Today’s painting, seen by chance, stopped me in my tracks. It is by an English artist I had not come across before; Frank Ward (1914-1988). I was immediately captivated; the street hovering somewhere between dream and reality, the colours capturing so well that liminal time of twilight.
It proves a portal through time and space: back to my father’s love for the Swiss-German artist Paul Klee, whose work this painting so reminded me of.
The moon was a recurrent theme in Klee’s work: painted in reds and yellows and whites, crescent and full, hovering over heads and cities, noticed and unnoticed by the strange figures that often populate his work.
I was devastated by my father’s death when I was 21 years old. But, I was left with an eye for the beautiful things he introduced me to.
“My barn having burned down, I can now see the moon.” — Mizuta Masahide (17th century Japanese poet and samurai).
I end with a short clip introducing a Paul Klee retrospective at London’s Tate Modern. I first saw an exhibition of Klee’s work in London, where he is often exhibited – unsurprisingly, considering his impact on a generation of British artists. His delicate, lyrical hand is seen in the still lives of Ben Nicholson, for example, and, to my mind, in Frank Ward’s ‘Street Scene’, full as it is with subconscious possibility.
