Irises, art and Jeanette Winterson

Truth to tell, I've found it hard to get back to the work in progress since my work frenzy before the Easter break. I've opened up the files, tinkered around a bit, and then closed them up again. Sometimes that's the way it goes, and I try to see the positive in that, because what happens is that it gets handed over to the sub-conscious, or the creative part of the mind, or whatever you want to call the magic of writing. For the past week I haven't been able to write much, not even a blog post, but I have had two important ideas for the next novel that have made me reassess what I have done so far and will improve it immeasurably.

For me, the way this re-firing works is that I give myself time to wander around, observing what's all around and making connections. I take my camera everywhere. I frame shots and then reframe by enlarging and cropping the images. All the while I'm looking and thinking. These irises at the northern edge of our garden, for example. You can't be in the South of France and not connect them to Van Gogh's irises. If you look very closely, especially in the centre-right part of my photo, you can even see the same speckle of yellow weed in the field behind as in his painting.

 

This looking for detail is what Eve did, in The Lantern, and it's a way of digging in deeper, becoming aware of the interlocking of times past and the present. It's also about experience, description and interpretation, and all the points between that artists and writers have in common. And then there's reading. I read a great deal anyway, but even more when I'm not working. You simply can't be a writer if you're not a reader in the first place.

 

Jeanette Winterson is a brave and brilliant writer who looks deep and makes every word count, and at the end of her novel Lighthousekeeping I found an interview with her in which she perfectly expresses how I feel about the way novels can explore the wild uproar of life while offering the security and order to be found in connections and patterns.

 

"Storytelling is a way of establishing connections, imaginative connections for ourselves, a way of joining up disparate material and making sense of the world. (...) I think that art is one way of discovering a genuine and unforced pattern in our lives and in the world around us and that's why writing can never be formulaic: it can never be done according to plan because it arises from a deeper part of the self which I think is less neurotic than the conscious mind and less afraid of not immediately having a shape to put on every new situation. (...) Nothing in the story ever quite works out in the way you imagine it will: there are always surprises, there are always twists and turns."

 

"...doing things slowly and doing things well - finding time for your friends, cooking properly, reading, going for walks, playing - all of the things which apparently yield no results. You don't make money that way and you don't get on in life that way, but what you get is something much more important. You get space for your mind. We don't have a lot of that and, of course, you can't believe in art in the way that I do and not believe that people need space for the mind, to slow down and to find time."

 

And as a final illustration of the point, here are the same irises, photographed from a different angle, with the setting sun in the west. A completely different set of plants, you might think, but no. Just the way the light has struck them.

 

Van Gogh and Gauguin at Les Baux

Yesterday I stood inside a painting by Vincent Van Gogh: surrounded, taken up and transported by colour and movement. Music by Saint-Saens seemed to push the images around vast spaces. Cornfields rippled and were echoed in different views, the starry night intensified above and below.

At Les Baux de Provence, the old bauxite quarry has metamorphosised into an extraordinary art venue. The current show is Gauguin, Van Gogh: Painters of Colours. The entrance is in a curtain of grey rock and gives little indication of the experience about to unfold.

An ordinary-looking door opens into a vast, dark and chilly space, and then the eye starts to make sense of the light show in progress. We arrived as huge yellow rush chairs appeared amid Arlesien street scenes painted by Van Gogh. On great rectangular pillars 14-metres high were pictures of and by the artist, all projected on different surfaces through the enormous chambers, and all moving languidly to music.

The theme of the exhibition is the different ways these two Northern European painters used colour to express their artistic release in the warmth and light of the South of France in the later part of the nineteenth century - Gauguin then famously travelling on to Tahiti.



It's hard to do justice in words to this astonishing artistic endeavour. We were left dumbstruck by the inventiveness and vision of the designers Gianfranco Iannuzzi, Renato Gatto and Massimiliano Siccardi. In these cavernous spaces, Les Carrieres de Lumieres is a permanent video installation, the largest in France, with 70 video projectors and surfaces that emblazon images on more than 6,000 square metres of wall, ceiling and floor. The result is just magical.

When we talked about it afterwards, what came through so clearly was that these are the kind of events the French do so magnificently. This is high culture: art, history and music all presented in a thrilling way. The music is of the period - Saint-Saens, Brahms, Ravel - and appropriate to the artistic movement of the time. All the images are from the paintings, and show the journey from cold north to Provencal landscapes and on to the South Seas in monumental scope and animation. There's no obligatory dumbing-down to make it "relevant" for young people as so often at home; there are no flashing lights and fast cutting to rap music. It is purely itself, and contains moments of indescribable beauty.

The exhibition will be on all summer and runs through until 6 January 2013.