Arty Farty Friday ~ Leonora Carrington, Feminist & Surrealist

Leonora Carrington OBE (6 April 1917 – 25 May 2011) was an English-born Mexican artist, surrealist painter, and novelist. She lived most of her adult life in Mexico City, and was one of the last surviving participants in the Surrealist movement of the 1930s. Leonora Carrington was a founding member of the Women’s Liberation Movement in Mexico during the 1970s. She was born into a wealthy family, her fathe a successful textile manufacturer, her mother, Maureen (née Moorhead), was Irish.

A good, well-illustrated read on Ms Carrington's life story is at Widewalls website - do go take a look. The piece begins:

Painting is a need, not a choice , said the legendary painter and novelist Leonora Carrington, who managed to completely redefine female symbolism through her own interpretation of surrealism. She was a restless and prolific artist throughout her career – she worked in oil painting, bronze and cast iron sculpture, but also mixed-media pieces that combined wood, glass, and various iron objects. Besides her important role in the history of surrealism, Carrington was also known as a romantic partner of another prominent surrealist, Max Ernst. The two of them shared their dream worlds and symbolic universes through their magnificent artworks. Carrington has also rejected the surrealist ideal of woman as the main source inspiration and she turned to novel realms such as the animal world, the occult, and Celtic mythology.

These two 4 minute videos show a selection of her paintings, the first, from the Tate Gallery in Liverpool, includes some explanation as well as commentary:







For some large-size images of her artwork, take a look at the website linked below. It really is essential to see her paintings in such sizes, to fully appreciate their intricacy and detail; not that it makes them easier for ordinary mortals like us to understand. We can probably ascribe our own meanings to at least some of them.

https://sites.google.com/site/tombowersites/leonora-carrington



ASTROLOGY

Born on 6 April 1917 in Clayton-le-Woods, Lancashire, UK. Chart is set for 12 noon - time of birth is unknown. Moon and rising sign positions will not be exactly as shown.

Without a time of birth to indicate rising sign and exact Moon position, we're left with just sketchy indications of personality. This lady, however, could truly have been described as what Sun sign fans love to call "an Aries". Due to her natal Sun, Mercury, Venus and Mars all in Aries, she would have in her nature many of those textbook Aries attributes: initiator, impulsive, confident, courageous, and so on. We've gleaned enough about her from online biographies to realise that she was certainly all of those things and more!

Natal Moon could have been in late Virgo or early Libra - not easy to guess which. I can see arguments for either, but if pressed I'd speculate on Venus-ruled (planet of the arts) Libra, another Cardinal sign, and opposite her Cardinal Aries Sun - bringing a sense of balance to her more exaggerated head-strong Aries instincts.

Jupiter lies in the other Venus-ruled sign, Taurus, and in semi-sextile to her natal Venus. Jupiter represents, among other things, travel, so lying here in what can be an awkward aspect, semi-sextile to Aries Venus, I see this as a calming and more stable influence on her prominent Aries-ness. Jupitarian highlighting could also link to her move to live and work in Mexico.

Uranus! Any surrealist painter is certain to have Uranus and/or Aquarius highlighted natally. Ms Carrington had Uranus in Aquarius, its sign of rulership in modern astrology. Uranus lay at at 22 degrees, and in helpful sextile aspect to Mercury, at 24 degrees of Aries. This lady was always going to gravitate to surrealism in her painting and fiction writing, and/or, in some other lifetime, perhaps to science fiction.

Considering the mystical mythical subject matter of her many paintings and her novels and short stories, mysterious Neptune had be linked into her chart - somehow. Neptune lay at 2 degrees of Leo when she was born; if natal Moon were in early Libra, as suspected, then Neptune would be in helpful sextile to her Moon - that'd work well!

Johnny & Jane ?...Really?

One of the silliest remarks I've seen in a long time (President Trump's utterings excluded) is this, from here:

“Scotch as a category is seen as particularly intimidating by women,” company vice president Stephanie Jacoby said in an interview with Bloomberg. “It’s a really exciting opportunity to invite women into the brand.”

Intimidating? Please! My mother was a Scotch drinker (her father, my grandfather, was also), I am a Scotch drinker. In the photograph, taken one Christmas long ago in Leeds, UK, Mum's brandishing her bottle of Bell's - I don't often see Bell's Scotch in the USA.

Johnny Walker isn't a favourite brand of mine, not because of the striding guy on the bottle label, but because I'm not keen on its flavour. The Famous Grouse, Cutty Sark, Chival Regal, Glenlivet are all more to my taste. The Famous Grouse was recommended to me by Gary, a Scottish work colleague, back in the UK, it's still the best reasonably priced brand I've tasted, but a tad more expensive than Cutty Sark, at least here in the USA.

Anyway...back to the point of this post.

Women are, and have been for years, seeking equal treatment, in employment conditions and opportunities, in equality of pay scales for same. Women need to know that, in their working environment, they will not be sexually harassed, and that sexual favours will not be necessary before promotion or fair treatment is metered out. These are all essential goals, and very late coming fully to fruition, at least in the USA.

Silliness such as Jane Walker on a whisky bottle, to my mind, is simply counterproductive.
I agree strongly with Heather Greene, a spirits expert and author, in a good piece at Forbes

Heather Greene told Forbes, “I have not seen any quantitative or qualitative data that show whisky-drinking women will respond positively to this type of branding. Women don’t want to be separated into this kind of silo. The trick is include them in on the conversation — and quite frankly this does the opposite.”

And

"Instead of the packaging of whisky, Greene would prefer to see the focus on increasing the role of women in the production of whiskies. “I am happy to see changes, but I will be supporting brands that have a more proven track-record when it comes to women distillers, master blenders or founders behind them,” she said. “There are plenty of them, and I want to reward them with my dollars. That doesn’t mean I don’t support great male-fronted and -made brands. I merely want more time from them to prove a commitment when they try to market to me. Let’s run up the score for the brands that have had some amazing female whiskey makers or blenders and let them shine for a minute.”

There is this compensating factor in the same piece :
For each bottle produced, the brand has committed $1 to like-minded organizations championing women’s causes, such as Monumental Women.

Arty Farty Friday ~ REMEDIOS VARO

Remedios Varo - at first I thought it to be the name of a male, but it's not. Remedios Varo's name given at birth was María de los Remedios Alicia Rodriga Varo y Uranga. In Spain names do take on a more epic quality than in most other countries of the world. Anyway, Remedios Varo, as she became known, was born on 16 December 1908 at 10:45 pm in Anglès, Spain. Her father was a hydraulic engineer, he taught her to draw in a style which had later clear influence on her artwork. Varo used imagery related to her father's profession. Complex pieces of imaginary machinery can be seen in her paintings, which draw also from her studies of alchemy theories and processes. Her figures are thought to be autobiographical. Science, dreams, witchcraft, mysticism and humor thread through her psychological or spiritual subject matter.

Educated in Spain, in Madrid and Barcelona, rumored to have taken classes together with Salvado Dalí. She married painter Gerardo Lizarraga, then, apparently without benefit of divorce married, or (it's not clear) conducted a lengthy affair with, French poet Benjamin Péret. During the Spanish Civil War they fled to France. Settled in Paris. She soon gravitated towards the city's arty bohemian surrealist groups. Varo and English surrealist artist, Leonora Carrington became friends at this time, a friendship that survived for the rest of Varo's life.

As World War II began Varo relocated yet again, this time to Mexico City. Most of her her artwork was created in Mexico, where she was also able to pick up her friendship with Leonora Carrington, who had also fled to Mexico.

In order to cover living expenses, Varo took a variety of jobs: furniture painting, costume design, toy-making, commercial illustration for a company selling pharmaceuticals, and scientific drawings for Venezuala's Ministry of Public Health. Her marriage/association with Péret ended on his return to France. Her third husband-to-be, Austrian businessman Walter Gruen then entered the scene. Wed in 1952, she no longer needed to rely on odd jobs for her livelihood. Her true creative potential now emerged.

Varo's longtime interest in mysticism, alchemy, magic and, oddly, science co-exist in her paintings. Many, or most, of these are explained as being an exploration of the female psyche. It was only around the time she died suddenly, of a heart attack, in 1963 when her career was thriving, that women were beginning to assert their independence after centuries of treatment as second-class citizens. Many of her paintings need to be viewed with this in mind.

A few examples of her work, some with explanation taken from Women as Mythmakers: Poetry and Visual Art by Twentieth-Century Women,by Estella Lauter. The book has an error in Varo's year of birth, by the way. She, as many women will, knocked a few years from her age for public consumption. It was not until her death that her true birth year was discovered.

Please click on the images for clearer and/or bigger versions:

 La Revelación (1955)

 Embroidering the Earth's Mantle

Re the painting titled Embroidering Earth's Mantle, explanation from Janet A. Kaplan's biography of Varo,
"Unexpected Journeys" ~

In the central panel of the autobiographical triptych, Embroidering Earth’s Mantle [...], Varo offered a closer look at the life of a convent student.... here captive in a tower, (they) work as in a medieval scriptorium, embroidering the mantle of the world according to the dictates of a “Great Master.” This hooded figure reads from the catechism of instructions while stirring a broth boiling in the same alchemical vessel from which the girls draw their embroidery thread. Each girl works alone, embroidering images onto a continuous fabric that spills out from table-height battlements around the facets of the tower. Together they create a landscape with houses, ponds, streams, boats, animals, and humans, all nestled within the folds of the fabric. Theirs is the traditional work of the convent, where needlework was deemed a skill appropriate for cultured young women.

Characteristically, Varo treated such tradition with irony. Among the girls working diligently, each at her own table, guarded by a comical veiled figure who lurks in the background playing a flute, Varo’s rebellious heroine has “embroidered a trick in which one can see her together with her lover” [...], their rendezvous subtly visible in a rendering hidden upside-down within the folds that flow from her table. In a masterful variant on the myth of creation, she has used this most genteel of domestic handicrafts to create her own hoped-for escape. Unlike Rapunzel and the Lady of Shalott, Varo’s young heroine imprisoned in the tower is not merely a metaphor for confinement, but also an agent of her own liberation. [...]

 Energia Cosmica

 Papilla Estelar (1958)

Papilla Estelar = either Stellar Porridge or Celestial Pablum, or similar.

(Page 90 of Estella Lauter's book linked above)
"[This painting creates] an image of female nurturing...The protagonist is seated at a table inside an octagonal enclosure in the sky. She is grinding the food from the stars and feeding it to the moon in its cage. She is at once powerful and impotent. Because the moon is waning, it seems likely that she is saving it from death...A closer look at her setting reveals the source of her ambivalence; although there are steps leading from her enclosure, she could not take them unless she could walk on clouds... [She] is as caged as the moon..."
Often seen as an autobiographical artist, Varo uses these women as her stand-ins exploring the occult, the Kabala, and alchemy.

 Creation of the Birds

Page 84-5 of Lauter's book "...protagonist has assumed the form of an owl in order to paint birds who will come to life and take flight for the first time... She dips the brush, attached to her own violin (in the place of her heart), into paint from an alchemical alembic where the substance from the stars is stored. With her other hand, she holds a triangular magnifying glass to intensify the light from the moon... The woman/owl gives wings to her visions of the birds."
[Page 91] "... [This] is her image of what will be required if human creators wish to make a world in which all the species of life can survive. Her choice of the owl, always a figure of wisdom, is clarified by the information that the pre-Hellenic, Cretan Athena was a patron of the arts and a goddess of renewal ..."

 Three Destinies

 Analogy of Winter

El otro reloj'  -The Other Timepiece (1957)

Sympathy (Sympatía), [Originally titled, The Madness of the Cat – La Rabia del gato], 1955

The "Sympathy" painting is mentioned in a very good biographical essay on Varo at a blog called Femspective. See HERE. The author offers one mundane explanation of this painting; I see another explanation, related to astrology. Does anyone else see the same?

 Premonicion (1953)

Varo doesn't appear to have as much interest in astrology as in the occult generally. There is one painting of "Taurus", but it's not as special as the rest of her work. There is oblique reference to astrology here and there among her paintings, if one looks for it, but I've found no evidence that she was "into it" to any extent.

 The World

Earth Air, Water, Fire - see?


ASTROLOGY

Remedios Varo's natal chart with data from astro.com where it is given an AA (very reliable) rating. Exact place of birth, Anglès, Spain, wasn't available on my software's atlas but it offered Zuera as nearest available. This puts placement of all planets the same as astro.com's' there are just three minutes of difference in the ascending degree.

I see her astro-signature, as it relates to her art style and choice of subject matter, reflected by Venus/Mars in Scorpio in harmonious trine to Neptune in Cancer. Venus, planet of the arts is being energised by Mars, which accounts for Varo's energetic support artistically for her gender and the need for equality of the sexes. Neptune's link to imagination, dreams and fantasy feeds into her way of illustrating her points in such a creative manner.

There's a nice chain of sextiles linking Neptune at 16 Cancer to Jupiter (her Sun's ruler) at 14 Virgo, to Mars/Venus at 14/22 Scorpio to Uranus at 15 Capricorn. I like to find such chains, they indicate a kind of smoothness in the way a person is using their energies in co-ordination, to successfully manifest their talents...depending on which planets are involved, of course.

There are also 3 oppositions in Varo's chart: Sun/Mercury opposite Pluto/North Node; Moon opposite Saturn; Uranus opposite Neptune. Her Sun and Moon, major components of her personality, are each opposed by a planet relating to intensity or rigidity/limitation. Maybe these two oppositions acted as drivers and brakes in her nature? The third opposition, Uranus-Neptune forms to link each end of the sextile chain already mentioned. It's a Cancer-Capricorn cardinal opposition framing the sextile-chain. One could say, whimsically, that in so framing, it seems to exclude Saturn and Pluto from the major mix, leaving a calmer, sweeter, more integrated configuration to hold sway.

Arty Farty Friday ~ Feminist Miriam Schapiro

FIVE DAYS OF FEMININE #5 :

Feminist artist Miriam Schapiro, born in Toronto, Canada on 15 November 1923, grew up and studied in New York and Iowa. She married artist Paul Brach in 1946. Schapiro worked a series of odd jobs until she became a artist full-time in 1955. She originally painted in the Abstract Expressionist style. As her commitment to feminism grew during the 1960's, she developed her own personal style which she called femmage. Combining such commonplace elements as lace, fabric scraps, buttons, rickrack, sequins, and tea towels she transformed them into sophisticated compositions that often imply multiple layers of both space and meaning. Her recent works juxtapose intricately patterned abstract backgrounds with stylized human figures in motion-whether falling or dancing- made of brightly colored paper. (http://mystudios.com/women/women.html)

In keeping with the topic of Passion, Freedom & Women, Miriam Schapiro is a groundbreaking artist who, in her 60-year career, stepped out of the mold to fight for women’s artistic freedom and the democratization of art. She was a key visionary in starting a new movement in art, Pattern and Decoration.

Schapiro challenged the male art system from within and without. Since the 1960s, she risked her artistic reputation to bring women to the fore and erase the line between high art and craft, flaunting uses of the previously taboo materials like organdy and lace.

Schapiro explained: “I bring to my paintings all the elements of craft because I believe that craft belongs to women. That’s how it’s been designated by the patriarchal art system. Our culture also insists that ornamentation and decoration are innately female. But, unfortunately, it then follows that what is female is considered inferior. It doesn’t have to be that way. Eastern and Islamic cultures don’t feminize their decorative arts. What the male patriarchal art world does here is sexist as well as racist. The binary concept of fine art being above craft is false.”

In addition to her painting, Schapiro fought for women’s artistic freedom, traveling across the country to deliver speeches that were filled with the work of ignored women artists. In 1971, she and Judy Chicago formed the Feminist Art Program, which, for the first time, addressed how the self-esteem of women had been damaged by male-dominated culture. With students, they created a collaborative environment, Womanhouse, that attracted national attention.
http://www.ontheissuesmagazine.com/2010winter/2010winter_art.php

AUTOBIOGRAPHY



In her natal chart I'm looking for creativity, Uranus, Aquarius, Mars and Fixed signs (determination) to be emphasised: art, rebellion, social reform and a fighter.



Sun is conjunct Mercury and Jupiter in passionate, determined Scorpio (Fixed sign) and in harmonious trine to Uranus in Pisces and Pluto in Cancer. These form a Grand Trine in Water signs - with the Scorpio factor prominent because those are personal planets, yet very much in in tune with the generational pull from rebellious Uranus and powerful Pluto.

If born before 8:00 PM Miriam's natal Moon would have been in Aquarius - that'd be a very good bet. Born later than 8:00 PM Moon would have moved into early Pisces. Although that would blend well with her Water Grand Trine, yet I feel Aquarius is clearly indicated here.

Venus, planet of the arts is in Fiery and outgoing Sagittarius, in a rather wide trine to Neptune planet of creativity in Leo. This outgoing Venus/Neptune factor is not quite as prominent as I'd expect - unless, of course, one or other of the planets was close to a chart angle (ascendant, midheaven, etc.) We cannot know that without an accurate time of birth.

Saturn (structure) and Mars (the fighter) conjoined in diplomatic Libra, semi-sextile (helpful)to the Scorpio cluster adds a hint that although Miriam is a passionate and determined fighter for her cause, she has found tactful and artistic ways in which to bring her concerns to the attention of the public.




TWO AMONG MANY



MADNESS OF LOVE



COSTUME FOR MOTHER EARTH



RUSSIAN MATRIX



PAS DE DEUX


MIRIAM'S LIFE WITH DOLLS



FOR PAUL BRACH



LOST & FOUND