Nika Talbot

Ella Guru has led a vibrant life… the mother of one is a ‘Stuckist’ artist and portrait painter, a teacher and has worked as a go-go dancer, a guitarist, and with the homeless, moving from Ohio to squat in London in the ’80s, all of which infuses her magic realist style. Her latest work is a 22-card Major Arcana Tarot Deck, which mirrors her journey from city to the seaside. Nicci Talbot met the artist at her home studio for a reading.

Last year Ella Guru packed her bags and moved to St Leonards-on-Sea after 23 years in London.

For the past 2 1/2 years, she has been working on a new collection: a hand-painted, oil on canvas, 22-card Major Arcana Tarot Deck, which has documented an arduous journey from city to the seaside.

“The cards are about the journey of moving,” she tells me when we meet at her studio and were inspired by her role as one of the 13 founders of the Stuckist Art Movement in 1999 (she also set up the website). At Paris Stuckist Ella Dax’s instigation 22 Stuckists painted a card each from the Major Arcana. Ella’s was ‘The Magician’ inspired by her friend, the international magician Paul Nathan. What she didn’t realise back then was that this was the start of a momentous journey that has culminated in a move to the seaside and the creation of her own Tarot Deck.

It has not been a sequential journey. “They are more back to front” and have taken on a life of their own with fortune-tellers, surfers and paddleboarders (her new hobby – she has swapped masked balls for masked swims…) colliding with Burlesque performers, artists, musicians and vagabonds. “Three of the cards are about Hastings, can you guess which ones…?”

There are recurrent themes of identity, alternative lifestyles, journeys, and being an outsider.

Does she feel that way about the art world?

“I’m a trained artist with a degree and so I don’t fit the bill of ‘Outsider’. However, I also don’t seem to fit in anywhere in the art world. I am not a conceptual artist. Nor am I a completely traditional painter. I am a ‘Stuckist’, which encompasses a huge variety of styles but is more of an attitude than a specific method of working. Some Stuckists can be outsiders; others have PhDs and successful careers.” She is inspired by painters like Caravaggio and Velázquez and her work has a modern twist influenced by The Tiger Lillies, Rocky Horror Picture Show, The Last Tuesday Society, Gypsy Hotel, Shore Leave (a sailor’s club) and the Lucha Britannia Mexican wrestling shows (wrestling comes up a lot of her work inspired by her childhood friend Maura who took it up in Seattle).

She works mainly from photographs she has taken and likes to play with role and gender reversal, exploring the idea of changing one’s identity through make-up and costume. She was brought up Catholic in Columbus, Ohio and says there was lots of shame around the body and being naked, so it’s interesting that she has chosen to push these boundaries with her work.

Scenes of Bacchanal Delight

Many of the cards depict a journey of some sort or a ‘facing the demons’ scenario. Occasionally she’ll add a self-portrait – the Medusa Mermaid is her scuttling away from the telephone not wanting to deal with bureaucratic nonsense, and in The Chariot, she is on the island of Sark in a chariot race, desperate to move. The Justice card shows a young black man, a friend’s son from Hackney who was so fed up with being stopped and searched by police that he went to Cambridge to study Law. The Empress card depicts Kali, the destructive side of the Mother Goddess. The Emperor is Pan, Alexander the Great and the Green Man, and the Devil is a drunk. My spiritual guide (The Hierophant) is a Rock & Roll priest, and Temperance is Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber, who mixes hair dye amongst severed heads. This was inspired by a friend, Amanda Mae Steele.

She had so many compliments on the peachy ass in the Devil card that it now has its own Facebook Page – The Arse of Almande Magdalene – and has been added to the Wheel of Fortune card. It was also a performance piece for a while in Brighton, she says, and you could spank it, stroke it, kiss it…

Ella has also been surprised by a number of uncanny events since she finished the paintings. Her friend who inspired the Empress Kali card fell pregnant and she noticed a fertility rabbit in the corner… another card shows a friend caught between illness and health and he later developed cancer.

I am curious about the eggs in the frying pan in ‘Baked Velázquez’, as they look slightly out of place. She explains that Velázquez painted eggs frying in his first masterpiece at age 19. In the 17th century, that would have been difficult because there were no photographs to capture that moment when the eggs are just starting to congeal.

Being in her studio is a bit of a magic carpet ride and so, feeling inspired I asked her to give me a quick Tarot reading.

“I can give you a basic 4-card reading,” she says, explaining that her friend Trisha is a whizz with Tarot (and will be doing readings throughout her exhibition, which starts tonight in St Leonards). “Trisha can do full readings with 72-cards. She does Romanian Gypsy cards too and the last few times she’s done them has been amazingly accurate – spookily so…”.

I drew the first and last cards of the pack as part of my set of four – ‘The Fool’ and ‘The World’ – which seemed rather fortuitous. The former indicates where I am now… “about to embark on a journey” she says, and the latter indicating that things will be alright. “The world is your oyster… things will come together.”

A nice balance to my favourite of the local cards, which depicts a darker side of Hastings… the Tower pub in St Leonards balancing precariously above the falling cliffs of Rock-a-Nore in Hastings Old Town (part of the cliff recently fell down and Ella was on the beach at the time). It captures the mood of living here brilliantly.

Signed packs of the Tarot cards will also be on sale at £45 each or you can buy them online here. 

I took the darkness and ran with it. She is passing the baton to Anne Sophie, her young protégé. She is saying be bold, be free, and be true to yourself. Express who you are, and don’t hold back. And whatever you do, “Don’t wear beige. It might kill you.” Sue Kreitzman.

Sue Kreitzman – http://www.ellaguru.co.uk

www.ellaguru.co.uk

Read our interview with Sue Bourne, director of Fabulous Fashionistas.

A couple of scenes in this play wound me up. In one the painter Marc Chagall is dismissive of his wife Bella’s talents and says, “You’ll never be a writer because you’re always thinking about something else”. In another, he’s four days late coming home following the birth of their daughter because he’s been immersed in his painting. When Bella tells him how painful the birth was and that she can hardly walk he says, “Do you think what I do happens painlessly?”.

The Flying Lovers is director Emma Rice’s final play for Kneehigh Theatre and tells the story of the surrealist painter Marc Chagall and his wife Bella Rosenfeld, the daughter of a wealthy Jewish family who own several jewellery shops in Vitebsk, Belarus. They go through several events together – two world wars, the Russian Revolution and the persecution of the Jews which drives them out of Russia to seek refuge elsewhere. I love this painting by Chagall, the inspiration for the cover photo from the play, which captures freedom of spirit and their feelings for one another. Chagall believed that freedom of the soul led to more abstract work.

It’s a small cast – just four actors on stage – Marc and Bella (Marc Antolin and Audrey Brisson) and two musicians (composer Ian Ross and multi-instrumentalist James Gow) who play beautiful, haunting music and take on different roles throughout. The first half is joyful to watch: funny, sexy; a riot of colour that introduces both characters and tells us how they met. Various scenes are played out around an imaginative tent pole created by Sophia Clist. The mood is expansive and full of possibilities as they get to know one another.

Chagall is restless though and building his career so goes off to Paris to discover new art movements – Fauvism and Cubism – he wants to be taken seriously as a painter in his own country and for this, he needs to leave and exhibit elsewhere in Europe. Bella stays home convinced that he’s discovering other women too. After a few years, he returns and they marry.

The mood becomes more sombre in the second half as they flee to St Petersburg so he doesn’t have to do service. The reality of married life sets in, Bella at home alone in their damp flat counting down the hours until he returns and they can “create a new colour together”. A smart and educated woman, she’s aware that she has been his muse and the inspiration for much of his work (“My whole life is pervaded by the colour of loving you”), but at the end of the day it’s his name at the bottom of the canvas and “what shall I do?”.

She starts keeping a journal and at the same time discovers that she’s pregnant, her initial surprise turning into creativity as she immerses herself in her writing.

On the surface, this seems like a simple play, a little clichéd in parts – starving artist meets a wealthy woman who becomes his lover and muse, but there are several themes running throughout which are just as relevant today: what it means to be married, an artist, a mother, private versus public life, loss of identity and homeland, loneliness, and the hidden side of lives that are not in the public eye.

How gutting that as they finally get some stability and peace in New York Bella becomes ill and dies at 56 from lack of suitable medication. Chagall goes into mourning and realises how wrapped up he’s been in his own work. He publishes her Yiddish memoirs with their daughter’s help. It’s also sad that it’s only after she’s gone that he realises how vivid her writing is and that although they saw the same things in life it was through different eyes.

It didn’t move me to tears as some of their other plays have but this is a story worth telling and even more relevant today with the movement of people across Europe. It is an intimate and personal tribute from Emma Rice to the theatre company she has loved and grown with over the past few years.

At the Lost Gardens of Heligan, St Austell from Thursday 14th to Sunday 31st July 2016.

Some of Marc Chagall’s paintings are on display for two months in Vitebsk.

Photographer Holly Wren’s exhibition LOVE LIVED is on the first and second floor lobbies at Broadgate Tower in the City of London. Giant cubes featuring images of 14 people she interviewed for her project were lit up outside back in February and are now on the move to two further locations. “The cubes have been really popular and look spectacular at night. They are a great way for people to engage with art,” says Holly, whose aim was to have a cross-generational project that challenges preconceptions around love and relationships and celebrates ageing. She is also questioning why older people – the fabric of the city – are no longer anywhere to be seen.

“It was really important that the project wasn’t all hearts and flowers. There are people who have that and there are people who have never found love, and all the degrees in between. There are many different types of love to experience, and these stories demonstrate that breadth”.

All of her subjects except one couple, Rita and Ernie (above) were sourced through Contact the Elderly, the charity supporting the exhibition. They were all photographed at home and have experienced love in many forms – from chaperoned dates to chance meetings, dance halls and war army bases. Themes include first loves, passion, rejection, affection and marriage.

All of the stories are fascinating but some stand out for their subjects’ bravery in challenging social norms at the time. Joan was rejected by her first love and went on to build a business based on love, running the UK’s first escort agency and a computer dating service with a man she met on a blind date. Chitra from Trinidad shunned her arranged marriage when she realised it would mean giving up her career and moved to the UK in 1963 to train as a teacher. Florence from Jamaica responded to a lonely-hearts ad in her local paper, which led to a lifelong romance. Sidney, an ex-serviceman, describes his 62-year marriage to Winifred was one of convenience that had its ups and downs and questions how relevant marriage is to the younger generation now.

“We don’t normally ask older people about their experiences of love so it was good to have a conversation around that. I asked them questions like, “Can you describe love?” and “what was it that you loved about your husband?” Two of the men cried when talking about their wives who had died but interestingly none of the women did, which surprised me as the exhibition mostly featured women. Sometimes the responses were quite simple, which made me wonder if we overthink love or place too much emphasis on looking for some pre-ordained idea”.

Looking at photos of strangers can be a little surreal so hearing their backstories and having some context through video interviews is grounding. The videos on Holly’s website add depth and enable you to get to know the characters a bit more.  Love is universal in whatever form it takes and it’s reassuring to know we’re not alone with our disappointments.

“I’m amazed at the things people said and their honesty. I feel privileged to have done this. Most ordinary people are completely extraordinary when you dig in…”

LOVE LIVED is at the Broadgate Tower first and second-floor lobby spaces, available to view by appointment until 10^th June. www.lovelived.co.uk.

Visit Contact the Elderly to find out more about joining their team of volunteers.