Bit of a catch-up, I didn't realise it's been absolute months since I wrote something...... so sorry it's really pathetic to say sorry but really..... sorry guys. You know, life just intervened.....
Here's the essence of last year (for CCC it's financial year to financial year):
We lost one of our talented, funny and loved members last year, Dennis Claydon. So miss his humour, the asides and comments, his amazing contribution only grows with absence. But most I miss the art, the amazing wonderful art. He had such a connection with land, the way he could paint the landscape, the spirit of the landscape was so deep and wonderful and the colour and composition and technique. Dennis was a real talent, unique, wonderful and deeply missed.
But life goes on, and we had some great happenings beyond the sadness: CCC group exhibitions have acquired themes and our visitors now get to vote in the People's Choice Prize: • Wine Week 2016 Mixed Dozen Portrait Exhibition. Our first themed exhibition, won by Meredith Cahill • Banjo Paterson Festival Outback and Downunder Australian Lanscape Exhibition, featuring Dennis Claydon • Food Week Palate to Palette Food Producers Portrait Exhibition, won by Heather Dunn
CCC members exhibitions have begun with a big bang, we had 3 Styles, in July 2016 and the Wild Women of Arkaroola PLUS, in March 2017, both with great art and great sales.
CCC open days on Farmer’s Market Saturdays have grown by a staggering 1200%…. from 1 visitor to 12, so that is super good, proof that we just have to keep doing, because the word is spreading, we just have to exercise patience, persistence and perseverance.
We have expanded our connection with the community by agreeing to teach Pre-School Art Classes this last June. Judy, Margot, Patricia and Jola as well as the kiddlywinks sure had a great time!
Our first attempt at a grant was surprisingly successful, this of course was channeled to us through Vince Loveccio who is the driving force of the Orange Youth Festival. Our grant is in cooperation with dLux Media, a Sydney based creative group and will culminate with an exhibition at Orange Regional Gallery in October 2017, during the Wine Week festival. Out theme for the wine festival is 'Terroir' Landscape Exhibition of Winemaking Country.
Boy we've been busy at the Barracks building, having moved our shop to the space outside Pottinger Gallery, gave us an extra studio. Tracey Callinan from Arts Out West came to the Barracks and held a
visioning workshop to help us channel a direction for the future. Isabelle re-painted the Gore and Pottinger galleries in a beautiful shade of white, so much better to show off art! Also thanks to Phil Salmon the loco office is now ours and though we'll have to do some fencing and lots and lots of renovating, we now have a solid lease for the next 5 years! and Phil also managed to negotiated the extra space for same rent! wow! The committee is still to decide but we're hoping to start a makers space or put framing equipment in there so we can cut some of the huge expense that framing steals from us all or put in some computers and have a teaching space for the digital future.....or......
It takes time to grow awareness of a group like ours and all the work everyone has put in, is showing. So thank you all for all you have done to contribute.
As an apology for not posting anything for months I'd like to share with you, something special. But before you read this, please remember, create, create with emotion, create with passion, but don't take your passion to the ultimate conclusion as Van Gogh did 😳
Gauguin’s Stirring First-Hand Account of What Actually Happened the Night Van Gogh Cut off His Own Ear
“Between two such beings as he and I, the one a perfect volcano,
the other boiling too, inwardly, a sort of struggle was preparing.”
By Maria Popova
Certain relationships are charged with an intensity of feeling that
incinerates the walls we habitually erect between platonic friendship,
romantic attraction, and intellectual-creative infatuation. One of the
most dramatic of those superfriendships unfolded between the artists Paul Gauguin (June 7, 1848–May 8, 1903) and Vincent van Gogh
(March 30, 1853–July 29, 1890), whose relationship was animated by an
acuity of emotion so lacerating that it led to the famous and infamously
mythologized incident in which Van Gogh cut off his own ear — an incident that marks the extreme end of what Sir Thomas Browne contemplated, two centuries earlier, as the divine heartbreak of romantic friendship. Vincent van Gogh, “Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear,” 1889
In February of 1888, a decade after Van Gogh found his purpose,
he moved to the town of Arles in the South of France. There, he
exploded into a period of immense creative fertility, completing more
than two hundred paintings, one hundred watercolors and sketches, and
his famous Sunflowers series. But he also lived in extreme
poverty and endured incessant inner turmoil, much of which related to
his preoccupation with enticing Gauguin — whom he admired with
unparalleled ardor (“I find my artistic ideas extremely commonplace in
comparison with yours,” Van Gogh wrote) and who at the time was living
and working in Brittany — to come live and paint with him. This coveted
cohabitation, Van Gogh hoped, would be the beginning of a larger art
colony that would serve as “a shelter and a refuge” for
Post-Impressionist painters as they pioneered an entirely novel, and
therefore subject to spirited criticism, aesthetic of art. Van Gogh
wrote to Gauguin in early October of 1888:
I’d like to see you taking a very large share in this belief that we’ll be relatively successful in founding something lasting.
Despite his destitution, Van Gogh spent whatever money he had on two
beds, which he set up in the same small bedroom. Seeking to make his
modest sleeping quarters “as nice as possible, like a woman’s boudoir,
really artistic,” he resolved to paint a set of giant yellow sunflowers
onto its white walls. He wrote beseeching letters to Gauguin, and when
the French artist sent him a self-portrait as part of their exchange of
canvases, Van Gogh excitedly showed it around town as the likeness of a
beloved friend who was about to come visit.
Gauguin finally agreed and arrived in Arles in mid-October, where he
was to spend about two months, culminating with the dramatic ear
incident.
In Paul Gauguin’s Intimate Journals (public library),
the French painter provides the only first-hand account of the strange,
almost surreal circumstances that led to Van Gogh’s legendary
self-mutilation — circumstances chronically mis-reported by most
biographers and the many lay myth-weavers of popular culture, all
removed from the facts of the incident by space, time, and many degrees
of intimacy. “Paul Gauguin (Man in a Red Beret)” by Vincent van Gogh, 1888 (Van Gogh Museum)
Gauguin recalls that he resisted Van Gogh’s insistent invitations for
quite some time. “A vague instinct forewarned me of something
abnormal,” he writes. But he was “finally overborne by Vincent’s
sincere, friendly enthusiasm.” He arrived late into the night and, not
wanting to wake Van Gogh, awaited dawn in a town café. The owner
instantly recognized him as the friend whose likeness Van Gogh had been
proudly introducing as the anticipated friend.
After Gauguin settled in, Van Gogh set out to show him the beauty and
beauties of Arles, though Gauguin found that he “could not get up much
enthusiasm” for the local women. By the following day, they had begun
work. Gauguin marveled at Van Gogh’s clarity of purpose. “I don’t admire
the painting but I admire the man,” he wrote. “He so confident, so
calm. I so uncertain, so uneasy.” Gauguin foreshadows the tumult to
come:
Between two such beings as he and I, the one a perfect
volcano, the other boiling too, inwardly, a sort of struggle was
preparing. In the first place, everywhere and in everything I found a
disorder that shocked me. His colour-box could hardly contain all those
tubes, crowded together and never closed. In spite of all this disorder,
this mess, something shone out of his canvases and out of his talk,
too…. He possessed the greatest tenderness, or rather the altruism of
the Gospel.
Soon, the two men merged their finances, which succumbed to the same
sort of disorder. They began sharing household duties — Van Gogh secured
their provisions and Gauguin cooked — and lived together for what
Gauguin would later recall as an eternity. (In reality, it was nine
weeks.) From the distance of years, he reflects on the experience in his
journal:
In spite of the swiftness with which the catastrophe
approached, in spite of the fever of work that had seized me, the time
seemed to me a century.
Though the public had no suspicion of it, two men were performing
there a colossal work that was useful to them both. Perhaps to others?
There are some things that bear fruit.
“The Painter of Sunflowers (Portrait of Vincent van Gogh)” by Paul Gauguin, 1888 (Van Gogh Museum)
Despite the frenzied enthusiasm and work ethic with which Van Gogh
approached his paintings, Gauguin saw them as “nothing but the mildest
of incomplete and monotonous harmonies.” So he set out to do what Van
Gogh had invited him there to do — serve as mentor and master. (Gauguin
was the only person whom Van Gogh ever addressed as “Master.”) He found
the younger artist hearteningly receptive to criticism:
Like all original natures that are marked with the stamp
of personality, Vincent had no fear of the other man and was not
stubborn.
From that day on, Gauguin recounts, Van Gogh — “my Van Gogh” — began
making “astonishing progress,” found his voice as an artist and came
into his own style, cultivating the singular sense of color and light
for which he is now remembered. But then something shifted — having
found his angels, Van Gogh had also uncovered his demons. Gauguin
recounts the tempestuous emotional climates that seemed to sweep over
Van Gogh unpredictably — the beginning of his descent into the mental
illness that would be termed bipolar disorder a century later:
During the latter days of my stay, Vincent would become
excessively rough and noisy, and then silent. On several nights I
surprised him in the act of getting up and coming over to my bed. To
what can I attribute my awakening just at that moment?
At all events, it was enough for me to say to him, quite sternly,
“What’s the matter with you, Vincent?” for him to go back to bed without
a word and fall into a heavy sleep.
Van Gogh soon completed a self-portrait he considered to be a
painting of himself “gone mad.” That evening, the two men headed to the
local café. Gauguin recounts the astounding scene that followed, equal
parts theatrical and full of sincere human tragedy:
[Vincent] took a light absinthe. Suddenly he flung the
glass and its contents at my head. I avoided the blow and, taking him
boldly in my arms, went out of the café, across the Place Victor Hugo.
Not many minutes later, Vincent found himself in his bed where, in a few
seconds, he was asleep, not to awaken again till morning.
When he awoke, he said to me very calmly, “My dear Gauguin, I have a vague memory that I offended you last evening.”
Answer: “I forgive you gladly and with all my heart, but yesterday’s
scene might occur again and if I were struck I might lose control of
myself and give you a choking. So permit me to write to your brother and
tell him that I am coming back.
But the previous day’s drama was only a tremor of the earthquake to
come that fateful evening, two days before Christmas 1888. “My God, what
a day!” Gauguin exclaims as he chronicles what happened when he decided
to take a solitary walk after dinner to clear his head:
I had almost crossed the Place Victor Hugo when I heard
behind me a well-known step, short, quick, irregular. I turned about on
the instant as Vincent rushed toward me, an open razor in his hand. My
look at the moment must have had great power in it, for he stopped and,
lowering his head, set off running towards home.
Gauguin laments that in the years since, he has been frequently
bedeviled by the regret that he didn’t chase Van Gogh down and disarm
him. Instead, he checked into a local hotel and went to bed, but he
found himself so agitated that he couldn’t fall asleep until the small
hours of the morning. Upon rising at half past seven, he headed into
town, where he was met with an improbable scene:
Reaching the square, I saw a great crowd collected. Near
our house there were some gendarmes and a little gentleman in a
melon-shaped hat who was the superintendent of police.
This is what had happened.
Van Gogh had gone back to the house and had immediately cut off his
ear close to the head. He must have taken some time to stop the flow of
blood, for the day after there were a lot of wet towels lying about on
the flag-stones in the two lower rooms. The blood had stained the two
rooms and the little stairway that led up to our bedroom.
When he was in a condition to go out, with his head enveloped in a Basque beret
which he had pulled far down, he went straight to a certain house where
for want of a fellow-countrywoman one can pick up an acquaintance, and
gave the manager his ear, carefully washed and placed in an envelope.
“Here is a souvenir of me,” he said.
That “certain house” was, of course, the brothel Van Gogh frequented,
where he had found some of his models. After handing the madam his ear,
he ran back home and went straight to sleep, shutting the blinds and
setting a lamp on the table by the window. A crowd of townspeople
gathered below within minutes, discomfited and abuzz with speculation
about what had happened. Gauguin writes:
I had no faintest suspicion of all this when I presented
myself at the door of our house and the gentleman in the melon-shaped
hat said to me abruptly and in a tone that was more than severe, “What
have you done to your comrade, Monsieur?”
“I don’t know…”
“Oh, yes… you know very well… he is dead.”
I could never wish anyone such a moment, and it took me a long time
to get my wits together and control the beating of my heart.
Anger, indignation, grief, as well as shame at all these glances that
were tearing my person to pieces, suffocated me, and I answered,
stammeringly: “All right, Monsieur, let me go upstairs. We can explain
ourselves there.”
Then in a low voice I said to the police superintendent: “Be kind
enough, Monsieur, to awaken this man with great care, and if he asks for
me tell him I have left for Paris; the sight of me might prove fatal to
him.”
I must own that from this moment the police superintendent was as
reasonable as possible and intelligently sent for a doctor and a cab.
Once awake, Vincent asked for his comrade, his pipe and his tobacco;
he even thought of asking for the box that was downstairs and contained
our money, — a suspicion, I dare say! But I had already been through too
much suffering to be troubled by that.
Vincent was taken to a hospital where, as soon as he had arrived, his brain began to rave again.
All the rest everyone knows who has any interest in knowing it, and
it would be useless to talk about it were it not for that great
suffering of a man who, confined in a madhouse, at monthly intervals
recovered his reason enough to understand his condition and furiously
paint the admirable pictures we know.
Newspaper
report from December 30, 1888: ‘Last Sunday night at half past eleven a
painter named Vincent Van Gogh, appeared at the maison de tolérance No
1, asked for a girl called Rachel, and handed her … his ear with these
words: ‘Keep this object like a treasure.’ Then he disappeared. The
police, informed of these events, which could only be the work of an
unfortunate madman, looked the next morning for this individual, whom
they found in bed with scarcely a sign of life. The poor man was taken
to hospital without delay.’
With pressure from alarmed neighbors and local police, Van Gogh was
soon committed into an insane asylum. From there, he wrote to Gauguin
about the sundering tension between his desire to return to painting and
his sense that his mental illness was incurable, but then added:
“Aren’t we all mad?”
Seventeen months later, he took his own life — a tragedy Gauguin recounts with the tenderness of one who has loved the lost:
He sent a revolved shot into his stomach, and it was only
a few hours later that he died, lying in his bed and smoking his pipe,
having complete possession of his mind, full of the love of his art and
without hatred for others.
