Tag: Frida Kahlo

Mari, A Free-Range Mexican Nanny in Hong Kong—And Other Comparable Characters—The Memoir Continues

Posted on by Barbara Fischkin

by Barbara Fischkin

An impressionistic watercolor by Marta Camarena: Barbara Fischkin and her first-born son in the plaza in front of of her young family’s rented home in the Plaza de los Arcangeles, in San Angel, Mexico City

Part One: Before Mari Saved Us

This is the back story: Maria Angeles Garcia, known to us as “Mari,” was a godsend to our family. In part two, which I plan to publish in May, readers will find out more about how this young, single mother from a small village in northern Mexico moved with us to, of all places, Hong Kong.

That move was in 1989. A few years earlier Mari had left her children with relatives with plans to earn money as a domestic worker in la capital, Mexico City—and then return home to give her family a better life. Eventually she came to work for us. Within a year, my husband was notified he would be transferred to Hong Kong. We asked Mari if she would come with us for a short while. We never expected her to say yes. But she did.

Mari grew up hearing both Spanish and an indigenous language. In Hong Kong, most people speak English and Cantonese. Regardless of geography, the underlying job wouldn’t change. When I was working as a journalist, from a home office or out doing interviews, I needed a nanny to take my first-born toddler son on small excursions. I didn’t want him locked behind the walls of our palatial home. I wanted him out and about, playing with neighborhood kids and savoring the bright colored flowers. I wanted him to suck oranges Mari picked right off the tree and to enjoy the aroma of elote— corn—roasting on sidewalk barbeques.

 Mari knew that in Hong Kong, things would change. She mustered the courage, the fortitude and a free-range sensibility to spend a few months with us in Asia. She could have easily found another position in Mexico City. But she was intent on doing her job and frankly wanted to make sure our family, especially the child, transitioned safely.

After watching Mari in action, I knew so much more about assessing and hiring good household help. Typically, I did a good job. This chapter, though, is about the ones who came before Mari. Some had their moments of glory. Most get lost in her shadow. Read more »

Monday, June 22, 2015

The Archetype Of The Suffering Artist Must Die

Posted on by Mandy de Waal

by Mandy de Waal

Click on over to the New York Times and you'll find a gallery of tortured artists. First up is a youthful, but ghostly looking Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud. The caption for the dark painting on the NYT site reads: “The Poet Rimbaud. Serial runaway. Absinthe and hashish benders. Shot by poet-lover Verlaine.”

Born in October 1854 in the Champagne-Ardenne region of France, Rimbaud started writing poetry in primary school. By the time he was 16 he'd already written Le Dormeur du Val [The Sleeper In The Valley].

“It is a green hollow where a stream gurgles,” the poem begins, before telling the story of “A young soldier, open-mouthed, bare-headed, With the nape of his neck bathed in cool blue watercress,” sleeping stretched out on the grass under the sky.

Written during the French-Prussian war, the denouement of this piece is tragic:

“No odour makes his nostrils quiver;

He sleeps in the sun, his hand on his breast

At peace. There are two red holes in his right side.”

Rimbaud

Arthur Rimbaud – A poetic genius whose talent flowered early, but who turned his back on verse at the tender age of 21.

Rimbaud's life was no less grim. His genius flowered early, and then stalled. By the time he was 21 he'd stopped writing. Four years earlier he'd send Le Dormeur du Val to celebrated French poet, Paul Verlaine, who'd forsake his wife and child for Rimbaud. The relationship would end after a few short years after Verlaine discharged a gun at Rimbaud in a jealous, drunken rage. Rimbaud wouldn't die then, but at at the age of 37 after suffering many agonising months from bone cancer.

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Monday, June 8, 2015

A Modern Mystic: Agnes Martin, Tate Britain, Until 11th October, 2015

Posted on by Sue Hubbard

by Sue Hubbard

“Beauty is the mystery of life, it is not just in the eye. It is in the mind. It is our positive response to life.” —Agnes Martin

010Over the last few years Tate Modern has paid homage to a number of important women artists including, amongst others, Eva Hesse, Frida Kahlo, Louise Bourgeois, Yayoi Kusama, Marlene Dumas and Sonia Delaunay. That the psychodrama of Frida Kahlo and Louise Bourgeois, the theatre of Kusama and the eroticism of Marlene Dumas should have had wide public appeal is not surprising. All provide the means for the viewer to identify with the artist, to ‘feel her pain' and be drawn into her emotional maelstrom and visual world. But the current exhibition of work by Agnes Martin is an altogether more difficult affair. It makes demands on the spectator who, if willing to engage, will be rewarded by moments of Zen-like stillness and clarity.

To sit among Martin's white paintings, The Islands I-XII, 1979, is akin to being alone with Rothko's Seagram paintings. Though while Rothko is chthonic, the colours womb-like and elemental as he wrestles with the dark night of the soul, the subtle tonalities of Martin's pale paintings are, in contrast, Apollonian. She is Ariel to Rothko's Caliban. Full of light and air, her paintings quieten the busy mind, provide space, tranquillity and silence. Yet each of these silences is subtly varied, broken by differing accents and rhythms. The tonal shifts, the small variations and delineations of the sections of the canvas demand attention and mindfulness. These works offer not so much an experience of the sublime – that form of masculine awe and ecstasy – as a dilution into nothingness, an arrival at T. S. Eliot's “still point in a turning world.” Here we find stasis, where everything, as in meditation, has been stripped away, so that we are left with nothing more than the rhythm of the world, with what simply IS.

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