Different Faces of Autumn; Groovy Landscapes and Wistful Faces

I love autumn for its richness, warm colours, falling leaves and its mystery, at the same time I loathe it because it’s the doorway to months of quiet, grey dreariness and winter’s misery. Whether you love autumn or hate it, I feel that no other season of the year has the power to touch us in such a peculiar and poignant way. Anguish of transience weighs on my soul as I gaze at the leaves falling down and the trees becoming more bare as each day passes. There’s something final about it, a sense of ending… No other season has such bittersweet duality; golden afternoons and dark overcast days, leaves rustling under foot and morbid silence of a hard, dry soil; the last ecstasy of colours and sights, and the most dreary sense of an end.

George Bellows, Romance of Autumn, 1916

George Bellows is mostly remembered in relation to the Ashcan group of artists and he was known for portraying the grim reality of the big city, but his painting “Romance of Autumn” is intensely vibrant and groovy and brings out this whimsical, warm side of autumn. The painting shows a woman in white and a man in blue climbing over the rocks and in front of their eyes a magical landscape painted int the most exquisite, intense, uplifting, electrifying magical colours; purples, electric blue, pink, orange and blue. Each colours shines and smiles as in a dream. The gesture of the girl holding the man’s hand seems symbolic; she is helping him climb up the rocks and see for himself the fantastical landscape that she is seeing, she is inviting him to step into the autumnal fantasy with her. This is the dream, this is the autumn seen through rose-tinted glasses.

O. Louis Guglielmi, Connecticut Autumn, 1937

Guglielmi was born in Cairo, spent his early childhood in Milano and Geneva, and in 1914 destiny took his over the ocean. His painting “Connecticut Autumn”, painted in the depressing decade of 1930s, shows a very different face of autumn; the face of desolation, decay and poverty. Despite of their warm orange and yellow colours, the buildings beside the road look desolate and abandoned. The whole scene reeks of alienation, as if no human foot had stepped there for a long time. Unused blocks of marble lie around idly, useless and forgotten just like the town itself. No one needs monuments any more, nothing to celebrate and glorify. The figure of the angel is the only figure out of all the marble blocks. The thin trees in the distant edges of the painting look dead and unreal, and the young boy is the only living thing in this desolate landscape. His childhood innocence and naivety are a shield from reality. Decay and depression of his surroundings cannot touch him. He is flying his kite under the mournful gaze of the forgotten marble angel. But again the hope and optimism are crushed, for his kite gets tangled in the power lines. The sky is darkening and the angel is motionless and silent.

Marco Calderini (Italian, 1850-1941), Gardens of the Palazzo Reale, Turin, c. 1890-1910

This painting by an Italian painter Marco Calderini quite realistically portrays the loneliness of parks in autumn; when rains descend, the trees are bare, the skies are grey, and you can’t even sit on a bench because it’s wet so you linger around the desolate park, like a ghost, circling the statues and avoiding the puddles, and you cannot help but fantasise of the days, not so long ago, when the grass was green, the flowers bloomed and golden sunlight was coming through the lush tree tops. You cannot help but think of mortality and transience when you see that the trees are wet, dark and bare and the air is cold as the grave. Born, lived and died in Turin, Calderini’s oeuvre is filled with romanticised landscapes with poetic moods. Painting “Gardens of the Palazzo Real” is at once realistic and poetic. This is exactly how parks and gardens look like after autumn rains, and yet no one can deny the romantic wistfulness and loneliness that the scene shows.

John Atkinson Grimshaw, Autumn Regrets, 1882

John Atkinson Grimshaw was a master of portraying cold, lonely autumn streets where golden light of the street lamps falls on the damp pavements, wetness and mists. The painting “Autumn Regrets” perfectly portrays the wistfulness of autumn and that “what’s done is done” feeling. The woman is sitting on a bench, she is dressed in black and both her clothes and her pose speak of her deep thoughts and regrets. All around her the soil is being transformed into a golden-orange carpet of chestnut leaves. The wind seems to be whispering “This is the end, beautiful friend…” Regrets flood our hearts and minds so easily in autumn; we could have done more, and we could have done things better, or at least differently. But what is done is done, now the flowers bloom no more and every new leaf which falls from the tree is like a confirmation of the ending. Autumn has a way of getting under our skin, whether we like it or not. Autumn is a feeling, a state to be in, not just one of four seasons. And to end:

“This is the autumn: it — just breaks your heart!
Fly away! fly away! —
The sun crawls along the mountain
And rises and rises
And rests with every step.
How the world became so withered!
Upon worn, strained threads
The wind plays its song.
Hope fled…”

(Nietzsche, In the German November, 1884)

Fashion Inspiration for Autumn 2020

Picture by Cari Ann Wayman.

Picture found here.

Two pictures above by Sara Waiste.

Picture by Evelyn Cormier.

My Inspiration for November 2019

Two things on my mind these days are for sure two wonderful but very different films; “What We Do in the Shadows” (2014) which was so hysterical and funny and also very educational because it offers a rare insight into the life of vampires, and “Desperately Seeking Susan” (1985) with Madonna and Rosanna Arquette which was so groovy and exciting and I loved looking at the fun fashions in vibrant colours. I also watched another vampire film, recommended to me by someone, “The Lost Boys” (1987) and really enjoyed it, the soundtrack as well, with INXS and Echo and the Bunnymen’s version of The Doors’s song “People are Strange”. I read the Gothic gem, Horace Walpole’s novel “Castle of Otranto” and I enjoyed it so much; the drama, the villains and innocent maidens, deaths, secrets passages, murders and love… all that one could want in a novel. And I started rereading Jane Eyre and once again I am swooning over their romance!

“I was never young. This idea of fun: cars, girls, saturday night, bottle of wine… to me, these things are morbid. I was always attracted to people with the same problems as me. It doesn’t help when most of them are dead.” (Morrissey)

Art by Torii Tsubaki

Beautiful as you, by Milamai

Found here.

Tonight the sky is red ✨(by Milamai)

Nesting for Autumn by *Nishe on Flickr.

Victorian Dream Rose ~ vip_roses

Autumnal Lolita Styles

Lolita dresses don’t come just in pink or white and aren’t necessarily restricted to springtime, here are some beautiful autumnal Lolita styles!

Pictures found here.

My Inspiration for October 2019

I feel so inspired these last days of October! Such rapture and love and enthusiasm mounting in my soul! It must be the influence or Rilke whose letters and writing are guiding me through life with their wisdom, comforting me and teaching me patience, and also the music I am listening to these days is fueling me like a drug; Pearl Jam Nirvana and Alice in Chains unplugged on MTV, such rawness of emotions and beauty. Eddie Vedder’s voice truly makes the song sound passionate and sincere. I reread Mikhail Lermontov’s fantastic novel “A Hero of Our Time”; and that’s a hint for a future post 😉 . This October was all about Japanese and Korean fashion and some interesting make up styles, cute and eerie Japanese dolls, Camille Paglia’s writings and interviews, Lolita dresses, witch aesthetic, Lermontov’s early poetry full of teenage angst and a feeling of emptiness within, then the beautiful melancholy Marine Vacth in the film “Young and Beautiful” (2013), paintings by Anna Kowch, film “Love Witch” (2016) with its gorgeous aesthetic and costumes to die for, Joy Division’s song “Ceremony” – so sweetly melancholy, Franz Liszt’s music… And now, with lighted candles I inhale the scent of the last October’s roses – in dusty pink colour – and listen to their petals falling slowly in autumnal dusk.

“The same cycle–excitement and despair, excitement and despair.”

(Alice Munro, from “Cortes Island”, published in The New Yorker c. 1988)

Photo by Laura Makabresku

Legend…by Muharrem ünal

Picture found here.

Andrea Kowch – I’m so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers

October is nearing its end. One more beautiful October leaving us slowly, leaf by leaf, sunset by sunset, until November replaces it in the calendar. November will turn the dazzling October’s glowing leaf carpets of orange and gold in parks and woods into a gloomy mass of rotting brown leaves, and even the pink sunsets will turn an ominous shade. But while the wonderful October – a time of witches, ghosts, pumpkins, ravens, haunted castles is still here, I will be so self-indulgent and take a moment to celebrate it with a few beautiful magic realism paintings by a contemporary artist Andrea Kowch.

Andrea Kowch, Soiree, 2019

Love of the countryside is something that connects the paintings of Andrea Kowch and the literary character of Anne Shirley Cutberth, the chatty red-haired freckled orphan heroine of L. M. Montgomery’s novel “Anne of Green Gables”; the first of the series of novels about Anne. There’s a slight difference though; Anne’s idyllic sunny Avonlea is transformed, through Anne’s vivid imagination, to an almost fairy tale place, whimsical, innocent and full of wonders to be discovered, with weeping willows, a shining lake, dreamy ethereal apple blossoms white as the bride’s attire on her wedding day, golden birches, meadows and woods, whereas the countryside world in Kowch’s paintings is always tinged with mystery and eerie foreboding, there are secrets and tales yet to unravel hidden behind the static frozen moments captured in her paintings. Imagination is what connected these different visions of the countryside life and scenery. Kowch’s paintings are painted realistically, but have a dreamlike quality and that’s something I adore. Space and figures in her artworks are painted in a detailed, precise way and every motif is carefully planned to symbolise something and combined all together the story is woven. In the artists own words: “There’s a subtle tension that I like to create in my work, that leaves things open to interpretation, for viewers to attribute their own unique experiences to it. (…) Each image is a story that I just want people to delve into.“(*)

My appreciation of Kowch’s paintings definitely doesn’t stop at their aesthetically pleasing nature, their physical beauty which comes from colours and compositions that appeal to my eyes, no, the appreciation goes way deeper when it comes to her art. There is definitely a sense of mystery, a subtle tension as she calls it, and there is plenty of room for interpretation. Since the artist herself allows interpretation, I will gleefully accept this opportunity. Kowch’s recent work “Soiree” caught my attention a few weeks ago. A pale, auburn haired girl dressed in old-fashioned vintage clothes is sitting on a blanket on a meadow and having a picnic by herself… well, she isn’t all alone, though she has no human company, there are crows and a little dog to share the moment and the delicious food with her. cookies, grapes, a pie. Porcelain dishes clanking. Clouds are thick and heavy, getting darker as they float the sky slowly. The trees and the dark house in the background look unwelcoming.

Crows are such mischievous wild things! They have no sense of decorum, is this the way one behaves at a picnic? It seems like the girl is in her element, for the strangeness hasn’t written the look of surprise on her calm face. She is holding a cup and looking ever so slightly reproachfully at the crow standing at the cherry pie. This could be Anne Shirley, not at her real picnic, but at the imaginary one. I can see her; baking the pie, in the kitchen, apron tied around her dull grey dress without puffed sleeves and she is looking at the dark and rolling skies in the distance, above the chicken coop and the cheery tree and this is what she is daydreaming about; a picnic with crows. Oh, the stories she could tell them! And how they would laugh, and how they would understand all the big, pompous words that adults around her do not.

Andrea Kowch, In the Hollow

Here is a beautiful and fun passage from “Anne of Green Gables” which shows Anne’s love of nature in autumn and her enthusiasm for nature and everything around her in general, from chapter sixteen:

OCTOBER was a beautiful month at Green Gables, when the birches in the hollow turned as golden as sunshine and the maples behind the orchard were royal crimson and the wild cherry trees along the lane put on the loveliest shades of dark red and bronzy green, while the fields sunned themselves in aftermaths.

Anne reveled in the world of color about her.

“Oh, Marilla,” she exclaimed one Saturday morning, coming dancing in with her arms full of gorgeous boughs” ‘I’m so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers. It would be terrible if we just skipped from September to November, wouldn’t it? Look at these maple branches. Don’t they give you a thrill—several thrills? I’m going to decorate my room with them.”

“Messy things,” said Marilla, whose aesthetic sense was not noticeably developed. “You clutter up your room entirely too much with out-of-doors stuff, Anne. Bedrooms were made to sleep in.”

“Oh, and dream in too, Marilla. And you know one can dream so much better in a room where there are pretty things. I’m going to put these boughs in the old blue jug and set them on my table.”

Andrea Kowch, On the Point, 2010

And to continue the Anne-theme, here is another passage from the Chapter five where Anne speaks ecstatically about seagulls which are also on Andrea Kowch’s painting above:

“Isn’t the sea wonderful?” said Anne, rousing from a long, wide-eyed silence. “Once, when I lived in Marysville, Mr. Thomas hired an express wagon and took us all to spend the day at the shore ten miles away. I enjoyed every moment of that day… I lived it over in happy dreams for years. (…) Aren’t those gulls splendid? Would you like to be a gull? I think I would–that is, if I couldn’t be a human girl. Don’t you think it would be nice to wake up at sunrise and swoop down over the water and away out over that lovely blue all day; and then at night to fly back to one’s nest? Oh, I can just imagine myself doing it.“

Rainer Maria Rilke: Whoever is alone now will remain alone

Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem “Autumn Day”, from his poetry collection “The Book of Images” has been in my thoughts every autumn ever since I discovered it a few years ago, and the last stanza is particularly beautiful to me. I love how Rilke combines the richness of autumn “command the last fruits to ripen (…) and chase the last sweetness into the strong wine”, with the introspection in the last verses, for, after all, autumn days are the best for writing letters and enjoying the long walks and the music of fluttering leaves. In these early autumn days, everything seems so fragile and ephemeral; the last rose, the last warm day, the last rose-gold sunset, or so it seems. It’s only after I realise that the richness, warmth and vibrancy of summer is soon to be gone, that I cherish it the most. Rilke is a perfect poet for these days of changes.

Armand Charnay, Park of Sansac (Indre-et-Loire), 1885

Autumn Day

Mister! It’s time. Summer was awesome.
But now you’ve got to cast your shadow on the old clock.
So, let the wind blow in the fields.

Command the last fruits to ripen.
Grant them two more southern days.
Press them to perfection.
And chase the last sweetness into the strong wine.

Because whoever has no house now will build no more.
Whoever is alone now will remain long alone
to wake, read, write long letters,
and wander in the alleys, back and forth,
restless, as the leaves flutter.

James Tissot, The Letter, 1876-78

My Inspiration for September 2018

I was in such a romantic mood this September, and I hope it continues well into October. When leaves start falling and rains play wistful melodies, my thoughts go to all things romantic and sublime; haunted castles, vampires and bats, crooked hawthorn trees, flowers wilting in moonlight, poetry read in candlelit old chambers, dust and spiders, German Romantic painters, Russian literature of Romanticism (Lermontov’s “A Hero of Our Time” is on my mind), deep mysterious forests in crimson and yellow, old Victorian photographs, graveyards, consumptive beauties, Poe’s stories, opium-dens, lilies and wedding veils, distant shores, solemn violins, Chopin’s Nocturnes, a waltz danced with a skeleton, tales of love and death…

I would endure ages of pain to hear one tone of your voice strike on my ear.

(Mary Shelley, from a diary entry, c. October 1822)

Picture found here.

Picture found here.

Photo found here.

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Picture found here.

Picture found here.

Dreamy woods, picture found here.

“And I bathed in the light you gave but it’s dark in another way” (by worteinbildern)

Autumn Fashion Inspiration: Lest I should be old fashioned I’ll put a trinket on…

This autumn I find it so hard to chose between so many different aesthetics to embody; shall I be Poe’s mournful bride with face pale as the moon, dressed in long gowns in white or dusty purple, instead of pearls my neck adorned with invisible kisses; shall I dress as Miss Havisham in a wedding dress, and put on a fragrance of wilted roses and dust, with spiderwebs on my hands instead of lace gloves; or wear my hair in braids with bows and roam the chambers of my castle as a ghost of a Victorian teenage girl, or simply curl my hair and take a porcelain doll instead of a purse and be a child-vampire for all eternity; or a Biba girl dressed in many shades of violet, brown and mauves; or a Pre-Raphaelite muse with flower woven in my hair, my cheeks rosy as ripe apples and lips as pink as rosebuds. Oh, the agony of choice! Is that what Donovan meant when he sang “So many different people to be, that it’s strange, so strange….” in “Season of the Witch”? Anyhow, I instructed my sweet darling bats who reside in the tower of my castle to weave a long veil and a white dress for me, and I kindly asked the butterflies to search the woods and the meadows and make a flower-crown from all the nature’s richness they find; last wild flowers, yellow leaves, rose hips, acorns and birch twigs. Now the only thing left to do is to ask the autumn wind to braid my hair…

A whimsical poem called “Autumn” by Emily Dickinson:

The morns are meeker than they were—
The nuts are getting brown—
The berry’s cheek is plumper—
The Rose is out of town.

The Maple wears a gayer scarf—
The field a scarlet gown—
Lest I should be old fashioned
I’ll put a trinket on.

Picture found here.

Picture found here.

 

Picture found here.

Picture found here.