Showing posts with label Edmund de Waal. Show all posts

Tuesday, October 19, 2021

Edmund de Waal / You know what you should eat off? White plates

‘Of course it can go wrong. That’s why there’s a hammer in the studio’.
Illustration: Lyndon Hayes for Observer Food Monthly

LIFE ON A PLATE

Interview

Edmund de Waal: You know what you should eat off? White plates

Mild-mannered ceramicist and bestselling author Edmund de Waal knows a thing or two about plates. Just don’t make them square

Saturday 18 October 2015
Alex Clark

t only occurs to me halfway through lunch that my companion might have more reason to care what the food he’s eating has arrived on than most of us. When you are an award-winning ceramicist renowned for the exquisite simplicity of your creations; when you describe yourself as having an obsession with white; and when your lifelong working relationship with porcelain takes such a hold that you have to write an entire book about it – well, then you probably notice the plates. So, I ask Edmund de Waal, potter par excellence, author of The Hare with Amber Eyes and now The White Road, is it the kind of thing that strikes him immediately?

My hero / Cy Twombly by Edmund de Waal

My hero Cy Twombly

by Edmund de Waal

'Twombly's sense of the erased, the partial, the lost and the fragmentary makes complete sense to me'

Edmundo de Waal
The Guardian, Saturday 11 December 2010

Cy Twombly, the 'great survivor of the heroic age of American painting'.
Photograph: David Lees/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Image

Cy Twombly is a painter of thinking aloud, of thoughts checked and then resumed, hesitancies and the rush of ideas. Twombly, now 82, is the great survivor of the heroic age of American painting, the generation of Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Jackson Pollock, who upended what was expected in contemporary art. Somehow he has managed to continue to create profoundly affecting work without histrionics or hubris.

Twombly is known for his scribbles, great looping calligraphies of white on black, of white on white – or, in the more recent Bacchus series, swoops of carmine three metres high. His paintings are a mass of marks, erasures and words. Phrases come and go, lines are repeated until they become incantatory. Sometimes you read a fragmentary part of a poem, or an allusion to a classical text, only for it to be crossed out. There are puns and odd misspellings: erudition giving way to doodling at the back of the class. And this is what I love: the way that there is slippage between an intended epic expression and a failure to finish.In his work he has both the shopping list and the great list of ships sent to attack Troy.

Untitled, 1970
by Cy Twombly

Twombly's sense of the erased, the partial, the lost and the fragmentary makes complete sense to me. In the recent Tate retrospective there was a room that showed the series Nini's Paintings, made after the sudden death of the wife of his Italian gallerist. Landscapes of writing: a glacial blue and white version next to another of an umbrous brown. And standing in front of them they seemed one of the most moving reactions to loss possible: the way that in mourning we go back again and again to a memory, that we cannot close down the need to return.

He has just completed a ceiling for the Louvre. Above a gallery of classical statues hangs a fierce Mediterranean blue sky in which the planets glow and the names of Greek sculptors are inscribed. It is beautiful and it is surprising. That is enough.

THE GUARDIAN