Poetry
Category: Individual Collections, Poetry, Poetry and Art
Number of pages: 42
ISBN: 9781781727164
Publication date: September 4, 2023
Price: £9.99
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.
Sue Hubbard
Sue Hubbard is an award-winning poet, novelist and art critic. She has published five collections of poetry, Everything Begins with the Skin (Enitharmon), Ghost Station and The Forgetting and Remembering of Air (Salt), Swimming to Albania (Salmon Poetry) and Radium Dreams (Women’s Art Collection, Murray Edwards College, Cambridge) in collaboration with the artist Eileen Cooper RA that also formed a major exhibition.
Twice winner of the London Writers’ competition and twice a Hawthornden Fellow, she has won third prize in the National Poetry Competition and received two bursaries from Yaddo, upstate NY, and a major Arts Council Award. As the Poetry Society’s Public Art Poet, she was commissioned in 2000 by the Arts Council and the BFI to create London’s biggest art poem, Eurydice, at Waterloo’s IMAX. This has now been carved in stone by the artist Gary Breeze and permanently installed in the crypt of St. John’s Church, Waterloo. During her Poetry Society residency she created a number of site-specific poems for Birmingham’s jewellery quarter and was writer-in-residence at the De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill during ArchiTEXT week in 2003. Her 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, including Carcanet’s Oxford Poets 2000. She has contributed to many arts programmes such as Kaleidoscope, Poetry Please, Night Waves and The Verb.
Her novels include: Depth of Field, (Dewi Lewis), Girl in White (Cinnamon and Pushkin Press), and the highly acclaimed Rainsongs, (Duckworth, Overlook Press US, Mercure de France and Yilin Press, China). Flatlands, her fourth novel, is due from Pushkin Press and Mercure de France in June 2023. Rothko’s Red, her collection of short stories, was published by Salt.
She has run creative writing workshops at Tate, the V&A, The Royal Academy, The Royal College of Art, Middlesex University, Kings College, London, Birmingham University, The Architectural Association, The Bartlett School of Architecture and Roche Court Sculpture Park, The Royal College of Art, and Arvon, and taken part in many literary festivals including Cambridge, Ilkely, Kinsale (Ireland), Clifden (Ireland), Listowel Writers Week (Ireland), Port Elliot, Wells by the Sea, and The Dylan Thomas Centre.
As an art critic she has written for Time Out, The Independent on Sunday, 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.
Her pamphlet God’s Little Artist, inspired by the work of painter Gwen John, was published in September 2023.
“…a series of evocative poetic sketches that trace the arc of Gwen John’s life…”
Ben Woolhead, Buzz Magazine
“[This] slim volume is quietly contemplative, pared down and focused in homage to those qualities in John’s work which continue to fascinate and enthral… Sue Hubbard’s contribution to the literary celebration and exploration of Gwen’s life and work is, through her verse, to enable us to feel with Gwen John as her life-choices emerge and as her work finds its focus as God’s little artist.”
Jonathan Evens, Stride Magazine
“…this is an important creative contribution to the ongoing reappraisal of Gwen John; but, more than that, its poems provide a fine match of uncomplicated forms and lucid writing to Gwen John’s ascetic life and exquisite art.’
Matthew Paul
“…this is a masterclass in clarity and focus in writing poetry. Gwen John exists like never before.”
Poetry Parc
“In the Introduction, Hubbard references Elizabeth Bishop’s belief that everyone should experience an extensive period of solitude in their life. As well as the clear relevance to Gwen John’s life, there is a nourishing Bishop-like tone in the poetry that is a further enrichment… This is a fine book, beautifully produced and with just the right amount of poems in it and perfectly arranged. For this writer, it was the ideal companion after a day at a recent exhibition of her work. It has a life well beyond that.”
Adrian Buckner, Litter Magazine
“Hubbard writes exquisitely of colour and its connections to spirituality… her skills as a novelist come to the fore as the poems animate John’s character and (often dire) circumstances convincingly… God’s Little Artist… may go some way towards ensuring [John’s] life and work receive the attention they deserve.”
Sarah Westcott, Artemis
‘With its wonderfully glowing imagery this is a work to be treasured.’
Gary Day, Everybody's Reviewing
‘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
‘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
‘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
