{"id":1898,"date":"2015-01-23T16:47:01","date_gmt":"2015-01-23T21:47:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pointestcharlesartschool.org\/?p=1898"},"modified":"2015-05-23T11:08:00","modified_gmt":"2015-05-23T15:08:00","slug":"winter-reading","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pointestcharlesartschool.org\/fr\/winter-reading\/","title":{"rendered":"Winter Reading"},"content":{"rendered":"[vc_row][vc_column width= »1\/1″]
<\/div>[vc_column_text]\u201cHave you heard about Mark Zuckerberg\u2019s book club<\/a>?\u201d Oswald asked, ploppling himself down on the couch at the art school. He had dropped by with his latest discovery from the tea world, Oolong coated in Ginseng. He is trying to reduce his coffee intake and is making a study of teas as a diversion. \u201cMark Zuckerman has a book club!? You\u2019ve got to be kidding me.\u201d \u201cHe does indeed. He makes New Year\u2019s resolutions – and keeps them, which doesn\u2019t surprise me actually. And this is this year\u2019s. Anyway, it made me think of you. You are always suggesting books to people, especially art books. It\u2019s your inner librarian and your desire to improve people that I find so charming.\u201d Hmm, I wondered if that was a compliment.<\/p>\n

All this while he was making the tea – he poured a cup of tea for each of us. \u201cTake this book, for example.\u201d He picked up a recent book about Joan Mitchell, an abstract painter from the fifties which was lying on the coffee table in our \u201ccomfy corner\u201d at the school. \u201cShe was part of the Abstract Expressionist movement that was blowing the socks off everyone at the time. And Riopelle\u2019s girlfriend, by the way, which in Canada may have been her chief claim to fame. An art dealer in New York told her he wished she was male, dead and French, and then her stuff would sell better. Pretty nervy of him! I know about her because my aunt moved in the outer reaches of that French\/English modern art circle in the fifties here, hanging around in coffee houses and talking art all night.\u201d He sighed a bit and took a sip of tea. \u201cLooks like a great book, may I borrow it? Maybe she mentions Auntie.\u201d I said of course, as Oswald is religious about returning books.<\/p>\n

After he left, I settled down (with another cup of his Oolong tea) to work on this blog. I remembered an article I had written about the pleasures of summer reading \u2013 the languid days spent on holiday with a favourite pile of books. But winter reading is an escape also \u2013 sitting curled up at home, cosy in pyjamas and fuzzy socks, or reading on the bus to relieve the boredom and darkness of a winter commute \u2013 or over breakfast to start the workday inspired by great characters and deeds.<\/p>\n

I read over that old article and decided to reprint some of it here for you. Reading has been a passion and a source of strength for me all my life, and I miss no opportunity to share the value of reading, especially about the great characters, mythical, fictional or real, who have shaped the world we know.<\/p>\n

As a child, I devoured every fairy tale I could get my hands on – many times over: my children\u2019s copy of the Greek myths; stories from the Hebrew Bible a friend of my mother\u2019s gave me; \u201cFolk Tales From Many Lands\u201d. And I particularly relished a book of my brother\u2019s about heroic wartime escape stories. Growing up Catholic, I read the lives of the saints, inspiring accounts of virtue and vice, courage, faith and integrity in the face of cruelty and ignorance. All these characters, heroines and heroes lived life to the fullest in their own ways, sometimes escaping a dreary or desperate existence, other times experiencing the outermost limits of excitement, drama and adventure. Now, I have turned to the lives of artists.<\/p>\n

In recent years, I have been reading their biographies in much the same spirit as I read about saints, brave soldiers or the simple characters of fairy and folk tales, myths and history, standing up to the rich and powerful, part-human, part-god, part-animal creatures of ancient Greece and pagan Europe, or despots (petty or otherwise) of a modern and sometimes equally frightening world. Their lives are every bit as interesting to me.<\/p>\n

I have read Dora Carrington\u2019s life story twice, and the movie about her with Emma Thompson is one of my cult favourites. I have a book of her diaries. She painted deep and unusual portraits and landscapes – as well as her walls and furniture. She documented her world and the adventures of her friends and lovers in simple sketches and little drawings sprinkled throughout her many letters. She hated being a woman, made pies and jam, wore breeches and short hair, loved men. After living a rich life, she chose to end it early when her dearest friend died. She and others are not mythical creatures, or lost in the mists of time, or faced with the arduous decisions of wartime. They lived each day as artists, courageously in my opinion, wishing to gain every ounce of experience it had to offer, each in a way unique to them – and inspiring to others, if not in their own time, in ours.<\/p>\n

There are so many, many artists and their stories to choose from. Here\u2019s a partial list of some I have read over the last few years.<\/p>\n