Yesterday Pope Francis introduced Mass in the chapel of the Domus Sanctae Marthae in Rome with a prayer dedicated to artists during the Coronavirus pandemic. Later on he rewteeted: "Let us #PrayTogether for artists, who have a great capacity for creativity and show us the path forward through beauty. May the Lord grant each of us the grace of creativity in this moment."
As museums, exhibitions, galleries, venues, performing spaces and film sets closed down to contain the outbreak, many artists and creative minds saw their exhibitions, concerts, events and films being cancelled or postponed indeterminately. Yet, while creativity never stops and many events have been reinvented and relaunched in a digital format, finding "the grace of creativity" may be a bit difficult. Some of us may find it hard to create at the moment as they may have a dear one in hospital or in isolation at home with Coronavirus; others may have developed a feverish obsession with keeping updated and find it difficult to unglue themselves from a computer or smartphone screen; and others may feel depressed and lonely in isolation or may be suffocated by the presence of too many people around them – from random flatmates to family members.
But we can still find the time to get inspired by other artsists and creative minds even when we may not have proper art materials around the house. Scottish poet Edwin Morgan provides us with some great ideas – scrapbooks.
Born in Glasgow in 1920 (yesterday it was actually his birth centenary), Morgan started putting together scrapbooks in the early '30s when he was 11 years old. At the time, he would use school exercise books and cut out images from general knowledge magazines featuring articles about a wide range of topics, from art and anthropology to archaeology, science and zoology.
This passion continued as he grew up, even though he started using ledgers for his scrapbooks and a wider variety of newspapers, magazines and books to make his collages in which he also incorporated his own notes and poems.
Morgan created 16 scrapbooks (totalling over 3600 pages), the last one in 1966, while he was in his mid-40s and had become an established poet and taught in the Department of English Literature at Glasgow University. The books are a mixture of autobiography, documentary and art.
The scrapbooks are extremely interesting as they are considered visual studies, complementary to Morgan's poems. It is indeed as if his visual diaries and catalogues of images were testing grounds for his writing.
When he first started putting them together Morgan focused on adventures, history, archaeology, and explorations, or information that caught his imagination, such as technological and scientific discoveries. His curiosity remained lively as an adult, but he also enriched his scrapbooks with images celebrating other disciplines and interests, from art and astronomy to architecture, film and zoology.
His collages became fascinating collections of ephemera, incorporating sacred imagery from different religions; pictures of coal mining and steel works evoking the industrial areas of Scotland, such as Lanarkshire and Glasgow; castles and statues; a quote from American painter Mark Rothko; a photograph of the hydrogen bomb exploded in 1952 near the Marshall Islands in the North West Pacific; space explorations; tickets and flyers acquired by Morgan on a trip to Russia, and handwritten and printed texts that brought a literary dimension to the images.
As time passed, the scrapbooks became arty collages in a surrealist key with a free association of images and ideas: in some cases bizarre juxtapositions prevail, with large images like the head of a young man emerging from mother in law's cushion cacti, creating arty effects that revealed a particular care in the selection of the various images. Sometimes there are also abstract patterns employed to decorate the gaps between the images and the texts.
It is possible to make connections between some of these images and Morgan's poems: his newspaper headline collages are directly linked with the "Newspoems" which engage with newspaper headlines and with the "Instamatic Poems" (you can bet that, if he had lived today, Morgan would have compiled Pinterest boards or posted on Instagram his compositions).
Morgan was passionate about the art of scrapbooking: in the 1950s and the 1980s, he tried to get his scrapbooks published, but didn't manage to as colour printing the volumes and getting copyright clearance for some of the images (even though most of these pictures were uncredited or it was impossible to trace back to their source) would have been too expensive.
Before he died in 2010 Morgan transferred his papers to Glasgow's University Library that now preserves an extensive Morgan archive in its Special Collections Department. In more recent years Morgan's scrapbooks were digitalised and some of their pages were published online.
Morgan described the scrapbooks as "partly documentary/historical, partly aesthetic, partly satirical and partly personal … a Whitmanian reflecting glass of 'the world' [as] refracted through one personality". So we could maybe move from this concept of scrapbooks as personal, but also documentary diaries, and come up with our own chronicles of this lockdown period we have been living. We may not create as surreal scrapbooks as Morgan's, but we would definitely find joy in the process of making them, rediscovering in this way the grace of creativity.
Comments