Inspiring Older Readers

posted on 03 Jan 2019

Paint Me A Book

It’s funny how books can invade all the little spaces of your life. Almost instinctively you find yourself drawn to anything with a book connection - ornaments, jewellery, calendars, even accessories like scarves or t-shirts. If it can be emblazoned with a bookish picture or motif, it’s welcome here whether we need it or not.

A long time ago we found ourselves covering whatever walls aren’t shelved for books with art that depicted people reading, reproductions of book jackets or scenes from famous books and even portraits of authors themselves. We’ve even commissioned original art with a book reading theme.

Not surprisingly, our trips to art galleries wherever we travel are dominated by our game of ‘find the reading pictures’ as we scour rooms for paintings we can photograph and add to our collection. In quieter moments I must confess that I’m sometimes struck by the illogicality of all this – it’s clearly obsessive and shows all the signs of being something akin to addiction. OK, so it may be less damaging than booze or drugs but in the final reckoning it’s not a lot easier to rationalise and explain.

As is the case with these sort of habitual vices, you tend to think you’re on your own out there and that no-one else can be in the grip of the same arcane addiction as you.

But then you discover, actually you’re not alone.

Over the past couple of years the calendar market has featured the very popular ‘Reading Women’ collection which is essentially a bringing together of existing paintings featuring women caught in the act of reading. And, on top of that, in the past year two new books entirely dedicated to depictions of books in art have popped up – Books Do Furnish A Painting by Jamie Camplin and Maria Ranauro along with David Trigg’s Reading Art: Art for Book Lovers.

I suppose the natural question to ask is what the nature of the link between art and the book as subject to be depicted actually is – and that’s a bit more difficult to answer. As a starting point it’s probably worth acknowledging that the symbolism of the book is irresistible. Martin Gayford writing in The Spectator when reviewing Camplin and Ranauro’s book put his finger on it rather well:

“Books are prominent in many portraits — clasped in their subjects’ hands, lining the wall behind them or the desks to their side. They also pile up in still-life compositions, saints reflect on them, and allegorical figures brandish them. That’s as it should be. After all, civilised life is unthinkable without reading and books.”

Put crudely, a book in a painting can be a relatively easy way to signal the subject’s erudition or the desire of the painter to associate the subject (animate or inanimate) with civilisation and learning. The jacket of Trigg’s book puts it this way:

“Books are depicted as indicators of intellect in portraits, as symbols of piety in religious paintings, as subjects in still lifes, and as the raw material for contemporary installations. “

I am happy to acknowledge that the book can be a useful symbolic tool for an artist but I’m also sure that the appeal for me is the way the two most important cultural phenomena in my life – art and books – come together so naturally. Paintings, like books themselves, offer us a captured historical moment, a cultural moment in time. Jamie Camplin puts it this way:

“Paintings contain a world of information about religion, class, gender, and power, but they also reveal details of everyday life often lost in history texts--and all the more so when books are depicted. Such artworks show us not only how books have been used and valued over time but also how the significance and practice of reading have evolved in Western society. “

Whenever I go to a new town or city, home or abroad, I go equipped with details of two things – where to find the bookshops and where to find the art galleries. For me these aren’t two separate activities – it’s all about books wherever I end up.

 

Terry Potter

January 2019