Gobbledygook and bluebells…

Some of you may remember Professor Stanley Unwin, the comedian who originated the word gobbledygook.  Gobbledygook, for the uninitiated, is any text containing jargon or especially convoluted English that results in it being excessively hard to understand or even incomprehensible. 

In a similar vein, Dylan Thomas was all for taking the highfalutin nonsense out of poetry.  He claimed that all one should say of a good poem is, as they said of the first motion picture, by God it moves, and so by God it does! 

But when it comes to talking gibberish, many of those who write about art can leave the rest standing.  A recently launched magazine focused towards “a converging nexus of artists” offers “the articulation of a contemporary space, and of a place that lies within coordinates that have become scattered and nebulous, without bounderies”.

Eh?  As passionate as I am for the subject you’ve lost me just as surely as Stanley Unwin did all those years ago.

I will illustrate this topic, in a non-convoluted way, with a painting of the English countryside that I made twenty years ago.  On my wife’s first day of her first visit to England she went walking in the woods shown in the painting and was enraptured by a carpet of bluebells.  Why?   Because bluebells don’t grow on Grenada and seen for the first time the flower is as beautiful as anything that grows on the exotic Spice Island of her birth.  Like my painting, it’s as simple as that!