'I wrote for...'

'I wrote for women whose lives consisted only of work and sorrow.'

- says the text for this week's calendar page. by hedwig courts-mahler in memory of the sixtieth anniversary of her death.

hedwig courts-mahler. the name is familiar. i came across it again and again in the verneered book shelf that i browsed as a little girl. along with other names and titles who proclaimed promise, love and tragedy in equal measure if preferably not in that order.

i also remember my mother's comments... 'och, that stupid woman and her stupid stories' - if not that phrase, then something to a very similar effect. h c-m nonetheless was her mother's best-loved author and so, my granny duly devoured her many writitings, even if all of them were so same.

how strange to stumble across this writer again. how strange also to reconsider my granny, as well as my mother's rejection in the light of the quote above.

'fairytales for adults' advertises the publisher; i think of something else as it resonates with a current writing that is being finalised for print in december. here's a mental note to this effect.

Rewind 3 – Blogging

At post #202 I firmly refused to comment on what was before and what Gesah’s Paint & Pastel was about, but now I’m another 50 odd posts further on and don’t feel quite so speechless. 18 months ago, Torben, my brother, and I had been talking about a website… part publicity, part ‘Gesa wants to learn the internet’ project; while that was proceeding (i.e. T. was writing the script and I was editing images), I rather spontaneously thought ‘oh, why not a blog? I can do what others do’ and within minutes it was set up. I was intrigued by its immediacy, its flexibility; I also figured that – unlike a website – it would actually act as a prompt to myself to write (think, reflect) about all this art stuff I had been doing… part structured journal, part exercise book.

Before, I had posted a few of my paintings and sketches at WetCanvas and got to appreciate the interaction and feedback that was lurking beyond my keyboard.

Corn in Late summer, Detail
Pastel on board, 50x35cm

And, looking back, I am amazed and fascinated by the extent to which the blog has been serving these two purposes to (a) get me to do more art; and (b) provide source book, journal and planning tool.

Over and above, it serves a social function along a number of axes, both online and offline. There are first and most obvious other artists who blog. Their blogs, their posts and their comments have become a source that I don’t want to miss. And while I am in parts at points mildly amused by the idiosyncracies of online communities amongst strangers, particular quirks and eccentricities, I am also fascinated by the ways in which interaction is organised at a distance.

Apart from individual bloggers, there have been most notably the Moley Exchange project which Steph asked me to get involved in May; and more recently the Watermarks group, kickstarted by Vivien, Lindsay and Katherine. In particularly with the latter I am thrilled by the focussed discussions on the group blog and a private ning networking site that are taking place and which even over the short space of less than two months have helped me articulate and develop a whole number of points around seascapes, distance and abstraction.

And then there are friends and family who read the blog; many of them do not post comments but it is nonetheless the source of rather frequent conversation; I do like the nicks my brother invents to comment once in a while with a link to a whacky website; and just on the weekend my mum ticked off her ‘have to learn to leave comment in Gesa’s blog’ item, which made me smile. I am hopeful too that she will make a go of reading the posts where I am sure she will understand far more than she thinks she would. She had picked one of my two cornfields from summer for her Christmas present (see post here), and the other one is now for sale on Etsy, here.

Corn in late summer,
Pastel on board, 50x35cm

So, over time, the stuff about which I will consider blogging has widened. Whereas initially it was rather narrowly focussed on my practical painting and sketching, it soon begun to include notes from exhibitions, about artists I like – most notably the series on Joan Eardley from last winter, and more recently Cy Twombly; and while I still don’t have a tag on ‘culture politics’, I do have now tags on ‘thinkings’, ‘researching creativity’ and ‘working in the arts’ – all of which are moving my academic and research work closer to the stuff I paint and art about.

It also means – related to yesterday’s post on writing – that some of the posts are becoming less explanatory – just recently Jafabrit had written about her blog as a piece of art itself [sorry, it took me a while to find, it was in the comments on Casey's intro to the Fine Art Department, a rather neat small online art showcase adventure, see link here]; and after reading that, I’ve begun to feel more confident about not explaining my posts; about posting notes for others (in past or present); and of not minding if stuff isn’t immediately communicated to all who read it.

So, with all this having gone on over an extended length of time, I am struck by the attachment I have formed to my blog and all it encompasses. It has become important; I use it as source of reference, as ‘I want to listen to that song again’, ‘Oh, let’s check if that painting was included’ or ‘how did that poem go again?’. Quite similar to a painting, it has taken on quite a dynamic, a process, by itself, sometimes it surprises me, or angers me, but mostly it makes me rather happy.

Yet, there are couple of consequences of this: I tend to spend even far more time online than I used to; and with a day job that is rather computer/inet intensive, it is a development I am not too keen on. It also can be rather demanding of my attention and immediate response: ‘Oh, I cannot not answer within 3 hours.’ – That’s something I don’t like, there’s enough stuff I get stressed about, and this isn’t supposed to be one.

Lastly, I noticed that I started to ‘think in blog’. My mind formulates blog posts – 90% of these never see the light of day, and that’s all for the better, but nonetheless it is a rather specific way of expressing and formulating a day, an experience, a thought. And with this thinking in blog, I then begin to wonder what else is there outwith. But that may be the content of another blog post… or rather not? See what I mean? ...

Ok… that’s the scene set for rewind #4: finally, the art I did in 2008. Next post.

Rewind 2 – Writing

Ok, it took me some time to arrive back home, but now it’s week 1 of the new year and what better things to do than to look back… not?
I think there may be three posts to this

• Rewind 2: writing

• Rewind 3: blogging

• Rewind 4: Art, art, art… not that either of the above are NOT art, but it’s painting, sketches, drawings and projects I finally want to talk about.

• (Rewind 1 was my Hogmanay flight above the clouds, here – in case you wonder about the missing first)

Found Papers Project Book #1.3
Mixed media collage 6.4x8.9cm

I want to start with the writing, partly because it provides so many overlaps with a lot of other things I’ve been doing; it also provides the actual tool for the post on blogging; and lastly the medium through which I’ve found I communicate (by blogging) most of my art.

Ok, I’ve written a lot over the past year. A lot in here (in fact 170 posts; that many, many words and almost a post every other day over the year).

But: I have written quite a few other things too over the past year. Most notably, 2008 has finally been the year that my PhD came out in print. Do you want to have a look at it? It’s over here:

Gesa Helms 2008 Towards Safe City Centre? Remaking the Spaces of an Old-industrial City. Ashgate: Aldershot, see publisher's site here

It took five years to get it published. And that’s already a first observation with regards to the blog. While here, I write, I publish and it’s there – for better or worse, but still with plenty possibility to edit – academic writing takes a long time.

This is to a good part due to a long process of peer refereeing, comments, revisions and hopefully final acceptance. But just as well, a piece several times revised can still get rejected and you start again. For academic writing, at least in the UK, there is a clear preference for such peer-refereed journal articles over single-authored books, edited collections or book chapters. So, once my articles were rejected, I postponed further and further the book publication, and suddenly five years were gone.

Most of my writing to date has been very clearly for academic outlets, with all the limitations (see above for time; but more crucially for a limited audience, it is e.g. considered successful if 5+ others quote your article over the ensuing years). But this autumn I co-authored a short piece on the Glasgow Gorbals with a colleague of mine in Berlin for the Berlin Tenants Association publication (Gesa Helms & Jens Sambale 2008 Rückbau in der Finanzkrise? ME189, see full text here). It’s shorter, much more immediate than other pieces I’ve done, it’s in German (which I don’t write in often as I tend to have forgotten about German grammar, or at least claim to) and it was published within a couple of weeks after we agreed on the final version.

These two pieces do have a lot to do with this blog. Why?

If anyone at the age of 16 would have told me I would earn my money with a job consisting of writing and public speaking I would have screamed at them. Writing wasn’t for me, and public speaking even less so. Moving to the UK and learning to write a piece of 100,000 words changed that. It changed that also because I could learn a writing style where I could ‘explain’ any of my favourite idiosyncracies with foreignness: I am not from here; and that hid issues notably to do with class and education.

In this sense, the blog over the past 18 months has more and more become a playground to experiment not only with art but with writing too. Have you noticed?

Most obviously, it’s the posting of little ditties and word plays. I have been writing these for a long time [and am in fact still looking for a suitable outlet for cringey, love-sick poetry by 14 years old school kids; any advice welcome].

When I was sorting through my sketchbooks yesterday, I came across this one. It was a drawing/observing/writing experience which was new, exciting and rather sublime; and I’m glad that that moment didn’t remain singular but has become a more and more frequent occurrence as the year progressed.

Mist. Graphite in Moleskine, 10x8cm

And.

Into the mist. Out of
Nowhere it descended
Embracing
The woods, branches
A lonely leaf
Silently it calls. Haziness
The world blurs to take
Notice. Lazily
Then - as it lifts
A spot of cobalt above
Trees in the distance
And
The world didn't stop
After all

Like most of the other stuff in here, it is pretty much about exploration: stuff I passed by 10 or 20 years ago, didn’t consider it to be ‘for me’ – poetry belonged very much in that category; it wasn’t that I couldn’t appreciate it, but it was tied up with habitus and status that wasn’t mine and so I discarded it. Here the last year, its encounters, discussions and experiences have opened up plenty of possibilities - be it about writing in a more open, associative manner without regarding it as not rigorous, or be it writing in German, or, or, or...

And with the blog also a medium where they are easily explored. How? That’s for the next post.