JULY - and NO DAY WITHOUT A LINE by Penny Dolan

There’s little writing angst with this first of July post, as I am still in a ‘What I did in my Holidays’ kind of mood - so do grab a cup of tea or coffee or whatever and read on.

Over the last four weeks, my life has been unusually blissful,  mainly because, for a few days, we met up – yes, person to person, in real life, in one and the same place – with the lovely people in our family and with time to be with each other: to sit, walk, talk, wander about, be with or away from each other when needed, as well as sharing a few meals together, from simple to splendid. Online contact, when you’re miles and oceans apart, can be fine but this patch of time together, feet on the same ground, was so much better.

The imminent sociability, I felt, meant stepping away from the drama-studio-black ‘uniform’ and becoming a different self for a while. I spent money on showy-off clothes, and I enjoyed wearing those showy-off clothes too because they felt totally necessary for an elegant Afternoon Tea and an important gathering or two. Not my usual life at all, but such very lovely fun. What will you wear? A jade green silk kimono decorated with cranes? How wonderful! A pink and orange over-shirt printed with lemons, oranges, a message across the back and large lobster? Yes, please, and with a smile!

Additionally, there was gadding about. I swanned across to the V&A for the Schiaparelli exhibition, in the company of a friend who knew about seams and fit and tailoring. During the pre and post WWII years, Madam Elsa designed stylish clothes that fitted women’s bodies and lives, adding touches of trademark pink and surrealism. However, Daniel Roseberry, Maison Schiaparelli’s present designer, seemed to me to see bodies as structures underpinning his impressively fantastic designs. Though these outfits would create impact at award ceremonies, on red carpet occasions and for the camera’s glass eye, none, for me, had the practical ease of the original designs. Slightly personally, I noticed that, as well as her richly embroidered jackets and shoe-shaped hats, Elsa went in for rather a lot of black in her designs too, as well as that Dali lobster, of course. Not so unfashionable?

Afterwards, out in the central courtyard, visitors sought ice cream and shadows and young children paddled and splashed in the long sunlit pool. What a delight! How empty and unfriendly that area had been when I first visited the V&A, decades before. What a good thing it is that museums and galleries are more welcoming now!

Another day of gadding took me to Tate Britain and the James McNeill Whistler exhibition. I knew little about JMW, other than his painted ‘Mother’, so how and why had that particular artist (1834-1903) become a ‘name’?

Whistler, an American, had an impact beyond his individual works and paintings: using ‘soupy’ paint and a freer style of brushwork, Whistler created an early impressionistic style of painting. Later, his atmospheric nocturnes of the foggy Thames had a role in bringing French artists to his riverside studio and the Chelsea area. Whistler’s argumentative nature led to rows with once-friends and donors - a sound recording and a video are part of the exhibition - and a controversial libel case against the art critic Ruskin, led to Whistler’s eventual bankruptcy. The kind of personality that creates headlines in the art world.

Art did not seem to make him kind. Whistler insisted an eleven-year-old model pose seventy times for a particular portrait. Now, when I see that painting, I wonder how much that poor girl earned - and must find out. As ever, with exhibitions, you go in and learn more, yet come away knowing too little. But I definitely did not want to carry the exhibition catalogue around with me all weekend. I’ll find out more, somehow, once I’m home.


By contrast, Hurvin Anderson’s huge canvases at Tate Britain brought bright sunlight, dark shadow and vibrant Jamaican foliage into the dark gallery space, some views veiled by bead curtains, painted grids or leaf patterns, all contrasting with the muted tones of his domestic and London shop interiors.

A day or two later, I called into Tate Modern to see Tracey Emin’s retrospective ‘A Second Life’ in real, before-me life. Some of her early items, seen before only as reproductions, were revealed as fabric-based. Her huge posters were large blankets, the bold statements spelt out in blocks of stitched-on felt lettering, and the smaller, mostly hand-written notes and statements sewn individually on to the giant collage. Elsewhere, and close-up, I discovered that the loosely-running lines of some large nude studies were created not by pen or paint, but by runs of black thread stitches. I had not linked Emin to ‘embroidery’ before, but there was stitchery there, among all the pain and rage, part of the impact of her work and personality on the 20C art world.

By way of contrast, my last gadding was a long-promised trip into the Kent countryside, to revisit that most beautiful of places, Sissinghurst Castle Garden. With this year’s weather, the roses were no more than crumpled heads of dry petals but the famous White Garden, full of plants and flowers, was at its ‘very best for years’, or so I overheard. We climbed the narrow stairs, up past Vita Sackville-West’s writing room, to the very top of the Tower and looked out. There was the wide and seemingly still tree-covered Kentish Weald, fading, as if in a story, away into the misty blue distance.

Then, of course, I came back north, and home, filled with a good many memories, and a buzz of questions to follow up. All the gadding about was an apt reminder of the need, in ordinary as well as at special times, to make time and space for the work of ‘filling the well.’
Now, if you have got this far, thank you for reading, and here is the explanation of today’s post’s title. 

The JMW show displayed several of sketch books and quantities of small etchings and prints, making it clear that the artist was in the habit of drawing, of making art constantly, wherever he was. Among his writing, is a phrase that the gallery had on display, high across one wall, almost as an introduction to his philosophy:

‘ NO DAY WITHOUT A LINE ’

The quote is an old one, first recorded by Pliny the Elder about a Greek artist, but the words have since been adopted and adapted by other artists, musicians, writers and more.  To me, the quote could easily be ‘no day without a line of words?’ 

Words - but does that mean writing? Or reading, possibly? Or both?

Whichever, whatever, have fun during July. With a bit of gadding about, too?


Penny Dolan

ps. Writing this post, I suddenly remembered A,S. Byatt’s ‘The Children’s Book’, a huge novel loosely inspired by the troubled family lives of Edith Nesbit and others within the Fabian Society, the Arts and Crafts Movement and the early years of the V&A museum. Must search my shelves! (Pub 2009)