Reciprocity and Art

It's Saturday 23 December and I arrived yesterday in Lençóis, which is 250 km or so inland from Salvador - in the Chapada Diamantina national park area, surrounded by gorgeous waterfalls and mountains. I'm sitting outside my room in our friend Maiza's pousada (hotel), listening to birdsong and crickets chirping ... 

So.... on Thursday night I came here to  Lençóis, to a hotel run by Maiza, a friend  of Jen's who she met when she was living here eight years ago. Maiza found me most of my interpreters for the 'For Dom, Bruno and the Amazon' conference that I organised in Lancaster last year.  So it was lovely to arrange to come and spend time here on the edge of the national park. I came with Agnieszka, a friend from the Nomad Cruise, and we went swimming by a waterfall yesterday - absolutely amazing experience. 

(here's a beached whale played by me, surrounded by wonderful nature)

Today was time to put up the Hannah Frank exhibition which is opening tonight.

so WOW..... this is a beautiful story of reciprocity which I will tell in full. 

My aunt for those who don't know her is a well known Glasgow artist, who studied in the 1920s at the Glasgow School of Art.  

Woman and birds, Hannah Frank 1947

My aunt died at the age of 100, fifteen years ago, but her art and her story live on. In the year after her death, she was awarded Glasgow University's first Posthumous Honorary Doctorate, and also received a posthumous award from Glasgow's Lord Provost.  Her work toured around the UK and also in the USA in the five years before her death, culminating in a 100th birthday exhibition at Glasgow University which she attended, together with Miriam Margolyes, and the Scottish Minister for Culture.   We will soon be inaugurating a new gallery in her honour in the Glasgow Care Home where she spent her last days. 

And tonight a Hannah Frank show opens for the first time in Brazil! 

This is happening due to a connection with Maiza's family which whom I'm now staying in Lencois. 

Last November, when I asked Maiza if she could find me some interpreters for our conference in honour of Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira, she also asked if I would be interested in exhibiting some engravings of Yanomami Body Art by her son, Artur Soar, an award winning artist.  At first I didn't think we could fit it into our 'festival of the Amazon' but in the end our festival expanded out of Halton Mill and into ten other venues all over Lancaster and Morecambe, so we linked up with an arts cooperative, the Good Things Collective, and showed them there. 

This year it turned out that Artur was going to be passing through Europe, and we talked about the possibilities of him spending some time in Lancaster and possibly doing an  art residency at the Good Things Collective, something we'd vaguely discussed when he had his exhibition up the previous year. 

20 Hannah Frank fans responded to a 'special offer' on signed prints during November, which meant that the Hannah Frank Art Project was able to cover all his travel and subsistence expenses from London and in Lancaster, and Beki Melrose from Good Things Collective found some grant funding to cover the residency costs and to give Artur a stipend for his visit. 

So we put up Artur's Yanomami Body Art exhibition at Halton Mill, alongside the 'For Dom, Bruno and the Amazon' exhibition again, at Halton Mill.... and I set off for Brazil! 

It's now Christmas Eve, the opening of the Hannah Frank show was yesterday, and I still want to talk about reciprocity and the most beautiful artistic homage to my aunt's work. 

The residency was meant to be happening when I was in the UK, but Artur's dates changed. So, a couple of weeks after I set off for Brazil, Artur arrived in Lancaster for his week's art residency at the Good Things Collective.  It was perfect timing because I'd left my house, and my lovely friend and tenant  Minna who's going to be renting my house while I'm away is currently in the USA.  This meant that my house was empty, and Artur was able to spend ten days living in there in Halton, by the river, part of Lancaster Cohousing. 

Beki at the Good Things Collective organised an amazing daytime programme for Artur in and around Morecambe 

while my neighbour Susanna looked after him while he was staying at my home. 

He ran an art class on the Friday , with 14 people learning printing techniques ... 

He worked with a group of Morecambe school children, he created lots of work in Morecambe using the rhisograph press that the GFC had recently crowdfunded ...

But the most amazing thing was that he spent the evenings alone in my house surrounded by the art of my aunt.  

Artur makes very distinctive engravings of people, usually older people who have made a big contribution to society, including Paolo Freire, Ailton Krenak, Nego Bispo.  He has a very original and easily recognizable style.

And he married his original style with the style of my aunt's eerie, black and white, Art Deco/Art Nouveau style drawings, taking a woman straight out of 'Garden'  (done in 1932 when my aunt was only 24)  

and bringing her to life again, getting her to embrace her creator, who was now a venerable older woman - in the shape of a new portrait of the artist in Artur's distinctive style.

I have really never seen such a beautiful homage to my aunt's work : it has moved me to tears. 

Here's the original lino ....

which is of course in negative

and here's the photo it was taken from, which I took of my aunt when she was about 93 and still working on sculpture in her home in Netherlee, Glasgow. 

And this piece took pride of place at the exhibition, in the centre of a set of my aunt's early work. 

The exhibition was a beautiful occasion...

there are a few videos and more pix from the opening that I'll upload tomorrow... the gallery is a beautiful venue with a music space, and Artur's work downstairs.  We are so honoured to have Auntie Hannah's work there for her first Brazilian exposure. 

(And many thanks to my Portuguese Teacher Juliana from falarportuguesebrasileiro.com whose idea it was to bring this art to Brazil ... so then I asked Maiza if she could see any possibilities for exhibiting it... and here we are!) 

We've been swimming in more waterfalls today.

And walking through the forests.

And I'm feeling very comfortable here.

Next blog... a few pix from the exhibition, and some very spectacular waterfall ski-ing. 

Please comment below or email me on fionaistravelling@gmail.com!