Overview

"God's Little Artist is a biography in verse of Welsh painter Gwen John (1876 - 1939). As with many female painters of the time, John's work was often overshadowed by that of her male contemporaries, especially her brother Augustus John. God's Little Artist is a celebration of her passionate life and work, illustrated with precision, authenticity and the keen painterly eye of the poet, novelist and art critic Sue Hubbard. ""In fifty years' time,"" wrote the painter Augustus John, ""I shall be remembered only as the brother of Gwen"". Now, nearly 100 years after Gwen John's death, her younger brother's prescient words don't seem so surprising as her work experiences a resurrection alongside other previously neglected female artists. God's Little Artist begins with poems about Gwen John's early life spent in Tenby with her brother Augustus, under the dour glare of their solicitor, organ-playing father. They detail her time in London studying at the Slade School of Art, and her eventual move to Paris where she modelled for other artists. It was here that she met Auguste Rodin, who was thirty-six years her senior and by whom she was captivated. Through close observation, and a landscape of colour, these poems bring John's artistic eye to the fore. Minute details from a 'pink china cup' to the way a shawl 'hangs in a cloud of indigo grief' bring these poems to life. Her heart-breaking affair with Rodin is told through a series of wistful poems depicting the loneliness and depression she felt as he drifted away. In her introductory essay, Sue Hubbard discusses how the loss of Gwen John's mother when she was a child could have impacted her later life. She was an intensely private person, with a tendency to become fixated on people and relationships, as shown in the two thousand letters she wrote to Rodin over thirteen years, and, later, in her intense commitment to her faith. For John, God and art became inextricably linked and saintliness an obsessive goal. Gradually, John's descent into poor health seeps into the poems, culminating with her tragic premature death, hastened, perhaps, by the use of toxic lead white paint. Regardless of the tragedies and challenges she undoubtedly faced, Gwen John was a woman of great passion. With precision and authenticity, succinctness and warmth, Sue Hubbard animates her singular life."

Full Product Details

9781781727164

Table of Contents

Reviews

"""Love is lonelier than solitude. Losing her mother at eight and running wild on Tenby beach hardly prepared this frail but determined Welsh child for passing sleepless nights in unrequited love for Rodin, who cared only for his art, and drawing in 'the clean ligh t/ of morning' while remembering 'those Pembroke fields'. Sue Hubbard's poems on this often anguished life delicately evoke the haunted atmosphere of Gwen John's own wonderful art."" - Ruth Padel; ""Like Gwen John's drawings in 'Blue', the poems in Sue Hubbard's inspired sequence often 'speak by quiet suggestion'. Underlying the poetry is Hubbard's knowledge of a visual artist's processes, and she is able to penetrate the world of colour, for instance, and of 'things'. With apparent ease, she conjures Gwen John's sensibility. An immersive and revelatory reading experience."" - Moniza Alvi; ""These poems see Gwen John as she would wish to be seen, in the clear light of her art. In crisp and memorable vignettes, they grasp the coherence that runs through a life of changes. Catching her particular blend of the cool and the passionate, of physical immediacy, discipline and distance, Sue Hubbard's writing gets her whole."" - Philip Gross"

Author Information

Sue Hubbard is an award-winning poet, novelist and art critic. She has published five collections of poetry, most recently Radium Dreams (Women's Art Collection, Murray Edwards College, Cambridge), which is a collaboration with the artist Eileen Cooper RA, inspired by the remarkable life of Marie Curie. Sue has also published three novels with her fourth, Flatlands, forthcoming from Pushkin Press in June 2023. Sue's poems have been read on Radio 3, Radio 4 and RTE, and appeared in The Irish Times, The London Magazine and Acumen, as well as prestigious anthologies. As an art critic she has written for Time Out, The Independent, The New Statesman and The London Magazine and is a senior writer for Artlyst. A collection of her art writings Adventures in Art was published by Damien Hirst's Other Criteria.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available