The Blogger's Biography, and This Week on TBN

Oh why not. After 39 (this is 40) posts to this blog, I figure I might as well try to put a face to the words for you. I thought I'd introduce myself. My name is Grace, though I've gone online as "Sidhe" for over ten years now. I'm 27 years-old, live in Ohio, work at a library, and have adored the Pre-Raphaelites ever since I was....16 or so? My first experience with the Pre-Raphaelites was an admiration in my early teens for Rossetti, but as I grew older, I started to dislike the "thick necks and man-hands" he gave his women (I have since come around again, of course, to admiration for his work). When I was 13, I became smitten with the music of Loreena McKennitt, and really loved her song "The Lady of Shallot." At 16 or so, I was browsing in a mall art store, and came across a print of a woman who looked just like she had stepped out of the song. It was, of course, John William Waterhouse's famous artwork by the same name. I became completely smitten with all of Waterhouse's art, and he remains my favorite artist.

A couple of years ago, I became enamoured with the idea of recreating pin-up photographs/modeling. I pursued this hobby for a while, and still enjoy it, but I started then looking more at the beautiful artworks of the Pre-Raphaelites, and other famous Victorian artists, and thinking how fun it would be to try to recreate some of these artworks as photographs, or just make photographs that reminded me of the same style and mood as the Pre-Raphaelites. I discovered that while I enjoyed pin-up modeling, I really enjoyed experimenting with photography in the style of the Pre-Raphaelites I so admire! It is a hobby I continue to pursue.

And, of course, the latest outlet for my admiration of the Pre-Raphaelites is this blog! I appreciate every bit of positive feedback I've received so far about The Beautiful Necessity, the name of which I shamelessly stole from a book about Arts & Crafts. I hope to continue this blog for a long time to come, for as long as the Pre-Raphaelites keep yielding new information to me (so in other words, for a LONG time to come!).

This week's posts (and likely a few beyond) will be about modern novels that feature the Pre-Raphaelites. In each blog, I will review a different title. I look forward to hearing your thoughts!

Sayers & Lundgreen

Today my intent was to do a post on another artist whose work I enjoy, but in the process of searching in Google for more information, I stumbled across a link to the website of the artists, Sayers and Lundgreen. I am quite fascinated! According to their website:

Phil Sayers and Rikke Lundgreen are a collaborative artist team who perform the characters in photographs which seek to connect everyday experience with precedents from art historical sources. Their contemporary interpretations of images from, for example, the Renaissance or the 19th Century, reveal moments of human transaction in which the roles of gender, status and power seem to be uncertain and in flux. Recurrent themes are power, ageing, death, sexuality, mirroring, doubling, sameness and difference.

Both artists are motivated by a personal search for identity and an investigation of how gender is signified, constructed and performed. They have gravitated towards photographic masquerade as a means of performing ‘femininity’ in order to question culturally-imposed gender stereotypes. Lundgreen is a woman, Sayers cross-dresses.

Much of their work assumes a feminist perspective which gently and ironically illuminates and critiques the misogyny embedded in many aspects of our cultural heritage. They are looking for new opportunities to respond to historical collections in galleries and museums, and also wish to develop opportunities for making and showing work in a site-specific context.

In an installation currently running at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, entitled 'Changing Places,' the two artists have created art reinterpreting several of the pieces owned by the gallery, including the one above, inspired by Alma-Tadema's The Tepidarium. According to a write up about the exhibit,

19th century images that depict women as passive, submissive objects of male desire are of particular interest to them. Other themes, including gender, identity, myths, ageing and the architecture and ‘power’ of the galleries are also a focus for their work. The artists seek to connect our everyday experiences with precedents from art historical sources.

Another piece by Lundgreen explores the artwork The Punishment of Lust by Giovanni Segantini. In a film artwork, she is shown "'floating' in a similar way to the women depicted in "Punishment". There is a background which resembles that in "Punishment". Gradually the background moves down over the space of 15 minutes. Rikke remains floating and simply lies back looking upwards, to the side and raising her arm a bit from time to time. During the 15 minutes of the video, you hear a recording of her heart beating. At first you think "bloody pointless" but if you stick with it, it becomes compelling - the ordinariness of her "reality" is an interesting juxtaposition with the painting showing a woman in some mythical "unreal" (male)fantasy. Well that's how it works for me anyway. Nothing too profound but, quite compelling." (according to a quote from a viewer)


I would absolutely love to see this exhibit!

The Merciless Lady

I just finished reading a, honestly, rather forgettable book called The Pre-Raphaelites: Their Lives in Letters and Diaries. There wasn't much new information to be found in this book, but there was a small color illustration in a section on Rossetti of an artwork I had never noticed before, called The Merciless Lady. The caption noted that the picture showed "a man between two women, one dark, one fair, in triangular tension of the kind that characterized many of his own emotional relationships."

Well, looking at it, I'd call that an understatement! I think this picture shows, incredibly clearly, the love Rossetti had for two specific women...Lizzie and Jane. The figure on the left is most definitely reminiscent of Jane Morris, with her dark hair and distinctive profile. The figure on the right, with her pale hair and eyes downcast, is a dead-ringer for Lizzie. The central figure, which is Rossetti in my mind, has his hands clasped in Jane's, but his attention is captured by Lizzie. What a perfectly iconic image of the tumult Jane must have felt being in a relationship with a man who was still, in many ways, fixated on his dead beloved. I've never seen an artwork that so fully captured the sum of emotions involved with Rossetti's feelings toward these two very different beauties.

What do you think of this image? What does it say to you?

The Hounds of Spring

A Song of Springtime, by Waterhouse.

Thanks to Tess, of Midnight Muse, for directing my attention to this gorgeous poem by Swinburne, a good friend to the P.R.B.

When the hounds of Spring are on Winter's traces,
The mother of months in meadow or plain
Fills the shadows and windy places
With lisp of leaves and ripple of rain...
And soft as lips that laugh and hide
The laughing leaves of the trees divide,
And screen from seeing and leave in sight
The god pursuing, the maiden's flight.

Where shall we find her? how shall we sing to her?
Fold our hands round her knees, and cling?
O that our hearts were as fire and could spring to her,
Fire, or the strength of the streams that spring!
For the stars and the winds are unto her
As raiment, as songs of the harp-player;
And the risen stars and the fallen cling to her,
And the south-west wind and the west wind sing.

For winter's rains and ruins are over,
And all the season of snows and sins;
The days dividing lover and lover,
The light that loses, the night that wins;
And time remembered is grief forgotten,
And frosts are slain and flowers begotten,
And in green underwood and cover
Blossom by blossom the Spring begins...

Viktor Vasnetsov and the Itinerants Movement

I have rarely...ok, never...linked to an outside blog from here before, but today's entry over at the wonderful Endicott Studio website is absolutely worth a look.

Their entry on Viktor Vasnetsov and the Itinerants Movement...references the Pre-Raphaelites and Topsy Morris!

Pre-Meowphaelites

First, we interrupt our regularly scheduled blog to bring you an update. I love doing this blog. Through it, I can not only celebrate my love of the Pre-Raphaelites and the Arts & Crafts Movement, but I can also learn. However, my brain may just...colloquially, 'go 'splodey' if I continue on doing 6 posts a week! Many of them take a lot of time to research, though it may not appear so. So starting this week, the posts may not be daily. I figure that gives us all more time to chit chat about each one anyway! Still expect at least a handful every week, but just not daily.

Now to today's topic. The last two entries have been about the Pre-Raphaelite cartoons, and cartoons about Pre-Raphaelites, respectively. Today I wanted to chat about a charming modern artist who does kitschy (and I mean kitschy good and amusing, not tacky) paintings of cats posed in Pre-Raphaelite paintings. Her name is Susan Herbert, and she has a wonderful and amusing book that I'd recommend as a light-hearted read or gift idea to any lover of Pre-Raphaelites who doesn't take the art too sacredly.

The book is called Pre-Raphaelite Cats, aptly, and in case you don't quite recognize what artwork is being parodied, there's a glossary in the back with small images of the original paintings. Several of Herbert's artworks made me laugh out loud. What gets me the most is the care she takes to add the details as cats instead of humans....for instance, the stained glass on Millais' Mariana? Cats. The figures on the mantle clock in The Awakening Conscience? Cats.

I saved my favorite for last....having a black cat-child of my own, I adore this one:

Snark and Punch

The Pre-Raphaelites weren't the only ones who enjoyed poking fun through cartoons. The general Victorian media also had a heyday with these eclectic bohemian emo artists. The above artwork of Dante Rossetti hosting a gathering in his back yard is definitely one of my favorites...this particular version has been captioned with the names of all the people pictured.

The periodical Punch was especially guilty of posting mocking parody art of the Pre-Raphaelites and their ideals.

Here we see an image entitled The Two Ideals, showing a seated Victorian woman, corsetted, curvy, with doll-like features. She was the standard epitome of beauty. Standing above her, thin and uncorsetted, wearing a loose gown with her hair a frizzed ball, is a rather unflattering caricature of Jane Morris, standing in as the Pre-Raphaelite idea of a Stunner.
A parody of Millias' Mariana.
A parody of Millias' Sir Umbras at the Ford

Punch even ran a near epic length illustrated poem with the sole purpose of mocking the Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic. One section is above, to view all sections, visit here.