“I loved it! This is a great story with a wonderful concept and excellent background.” Readers’ Favorite
As they continued slowly down the centre of the aisle Omri resumed his photography taking pictures of each of the six apses, of the ceiling, of the floor and the seating and then the stairs leading up to the transept and the choir.They passed behind the raised altar and stared up at the cupola before arriving at the two marble slabs denoting the tombs of Franco and de Rivera, about ten yards apart.‘So where exactly is our object?’ asked Omri in a lowered voice.‘You’re standing on it now’ Alex said looking at the slab beneath Omri’s feet. ‘You’re right on top of it.’
As seasonal happenstance would have it, while thinking of a subject for this post I came upon slides of two Hanukkah-related pictures I made many years ago in my mid-teens. My original intention had been to create an epic account of the Hannukah story in the form of a heavily illustrated book-cum-comic, however, I soon found the task to be overwhelming and abandoned it after just a few weeks.
The unfinished project coincided with my growing interest in biblical and ancient history and this had a strong influence on the way I considered the story of the Maccabees and their war of liberation against the forces of the Seleucid Empire. This meant that I was passionate about executing not only an accurate visual portrayal of the Hebrews, their Macedonian foes, and the Judean backdrop, but also an historically objective account of the story itself.
This is my take on the gruesome climax of the highly apocryphal story of Hannah and her Seven Sons. Within the Hannukah context, the episode is set before the Maccabee Revolt, and presented as one of its precursors. There are several versions of the story, and in this one I went for a touch of historicity by having Antiochus IV (Epiphanes) use crucifixion and impaling – a favoured Macedonian method of execution – to kill the seven sons for their’s and their mother’s refusal to submit to the will of the king by transgressing their religion. The scene is set in the western Jerusalem foothills and intentionally contextualises a later, far more famous such execution of another Jew at the hands of a later occupying power…
As a little Jewish boy I had received the traditional, pious version of the story based on the first and second books of Maccabees, in which Judah Maccabee and his family are presented as flawless heroes, struggling against an evil foreign enemy and even wickeder “Hellenised” Jewish collaborators. Until I was about twelve, the Hasmoneans (Maccabees) were totally good and all those who opposed them, totally bad.
This more stylised image was intended as the cover plate. It’s a depiction of Judah Maccabee in the full armour of a Macedonian hoplite (heavy infantryman). Originally, Judah and his fellow fighters would have been lightly armed guerrillas, but with each victory, would have acquired both battle experience and the armour and weaponry from those they defeated. It’s unlikely however that the Hebrew forces ever fought in classic Macedonian phalanx formation, hence the shortened sarissa (pike-spear) for close-order combat.
But as I grew older, and read more deeply into the history of the period I came to understand that the truth was – as it usually is in these sort of encounters – far more nuanced, and that if I’d been around at the time I might very well have seen the Hellenised Jews as enlightened and civilised, and the Maccabees as reactionary, intolerant and often cruel. Evidence for this probability lies in the fact that once the Maccabees were victorious and came to power, they too surrendered to many of the intellectual temptations of Greek culture and thought. Moreover, once the Hasmonean’s established their royal dynasty, the more powerful they became, the more they emulated their Seleucid and Ptolemaic imperial neighbours, including the hiring of large Greco-Macedonian mercenary armies – the very troops they had once fought against – to protect and expand their kingdom.
Thus, what I planned to do was to offer the first objective version of the epic struggle, which neither glossed over some the undoubted barbarities of the Macedonian occupiers, nor the fanatical fundamentalism of the Maccabee resistance fighters – and crucially, all wearing the correct gear, and inhabiting the genuine landscape. Looking at the two plates presented here, if I had completed the project, I might have created an early form of graphic novel. On the other hand, perhaps, my teen-self wasn’t yet ready to reveal myself as the “de-constructor” of a cherished myth and so risk the ire of many of my more traditional fellow Jews, something I did eventually manage to do thirty years later with my history of King Saul…
There’s nothing remarkable about spotting famous people in Hampstead and its environs; especially people famous in the performing arts, for whom it’s something of an English Beverly Hills. At one time or another, NW3 has been home for everyone from the Pythons and Peter Cook to Daniel Craig and Ridley Scott, and hundreds more. So, the fact I’ve had an unplanned beer with Robert Plant, and almost had my head removed from its shoulders (accidentally I hasten to add) by Ricky Gervais (whilst performing some kind of Capoeira-cum-Taekwondo / jogging exercise in the street) is hardly surprising.
The walk up Holly Hill…
In fact, it’s no exaggeration to state that I spot at least one notable each and every time I take a stroll down the High Street. However, in all these years of involuntary celebrity spotting there’s one such incident that stands out for the way it highlights both Karinthy’s hypothesis of six degrees of separation (more properly just two in this case) and perhaps also a classic “Jungian” synchronism…
Approaching the pub in Holly Mount…
The Holly Bush was and is Hampstead’s quaintest and most picturesque public house. Originally part of the home of the great portrait artist George Romney, it retains an 18th century charm and warmth irresistible to lovers of traditional English watering holes. And being just such a fan, I would often go there during my lunch-time break from my work in a nearby picture framery.
So it happened on one such occasion, when sat in the main saloon, I looked up from my newspaper and spotted a familiar face propping up the corner of the bar, who I instantly recognised as the actor Michael Williams. Although I knew him from his TV roles, he was more famous to me as being the husband of Judi Dench, already established as one of the greatest stage actresses of hers, or anybody else’s generation. Funnily enough, it wasn’t so much Michael Williams who caught my attention as it was his drinking partner – a gentleman in late middle-age with a strikingly luxuriant mop of silver hair.
The corner of the bar where Michael Williams and Leonard Nicholson used to drink…
Over the following weeks, during subsequent lunch-time visits to the pub, I was greeted by this same scene on a regular basis – Michael Williams, and the silver-haired gentleman, always at their allotted places, at the corner of the bar. All of which would have remained nothing more than several in a long list of similar such celebrity sightings during my time in Hampstead.
However, the following year I met my future-wife, Dido Nicholson, whose mother and younger sister it turned out had been at school, with none other than Judi Dench. The fact that Dido’s aunt remains close friends with Dame Judi to this very day is merely interesting of itself, but what is far more intriguing, was the fact that Michael William’s silver-haired drinking partner turned out to be none other than Dido’s paternal uncle John Leonard Nicholson (a noted professor of statistics who had worked for several British government administrations in the 60’s).
The front of the building on Holly Hill with the blue plaque indicating this was once the home of the great portraitist George Romney.
In other words, about a year before I met Dido or knew anything about her, I had regularly shared a pub bar with both her uncle, and her aunt’s best friend’s husband. And perhaps even more remarkably, Leonard’s friendship with Michael Williams, and Dido’s aunt’s friendship with Judi Dench were totally unrelated to each other – the former having met socially in Hampstead, while the latter met at school as explained above.
Despite this apparent synchronicity I remain separated from Dame Judi by those aforementioned two degrees, as I have yet to meet her in person…
AND HOW TWO THOROUGHBRED “FILLY foals” HAD THE SAME NAME…
When my then-wife-to-be, Dido, took her first lead dancing role as a member of the Sadler’s Wells Royal Ballet Company in 1981, it represented the fruition of more than eleven years, (literally) blood, sweat and tears.
Dido’s life as a ballerina began in earnest at the age of thirteen when she left her home in Lexington, Kentucky for one year to go to the Washington (DC) School of Ballet. After attending the Joffrey Ballet summer school at the age of fifteen, she returned to New York City to train with the American Ballet / School. Later that same year Dido left America to join the Royal Ballet School in London, where as a student she danced with the Royal Ballet itself. She then took up her first professional position at the National Ballet of Canada based in Toronto, where she danced for a year. Finally she returned to London where she joined the Sadler’s Wells Royal Ballet Company, seeing out the remainder of her brief career before a serious foot injury – sustained while dancing at Covent Garden – took its toll. Despite attempting a comeback in Monte Carlo, her foot never fully recovered and she was forced to retire at the age of twenty-three.
It remains one of my chief regrets that I never got to see Dido dance (we only met in 1988), and perhaps that’s why I treasure all and any archive material I can find from her time as a ballerina. However, when Dido left the ballet world for her second career in occupational therapy, and being one who rarely looked back, she kept very little such material.
Thus, a couple of weeks ago, when I was in the home of Dido’s mother Ann in Little Rock (Arkansas) I was overjoyed when we discovered a small envelope stuffed with photos of Dido as a fourteen-year-old aspirant ballerina. Although no expert, even I could tell that these were pictures of an precociously gifted and beautiful dancer, truly worthy of being given the “Degas”-type treatment presented here.
They date from when her family lived in Lexington, Kentucky, and from about the time Dido realised she had what it took to go far on her chosen path. Studying under Nels Jorgensen, who had recently started the Lexington Ballet, Dido went on to win the Southeast American Ballet Competition, and subsequently perform a solo dance before the great and the good of Kentucky at the mansion of Henry Clay.
As it happened, the lady who arranged the performance at the Clay Mansion owned a stud farm in Lexington, and was so enchanted with Dido that she named her recently acquired filly foal for her. The fact that Dido the foal was a daughter of the great Secretariat made the gesture all the more special. Talk about naming a thoroughbred for a thoroughbred…
I began drawing when I was a young boy. Not because I ever enjoyed it, or got any particular satisfaction out of it, but simply because I always could and it helped me get through the many school lessons I found otherwise pointless and boring – specifically maths and French.
Drawing, for all its tediousness was a survival strategy for me at school in a way similar to reading the Tanakh (Jewish Bible) had been for me in Synagogue – the main difference being that I actually found elements of reading the Bible genuinely thrilling (see my previous post).
I rarely got into serious disciplinary trouble at school, but the little opprobrium I did attract from my teachers was normally because of my drawing in class. Fortunately I suppose, my maths and French teachers regarded me as a hopeless cause, and often liked my sketches, and so they generally left me to get on with it undisturbed. I remember one episode in particular, when I must have been 12 years old, my maths teacher did finally loose her patience with me during an algebra class. She marched up to my desk at the end of the hour-long lesson intending to scold me until she saw what I had drawn… an epic depiction of French cavalry assailing the British infantry squares at the Battle of Waterloo. Instead, she simply leaned over my shoulder and marvelled at my felt-tip representation Napoleonic military mayhem.
Of the thousands of drawings I did, over nearly forty years, this is one of a handful which I feel is accomplished. It’s a pen sketch of an art school friend, and I like everything about it, including the foreshortening, the sense or weight and the hands. It’s something to do with instinctive decision making, but sadly, unlike the greats, from Da Vinci to Watteau, I never learned to bottle “it”, whatever “it” is.
Ultimately my drawing led me to the art room in senior school, where I learned the rudiments of painting, and which in turn led on to a foundation degree and then to a BA. It was all an oddly thoughtless and ill considered career path which was never really planned, but rather just happened to me.
Thus it is, that the vast majority of the thousands of drawings I did over the best part of 40 years are of distinctly average quality, and perhaps more interestingly, that I cannot begin to explain the hows or the whys of the half-dozen or so decent sketches I did manage to pull off.
All I can offer as a theory, is that practise really does make perfect, very occasionally.
About this time, two years ago I wrote a post related to the Jewish New Year (Rosh Hashana) and the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur) from my perspective as an amateur biblical historian, and illustrated with dramatic images of the Negev Desert ( https://adamhalevi777.com/2016/09/29/the-wilderness-of-zin-yahwehs-kingdom/ ).
Spring, in London’s glorious Regent’s Park, bedecked with prunus blossom and daffodils (gouache on paper)
As made plain in that post, my interest in the origins of those and other Jewish / Hebrew / Israelite festivals is now purely of an academic nature – in the literal sense of the word. And in truth, I think it always has been, going all the way back to when, as a little boy, I sat and stood, dutifully at the side of my righteous Zaida (grandfather), in shul (synagogue) for hour-upon-hour in a state of abject boredom.
Summer was often a sandy beach in Israel – here with me and four friends at Ashkelon in 1981 (oil on canvas)
As I expressed in the introduction to my book on King Saul, I only survived the tedium by reading my Zaida’s Tanakh (Jewish Bible), which he permitted me to do rather than pray, as a kind of compromise, in the vain hope that I might one day see the light. Although, from a precocious age, I generally skipped through the supernatural stuff and miracles, which I always found unconvincing, I was excited by the narrative and the stories. By the time I was in my very early teens I became fascinated with the two books of Samuel in particular, sensing in them the grains of a history for the birth of the first nation of Israel.
Autumn (or in this context, more properly Fall) in North America, is a sight beyond compare – as here, in the Ouachita Forrest in Arkansas (enhanced photo)
My own writings on King Saul, and my novel about the Ark of the Covenant are my ultimate expressions of that continuing fascination and interest. So, in a way, I suppose I am indebted to those countless hours in synagogue and my forced intimacy with my Zaida’s Tanakh.
Winter was for many years a ski resort, most often in Italy, like here in the Apennines at Bormio (gouache on paper)
Despite my own acquired indifference to the many annual festivals of my people, I do sometimes miss the sense of the seasons they used to evoke. Pesach (Passover) for instance was always the herald of Spring, while Rosh Hashana, Yom Kippur and the close-ensuing Succot (Tabernacles) resonated with the feeling of Autumn and the approaching dark days of winter. This somewhat rambling post is thus intended as a seasonally inspired salutation to all my readers and followers, whatever your beliefs or none…
Falling in love with a once-loathed painting – of my first love
I first fell in love about the time I turned twenty. The relationship was as torrid, as it was brief and was doomed from the start due to irreconcilable logistics – among other things. I was a near-penniless artist, starting out on my career in London, and she was farmer’s daughter from a village near Cremona in northern Italy.
We’d met in London where she was au-pairing, and enjoyed several weeks of passion and fun. She barely spoke a word of English, and my Italian was all-but non-existent, but verbal communication was never an issue, for the simple reason, we didn’t spend much time attempting to talk. Rather, it was the very cliche of the shared language of love and a fizzing chemical attraction.
A short while after her return home I broke off from a skiing holiday in the Italian Alps to visit her , and despite having a wonderful time, I left her knowing that there was little chance of the relationship continuing.
Until recently, I had always regarded a set of pencil portraits, and some romantic gouaches of her by Lake Garda, as my most pleasant mementos of that brief encounter (some shown here: https://adamhalevi777.com/2018/06/29/winter-wonderlands-italian-style-sepia-memories-of-a-magical-trip/) . But then, a few months ago, trawling through slides of some forgotten oil paintings from that period, I discovered a life portrait in oils I had done of her back in London.
At the time, I had dismissed it as clunky and awkward, and I put its “failure” down to me being too stimulated and emotionally agitated by the sitter, and I loathed it so much, I painted over it within days. However, seeing it again, for the first time in 28 years, I found that I actually quite like it, and that in an albeit quirky way (perhaps slightly derivative of Mark Gertler?), it captures something of the tenderness and fascination I had for the sitter. Although I hadn’t realised it at the time, the portrait was as pure an expression of my love as I could have hoped for…
Normally, my travel themed posts concentrate on things we’ve done and seen. However, while I was preparing this short piece on our two stays in Santo Domingo de Silos I discovered that what is arguably its most interesting feature – and certainly it’s most famous tourist attraction – is something I never knew was there!
Briefly, Santo Domingo de Silos is a small town (more of a large village in actual fact) near the ancient royal city of Burgos in the north of Spain. Until 1968 it was most-known for its ancient Benedictine monastery (which closed its doors in 1835) and for possibly being within the estates of one Rodrigo de Vivar – otherwise known as Charlton Heston…I mean El Cid!
All this changed however in 1968 when the local cemetery, known as Sad Hill (Cementerio de Sad Hill in Spanish, apparently?) was used as the location for the final scene of the movie, The Good, The Bad and the Ugly. The combination of Sergio Leone’s super-terse direction; Enrico Morricone’s slow-build-tension music; the three actors involved (Eastwood, Wallach and Van Cleef); and the surreal cemetery itself created one of the most memorable – not to mention imitated and parodied scenes in the history of cinema.
Until this morning, I had always assumed that the scene was filmed somewhere in the Almeria region, like the vast majority of Leone’s “Spaghetti Western” location shots. I’d also assumed, given its unusual configuration, that the cemetery was an outdoor set created for the film. Never did it occur to me that it was an actual place, and one that I’d been a mere five minute walk from on two occasions.
Unfortunately, my past obliviousness means that the pictures illustrating this post, of the picturesque town and its other environs, do not include any of Sad Hill Cemetery. Fortunately though, we plan to pass through the area again in the near future, and although our main reason for doing so had been to sample the delicious local roast lamb, we now have Sad Hill firmly on the agenda.
…and how two ice cream ladies ended up being PORTRAYED on the wall of the chilean embassy in london…
During our 1991 visit to Chile we took a day-trip from Santiago to Valparaiso, to have a look at the National Congress building, but mainly to try and get a feel for one of the great ports of the Americas. In the event, the building was nothing to write home about – an unresolved confusion of brutalist classicism – and the port area was more plain sleaze than the Hemingway sleaze I’d been hoping for. Sadly, we lacked the time to explore more of what was once described as “the Jewel of the Pacific”.
Although blurry, this photo inspired not only the oil painting below, but later an entire series of my most abstract attempts at capturing human movement…
However, as often happens when travelling, memorable moments occur when least expected, and from surprising sources. In this case for example, it occurred buying ice creams in a gelateira by the bus station, when my wife Dido and our companion Lynne got into conversation with the two ladies running the shop, about Chile’s national folk dance; the Cueca.
This spontaneous display perfectly captured a trait of understated assuredness that we often encountered in Chile – a trait for which the Cueca is the perfect expression…
How or why what happened next, I can’t quite recall, as the two women, in the sweetest and most obliging of gestures suddenly broke into song and started performing the dance. Fortunately I had my camera to hand and was able to get a visual – if slightly unfocused – record of the impromptu outbreak of traditional Terpsichore. Happenstance often resulted in my camera being my sketchbook, and this turned out to be a prime example as I found the fuzzy photos more than adequate reference for a later work back in my studio.
…a trait I endeavoured to capture in this,* and at least two more versions of the painting, La Cueca. The version here was included in an exhibition I had the following year at the Embassy of Chile in London, and which was subsequently purchased for the embassy. I often wondered what the two ladies would have thought if they knew?
* This was one of the first times I used black ground on a canvas (I’d often used the technique in commercial work), and I found it a dramatic contrast to the broad, bright impasto gestures knifed on top. The painting was about five-foot (about 152 cm) square.
and the perils of amateur photography for commercial purposes…
We spent November of 2003 in the Tamil Nadu city of Coimbatore, India’s 16th city and the home of the “wet-grinder” – a kind of food processor for making dosa batters among other things… Our visit had little to do with dosas (although we did enjoy them as a regular lunch snack) and was primarily concerned with Dido supervising the setting up a clinic of her own design, for children with autism – the first of its kind in that region of India.
Composition wasn’t one of the manager’s strong points…
It was an exciting challenge, but also an exhausting one so after two-weeks work the chance for a few days break at the nearby “hill station” town of Ootacamund – affectionately known as Ooty by most people – was welcome and timely.
…Composition, and lighting too, not his thing…
During the time of the British Raj, dozens of hilltop towns in India became popular escapes, especially for the administrative classes, away from the heat and bustle of the cities. Over the years several of these towns developed into luxurious resorts known as hill stations, with perhaps the two best known in India being Shimla and Ooty.
Love the parasol pole bisecting Dido’s shoulder…
Before our visit, the only thing I knew about Ooty was that it was where the game of snooker was invented in the 19th century, by British army officers bored with playing billiards. That it was also a much used location backdrop for the Bollywood Film Industry, and the site of India’s finest boarding schools, where the country’s elite send their children, was all new information.
And the poor waiter serving us plastic food…great acting though!
We ended up staying at the Holiday Inn, which despite its IHG associations felt like an authentic Indian hotel, with a particularly good kitchen, turning out excellent Tamil and Kerala cuisine. It also had a terrific little bar overlooking the lush Nilgiri hillsides, where we were introduced to the local version of the Polly’s Folly cocktail, (comprising, Vodka, soda-water and very spicy green chillies!)
Yup! Plastic kebabs on the grill…
It must have been about our third or fourth evening at the hotel, sipping Polly’s Follies probably, when we were approached by the hotel manager, who asked us if we would be happy to to model for the new online hotel brochure he was preparing. He wanted pictures of a “nice European couple” enjoying the cuisine of the hotel and he thought we “were just the ticket!”
I think the drinks were real – or at least they were actual liquid…
We agreed, and the photos presented here are the slightly surreal fruits of the manager’s own sincere but amateur camera work, plastic food and all. Sadly, I don’t think these pictures of the “nice Europeans” did much to help his booking figures as the Holiday Inn morphed into the Gem Park a few years later. As for us, we did rather well from our half-an-hour being served plastic delicacies, for, to show us his gratitude, the manager gave us each a gold IHG loyalty card loaded with thousands of priority points. The following year we used our booty from Ooty for a free stay at the Intercontinental Hotel in Singapore. A restful and rewarding experience all round…
At least you can make out the chef, even though Dido is in near-total darkness. The moral being; it’s always best to hire a professional photographer, even when using top models !
Generally, one associates the concept of theme and variations with music. From Classical to Heavy Rock (e.g. Brahms’ wonderful takes on that tune of Haydn’s or more recently Leslie West’s fabulous live improvised versions of his own Swan Theme on the album Flowers of Evil) and all idioms in between and beyond, most composers have enjoyed playing around with a basically good tune (their own or other people’s) and taking it to new places.
This is the original photo of Dido in that doorway somewhere in the Alcazar gardens in Seville. This was our first trip abroad, soon after we met, and we could not have picked a more romantic city (including Paris!!)
However, this is hardly unique to musical composition and if anything, an exercise exploited far more by visual artists, and most famously by both the Impressionists (e.g. Monet’s Waterlilies) and then the post impressionists (e.g. Cezanne and Mont Sainte-Victoire).
This was my first take on the photo, in oils, using a palette knife…
The greatest distinction between the musical and painterly approaches is that in the former the variations are normally presented together within a single work, whereas in the latter they typically appear as a series of individual pictures.
My favourite of the four versions here (there were several more in other media) – a roughly painted gouache
As a regular practitioner of the latter painterly approach in my past life, I often mused whether or not I was merely obsessed – struggling for an unreachable perfection – or rather practising the artistic imperative of interpretation.
1989, was during the height of my poster phase – hence this version
In the end, I came to conclusion that it was a mixture of the two and that in fact, the secret of all good art, and good science too for that matter, is an obsessive love of a particular subject and the interpretive skills to channel that love into something coherent and meaningful. The four pictures shown here present my first ever paintings of Dido, before we were married, standing in a doorway in the gardens of the Alcazar in Seville: The object of my love, obsessively interpreted…
