Dennis Hollingsworth

Victory Over the Sun

I was talking to Andrew Hahn the other night, describing my researches into Malevich. He jumped up and started to draw the image of Malevich's Victory Over the Sun from memory. As we have it, the actual image was at our fingertips on the web, and I immediately appreciated the differences: the outer square gone, the angle curved (so much like Orbital) and struck on the other side of the central square, which became a rectangle that conformed to the proportions of the scrap paper he was working on.

I was delighted: "Thanks for composing my next painting for me, this will do nicely!"

And melancholy? A grocery list: melon, cauli(flower).... which prompted me to mention the In Our Time podcast about Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholia, an excellent podcast, highly recommended:

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss Robert Burton's masterpiece The Anatomy of Melancholy.

In 1621 the priest and scholar Robert Burton published a book quite unlike any other. The Anatomy of Melancholy brings together almost two thousand years of scholarship, from Ancient Greek philosophy to seventeenth-century medicine. Melancholy, a condition believed to be caused by an imbalance of the body's four humours, was characterised by despondency, depression and inactivity. Burton himself suffered from it, and resolved to compile an authoritative work of scholarship on the malady, drawing on all relevant sources.

A nice cure for the blues: get up off your butt and shop for dinner.

Posted by Dennis at December 29, 2011 1:30 AM