Great Landscapes: Bruce Pennington

There is a subtle, and possibly snobbish distinction between mere illustrators and painters. The former often have more of a career than the latter, but they all started out the same way.

Some illustrators, like Robert McGinnis – still with us at 94 – are extraordinarily gifted artists, displaying not just the essential technical chops, but also a vivid imagination and scene setting. McGinnis’ brooding and often sexy men and women are instantly recognisable, oozing style and iconicism. He could paint landscapes too. His status is also assured, the combination of Americana and ineffable cool gives him a cachet that some of his peers lack. By way of contrast, the demographic that everyone looks down on is probably the scifi/geek set, exhibit ‘A’ being the Simpsons’ Comic Book Store Guy. They’re all losers, right?

Yet lurking within the genre are some extraordinary works of art – posters, book covers, LP covers, illustrated exegeses and more. The British artist Bruce Pennington (a mere 76 years old) is one of the masters. I had a few of his book covers in the 70’s, and they always had a dark, authentic imagination working away, clearly above the herd. His otherworldiness actually reminds me of Goya (at times), Bruegel and Vereshchagin. An unusually diverse peer group.

…. a Pennington classic…

By coincidence, the daily Office of Readings in the Catholic Lectio Divina, is, in this Eastertide period, excerpting heavily from the Apocalypse of St John, or the Book of Revelation. It’s quite a read. An essential read I’d suggest. Interpreting it is another matter.

The scripture teems with arresting and still terrifying imagery. A lot of it is hard to form as a coherent mental picture. The New Jerusalem is one example. How many jewels in the walls? What are the pearls as gates? There are endless examples.

But the two key protagonists, apart from God, are the “woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars”, and the “great, fiery red dragon”, although you also have numerous angels, the Four Horsemen, the other Beast and many many more. Oddly, given the scriptural roots of much of the canon of Western art, there are very few major depictions of all this going back into the centuries. It is definitely a subject for the modern amateur and numerous contemporary evangelical Christian artists, but rarely of any aesthetic merit. Which brings us to Bruce Pennington, who may be contemporary but is in neither of those two categories**.

The rise of the antichrist

It may not be to everyone’s taste, but to me the detail, the lighting and the sweeping imagination melding the Mediterranean and the Piazza San Pietro is quite brilliant. The emerging dragon fulfils the requisite threat and enormity superbly. It is indeed a landscape, but of a very strange kind, which fits with the subject matter. The restless sweep, colour and energy remind me of Dali’s late masterpiece, Tuna Fishing. That is quite a compliment.

…magnificent

** In the interests of accuracy, I should add that my reference to Revelation is correct, for the most part, but strictly speaking Bruce was interpreting Nostradamus (in his book Eschatus), although much of the Frenchman’s work seems pretty obviously derived from that book of scripture.

James Hunt: The W126 Mercedes SEC ~ men of taste and distinction (a continuing series)

Some of the most read posts on this blog relate to the sublime masterpiece that is the Mercedes SEC coupe – try these: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.

I was watching a Freddie Mercury documentary the other day, in which Freddie jumped into an all black SEC, being a de rigeur 80’s classic, as enjoyed by Clint Eastwood and numerous racing drivers, the latest of whom – that I’ve discovered –  is the legendary English madman, James Hunt, winner of the 1976 Formula 1 title, after Lauda’s accident and severe burns just about took him out of contention.

Hunt had plenty of cars – here he is with an SEL, and he was thought to have possibly owned this SEC convertible – although the modification ruins the sleek brilliance of the pure coupe. In any event, the highly readable Mercedes Driver magazine has just done a cover story on Hunt’s 500 SEC, which came up for sale a while ago.

Here’s the file. They are simply brilliant vehicles – truly things of beauty…

 

…relaxing before a race

Ayrton Senna: The W126 Mercedes SEC ~ men of taste and distinction (a continuing series)

…terrible number plate

This is the 6th post I’ve done on this topic, slightly to my surprise (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). They always get regular hits, presumably from people googling Mercedes W126/SEC/coupe. I do it myself.

I previously noted that racing drivers liked to drive SEC’s in their civilian lives, and if you’ve seen the remarkable movie documentary Senna, you’ll know that he was in some ways the greatest of them all, a true archetype.

One of my patients knew him from back in his Formula 3 days, and has nothing but praise for him as a driver, naturally, but also as a man.

Well, the excellent Mercedes Enthusiast magazine has done some detective work and unearthed Senna’s original 500SEC, which clearly has had a harder life than some. It’s been somewhat transformed, but this car has real pedigree, something not very common in the used vehicle market.

As before, here are expandable .jpeg files (just click) and a pdf…

…and…

French election special ~ The W126 Mercedes SEC: men of taste and distinction

It’s always nice to have an excuse to go on about the awesome and beautiful SEC series of Mercedes coupes from the 1980’s. In fact the two previous posts on the topic (here and here) have been among the most popular things on this blog in the last 7 years. It’s partly the aesthetics, courtesy of the genius of Bruno Sacco (1, 2), and partly the sheer joy of zooming around in one, although they’re almost primitive by today’s standards. Such simplicity is is appealing in itself – and easier to fix when there’s a problem. I had a well used 560 SEC as a taster, I now have a 500 SEC, and it’s a keeper.

When you find out that it’s the favoured car of Clint Eastwood and the late Ayrton Senna amongst others – who could buy any car they liked – then you realise it must have a special allure, or pace the female readers, a certain manliness. It’s the antithesis of a highly capable yet boring and ugly modern car – the Nissan Juke, say.

L’homme lui-même

Which brings me to today’s post. It takes a gallic sang froid to walk into the nearest Mercedes dealership to your appartement on the Champs-Élysées and order the absolute top of the range 560 SEC, with pretty much all the extras. The buyer in question, back in 1988, was Pierre de Bénouville, a prewar  literary critic who became a general and a hero of the French Resistance. Here’s a sample of his New York Times obituary:

…like many French rightists, he was a patriotic nationalist and a bitter foe of the Germans,” and he rejected the occupied government’s call to capitulation and collaboration and went into the underground. An ardent supporter of Charles de Gaulle, to whom he was close in his later political career, he was also a member of the Free French Forces during the war and organized French forces in Algeria. In 1944 he was promoted to brigadier general in the French Army because of his achievements as the commander of a unit of Moroccan sharpshooters on the Italian front. He went on to be a major general. A high-ranking member of the Legion of Honor, he received other decorations, including the Croix de Guerre and the Medal of the Resistance.

Impressive n’est-ce pas? Although he was a ‘rightist’, whatever that is, he was a long term pal of Mitterand (not necessarily a recommendation) and his post-war career was of a fiercely patriotic and successful establishment fixture. His views on the EU are not known to me, but as a Gaullist he was probably for it, as long as the French were in charge, and against the Brits. A couple of other obituaries make interesting reading (Guardian and Telegraph).

Tomorrow is the highly consequential French general election. What a patriotic and brave high achiever like de Bénouville would make of the lightweight effete Blair manqué Emmanuel Macron is a tricky one. His own career path has some similarities to that of Marine Le Pen’s dodgy father. My guess is he would emotionally sympathise with Le Pen but pragmatically vote for Macron, to keep le projet Union européenne alive.

So here, from the outstanding Mercedes Enthusiast magazine, is the full feature on de Bénouville’s exceptional W126 coupe. I’ve provided it as a jpeg and a pdf for any SEC geeks out there.

Vive la France, mais vive la différence!

C’est magnifique

and….

The Art of Surgery

Et toujours! Et jamais! – Pierre Hebert

There is a subject that runs through the history of painting, sculpture and indeed music, of ‘death and the maiden’, particularly in the Romantic and Symbolist schools, and I suppose I could have called this post ‘death and the surgeon’. My aim, though, is not to highlight death, but rather that interface where art meets surgery. Some surgeons, such as Sir Roy Calne, were pretty accomplished painters, and took their subjects from what they knew. Anatomists such as Vesalius, Bourgeury or the notorious nazi, Pernkopf produced work of great aesthetic merit.

Every now and then though, a work of art grabs me as capturing something special, related to surgery. Photography can do it, like this famous shot.

Most surgeons have been in comparable situations:

Extremely tired country doctor Ernest Ceriani drinks a cup of coffee and smokes a cigarette, in the hospital kitchen at 2 a.m., Kemmling, Colorado, August 1948. He had just performed a caesarean section where both the baby & the mother died following complications. (Photo by W. Eugene Smith/The LIFE Picture Collection)

This one caught me today, from @ChickAndTheDead, it’s self explanatory. It might be a piece of upmarket pulp art, but I think it captures something real:

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The artist, Saliger, had nazi links, like Pernkopf, does that invalidate what is, to any practising surgeon, a pretty evocative image?

My own practice only occasionally deals with ‘dramatic’ death in the form of life-threatening trauma, although much more commonly in the terminally ill for one reason or another.  Here are two sculptures which capture something unique about that struggle at the interface between death and the chance of continuing to live. I love the fact that the first one is on the side of a hospital

Fulton County Health Services building, Atlanta

The last one is Barba’s sculpture in Poblenou Cemetery, Barcelona, El beso de la muerte and I guess that in the context of this post, the surgeon has lost the battle.

The Kiss of Death, 1930

This extraordinary work brings to mind a quote I gleaned from the now ubiquitous Henry Marsh, a (sort of) retired neurosurgeon, and a true NHS hero. He references the French surgeon and author, René Leriche:

Every surgeon carries about him a little cemetery, in which from time to time he goes to pray, a cemetery of bitterness and regret, of which he seeks the reason for certain of his failures

When the cars look like insects

Insects of 2014

What do you like about America? Assuming that you don’t possess a reflexive hatred of it. Even the noisiest lefty usually has a sneaking regard for the country.

From my point of view, I like the bigness, the friendliness, and the panache of the place. If you were lucky enough to be a white middle class American in the 50’s and early 60’s, life probably didn’t get much better. None of this is to disregard the social issues of those times. The Knife’s second cousin was a civil rights marcher with MLK. But he loved the States.

Lots of things have improved since then – medicine, technology, civil rights etc – but something has probably been lost as well.  The US is coming to the end of its own Blairite experiment, under Obama, and it’s been pretty messy. Like the UK under Blair, a lot of good things have been lost forever. I’ve blogged on this stuff many times before.

Here is Thomas Sowell, one of the greatest thinkers and writers in America, with a vignette of his own. Occasionally the smaller details tell the big story

One more thing. Today as I was hurtling down Portola at the intersection of Country Club Drive I saw a perfectly restored 1956 Ford Fairlane Coupe, two tone, bright yellow and white. It was elegant, powerful, a symbol of a confident nation with an artistic sense to match its power. Now we have little cars that look like insects and we are a nation in as much self-doubt as Barack Obama even though we are incomparably richer than we were in 1956 and there is no more Soviet Union. Where did our confidence go? Somewhere in the deep bosom of ocean buried, chased there by a media that hates the nation and the people that made it rich.

The 1956 Fairlane. He has a point

 

 

 

Public sculpture – where did it all go wrong?

Last night’s World Cup final was great in so many ways, not least the astonishing juxtaposition of Rio’s Cristo Redentor with the sun (and the moon):

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It was completed in 1931, funded by local donations, with a total cost of about $250,000, which is the equivalent of $3,300,000 now.  A bargain, if you ask me

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Admittedly Corcovado (the mountain) and the bay are unique, but even so, a truly inspiring and aesthetically perfect piece. Here in Britain, if you are on the A1 at Newcastle, you’ll see the Angel of the North, by Antony Gormley. Personally, I like it, though it’s hardly Cristo Redentor.

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It was paid for by the Lottery, completed in 1998, cost: £1,000,000. Still good value, and more to the point, enigmatic and impressive.

Which brings me to Arria, the ‘Cumbernauld Mermaid’, on the A80 just north of Glasgow, completed in 2010. If you can imagine a  gigantic Barbie with 4 arms, a 60’s hairband and a fishtail, you’ve got it. The sculptor also did the Kelpies, which are alright, if you have an enormous garden centre to fill, but Arria is just embarrassing. It cost the public £250,000. No doubt the council had a surplus on the council tax that year, and were looking for something to spend it on.

Cumbernauld isn’t really renowned for mermaids, at least to my knowledge. However, if you’re looking for a symbol of money wasting, crazed local government philistines whose taste is in their boots, it’s perfect. I reckon it’ll last about 20years.

I don’t know what to say

…it’s even tackier at night

 

 

 

The W126 Mercedes SEC, again

You can’t have too much of a good thing. The Knifes’s previous two posts on this topic, here and here, have been pretty popular.

I’m no Clarksonoid petrolhead, though I’ve nothing against that kind of stuff, I just love this because it’s so beautiful. It’s also a fantastic car to drive, from the very best Stuttgart era.

On a day when Nick Clegg, not in any shape or form a “man’s man”, decides to blow half a billion pounds of our money on pathetic and pointless electric cars**, The Knife is particularly proud of owning an aesthetically magnificent 5 litre V8 cruiser. As does Clint Eastwood.

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**the hospital where The Knife works decided to cut down on travel expenses, although there can be a lot of driving. You could still have the option of an eco-friendly electric hire car (on the taxpayer),  if you booked it in advance. It would certainly get to another hospital 35 miles away, but there was no guarantee that you would make it back. Always pack a toothbrush.

The W126 Mercedes SEC: men of taste and distinction

One of the most popular posts on this blog is an old one, praising the most beautiful car ever made – in fact one of the most aesthetically pleasing objects made by man – the mighty Mercedes 126 coupes from the 80’s and 90’s.

No doubt about it

Anyway, what brought this reverie on was seeing a celebrity in one the other day. Not just any celebrity, but one with decades of accumulated cool and credibility – Clint Eastwood. Clint was giving his new lady friend a lift.

Clint’s white 500 SEC

Now, why would a multimillionaire be driving around in a 20+ year old car? Because it’s so damn enjoyable. He’s not the only one either. What would the wildest F1 driver of them all drive when he’s not at work?

The legendary Ayrton Senna!

And Nigel Mansell, Keke Rosberg and Alain Prost.  Even Martin Brundle.

Or what would the finest living art critic drive (it’s in the superb DVD’s recommended here and here)?

Brian Sewell: my hero

Genius at work

 

 

 

 

 

 

Really, Bruno Sacco is the Michelangelo of modern design. Philippe Starck doesn’t come close. Naturally Bruno drives a 560 SEC. It’s in films and video games.

Sadly, The Knife’s own 560 SEC (see below) has moved on, even if this only a temporary state of affairs.

For unrequited SEC junkies I can recommend this Tumblr page.

Three more images, it’s worth it…

…ahhhh…

The one in the middle. It’s successor is on the left. Still pretty extraordinary.

…in jeder Sprache, perfekt

 

 

 

Comic Art (6): Paul Rader

Ever surreptitiously admired a pulp fiction book cover? Seriously, some of these are quite superb.

One of the masters was Paul Rader, who made a bit of money this way. He was also a noted portrait artist, and it’s said that there’s a modern setting crucifixion scene by him in a church in New York State. That would be worth seeing. His Tumblr galleries are quite something, if you like lurid, with considerable imagination and skill.

…another NHS scandal exposed