Image

Name on every tongue; figure held in every eye. Lizzie Siddal. Annie Miller. Representing in a painting not themselves but some other female beauty; the painter inspired by their looks also using them as a study – the shape of their face, their hands, the fall of their hair. Forever possessed, forever caught.

Picture credit: Annie Miller as Helen of Troy, 1863, Dante Gabriel Rossetti (source: WikiArt).

Written May 2022.

Man Ray

The attempt made to crystallize thoughts on the page; the thoughts of years. The language simple, the punctuation sometimes mystifying; a resemblance at times to Gertrude Stein: on lecturing and teaching (page 353): 'the goal was the same: to make people think. I [Man Ray] have made some of my listeners think, and it has sometimes made them angry, but I have also made others angry and it has made them think.' The author aware of his own contradictions in behaviour, in thought, in speech, in art; and nowhere are these contradictions more apparent than in autobiography; for in writing of oneself – one's life, one's thoughts retrospectively – it cannot be helped. Contradictions will occur whether one is aware of them or not. It is a problem of autobiography as is chronology; one snapshot leads to an earlier or later remembrance, thereby distorting, confusing time, and the reader's sense of the lived life and the experiences it contained. The author explores the finished and the unfinished areas and hopes the reader follows. The reader considers her own unfinished areas – the not seen through, the not taken up – and wonders if they are just as valid? Or even if perhaps their unfinishedness was somehow intended? A blank on her canvas.

Written April 2022.

Picture credit: Landscape, (Paysage Fauve), 1913, Smithsonian American Art Museum, (source: Wikipedia)

Reading Recommendation: Self Portrait by Man Ray.

A Scroll

A scroll opens, life – to this point – unrolls: images, faces, questions. The still living, the long or recent dead. Memory battles with itself, for who else could verify these impressions? Dormant, they have risen; a resurrection, in the here and now.

Picture credit: The Joshua Roll, Vatican Library, an illuminated scroll, circa 10th century, Byzantine Empire, University of Arizona (source: Wikipedia).

Written April 2022.

Dove

Dante's. Her soul never to bloom, her bright hair to fade. I paraphrase. Ruskin's “Ida” after Tennyson, “a noble, glorious creature”; might have been “a countess”, Ruskin's father. A beautiful tree Ruskin wanted to save, a piece of Gothic he wanted to support. He tried... But Lizzie S. was always caught been life and death, earthly and heavenly love. Dante, her sickness and her medicine; laudanum, her familiar.

Picture credit: Beata Beatrix, 1864-1879, Gabriel Dante Rossetti (source: WikiArt).

Book recommendation: Lizzie Siddal by Lucinda Hawksley.

Written April 2022.