Bee Food April
Home Truths
Home Truths
(Ambit Magazine Issue 202)
The Dogon tribe eat onions.
Chickens have been known to lay eggs.
Arthur Scargill, top dog of trade unions,
a square hole on a wicket of small round pegs.
Grandmothers take terrible photos.
Children should not eat liver.
It hurts to sit like a lotus.
The royal family is not especially clever.
Guinness is a form of stout.
The world is divided in two sections
of those who do and those who don’t care about
Africa and its elections.
Egyptians drive rather fast.
Men in France wear too much cologne
Diagon Alley is the last
place you might find a working phone.
China makes cheap versions
of the things you really need.
Ravel once asked George Gershwin
how he wrote with such success and speed.
Fifty thousand to a hive.
Counsellors say “How do you feel?”
Lord Lucan is still alive
Braveheart is not for real.
We all have our heroes
who we may never meet,
some beyond the ice floes
or just walking down the street
People float on the Dead Sea.
My best friend used to snore.
It was he who once told me
The World Trade Centre is no more.
February
With a single
blow
the man ahead
chops
his out of season
asparagus
spears
in two
and tells
me of his
colourful life.
On the way
home
I step aside
to avoid
the neat
sausage of
dog turd
that leaks
thoughtfully
into its icing
of snow.
A Critic’s Choice by Andrew Lambirth
Charlie Millar derives inspiration from foreign residence and travel. His previous work has drawn on trips to Mozambique, Ghana, Jordan, Greece, Nigeria and Mali, and upon an extended familiarity with Ethiopia. Most recently he has been living in Kenya for a couple of years, and the fruit of this experience may be seen in a group of exquisite still-life paintings he has brought back with him.
His last major exhibition presented a body of work that ranged from detailed topographic watercolours and botanical studies to large ambitious abstracts on the great theme of communication through language – visual, verbal and musical.
His new work returns to what he calls ‘small painted real things’: a sisal plant, an aubergine, a cut lime, all presented on a kind of stage or platform, against a coloured ground and boldly stencilled numbers, which refer to Nairobi’s bus routes.
Millar has thus chosen to record specific things in a process of assimilation of recent experience, rather than make a formal statement about living in Kenya.
2010 essay by Andrew Lambirth
Seen and Unseen
In November 2000 Charlie Millar flew to Mali equipped with a handful of pencils, a tiny watercolour tin and a bag of paper. Travelling vast distances within the country, he created a series of sketches and works on paper that formed the basis of some of his most exciting work of his career.
Mali has given him a rich new perspective on those things that matter most to him: music, faith and buildings. These are the frontiers of his life, and have proved fertile themes in his work to date. For some years his paintings have evoked a strong sense of place through an exploration of what makes those places unique. Now he has turned his attention to the topography of that borderland between the seen and unseen worlds.
It was the soulful, dancing rhythms of Ali Farka Touré’s masterful Blues that first drew him to Mali; he arrived steeped in music that had struck him as intense and happy and seductive. Photographs of Djenné had revealed the beauty and extravagance of the town’s celebrated mud buildings, a promising contrast to his earlier experience of the rock-hewn Christian temples of Lalibela in Ethiopia. Finally there was the prospect of an encounter with African Islam and particularly Djenné’s Grande Mosquée, the largest mud building in the world.
As Charlie Millar travelled he sketched onto paper so hot that paint dried immediately. These works on paper are honest documents that serve as source material for the big paintings. They come as naturally as the artist’s handwriting. We are shown a landscape that compresses itself into the skyline; there is little sense of volume, and an overwhelming horizon. It seems that all life is concentrated into a single strip beneath a massive sky.
In this exhibition the artist has revisited familiar themes with a new perspective, illuminating and deepening our understanding of what it means to live in a world where time and eternity co-exist.
from an essay by David Evans
An Artist’s Work
I first met Charlie Millar and his work courtesy of Adam Reynolds at Adam’s, now sadly defunct, gallery. We are struck now as we were then at how this unaffected and not self-promoting, yet artistically very ambitious young man stands out from the contemporary art world. It is perhaps not over-cynical to suggest that the key to immediate success for the contemporary artist is to find a genre that stands out and to stick to it for a long time. You can find no single genre in Charlie’s work. The width and the depth of his work are astonishing.
As I write this in our kitchen I am surrounded by the fruits of our first raids on Charlie’s work nearly ten years ago. Opposite are two of his ‘books’ – a.k.a. rectangular objects in a book-like form on which decorations which you may see as representative or abstract at your will are imposed on simple monochrome colours. Alongside them is a red and grey cross – crosses are a recurring them in his work – put together largely from found objects and creating an impact somewhere between Cecil Collins and Sean Scully. Next to the books is a work almost impossible to describe in which he has juxtaposed a very old photo of Messiaen teaching in Paris alongside Chinese script. To the other side of the books is an exquisite, tiny collection of what appear to be pink petals on a grey background. We love it and enjoy it as an abstraction but history relates that it is inspired by Charlie’s love of Wagner.
As if that were not variety enough, turn to the facing wall and you see a magical watercolour of a Suffolk church. Call it ‘conventional’ but the impact is still wonderfully fresh to the jaded East Anglian palates of my family and friends.
Charlie appears completely unselfconscious about the diversity of his output; and might even be mildly surprised that anyone should remark on it. And perhaps he is right, since across the different expressions of his creativity run a number of common themes.
Music is perhaps the most obvious thematic influence sometimes acknowledged in the title of the work, sometimes via a quotation. When we first met him, Wagner settings, Wagner scenes and Wagner leitmotifs were the inspiration of many works. Go to his studio and inspect his CD collection and you will see a wider palate. Stravinsky features heavily and it will be fascinating to see the impact of The Rake’s Progress on his work at Glyndebourne.
Religious allusions and symbols also permeate Charlie’s work. It would be a brave person who inferred anything about his own religious beliefs from them. I am inclined to see the religious symbolism as a way of transmitting the sense of mystery and wonder which runs throughout his work and which is probably reflective of his own feelings about being alive.
This sense of wonder is akin to his fascination with the built environment. He constantly takes the built form – sometimes representing it literally, sometimes taking a shape and imposing it in different contexts and different ways, sometimes doing this to the point of abstraction. Behind it appears to be a fascination with the secrets that buildings retain over the years and the effect of the built environment on the surrounding countryside.
Finally, and most importantly, is his use of colour. This is not an obvious or extravagant use of colour. Subtle, yet it is pivotal to everything he does. His watercolours are almost monochromatic, yet he able to convey astonishing nuances. In his oil paintings he eschews dramatic and ‘easy’ contrasts of colour, achieving his effects through subtle juxtaposition of different shades of the same colour.
We had become used over the years to finding Charlie working as well as showing at Adam’s Gallery using the upstairs room as a studio. It came therefore as something of a shock when he decamped with his wife to Ethiopia. We all waited to see what would emerge. The work which was shown in his Lalibela and Beyond exhibition in Gallery 27 was worth the wait.
True to form, he produced a set of watercolours mostly of the urban form of Ethiopia. As he wrote in the catalogue at the time, they are “the most natural and the only obvious way of processing a place while actually there”. He had to adapt to local conditions to do them – the discipline of paint drying almost as soon as it is on the page is as helpful to the brave and decisive as it is unforgiving. The watercolours he produced are so much more than technical sketches. With extraordinary economy of paint and colour each painting conveys much more than a visual image. They invite you to feel the heat on the walls and the dark shadows where the heat can’t penetrate.
True to form again religious themes come together with the built environment and his use of colour in the large oil paintings from Ethiopia. Two key Ethiopian landmarks appear; Axum, regarded as the most holy city for Orthodox Christian Ethiopians and considered to be the resting home of the Ark of the Covenant; second – and more prevalent in his work – is Lalibela, a community of ancient churches cut into the rock with the effect that their roofs are at ground level. The theme of the cross is everywhere in the churches; not only do they have their own ornamental crosses but the cross is communicated via the architecture being laid out in the cross shape and the use of windows and openings.
For his larger oil paintings, Charlie takes many different perspectives of these churches. He sometimes simplifies the shape and represents its on its own; alternatively he mixes it with the same shape seen from another perspective. In some of the paintings he has started to experiment with Amharic script. In others shapes are imposed on a pattern of the Nile. Many of them end up as beautiful abstractions. As I write this I am looking at the oil painting called Jerusalem in Lalibela. It is a mixture of several forms which I know from other paintings have been taken from churches in Lalibela, superimposed on one another. The Nile appears like a three-humped camel on top of it. The ‘glue’ that creates the emotional impact – and the ambiguity as to whether it is representative or abstract gives and added pleasure – is the subtlety of his use of colours.
From what I have seen of his first paintings at Glyndebourne, he has fallen in love with the perception of the built form. The silhouette of the shape he has drawn is noticeably Glyndebourne yet noticeably different. The way he has juxtaposed with his own – to my eyes! – unrecognisable versions of the immediate environment is fascinating because they can be read in so many different ways. At one moment I saw musicians wandering around a field, in another I think I just saw corn!
Glyndebourne, the Christie family and successive directors have had the knack over the years of doing the obvious that other people haven’t seen. Inviting Charlie Millar to work there is yet another example. His fascination with music, his fascination with the built form and with the mysteries at the heart of things make Glyndebourne a wonderful feeding ground for him. I cannot wait to see the final tally of his work.
essay by Dennis Stevenson
Where the Bee Dubs
Charlie Millar is interested in the exchange of visual information, in the passing of images between individuals; in other words, in the making of paintings which will communicate with the viewer. By these means he proposes to share and celebrate the things that he loves: the appearance of the natural world, the complexity of man’s relationship with his surroundings (and the varying faiths that uphold, or underpin, this) and the achievement of high culture – especially the structures that man has built, in terms of music and architecture. These themes weave through his work, creating subtle patterns of great beauty, and offering us valuable insights into the truth of the world order.
Much of Millar’s past work has evolved directly from his experiences of travel: to Mozambique and Rome (1991), Ghana and Jordan (1993), Greece and Nigeria (1994), and then the extensive Ethiopian trips (1996-8) followed by a visit to Mali in 2000. Previously the travel has drip-fed the imagery, but in the case of this new body of work, although various excursions were considered, no substantial travel resulted. Instead Millar has focused on his immediate surroundings, and re-tuned the explorer’s sensitivities to the home patch. The results are unexpected: Millar, who lives in populous South London, has taken up bee-keeping, and is suddenly more nature-conscious than ever before. Plants have taken on new meaning, and so has the most pervasive substance in the world, pollen.
Inevitably, these new-found activities and influences have deeply permeated his art. Can you think of a system more wondrously disciplined than the society of the honey bee, or a structure so ingenious and aesthetically satisfying as the honeycomb? (Ant-works don’t have the same allure somehow.) Consider the perfect geometry of the comb – Virgil refers to its ‘waxen trellis’. Andthen there is the bees’ ancient and important role in myth and story. ‘Some say unto bees a share is given/ Of the Divine Intelligence…’ (Virgil, again). A worthy subject, and not a slight one.
Tell me about bees dancing, I said. Millar replied: ‘Much has been written on what we know about bee dances. the main one we can spot is the waggle dance. A foraging older bee on the face of the comb goes round in a figure of eight pattern vibrating its abdomen each lap. It is communicating to the bees near it (and you will often sees bees doing this really vigorously to get the attention of others) the direction from the hive of a good source of nectar that it has found. The angle it faces is all to do with its relation on the comb to the sun. It’s hard to remember that these activities happen in the pitch dark of the hive, communicated purely through scent and vibration….’
How to incorporate such impulses into his own art? Vibration can be achieved pictorially by the juxtaposition of colours, and movement by the surge and interplay of line and shape. Millar turns the honeycomb into a grid and makes a stencil of it, varying the thickness of its divisions (speeding and slowing the pace of the eye travelling its meshes). Look for instance, at the painting Bee Dub. Chords of structure, like cells or vertebrae, undulate across the picture space. The colours modulate between cerise and citrus. Landscape forms are suggested, and so is a suspension bridge. Lines arch and span indefinite space. Waves uncurl as in the rhythmic paintings of S.W.Hayter. Natural patterns are abstracted and locked into a new reality which yet speaks of them. This is a species of commentary on the natural world, but it is also about painting.
Although there are a number of significant paintings on linen in this exhibition, it is the works on paper which form its backbone. These are many and various, acting as a kind of sketchbook or sounding board for Millar’s ideas. Although they often feature formal experiment involving the application of washes of oil paint (diluted with turps or white spirit) poured or sprayed, the technical aspect is secondary to their meaning – rather like physical training, it enables the artist to keep limber and alert. For his real course and purpose is to follow his intuitions. As he says. “The great thing is to be led astray all the time’. The act of making thus becomes a fruitful form of contemplation.
There is often pencil drawing to be found over the oil. Sometimes it resembles script, but is not intended to be deciphered so much as apprehended as relevant pattern. Millar strives to maintain a balance between overdrawing and landscape, lettering and architecture, distance and the flatness of a drop curtain. His process alternates between commands: obliterate and reveal, screen and scramble. (He sometimes alludes to the outline of a TV screen; more often, there’s the suggestion of televisual inteference – of an image breaking up.) A centralised shape is just off target, lurching to the left or right, going wrong, like a healthy organism attacked by a virus. Even in what might be called this diseased nobility (‘noble’ is a Millar word), there is a terrible beauty.
Millar also makes topographical watercolour studies during his travels, which have a simplicity and directness that it utterly compelling. What he calls ‘stained drawings’ are completed at speed and often under adverse conditions, in the heat which almost instantly evaporates the water from its freight of pigment. Millar regards drawing as the relic of he experience of looking, but there is nothing dead or desiccated about these fine, nervy paraphrases of place. A recent trip to Luxor elicited some delicious, pale evocations of temple architecture, each made during a couple of hours in the comparative cool of the morning. Here is evidence of the precise way in which Millar observes the world, the foundation upon which his more speculative art is built.
For it is intensely speculative. The whole business of visual communication is chancey, added to which Millar positively relishes the idea of ambiguity and the fact that people might miss things. Likewise, he recognises the creative importance of dead ends, and the supreme need to be able to identify such. And after all, Millar is making paintings, not writing a philosophical treatise on the nature of being. His artistic activity begins with the construction of a canvas or board of a specific size as a pristine object; it should conclude with this identity remaining, to some extant at least, intact. The object quality of a painting is a sensitive subject.
For a different area of speculation consider the painting Sorek, so called because this was the name of Delilah’s birthplace, and the Samson and Delilah story is a favourite of Millar’s, which also happens to have bee links (the swarm in the carcass of a lion). This picture tends more to the interior space, though it is traversed by a beam or swathe of honeycomb, which seems to be breaking down into its constituent parts. Meaning resides in the bringing together of these various shapes and colours and stories, within the specific net or context of Millar’s interests.
The references continue unabated. Millar quotes the musician Graham Johnson’s felicitous phrase ‘silver-tinged melancholy’ (used originally in connection with Schubert’s songs), to describe the silver edges with which he encloses the works on paper. This has a certain distancing effect, similar to that achieved by the heavy shiny varnish he coats some of the paintings with. Many of his images deal with two worlds in relationship, but not quite meeting, such as heaven and earth, and it is that tangential quality which Millar seeks out here.
In another and complimentary aspect of his current practice, Millar has matched his deliberately straightforward pencil drawings of spring flowers and trees in blossom with spore prints – like mouths – taken from mushrooms. As the blossom comes forth from the dry twig in a spirit of superb regeneration, so does matter (in the form of pollen) prepare to traverse the world once more by air. And, of course from the bees’ point of view, the whole globe is just a riot of pollen.
Then there is Millar in his role as collector and collator. His studio is stuffed with things – organic and manmade, found or picked or pickled. Chilli peppers rot and deliquesce in plastic specimen bags. Mushrooms deposit their spores onto glass plates. There are chests of old bones and nails scavenged from the Thames, heaps of clay-pipe fragments. (Some of the bones Millar has coated with aluminium leaf, with the idea of incorporating them into a mobile.) There are various concoctions of salt and wax, and the mysterious honey works. Elements are ranged and mingled as in an alchemist’s parlour. Possibilities seem endless.
There is also an astonishing collection of 1,000 resin casts, each measuring 5.5 x 8.5 cms. In these blocks are embedded the souvenirs and detritus of an active life of looking and beach-combing. They are like cobbles or setts from a vast pavement, that, being unattached and discrete, can be re-configured in innumerable ways. Beside the expected presence of mushrooms and various organic elements (including choice specimens of dust), Millar has accumulated in these freeze-frames objects from his travels, layered with collage chosen for its colour and texture. Here are shells and stamps and a razor-blade, cuttings from newspapers and every kind of information-rich artefact imaginable. Each horizontal block is a memory cell evoking whole strata of the past. For Charlie Millar, research continues on all fronts.
essay by Andrew Lambirth
Meditation for Lent
For Lent, the artist Charlie Millar has installed a pavement of 308 resin casts, like transparent bricks, arranged in a rectangle on the floor of the Eastern Crypt of Canterbury Cathedral. Millar casts these bricks himself, embedding within then an eclectic mix of objects. Each in itself is an individual work of art, but combined they make an image-rich meditation for Lent, a series of tableaux which are infinitely suggestive, and throw the viewer back upon his or her own resources and responses, in a quest for meaning. By focusing upon the detail of such unconsidered trifles as riverbed detritus, builder’s rubble or ordinary dust, Millar opens the doorway for speculation of a larger, more spiritual order. The Dean of Canterbury and all those responsible for this original and rewarding commission are to be highly praised for the initiative.
A good place for a pilgrimage, Canterbury. But Chaucer’s pilgrims set out from Southwark’s Tabard Inn in April, ‘when the sweet showers fall’, not in the last wintry days of February when I wended my way to London Bridge. Thence by train through the desolate suburbs of south-east London, out past the dormitories of Orpington and Sevenoaks, through the pillared Martian emptiness of Ashford so-called International, to the unmanned halt at Canterbury West. By foot from there, on the approach to West Gate and then into the rather tawdry pedestrianised shopping precinct that was once a main street. The cathedral is at no point visible above or beside the enclosing shops and offices. Then you glimpse it down a side street, turn in through Christ Church Gate (where you will be asked for an admission fee) and confront the building – large, but by no means at once awe-inspiring.
The first church was established here by St Augustine in 597. It was rebuilt in the 1070s by Archbishop Lefranc, a century before the place really got famous when Thomas Becket was murdered in the Cathedral in 1170. Over the next ten or fifteen years, the quire was rebuilt, and the Eastern Crypt – our destination today – added. The soaring spiritual genius of the building itself, captured so memorably in the closing sequences of Powell and Pressburger’s A Canterbury Tale (1944), is not our immediate concern, though its encompassing identity establishes the context for Millar’s installation. Down the steps, therefore, to the Crypt, a still place, the perfect setting for a work of art which seeks to rouse, as the artist says, ‘the individual visitor’s highly tuned and unique sense of nostalgia, memory and encounter’.
Here let me quote from that remarkable novel Shamrock Tea by Ciaran Carson: In the Confessions, Augustine speaks with awe of the vast cloisters of his memory, which is an immeasurable sanctuary for countless images of all kinds. Perplexed by time – since the present has no duration and past and future do not exist – he concludes tat the measure of time must be memory; hence a long past is a long remembrance of the past.
Of course, it is a different Augustine from the founder of Canterbury Cathedral, but the sentiment holds true nevertheless. And an ‘immeasurable sanctuary for countless images of all kinds’ is the perfect description of Millar’s installation.
There are those among us who will claim that loss of contact with our past is precisely the cause of our decay as a civilisation. Certainly, a general and particular knowledge of the past can lead to greater understanding of our current predicament, and our individual and collective identity can only be augmented by this kind of awareness. Yet many shun it as a misguided attempt to reveal themselves, n a self-vanquishing urge to be ‘of the moment’. Millar’s art deals with the resources of the past (one friend described his objects as full of ‘longing’), and re-presents them for our enlightenment. His collection of occupied resin casts is somewhere between a cabinet of curiosities and a box of delights – where museum meets magic.
Charlie Millar is a painter of innovative abstract images which relate closely to music and architecture, a skilled topographical watercolourist and a maker of objects. His work with resin casts finds the artist in his role as collector and curator. Objects he has found on his travels and brought back, imagery from his paintings and photographs, specimens from the natural world – the man-made mingles with the organic in these bricks. Each block of resin contains souvenirs from Millar’s past, reinterpreted and recomposed, and structured in terms of line and form and colour in much the same way as a painting is made. This particular for Canterbury, which was made specifically for the Eastern Crypt, is designed to have as much contrast between the bricks as possible, to show up in a variegated, tessellated pattern a taste of the visual richness of the world we inhabit all too briefly.
Millar is stranger to this medium: he made 1,000 smaller blocks before the Canterbury commission, and became adept at the gradual setting of objects in this kind of resinous aspic. As I wrote in 2004, they are like the ‘cobbles or setts from a vast pavement that, being unattached and discrete, can be reconfigured in innumerable ways’. I also likened them to freeze-frames and memory cells, densely packed with information and resonance. Associations should spark and develop in the mind of the beholder as the viewer’s own experience of life is brought to bear on these carefully selected aspects of existence.
London is Millar’s home and where he works, so much of the raw material incorporated in these setts is of London origin. He keeps bees in the gardens of Lambeth Palace (there are traces of honeycomb in some of the images) and goes mud-larking by the Thames. (Peach stones and bones are part of the river’s contribution.) The gardeners at Lambeth Palace entered into the spirit of the exercise and donated fragments of stained glass and an old clay pipe bowl dug up in the flower beds. Blossom and other organic material were also gathered there.
The process of assembling these setts is one of collaging, the juxtaposition of previously unrelated objects arranged in layers in a much more interesting three-dimensional way than is usually achieved in flat collages. Printed papers, layers of salt or grain, grass seed or petals coincide with a clinical thermometer, lengths of thorny stems, small metal boxes or cotton reels that look like baby parsnips. A dragonfly larva makes a guest appearance, as does a graphite coated wooden spoon. Crucifix-size nails in a bunch, an INRI cartouche, palm crosses – the imagery makes specific references, and indeed began with the Parable of the Sower. In one block, an Apostle spoon cradles a medicine capsule. But Millar deliberately opened out the frame, and a silvered oak leaf and a phial of honey suggest a ‘pagan’ presence as well. Even popcorn makes an unblushing entrance. The banal rubs shoulders with the exotic. A weaver’s house in Mali is wound round with cotton in horizontal bands; a photo of this is juxtaposed with an orchid bloom. A vast array of objects is brought together in stillness and transformed into art, as the dried crocus bulb bursts forth into new life. Take my advice and hasten away, on Lenten pilgrimage, to Canterbury.
(All Flesh is Grass, 2006) review by Andrew Lambirth
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