Mt Barth

I don't normally talk about the landscape much in this blog, being a fairly urban person by nature. But I was most intrigued today to discover that a New Zealand mountain is named after the famous theologian, Karl Barth.
Mt Barth (2456m) is located in the South Island of New Zealand. It is part of the Southern Alps. Named by Captain Cook in 1770, this range extends 550 km and includes 17 summits over 3000 meters, the highest of which is Aoraki/Mt Cook (3754 m).


If you're the first person to climb a mountain you apparently get the privilege of naming it. (So how did Mt Everest get its name, or does this just apply to New Zealand mountains?) The first people to climb Mt Barth, together, were a group of Christians: a Baptist minister named James T Crozier (he also named Anita Peak after his wife); his younger brother, G L Crozier (a pacifist who eventually became a Quaker); Bruce Gillies, who had married into the Crozier family; Selwyn Grave, the then Anglican minister of Kurow. B M Pinder was involved in a third attempt at the mountain, when they named Mt Heim, as well as naming the glacier between Barth and Heim: Thurneysen. In a later trip they renamed another mountain, Mt Calvin.

You can see a bunch of photographs of the mountain, and climbers on it, here.

Three quotes

Without yet again exercising my Eeyore characteristics – that is, being dour about everything I read – I have to say that the following paragraph in today’s Otago Daily Times surely serves as a good example of gobbledegook:

In her detailed 324-page report commissioned by the council, [Jackie Gillies] said additions to the exterior of the town hall would need to be ‘extremely carefully considered in order to avoid detracting from both the bulk appearance of the building and/or the rhythm provided by the articulation and placing of the openings on all facades.’ It’s hardly surprising it took Ms Gillies 324 pages to write her report. 

In another place (in the now defunct Dunedin freebie newspaper, Deadline), I found this piece of rather unsubstantiated journalism: I agree with his sentiments on the stupidity of NZ’s marijuana laws, which are (as far as I can make out), principally there because some Christian nut-job blackmailed the government into backing away from the reforms recommended by their own legal and medical experts. ‘some Christian nut-job blackmailed the government’ – oh, puleese, Mr Ben Vidgen. If the Closed Brethren couldn’t change the way a party thought by using a heck of a lot of money, I don’t personally think that any Christian nut-job (whatever that may actually be in real life) could blackmail the government. But then again, maybe I’m as wrong as I think you are! 

 

And the last of my quotes today is this paragraph from a wonderful piece of humorous writing by David Hill, whose fairly regular pieces in the ODT opinion pages are invariably a delight to read. He’s talking about walk shorts, those wonderful pieces of menswear that were fashionable in the 70s (and still are, in some circles). I still have those walk-shorts. Partly this is because men bond much more with their clothing than women do. Those who claim Anglo-Saxon males aren’t capable of deep emotional attachment have never seen a man trying to throw out a 12-year-old T-shirt. I can empathise entirely with this: I’ll wear clothes until they’re practically falling apart, if they’ve been something I enjoy wearing. I don’t like to part with clothes until I’ve got my last ounce of wear out of them, for one thing, but equally I hate trying out new clothes. 

You can read Hill’s piece here. The Otago Daily Time’s approach to archiving older material is much improved from the time I wrote this post. (You can now find some of my book reviews there along with other bits of writing.)

 

Photo of (one bit of) the Dunedin Town Hall by bronzebrew, on Flickr.com

This post was updated on the 12.10.20 due to various links being out of date. 

Art/Christianity/Crossmans/Fromberg

I mentioned our church in the last post, and was reminded that the artists Wallace Crossman and his wife, who paints under the name of Rosalie Gillies, also go there. I’ve probably mentioned before that we have three of their works: one largish picture by Wallace and two by Rosalie. I say this not to boast, just to state the facts!
Wallace and Rosalie are the parents of children who also have artistic streaks; one daughter whose name for the moment escapes me, sculpts in Oamaru stone, and one of the sons, Bruce Crossman, who lives in Australia, is a successful composer.
Like his parents, Bruce is a Christian. On one site, there’s this statement: Bruce Crossman sees his music as an expression of the inner life (spiritual and emotional) in combination with a conscious intellectualism, which aims to express a ‘life essence’ to an audience.
There’s an even more focused statement on another site: I see the spiritual essence in my own work as an expression of a Christian faith whereby composition becomes a deep-felt emotion and spiritual sensibility linking heaven and earth.
Bruce’s music is barely known in New Zealand, his home country. Sometimes you just have to go outside your usual world to be heard. I’m one of the many New Zealanders who’s never heard his work. Years ago, when my wife and I were helping Wally and Rosalie with some interior decorating, Wally showed me the stage designs he’d done for an opera that Bruce had written. I don’t know if the opera’s ever been produced.
On the other hand, Wally’s designs for last year’s Narnia stage production (Prince Caspian) were well received.
All this is a typical bit of rambling. It’s that time of night. The time when the air tools its way into your brain and makes logical progression a little difficult. Anyway, it’s good to commend the Crossmans to you as artists and Christians, a combination I know from experience isn’t always the easiest.
In a book I’m reading at the moment (Take This Bread, by Sara Miles) another Christian artist is mentioned – Paul Fromberg. Miles writes, ‘Paul’s interest in religious architecture, liturgy and art was not just academic, but passionately spiritual, and it put him at odds with the church.’
The church isn’t always at odds with artists, as Christianity itself isn’t, but there are often times when the artist himself or herself is at odds with the church, or with Christianity. But trying to figure out how to be an artist in the context of Christianity is often difficult: the artist can be torn between doing works of justice and mercy and good, and doing art, which so often seems to bring nothing of ‘value’ to the world; it doesn’t alleviate suffering, it doesn’t feed the poor. How can it be valuable? Jesus never mentions art and neither does Paul.
I’m not going to go into the great debate about art and Christianity that all artists, I’m sure, have to work through. Suffice, at the moment, to say that some artists – the Crossmans, for example – seem to be more at home within the two worlds than others (me, or Paul Fromberg).

Promote Yourself! Now!

I’ve talked about the late Lindsay Crooks before in this blog. Apart from being an artist of high calibre, he also thoroughly enjoyed surfing. At this funeral it was a surprise, I think, to the arty people, to find that the church also contained a large number of (ageing) surfies.
But something else was special about Lindsay. He was one of the few artists I know who had marketing ability. I guess Grahame Sydney is another; certainly his work is available in many reproductions and books, but Lindsay seemed to do it with a certain ease. We first met when he walked into my shop one day saying he’d met my wife up at the Health Centre and she’d suggested coming to see me. What he was doing was hiring out his unsold paintings at a very reasonable price for three months at a time. It provided Lindsay with an audience for the works, and the hirer with a certain thrill in ‘owning’ something special for a time, and the opportunity to have a change of picture regularly. All, as I said, for a very reasonable price. In fact the price was ridiculous, but the value of it was that it made Lindsay known. We would never have come across him personally in any other way. As it was, after that we would look out for his work, or go and see it in galleries – eventually we even bought a piece, something unheard of for us.
Artists aren’t, in general, good at self-promotion. Like builders and carpenters and other tradesmen who work for themselves, they won’t to get on with the job. Selling your skills and products is another ‘job’ altogether and many tradesmen and artists don’t have that ability. We have some other friends, husband and wife Wally Crossman and Rosalie Gillies, who are excellent artists. But neither of them is good at promotion, and it’s only in the last few years that they’ve had the recognition they deserve because others have promoted them.
I’ve come across a site that seeks to rectify this issue for artists. It focuses on fine art marketing, and is presented in the form of a blog (like this one). One post offers the following suggestions as kind of marketing resolutions for 2007:

Do read an inspiring book from a great direct marketer. Find out what kind of results other people get from good marketing and sales tactics, and get excited about the subject.
Don’t read books about "brand marketing" if you’re a solo or small business. Brand management is for the big guys.
Do make a note of just one or two new marketing activities you will put into action in the first quarter of 2007.
Don’t spend your money on printed promotional material unless you know exactly where it’s needed (for example, at a trade show)
Do sign up for our free mini-course at the top of this page, if you haven’t
already.

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