"Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art."
Betye Saar, Amid Hallucinatory Moons1962
Lately I’ve been thinking about personal taste - knowing it, changing it and the extent to which we care about how others view it. In her 1966 essay Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag advocates for a more sensual and immediate appreciation of art rather than an overly analytical and interpretive approach. She argues that the intellectualization of art acts as a sort of violence against the artwork’s intrinsic qualities.
I agree, but what of appreciating, but disliking? Or not appreciating but wanting to?
July Waterfall, Pat Steir 1991
And now for a taste of Paris: Augusta Sagnelli
Photograph by Augusta Sagnelli, via Samuel Lopez-Barrantes on Substack
Self Portraits: Augusta Sagnelli
Augusta Sagnelli via Baby Blue, Substack
Augusta Sagnelli via Baby Blue, Substack
Find her here: Augusta Sagnelli
And her partner/writer, Samuel Lopez-Barrantes
At Breakfast
"At Breakfast" was created in 1898 by the Danish painter Laurits Andersen Ring. The painting is subtly groundbreaking, as it portrays his wife deeply engrossed in the traditionally male domain of reading about politics in the newspaper.
Colour and Light
Joanna Constable Green, Noon Powell Fine Art
The Turquoise House, Seville, Oil and variable leaf on canvas, Year: 2024, 102 x 102 cm
A London Map of Days
Map of Days, Grayson Perry
Today London was the greyest of grey and colder than cold.
S and I tried to find inspiration by traipsing all the way across town to attend the London Art Fair. But honestly, we were both tired and cold and our hearts weren’t in it. We walked around for about an hour, had coffee and schlepped ourselves home again.
Rêve de Voyage
Luc Lavenseau, as seen at Galerie d'Art Sylvie Platini, in Veyrier-du-Lac.
I can't stop thinking about this painting.
Muse
Valerie Hadida
My friend told me that if you keep shutting the door on your muse, she will eventually stop knocking. Your muse will find another, more receptive home for her ideas.
Ideas want to be played with and shared. They don’t want to be held captive, squirrelled away in the basement. They need to play in the light of day and feel the air swishing around them.
What is the point otherwise?
Too full of the truth
“Darling, you feel heavy because you are too full of the truth. Open your mouth more. Let the truth exist somewhere other than inside your body.”
- Della Hicks-Wilson
Coco Chanel
Last night - at 4:30pm! - London was cold, dark and rainy. My hormones were totally out of whack and all I really wanted to do was put on my pyjamas and eat mashed potatoes on the couch while watching Christmas movies.
Instead, I performed a small miracle: I managed to get myself all dolled up and went to an event that started at 8pm, which is basically midnight.
I KNOW! I’m an overachiever.
Gabrielle Chanel: Fashion Manifesto is on at the V&A until 8 January. It’s a truly gorgeous exhibition featuring her life’s work, fashion philosophy and a handful of personal letters.
She was obviously an incredible artist and business woman. But there’s a lot more to her story than meets the eye. Namely, was she pro-German or was she a spy for the French resistance? No one seems to be particularly motivated to investigate these issues….
For example, she had a decade long affair with the (married) Duke of Westminster, Hugh Grosvenor. When he finally asked her to marry him, she declined and famously explained: “There have been several Duchesses of Westminster. There is only one Mademoiselle Chanel.”
That’s a great quote. What she didn’t say was that Grosvenor was a passionate anti-Semite.
Wow! that got dark! I hadn’t planned on that tangent, sorry about that. Let me get back to one of my favourite chanel creations: Chanel no. 5.
The iconic bottle was designed to be both masculine (it’s essentially a whiskey/hip flask) and feminine (fragile and elegant). The result is a simple design that has hardly changed since its creation in 1921.
And it happens to be the only perfume I wear… :)
image via hashtaglegend
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Transfiguration
Today’s poem was written just for me. (And every other woman I know, but mostly me.)
**
Transfiguration
by Kate Baer
I dreamt myself into a mother,
but when I became her, I had to
dream her back into a woman
back into a woman
back into a woman
again.
Heavy by Mary Oliver
Luke Knight, We sit and watch. via The Auction Collective
Heavy
by Mary Oliver
That time
I thought I could not
go any closer to grief
without dying
I went closer,
and I did not die.
Surely God
had his hand in this,
as well as friends.
Still, I was bent,
and my laughter,
as the poet said,
was nowhere to be found.
Then said my friend Daniel
(brave even among lions),
“It is not the weight you carry
but how you carry it—
books, bricks, grief—
it’s all in the way
you embrace it, balance it, carry it
when you cannot, and would not,
put it down.”
So I went practicing.
Have you noticed?
Have you heard
the laughter
that comes, now and again,
out of my startled mouth?
How I linger
to admire, admire, admire
the things of this world
that are kind, and maybe
also troubled—
roses in the wind,
The sea geese on the steep waves,
a love
to which there is no reply?
Doris Derby, Photographer
Doris Derby went behind the scenes of the Civil Rights movement, to capture the everyday lives of women and children.
A parishioner of the Union Baptist church in South Carolina in 1972.
Sleeping children in Rome, Miss., in 1968
Outside a Black-ownded grocery store on a Sunday in Mileston, Miss., 1968
Alice Walker
