PAUL KLEE
‘First of all,’, said Paul Klee when asked what was most important for a good life, ‘the art of living; then as my ideal profession, poetry and philosophy, and as my real profession, plastic arts; in the last resort, for lack of income, illustrations.’ Of course, Illustrations were more than mere income for Klee, they instead became some of the most important works of the 20th Century, but his tongue-in-cheek response has more truth than he lets on. Klee was a wildly individual artist, refusing the modes of the day and merging influence into a unique style. A soldier, a thinker, a writer, and a teacher at the Bauhaus School alongside his closest friend Wassily Kandinsky – Klee’s genius moved across mediums, but it is perhaps, against popular knowledge, his writing that was his greatest impact. Klee’s notebooks are amongst the most important pedagogical documents of modern art, his perspective exists beneath so much of the post-war and contemporary works we know today. Chiefly, that art was a serious pursuit best pursued unseriously, like a child approaches the blank page.
JOAQUÍN TORRES-GARCIA
There are no contradictions. Nothing is incompatible. These were the tenets that guided Torres-Garcia’s life, the life of a writer, painter, sculptor, teacher, theorist, muralist, novelist and architect; a renaissance man of the highest order. Born in Montevideo, Uruguay in 1874, he emigrated to Catalunya, Spain in 1891 and began a career as an artist. Over the next 50 years, he would go on to found numerous schools, groups and movements including the first European Abstract art group and push the art and culture of Europe and South America to its vanguard. It was the duality of his homeland and his adopted nations that drove Torres-Garcia, and his ability to hold this duality together in a single mind. He existed between places, carrying the identity of Uruguay with him everywhere, and in doing so he was able too to carry the new and the old, the classical and the avant-garde, reason and feeling, figuration and abstraction. There are no contradictions, he said, nothing is incompatible.
EDWARD HOPPER
A far-off storm felt under clear skies, ground swells are harbingers of things to come, messengers of danger. When Hopper painted this work in 1939, he could feel a change brewing in the air. The Second World War was looming and American isolationism was beginning to wane, it would not be long before they were a part of the conflict happening across the sea. To this uneasy world, Hopper responds with a depiction of freedom, of youth, and of the surging promise of youth, The boys on the boat look out to a buoy in the water, ringing with the motion of the waves. They are sun drenched and the sea water spits up gently, but they are off kilter. Small waves rock their boat ever so slightly, but the waves seem unrelenting. Hopper was most known for his depictions of urban loneliness and melancholy and this picture, with its vibrant blues and idyllic scene, seems anomalous. Yet the same themes pervade, on a grander, more cosmic scale. Hopper depiction of a happy American scene is perhaps his most ominous of all.
Paul Zweig
A poet, critic and memoirist, Zweig was admired by his friends and the literary circles around him, but remains in wider obscurity to this day. Zweig was an obsessive study of culture, peoples and moods. Cross pollination is clear in Zweig’s work, his techniques as a memoirist clear across his poetry. A careful and astute eye, self-possessed and self-aware, he wrote as if with a magnifying glass, looking at the offhand nature of the world and reading the truth from it. While he looked outwards, he found himself everywhere. He journeyed deeper into the self with each evocative work.
Jack Spicer
Spicer saw the poet as a radio, intercepting transmissions from outer space. Language was furniture, through which information navigated. He was a radical, both in his literary style and in his life, defying every convention at every turn. Refusing to allow his work to be copyrighted, Spicer ran a workshop called ‘Poetry as Magic’, and for him the statement was true. Poetry was a means to experience and translate the unexplainable, and had to be freely available for those who searched for truth. Spicer died penniless and with only small acclaim, like so many poets before and after him, but the ideas he laid out in his work have gone on to influence thousands of poets after him.
Amiri Baraka
Amiri Baraka was many things, and many things to many people. The most significant black poet of his generation, Baraka also is considered the founder of the Black Arts Movement and the Second Harlem Renaissance. Baraka wanted poetry, literature and art to be a legitimate product of experience. In doing so, he could hold a mirror up to a world in desperate need of self reflection. He was as fearless in his writing as he was in his activism, and he had a clear vision. The BAM became an aesthetic and spiritual sister of Black Power and Baraka’s voice was the most poignant, cutting and profound.
Robin Sparkes May 21, 2025
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Thursday 21st May
The Moon rises in Cancer, bringing a water-like quality into the garden. In biodynamics, Cancer is a leaf sign, making this a favorable time to transplant leafy greens and tend to the plants whose growth is held in their leaves. With Saturn, Neptune, and the Moon all in water signs, the day carries a strong watery character, both physically and archetypally. We may feel this through moisture, rain, sap, soil, and the need for young plants to settle into damp earth, but also through the deeper qualities of water: flow, receptivity, sensitivity, and nourishment. Today invites us to work gently with the garden, supporting plants as they move from pot to soil, and recognising water not only as something the garden needs, but as a living quality moving through the whole garden organism.