Good morning gentle readers. Where else might you find a coaching blog that covers the latest (and greatest) art exhibitions at Cardiff Museum? Never let it be said that I’m afraid to go niche.
I wrote a little while back about a Gwen John painting at the museum that I kept going back to and that I’d found strangely mesmeric.
I’d recently read a book in which a quote of hers stood out that explained her philosophy, essentially that you have to be prepared to commit and work quickly and be comfortable not always getting things right (wasting a lot of canvasses), which I thought also had parallels with the mechanisms that we use in coaching & the mindset the coachee tries to adopt to get things moving.
Gwen John’s stock has continued to rise and the museum is now hosting an extensive exhibition of her work which has been getting rave reviews in the national press, and which, despite being one of the few “paid for” exhibitions, was pretty busy when we went along to see it a couple of weeks ago.
https://museum.wales/cardiff/whatson/12640/Gwen-John-Strange-Beauties
The drawings, paintings, watercolours and artefacts on show take you through her life’s work, starting out at the Slade school of art with her brother. It looks like that formed the basis of her classical training, having her capture portraits of her contemporaries, models and other artists and musicians, who would sit for the classes.
There’s a prescient painting of a violinist at practice which seems to foreshadow her predilection for drawing people whilst they were seemingly unaware (although the notes accompanying many of the drawings explain that she would painstakingly insist on very particular poses of those she was painting, explaining why there were so few pictures of people posed with cats… as they were not so co-operative in holding a pose).
She moved out to France and, after undertaking a walking tour, settled in Paris where she made the acquaintance of many of the famous and leading names in art and poetry of the time (Rodin, Rilke, Matisse and Picasso). It sounds as though she had quite an intense and obsessive personality, but also tended to prefer to work alone. The paintings in this era are properly spooky, painted onto boards prepared with chalk and glue, that allowed her to glob paint onto the surface and move it around until it was placed as she wanted it.
The many repeated images of the same models, in slightly different poses, occasionally different clothes and in different types of light, seem to catch different aspects of the sitter’s personality. Where sometimes the paintings can look a bit flat, when reproduced on a computer screen, in real life they change aspect as you walk past them, the light from the gallery highlighting different textures on the painting surface and giving the images a sense of movement not entirely unlike those lenticular lens rulers and fridge magnets that you may have come across as a kid.
In later years she obsessively sketched and painted the nuns and the congregation at her local church (much to the consternation of the vicar), and what is remarkable in these simple line drawings and watercolours, is how much context and personality and difference she manages to capture in these repeated views of people, painted from behind. The subtle differences in how someone holds their shoulders, tilts their head, or positions their hands, radically alters the way we understand them to be feeling.
So, back to coaching. I think there’s a few things we can learn from her work, both good and bad. There’s lessons to be gleaned from how we relate and pay attention to body language. The subtle shifts in how people show up physically in our coaching sessions can tell us an awful lot more than if we just listen to the words. As our coachee’s witness, we can feed back those observations to them, and through that confirm or clarify the impressions that we’re forming (and help the coachee to understand how their non-verbal cues might be being interpreted outside of the coaching context).
The way in which we can also help a coachee is to understand that it is through repetition that we move towards expressing or perfecting the work that we’re undertaking. That perfectionism can be stifling if it prevents us from starting, and so it can be important to evolve a body of work and edit back, in order to get where we need to get to.
It’s also possible to look at some of the fiddlier parts of her life (which, while singular, also didn’t appear to be a particularly happy one), to consider the idea of how we strike a balance between our work, our calling, and our life in general. The concept of ‘work/life balance’ has ebbed and flowed over the years, but there’s much to be gained from crafting that balance, as opposed to falling into a pattern that isn’t working for us.
But mostly I would say that, as with any art, the real value is to go, and look, or read, or listen, and engage with it on your own terms. It’s the gaps that we fill in ourselves that will provide much of the connection we feel (or don’t) and likewise what we can learn of ourselves, and the world, from doing so.
It’s a nifty exhibition. Five stars. Highly recommend.