HAPPIER NEW YEAR!

Here is a great way to start what could be a difficult year off right:  The 31-day art diet for January, 2024, courtesy of The Guardian.  Being a teensy weensy bit hung over from New Year’s Eve but not wanting to waste an opportunity to share this positive vibe, I commend the article to your reading, as I quote shamelessly from it and then call it a day.

January is the cruellest month. TS Eliot was wrong. A full 31 days with the sad tinsel of Christmas a departing memory in the winter darkness and February stretching rigidly before you. Even willing yourself to go out for a walk can sometimes feel heroic. This year’s cultural diet, rapidly becoming a tradition for Observer readers, will speed you on your way.

Here is a work of art for every day of the month – to lift your spirits, shift your mood, deepen your thinking. Everything here reaches the mind and heart through the eyes. And some of it does so with fast-acting effects. Painting, surely the most open and immediate of all art forms, offers itself so instantaneously. You have the sense of it straight away, even backlit on a glowing screen. Some of the images here are so small, in fact, that you can look at them without any loss of scale while out on that walk with your smartphone.

Art can take you anywhere, any time: to snowbound Japan in the 19th century or to the Dutch golden age; to the Mediterranean in blazing July or British Columbia in windswept autumn. It is not separate from life. We should use it, not least to enter the lives of others. Day by day, through what follows, you will know something of what it was to be an Elizabethan courtier, a painter during the French Revolution or a worker in Weimar Germany.

This diet has drawings, sculptures, videos and films. You can home in on a single star by Van Gogh, in almost subatomic closeup, or view the whole oeuvre of Vermeer. You can learn how to weave like Anni Albers, study the tiny woodcuts of Thomas Bewick for inspiration to make your own prints in lino or humble potato. Everything here can be lingered over at leisure, without the museum’s milling crowds pressing you ever onwards, or consumed at speed in a frantically busy day. And everything here is free.

What could be better than that?!  Here is the first image and sage advice to whet the appetite, “The Skating Minister,” by Sir Henry Raeburn, 1875.  

Start as you mean to go on – best foot forward! Raeburn’s celebrated Rev Walker gliding across Duddingston Loch, poised on one red-ribboned skate, the ice incised with his elegant arabesques, is absolutely still and yet in full swing. Such a cool painting, in both respects: hold it in mind through 2024.

The other works for January are equally wonderful and should keep us on an even keel as we sail into uncharted waters toward February and beyond, steering clear of unsettling carry-over events from last year that threaten to make quite a bit of chop.  Let's damn the torpedoes and full steam art-head! 

Happier New Year, everyone!  And many hanks to my friend E. for  The Guardian link.

Keep it real!

Marilyn