benci

 by

Leonardo da Vinci

  

The next group we really enjoyed were the Northern Europeans.

I love the little crowds amid the winter landscapes. It is such

a romatic image everyone dressed up, no cold.

Sorry the photos an pretty bad but

I could not resist.

details from Adam van Breen (ca.1585-1640)

Skaters on the Amstel with a View of Amsterdam

"After the brief bivouac of Sunday,
their eyes, in the forced march of Monday to Saturday,
hoist the white flag, flutter in the snow-storm of paper,
haul it down and crack in the mid-sun of temper.

In the pause between the first draft and the carbon
they glimpse the smooth hours when they were children--
the ride in the ice-cart, the ice-man's name,
the end of the route and the long walk home; "

The Stenographers

P.K. Page

 

Detail of the interior of a Gothic Church

 Dirck van Deelen

He seemed to do a lot of church interiors.

"Walking sometimes in the streets of the town
I live in and thinking of the people who
lived here once and fill the space I fill —
If they'd painted white trails on the sidewalk
everywhere they went, it would be possible
to see them now."

                              Method for Calling up Ghosts

Al Purdy

As it snowed again Thursday and you were about to

be treated to more pictures of the frozen trees

it the yard, and birds or more likely squirrels at the feeders

as they are cleaning me out, when I received my Easter

present. Just as well, the snow is melting fairly quickly.

But we will doubtless have more snow so your not off

the hook yet.

But my Easter present generated a new subject. It was a copy

of Charles R. Knight The Artist Who Saw Through Time

by Richard Milner, Abrams, New York 2012

ISBN 978-9-8109-8479-0. ( Thanks sweetie )

"Charles Robert Knight

(October 21, 1874 in Brooklyn – April 15, 1953 in Manhattan)

was an American artist best known for his influential paintings of

dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals. His works have been

reproduced in many books and are currently on

display at several major museums in the United States."

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I mentioned in an earlier post Sunday, November 13, 2011

how much I loved dinosaurs as a child,and this interest in dinosaurs,

early mammals, and early man has never really disappeared. Knight and

Zdenek Burian (I posted several photos from his work on my poetry

site for a poem called Lost Things,Friday, January 21, 2011) created

the images that fed the  wonderful world of my childhood imagination

( too late I realize I have to thank my parents for supporting this interest )

and played an important part in my first career in Archaeology

( great memories but no money there ).

by J . Augusta illustrated by (the great) Zdenek Burian

So this was a great present. I have quickly scanned the book

and found a wealth of information on Knight's career and the

many struggles he had to present his version of the past through

his murals and sculptures. The new information that

we have received on dinosaurs in the past few years, especially

the many finds in China mean the images shown in my books

and my beloved collection of Papo dinosaurs could well be wrong

and that Tyrannous may look more like a Secretary bird than

a Monitor lizard. But truth be told it is the images of Knight and Burian

that still roam the Jurassic plains of my imagination or peek out

of the stories of Ray Bradbury, the films of Ray Harryhausen

roaring defiance down  through the years.

Figures from the Bronx Zoo

Papo Dinosaurs

 "Out of the debris of dying stars,
   this rain of particles
   that waters the waste with brightness...

   The sea-wave of atoms hurrying home,
   collapse of the giant,
   unstable guest who cannot stay..."

                                                        Little Cosmic Dust Storm

                                                     John Hanies