Heartfelt

Heartfelt

One of the oldest symbols of love is the heart.  For some reason the ancients felt that this was where the emotion came from.  Nowadays we know that all human emotion is generated in the brain but we still talk of giving someone our heart.  Or, when someone is speaking earnestly, that they are speaking from the heart - that what they are saying is heartfelt.  You don't have to be a New Age mystic to understand that expression or, indeed, what it expresses.

Inside all of us, according to psychology, is the male and the female part.  Externally we seek to balance that with someone else's personality.  In this drawing of a heart I put together these ideas and the connections that bind us.  We talk of someone as being heartless and others of being all heart.  The words go on.  Who would want to be cruel-hearted?  Finally, who would not want to be of good heart?

Science may have the brain but experience has the heart.

Once Upon a Time in Athens

Greece has been in the news for all the wrong reasons of late. I visited a few years ago and recently came across a stash of images from the time. They certainly contrast with pictures of rioting, tear gas and anxiety.

The olympics had just been held and Athenians had a certain bounce in their step - the unfolding crisis there would have been as remote as the shenanigans of the gods on Parnassus. Much was shiny and new admidst the ancient temples and medieval churches. However some traditions were zealously guarded.

Particularly striking was the elaborate ritual carried out by the soldiers in front of the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior. Hand-picked Greek men are chosen to goose step and stand at this sacred spot and are, of course, of much interest to tourists and pride to locals.

There is much rifle lifting, saluting and stomping. One tourist thought it would be amusing to make fun of a soldier and stood beside him a caricature of the Greek manhood beside him - ramrod straight, pursed lips, steely eyes and elaborate costume.

Too late, our foreign friend realised his mistake when the soldier brought down the butt of the gun with a mighty bang on his trainers clad foot. The tourist, shocked, limped off into the city.

Mr Mountjoy

Whilst wandering around Dublin I spotted this gentleman wrestling with his map. The city can be frustrating for visitors as streets often have no name signs, or they are at one end only. I stopped to help him find his way. Up close he revealed himself to be in his nineties and Anglo-Irish from Belfast.

This intrepid character explained that, long ago, he used to bring his father to Dublin to enjoy the atmosphere. As he explained his face lit up with a two hundred Watt smile. His purpose was to find Mountjoy Street and I expressed concern that it might be a little colourful to the uninitiated. Laughingly he identified that his surname was the same as that of the street. It was an article of faith for him, each time he visited the capital, to drink at the Mountjoy Pub on the street.

He explained too that on his last outing, he was welcomed whole-heartedly by the denizens of that watering hole who insisted on buying him pints all afternoon once they learned of his sharing his name with that of the boozer. Having ensured that he was going to be well looked after I pointed him in the right direction and wished him good luck.

Leaving in opposite directions we were both content on a lovely summer's day.

A Private View

Florence or, as the Italians would say, Firenze has always held a special place in my imagination. Anyone who has read Vasari's Lives of the Artists knows how central this medieval seat of learning and culture is to the history of art. A roll call of the masters who practised there from the 13th to the 17th centuries is very impressive indeed. Giants such as Michelangelo, Donatello, Giotto, Bernini and Botticelli will forever grace this city with their presence. Monuments such as the Baptistery and the Cathedral, not to mention the Cappella dei Principi, pepper the urban landscape and attract millions of tourists from all over the world.

In 2009 I spent some time in December visiting the city and seeing the main sights. I travelled two weeks before Christmas and even though Tuscany was cold, there was no rain and the sun sparkled from time to time. What was fantastic was that I was one of only a small number of tourists enjoying the atmosphere. I visited the main gallery, the Uffizi (above), one bright morning and wandered through the rooms entirely on my own under the laconic gaze of the attendants. Each happily nodding to my acknowledgments. It must be rare indeed for a visitor to have ten minutes alone with Botticelli's Birth of Spring and the Primavera. At the Duomo museum there is Michelangelo's third and final Pieta. Whilst examining this moving depiction, where the artist - a deeply religious man - depicts himself cradling the dead Christ, I was joined on my solitary watch by an elderly English couple. We all agreed that it was very surprising indeed to have one of the world's key masterpieces all to ourselves without having to push through throngs of tourists goggling and guides berating us with whole extracts from Wikipedia! The life size sculpture would have struck it's Renaissance audience by it's spirituality and demonstration of Christ's sacrifice. A 21st century viewer is struck more by the modernism of the Florentine's holding the body himself and by the fact that having decided that the work was not up to his lofty standards he took a chisel to it and sought to destroy it before abandoning the marble. An assistant later tried to complete it. The original passages of Michelangelo's carving stand out in the torso and composition highlighting that even in a failed vision the artist could not be equaled.

Having seen a number of the sculptor's works (such as the famous David, (above) I decided to visit Casa Buonarotti. Here are found a number of his earliest works including the Madonna of the Stairs carved when he was 16 as well as a great unfinished torso. Whilst admiring his work I said hello to one of the room attendants. This guard was a woman of certain years who managed to make her utilitarian uniform appear as a work of haute couture. As her solitary charge she admonished me for arriving in Winter when half the museum was shut and missing it. I agreed it might not have been good from that perspective but that I got to see so many things in comfort and could spend ten minutes in front of each of the master's drawings as a result without being pushed aside by the inexorable swell of tourists hailing from Beijing to Boston. The lady snorted, then let out an exasperated sigh and told me to wait where I was. She then darted off, perilously high heels clicking on the marble, and locked the entrance. Returning to me she ordered me to follow her and then gave me a complete tour of the house through the closed sections and behind the scenes. Amazing and another proof that travelling on your own and taking the time to talk with complete strangers pays off.

Following my once in a lifetime tour I dusted off my guidebook in a swish restaurant on Piazza della Republica and identified all the sculptures by the artist around the city and visited each one (below is his Genius of Victory from the Palazzo Vecchio). There is no place like Firenze!

The Fall

There's nothing worse than the end of a party. Especially as the morning light stretches across the empty cans, abandoned coats and over-flowing ash trays of the night before. Coupled with a hangover, an empty wallet and memories of excess is the sense that the good times are over.

That's the vibe that hangs over the City of Dublin, the Province of Leinster and the Island of Ireland. For the best (and worst) part of two decades the country partied like there was no tomorrow. Money was thrown into the ether, burnt in piles and generally wasted. The hangover has settled deep and dark over the populace and the pain is just beginning. And people ask, what have we got to show for it? Apart from negative equity, increasing unemployment and rising taxes what have we got left?

I was wondering that as I sauntered along the boardwalk of the Liffey and considered the Irish experience. How at the height of the Boom the country worshipped money for it's own sake and what was left?

And it dawned on me, there are a few things and the Boardwalk was one of them. It's the best place to view the city and the bridges that join those age old enemies - the Northside and the Southside. The bridges are monument to a small germ of beauty that bloomed.

Furthest West is the James Joyce Bridge (2003) that joins the city to the House which is the setting to Joyce's melancholy story of place, The Dead. It forms two beautiful arcs of white steel forming semi-haloes over the riverflow. A blessing on the city by Santiago Calatrava.

Downriver is the Millennium Bridge (1999) which forms a graceful curve over the water, connecting the Henry Street district with Temple Bar. One pleasure is to jump up and down in the centre of the bridge and watch the startled faces of pedestrians negotiating the rippling deck.

Connecting to the sparkling offices of the IFSC is the Sean O'Casey Bridge (2005). This low bridge forms an ungainly sprawl across the water like a relaxed spider. It's beauty is in contrast to the older bridges that frame it.

The final structure in the set is the newest - the Samuel Beckett Bridge (2009). It joined it's fellows at the apogee of the Boom as the financial world collapsed. Another work by Calatrava it's a final benediction on the river. The bridge (pictured) is a post modern vision of an Irish harp and perhaps the finest of the paths across Anna Livia.

The good times are over but we still have connections and on a sunny morning in January the view still reflects the better days.

Chairing Onwards

It's part of mankinds condition to relate to all objects, animate and inanimate, in human terms. Toddlers turn their teddy bears into guests for tea, cartoonists promote a beastiary of the bizarre and many languages demand that objects are given a sex. It's a long known fact, of good design, that objects must be created in human terms. The origin of the Georgian window is a case in point. All it's proportions are based on human ones. It's not for nothing that we stand back on the pavement in Merrion Square and admire the twinkling lights of so many panes catching a shrinking sun. We are admiring ourselves.


Any woman, of a certain age, will tell you that you can judge a man by his shoes. After all, that is how the fairer sex judges itself. YSL, Jimmy's or Louboutin's? A shoe may not have a face but it does have a soul. For me the most anthropomorphic of loves is the chair. I like a good human quadruped. Wherever I go I am on the look out to make new friends of the four legged variety. Not dogs, not cats - but chairs.


The Amstelkring in the Red Light District of Amsterdam hosts some Christian examples. These are not the thrones of the Kremlin, the Victorian sofas of Dublin Castle or the Academic mahogany examples of Trinity. These are chairs worn soft by constant vulgar use. Vulgarity being, in chair terms, the highest order. Of course, the Netherlands has form when it comes to sitting down. The most famous chair in art was depicted by Van Gogh. Sitting there, nursing the artist's pipe, the chair waits to provide relaxation for a man whose mind was a hectic machinegun of ideas and emotions. Cousins of that chair sit in the kitchen of Our Lord in the Attics as the museum is known when translated from Dutch. An example (probably late 19th, early 20th century) with an ancient coffer is given above.


Closer to home, in Glasgow, sits one of the greatest of the museums of the British & Irish Isles, the Burrell. This is the collection of a Scottish magnate which was donated to the city of his success. And what a collection! Wonderful works by Rodin, Chinese porcelain, a Rembrandt and so many other delights - each worthy of a sonnet. And there in the cafeteria, some wonderful hide and wood chairs. I have pictured one below. And they say the 70's was a decade that style forgot? These chairs have it!


Whether wood of oak, mahogany or pine was shaped and hung with hide or straw each of these chairs, for me, tells us a little about the age and a lot about ourselves.


I think I need to sit down now.

Escaping the World

Nowadays every moment of our working life is ruled by the calendar and clock. Every so often a beep indicates another meeting, a ring an incoming call, a buzz a text message and horror of horrors - a tweet. There are now so many electromagnetic ways of demanding your attention that it's hard not to have sympathy for a group of middle aged French Luddites who have retreated to a woody cleft somewhere in the Massif Central to escape the debilitating effects of all these electronic impulses. As they sit there cowering against their alumininium caravans, wrapped in tin foil shawls a certain human impulse empathises.

For the less extreme of us there are holidays. I've just come back from one which I try to do at least once a year. A trip to Holland, the Netherlands, the Low Country. People have all kinds of reasons for travelling East to the Kingdom of the Dutch. For the young and impressionable the narcotics speak loud, for the hippies its the heady scent of marijuana and for the middle aged the chance to sit in a gezellig brown bar drinking jenever and listening to rumpy thumpy Eurovision accordion music. The more discerning travel over to visit the museums and for the nostalgic it's a chance to wander in the steps of long dead comrades who perished in the second world war.

For me there's the opportunity to meet old friends, hopefully make some new ones and practise some apalling Dutch. There is the chance too to study the paintings and architecture of the Golden Age. This is the country of Bartholomeus Van Der Helst, of Carel Fabritus, of Rembrandt and of Johannes Vermeer. Add to that Hoogstraten and Jan Steen. Think too of the landskip experts Van Goyen, Ruisdael, Ruysdael, Hobbema and Cuyp.

Then there is the chance to walk in these artists' shoes in cities that still bear remarkable resemblance to the towns of the 17th century. A wander around Delft reveals Vermeer's hometown, a circuit of Leiden gives scenes of Rembrandt's youth and Harlem echoes memories of Van Der Helst. Even the most mundane of strolls opens up vistas to worlds that hitherto seemed the sphere of oil paints and etchings. Each new view another sigh of relaxation.

Purchasing a museum card allows you to closet yourself with the minds of men and women who passed on centuries ago but still speak to us. Their's is a language immediately apparent to us today. Rembrandt's etchings, carefully displayed in Rembrandthuis, tell stories that highlight the eternal human experience. His are children caught in angry fits and biblical characters contemplating existentialisms. Even a trip to the Van Gogh museum tells us more about what we have in common with a man of enormous willpower who in the end could not hold his sanity together despite the superhuman efforts of his brother Theo. There can be few statements as universal as his canvas of almond flowers. This Chinese inspired oil was Vincent's heartfelt reaction to the news that Theo and his wife had decided to call their newborn son, Vincent. He painted it and presented it to Theo in thanks for this ultimate of gifts. In the museum there is a poignant photograph of two comradely gravestones, one for each brother, and a note that Theo's wife insisted that her husband be buried beside his brother despite the loss she felt at having him interred so far away.

From the good humour of the tram drivers, to the sardonic eye rolls of the waitresses, the narcissism of handsome Dutch men, the friendliness of barflies and earnestness of museum guards the openess of the Lowlanders is a pleasant interchange for visitors. An attempt to speak some Dutch results in even more sincere discussions. There is little danger of beeps, buzzes and electronic whines. There may be advice on a little shop selling advanced furniture, a little known museum somewhere in The Hague or a discussion on post colonialism. The beauty is that as a land, what you put in as a visitor, you get out a dozen times. A visit to this flat and ancient land is a conversation and an escape.

For now I am not thinking of hiding in a French valley. Instead if you wonder where I am as I day dream on my way to work it's probably somewhere in the Veluwe or perhaps sitting quietly in the Amstelkring (pictured at top and above) waiting for the ghosts of tolerance three centuries ago. Escapism can sometimes be the best part of life.