The Letters of Dora Carrington

Dora Carrington was a painter, affiliated a bit with the Bloomsbury group. Though their eloquence sometimes made her uncomfortable, Virginia Woolf is known to have rushed to hug her upon learning that Dora's long time companion, Lytton Strachey, had died. Woolf was not prone to enthusiastic physical embrace so it speaks to Carrington's gentle nature that she would do so.

Through her paintings, I became interested in her and so started reading her letters. She included drawings in so many of them. Some humorous, some to replace words, others to illustrate the text. This first drawing shows how Carrington's drawings could tackle a topic painful to her and her friend.

Given that she was first an artist, a successful student of the Slade School of Art, I wonder that her letters are not more often seen as an extension of her artistic oeuvre. They are relegated to biographical and historical relevance rather than being seen as participating in her relationship to art.

There are many more that I could have posted but this last one best shows how the nature of printing her letters loses the artistic quality of her letters. Though the text presents her first line in black and white, the words danced around her drawing before continuing through the letter.

As such we lost much in the collected edition of her letters, chosen by David Garnett, because the letters are printed and not reproduced. At any rate, I am grateful that he managed to include some of the visuals to give us a flavor of her work. I hope one day to go to Austin where they are held.

Over Thinking It

Over the course of the latter part of the 20th Century, an attitude of belittlement, destruction, and dismissal produced by extensive philosophizing became the focus of art marketing and art itself. When Marcel Duchamp said that every work of art is finished by the audience, among the things his statement implied, he actually permitted the viewer to have their own experience of the work of art, favorable or not, as opposed to the current belief that art must always be explained by an idealogue, the curator or critic. The dominant voice in art today is no longer the formal bourgeoisie but the pedantic art academics who dictate the terms of the discussion in language that often makes Dada poetry appear the height of clarity.

That a contrast has been made between figurative and conceptual art is dismissive of the amount of conceit involved in producing a figurative work of any quality. Figurative art is not inherently better than conceptual as can be seen by the endless pages of academic painters and their boring still lives. But figurative art has been dismissed entirely to the perplexity of all but the curators and gallerists, who appeal to some secret knowledge and vocabulary in expounding the virtues of the mess they are selling for thousands, if not millions...and always with a large percentage rate for themselves.