Images and words: John Berger

I have just come from the Berlin premiere of ‘The Seasons in Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger’, film project by Tilda Swinton and Colin MacCabe. Berger has been a hero for decades now, a constant force of  intelligence and an exemplar of a life well-lived, pointing a way into ourselves through action.

He was not there today, and he was enormously present. He was present in his intensity of expression on film, in his determination to communicate, and in the impact he had made on the filmmakers who afterwards talked about the filming in a Q and A session.

His voice over images of nature: A season is not something that befalls you. It is something that you inhabit.

In a panel on politics: I see myself as a storyteller… a passer of stories… across borders.

A supremely creative person who speaks of passing on what he hears, not of inventing it. And that strange word – passer – that seems to be neither French nor English, and to be both French and English…and to pass in all languages.

Time, vertical and horizontal. Parents and children. Deaths and births. Honouring memory and the past, and yet without nostalgia.

I need to think about that last idea.  … And as usual, he offers something to consider, to change the course of a life.

Tilda Swinton read his “Self Portrait” which he had sent to the opening instead of himself. He writes, he tells us, because something needs to be told and if he does not tell it, it might not be heard. He describes his writing process as a confabulation as an idea is shaped into words, followed by murmurs of assent when the words are fit for purpose.

I waited with a note to pass on to him, then wrote this blog post instead. The note said: Thank you, John Berger, for your inspirational life.

Words and images

In my developing practice of 'dynamic painting', the placing of paint on paper is sometimes accompanied by words and phrases. Sometimes these words and phrases become poems.

On Sunday, I was fortunate to have the opportunity to read and show at the Poetry Cafe in Woburn Sands, organised by Karen Littleton and Eleni Cay. Back in Berlin, I am combining the two on a single plane. Other modes of combining are being explored...

Watching the tulips

As a start to my contemporary flower painting project, I bought tulips from the market and watched them open, bloom and die. It took a week. It produced a painting and this slideshow:

Flowers and contemporary painting

I love flowers and I'm not ashamed to admit it. I love their growing and their blooming, and especially their colours. I consider it part of my mission as a contemporary artist to encourage attention to flowers.

a gift of flowers

And as a contemporary artist problematising the beauty of flowers is also part of the remit (see the collection Undoing the Arrangement). When I arrived in Berlin, a gorgeous bunch of flowers sat on the table in the kitchen/dining room that has become my studio. As the days passed, I had to watch them fade and die. This experience became a painting.

Watching the flowers die. acrylic on paper, 43 x 60 cm Lynne Cameron, 2015.

And now that experience is becoming a project ... more soon

The sun line

Glimpses of a new artwork, painted in the warmth of the studio, called 'Tangents'.

Once, long ago and far away in the north of Norway, I heard how the people would wait for the return of the sun. Six weeks they had to wait to see it again, counting down the days. When the day came, the children from the school would be taken up the hill to catch the first sight of the returning sun. With a picnic.

Here in Berlin the sun is not so lost, but it has fallen behind the apartments across the road and is not yet back. Any day now, I think. I am measuring its rise each day, looking up to where it shines on the balcony above mine.

The sun line - like the tree line (on mountains - the height at which trees stop) or the water line (the height of a flood or tide). It is elemental, embodied, essential. It matters when choosing where to live.

Today I found the sun on bridges over the railway and then in a surprising park created by leaving old railway lines and sidings to return to nature.

With temperatures below zero, the ice did not melt in the sun but at least it was visible.

From sun to snow

Three sunny days by the beach in Spain then back on the plane to Berlin - "the temperature outside is minus 10". Time for the big boots, multiple layers of clothing, walking carefully.

the angels that I keep finding on my travels appeared at sunset over the Mediterranean

a copy of Picasso's Guernica in a mountain village was a reminder of the power of art to challenge violence

the early Berlin spring is on hold

boots on

Back in cold and strangely beautiful Berlin, my first painting of the year spoke of the sea.. called Buried treasure, it is still a work in progress.

Crimson on crimson

I’m curious about

the monstrosity,

the crimson on crimson,

the broken circle.

How others see,

and no one sees it all.

Shifting

into the authority of the mark,

into the empty landscape,

I find

the dangerously decorative

and the ruthless selection

letting November light in.

A walk downhill

Walking downhill is actually quite difficult in Berllin as it is mostly very flat. That Saturday morning when I wanted some elevation, I remembered the area I lived in before and how the road slopes down from Platz der Luftbrücke to Bergmannstrasse. So that's where I went.

I took an artist's walk, with my camera, looking at what was around. From the Platz der Luftbrücke down the hill to Bergmannstrasse. I found inspiration for abstract paintings: colours, shapes, textures, and outlines against the sky. Back in the studio, I selected and cropped the images. Later it became a drawing, then a painting.

My starting point commemorates the Berlin Airlift that began in 1948. Nearby was a late rose and a bird's nest thoughtfully lined with plastic. A courtyard by the English Theatre was full of views and objects that demanded attentiion. In Chamissoplatz, I found a small market and a stall where the vegetables seemed to be arranged by colour and climate. The walk ended with the best coffee in the locality and my journal.

Studio Interludes

As part of my artist residency here at the Free University, I offer a weekly 'Studio Interlude' to researchers on the Cinepoetics project. People come into my studio at lunchtime or at the end of the working day to spend time with the process of art-making. It's turning into a very formative space for all of us. And fun.

Today I have moved my red sofa in front of the large picture we are creating together. My response to monolithic modernist art galleries is to question whether looking at art needs to be uncomfortable, or whether looking and seeing might actually be more rewarding without 'museum legs'...

A Studio Interlude includes lots of looking, some drawing or painting, and making connections between painting and film. We're building a shared vocabulary and I'm happy to see theories being visualisied on office walls and artworks appearing alongside computers.

Always a stranger, travelling

We travel, always only ourselves.

Reaching across the surface,

straight across.

How unknowable these new lands remain,

even as they push up towards us,

out of their geographies and their layered histories.

We carry with us,

in one small bag,

our lived memories

and find them, echoing back to us in new places.

Always a stranger, travelling.

We went to a fascinating exhibition at the Kulturforum in Berlin. Prints from Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) and William Kentridge (1955-  ). My favourite room was titled "Inside the thought-space of images". Kentridge's response to Dürer's Melancholia was a journey through his studio:

He traces his pacing around, labels places of emptiness, lassitude, and the 'insupportable weight of eyelids'. The collage, ink, pen and pencil drawing was 24.6 x 39.3 cm, framed behind glass on the gallery wall. A very large version was copied on to the floor so that visitors could retrace his steps.

Seeing the exhibition prompted me to think more about one of my artworks. Called 'Cartographies', it has stayed in my cottage in England. Red wool from Nepal is stretched across the surface of collaged tissue paper and paint. It is 60 x 80 cm

Now I saw in it how, travelling, we are always strangers.

Finding quiet ways that fit

Well, it took nearly six weeks in the city before the mountains pushed back into my imagination. I woke up on Saturday and wanted, desired, a walk high up with a view. The best I could manage was walking down one of Berlin's gently sloping streets (there aren't many of those even). And of course I experienced a fascinating voyage, which I'll blog about here later.

Meanwhile, the mountains. Acrylic on paper, Lynne Cameron 2015.

I also felt a longing to be cosy in a little house in the mountains. There was one village in the French alps that I remembered wandering around. Near deserted but with small signs of life, of lives. A cat curled up in a basket on a balcony table. Flowers in a garden, tended, weeded. Signs of care taken. Quiet lives that fit into the landscape, into elbows of land between rocks, between paths and mountains, on flat patches of land. Ensconced in the land; working with it, not bashing into it with concrete and bulldozers.

Looking down on Albiez-le-jeune, France. October 2105

As the first snow comes to Berlin, I consider this imagined desire metaphorically, in relation to my art. Not bashing into my landscape with concrete and bulldozers but finding quiet ways that fit how it is.

Albiez-le-vieux, France. October 2015.

I might also just ring that woman who may have a house to let...

A journey by train, Berlin to Copenhagen

At Berlin central station, a mother and two children sleep deeply behind a bench. Around them gather policemen and women, with kind faces. Plastic gloves are pulled on before they are gently wakened. Taken elsewhere before the rush hour. Compassion and barriers.

Flensburg station, the outside platform. Trains from Germany stop and we change for Denmark. Families with four or five children and tickets for the train. Such small bags they carry. 'Station Mission' women with tabards and badges. One stops to help me understand where to go.

Barriers, makeshift pieces of wood tied with string. Red and white. They make us queue. Migrants at one end and 'us' at the other. How uncomfortable we feel and yet don't know how to move. A pair of policemen doing nothing much. A train station employee with Service on his red jacket checks tickets, reassures that this train will go, in one hour, in twenty minutes.

Downstairs in the station hall, people on benches, on the floor. A long jumbled line following mission women, who knows where. It feels like the town itself is in a state of shock, doing what can be done, in a hushed daze.

Cold and knowing this is not yet winter, our minds imagine us onwards. Tired and knowing there is another country to cross. Welcomed and watching the plastic gloves being pulled on.

   Who are the guardians? (2)  acrylic and collage on canvas

A walk in the park

Before the leaves disappeared, I managed to find one of the places I had missed before - the edge of Berlin where it meets Potsdam. I found parks and water, remnants of the Wall, a brewery, a palace, a green house, and the crows investigating molehills you can just about see in the photo above.

The park on a sunny Sunday was a place of rehabilitation. I saw people with sticks, with crutches, with leg braces. Even the famous Cecilienhof, where Churchill, Truman and Stalin met to end WW2 and divide Europe into zones, was under repair. There was scaffolding around it and plastic sheeting over it.

I noticed people with red hair, the colour of the trees, and wondered if they felt particularly at home in autumn...

And a lost shoe placed on a fence post as if to invite narratives ...

On not quite getting there

Since I started documenting my 'voyages of (re)discovery' around Berlin, I notice how often my expeditions are aborted before reaching what I had set as my goal.

Last night for example, I had planned to go to a gallery vernissage over in the north west of the city. I set off a bit early, took the U-bahn, standing most of the way. I then found my way from the station to the Charlottenburg Palace - huge roads, dusk, golden trees. I wandered through the garden and back along the avenue to the Bröhan Museum. This is a collection of Art Nouveau painting, ceramics, and furniture. I am fascinated by the traces of Art Nouveau that remain throughout Berlin. Some of the houses in my street have swirly, organic plasterwork, sometimes touched with gold paint, and then right next door is a modernist building with only right angles and straight lines. I seem to find this juxtaposition everywhere I go.

An hour in the museum, and I was done in. More walking to find a cafe and drink ginger tea. The private view became an impossibility for a tired introvert, and I crawled back home to the sofa.

I am accepting that this has to happen as I get used to the city. Sometimes it is just the journey

                 All the town rivers. acrylic on card.

Other aborted journeys include: The 'rundtur' of IKEA only to find my credit card wouldn't work at check out. To the Brücke museum (my favourite expressionists) to find it closed for hanging a new exhibition. To the restaurant across the road for dinner to find it closed on Mondays. To the Glienicke Park - satnav couldn't find it.

Usually, what I find on the way or do instead is worth leaving home for.

Rauch: harsh, cold, searching, keen-eyed, noticing, shouting

My proposal for the artist residency and fellowship here in Berlin orientates to process. Rather than promising to produce a particular body of work, I have commited to a process. The process starts from "voyages of discovery", moving around the city with an artist's active attention. camera and sketchbook. Then playing with the material back in the studio on a re-creative voyage with paint, drawing and collage. A blog post will be part of the process for some voyages, reflecting on the journey and the emotions it produced.

The first voyage was to find an exhibition of paintings by Neo Rauch. A contemporary painter from Leipzig, I had heard about him and the artists who gather around him in his city. Posters on street furniture announce the exhibition. Google maps and Citymapper app show me how to get there.

The M48 bus on a Sunday morning takes longer to arrive than promised by the electronic sign. It takes me, for 2.70 euros, through the city, over the river and towards Alexanderplatz. I get off just before, where I see a sign to Prenzlauerberg, with a groundless confidence that this is my direction. I walk, past Hackescher Markt station and the desperate-looking restaurants outside it, past Hackescher Hof with its smart shops selling upmarket non-necessities for adults, and the restaurant where I remember the lovely B. insisting on buying lunch for me and my friend. How guilty I felt – I should have insisted on paying for her but that internal twisting shyness froze my words before I could utter them. I resolve to buy her lunch soon, to repay, to make amends. I walk on.

I take what feels like the right direction, follow a street that feels good. Always alert for safety, but no need. A father cycles past with his toddler in a wooden box on wheels attached to the front of the bike. At the corner, a shop with high windows and on a rail, a line of little tutus, net skirts some with bodices, pastel colours, pinks blues and apricots. With one, as if liberated, high up. Underneath, on the window sill, another line. This time of little boots, the soft fabric, bulky ugg-like boots, waterproof and sensible. The colours neoprene-hard blues and bright pinks. The combination stops me in my tracks and I walk back across the road to take a photo. The father with the toddler in the bike box turns around and comes back down the street, telling her forcibly to sit down, stopping until she does so. I wonder if it’s the first time and they are trying it out, working out the rules.

The combination of boots and tutus says – you can dance and feel lovely like a little butterfly, then you can put on your boots to tramp safely through the dark wet streets to your warm home. You can fly and you can walk, and ride in a bicycle box.

I pass a shop that sells the shampoos and body creams that I found in the expensive hotel in Switzerland. I am choosy nowadays and often leave the little bottles in hotel bathrooms, when they clearly look as if they were chosen for economy. These, though, were soft and sweet-smelling, worth bringing away. I find a café to stop, and eat ‘Canadian pancakes’, drink coffee, feel grateful for cafes. The waiters, all young women, are a bit ditsy, or perhaps hungover like many of their customers; they forget my second coffee and the milk I asked for in the first one. There is wi-fi so I can find myself on Citymapper and see I am not too far from the brewery, although the dots it puts on the street map are so big there is room for error.

And I walk on, crossing a large road, turning up a hill. Past large elegant apartment buildings that must have passed through the DDR period. I wonder how that worked. At the end of the road, red-leaved trees rise up. It is not the brewery but a park. I ask a woman and she directs me to the exhibition. Back down the hill, on to Prenzlauer Allee, a vast dual carriageway of a road - very ‘east’, a very stalinist statement of power. Eventually, the brewery entrance. A security man sitting outside under a makeshift shelter points towards a door. When I come out, his colleague is sticking up one of the posters near the door and I guess they got tired of telling each new arrival where to go. The brewery is quite dilapidated, ochre bricks with reddish borders, arched around the windows.

Inside the valves and pipes remain, the thick wooden floorboards with metal plates and covers. It’s barely lit and still not evident where to go. Suddenly, strings of crystals hang over shiny washbasins, large arrangements of gladioli – it’s like walking through the cloakroom of an expensive restaurant. I think it actually is the cloakroom for the upstairs ‘soup kitchen’. A large crocodile seems to leap out of more pipework.

Around a corner and there are paintings on the walls, a modish young woman sitting at a table busy with her phone. I am allowed to take photos – natürlich! Not at all natürlich, I think, remembering London galleries.

A few very large paintings and some smaller prints. Restricted colours, dry, acidic blues and greens and yellows, highlighted against the browns. Desperate scenes, judging by the faces of the characters and the suggestions of violence. Not pleasant to spend time looking at. Not easy to find the narratives inside the paintings. Several corners of the gallery have chairs or sofas, I note. Comfort, discomfort. A 1970s steel chair provides a squeaky seat outside. I write down my impressions of the paintings, “They feel harsh, cold, searching, keen-eyed, noticing, shouting.”

Down the hill towards Alexanderplatz, I find a bus stop and get back on the M48 towards Schöneberg. First voyage accomplished.

Later I read about how, when east and west Germany were united, Rauch tried moving away from figurative painting to abstract painting, which was then more fashionable in the west, and how he found the results so dissatisfying that he returned to his figures and folk tales and history. I keep noticing acid blues and greens.
 

Dolls and continents

The beautiful art museum in Thun, Switzerland had an exhibition called The Morgenthaler Continent, with work from the visual artists in and around the family of Ernst and Sasha Morgenthaler.

I notice what a large metaphor 'continent' is compared to the more usual 'circle of friends'. The land we find ourselves in and build around ourselves.

photo: Kunstmuseum, Thun

Sasha Morgenthaler (1893-1975) made dolls, both as art and commercially. Sasha dolls were mass produced from 1965, but began as hand-made, almost sculptures, with asymmetric bodies that stood or sat in a pose, and hand-sewn clothes. I liked this story but not its roots; I quote from the museum leaflet:

"Thanks to Paul Klee's intercession she left the grammar school at the age of sixteen and spent four years at the Art Academy in Geneva. ... in Munich ..she trained under Klee...came into contact with the artists of Der Blaue Reiter... Sasha Morgenthaler quit painting after marriage in favour of her husband, because she couldn't meet her own demands and believed that there could only be one painter in the family."

A sharp intake of breath echoed around the museum at that point.

photo: Kunstmuseum, Thun

This loss reminded me of the painter Rose Hilton who also stopped painting as a young woman after her husband Roger Hilton told her he would be the only painter in their marriage. She started again later and had her work featured in this year's RA Summer Show.

The unfairness of these decisions makes me angry on their behalf. The eventual art-making inspires me. I'm glad that times have changed a little. And I contemplate the continents on which we find ourselves, their possibilities, their barriers, and the forbidden terrains we refuse to enter.

Travelling and staying in

I'm writing this on an anniversary - 40 years ago today, we left England to work in Tanzania with VSO. I had only been to France and Austria before this. I was young. Tanzania was to teach me so much - about people, politics, development, learning and teaching English, myself. It changed my mind, my career direction, my perception of everything.

As we drove to Heathrow, lights were on in homes and curtains not yet drawn. I could see people inside, apparently living cosy, safe lives as we set off into the unknown.

I've been in Berlin two days now. It is cold and rainy. I haven't been out much. I recognise it as a pattern that goes back 40 years. Having reached my destination, I hunker down awhile, as if I need to inhabit the idea of being in a new place before I can inhabit the actuality. Because I know this is how it goes, I am happy to wait, knowing it's all out there when I'm ready.

The space (East Africa) acrylic on card

Catching snatches

I am carrying sketchbooks of at least four different sizes on my journey through the mountains. In the very smallest one, of an evening, I've been writing and drawing snatches of memories from the day.

Click on the photo to see some of the pages from Thun and the drive to Disentis-Mustér.

A change of scale

On my last day in the French alps, there was low cloud covering the peaks and some rain in the air. Instead of going higher, I drove down into the valley and parked by the stream. A dog watched quietly. A man continued repairing his car. I started walking up the path alongside the stream.

And a small despair crept into me. I didn't actually want to be doing this damp walk on a grey path alongside grey water. It was too reminiscent of walks with parents as an unwilling 11 year old - I had always found more pleasure in staying at the bottom of the hill with my book.

It was a change of scale that shifted my mood after I took out my camera and started looking more closely. Then I could see the bright splashes of colour in berries and hips, and notice the peculiar colourings of leaves,

The feeling of despair was dispelled by giving my attention on this smaller scale. I recognise it as the scale of many of my paintings; a scale that speaks to my soul.

Watching how night falls

I am not sure why I had to come to the mountains on my way to Berlin. But here I am in Albiez Montrond above the Maurienne valley in the French Alps. Yesterday's rainstorms brought snow to the tops.  

I am watching how night falls. I am here to look, listen, attend. To sit, awed by the landscape, feels right.