Murder is Everywhere: David Mackie

Sunday, October 30, 2022

Sheppard Craige’s Italian garden

Il Bosco della Ragnaia, San Giovanni d’Asso, Italy

On the outskirts of San Giovanni d’Asso, not far from Siena, in Tuscany, I was taken to see the remarkable work of art that is Bosco della Ragnaia.

It is difficult to categorise this ten-acre woodland park and garden, into which has been woven images, sculptures, and words. Or perhaps the art is the cornerstone, and the garden has been formed around it?

This huge project was started in 1996 by American landscape artist, Sheppard Craige. He’s been working on it ever since, although when I met him in September, he declared his masterpiece was done.

“I’m trying to design ways it could be maintained, but nothing’s more fragile than a garden. It changes all the time. It changes every five minutes. There’s always decay. Things are dying, things are growing.”

It seems almost ironic that Sheppard has chosen to concentrate most on the land, when his art is particularly known for its depictions of clouds and sky. He reckons that being a painter was an ideal grounding for his work creating the garden.

“Sometimes when you’re painting you do things that you think, maybe it’s not right, but let’s do it anyway, or maybe you don’t have a real purpose—you’re just experimenting—and it was the same thing here.”

The lack of formal layout—sometimes of formal meaning—is part of what makes Bosco della Ragnaia so fascinating. As well as the straight lines, foliage, water and geometric patterns, there are odd words and phrases that seem placed only in order to make you think.

“I only have one rule—I try not to put in words that actually describe the place itself. They’re just things that occur to me, phrases or just three or four words together.”

Unlike landscape gardeners, who often mould the entire surface of a garden to meet their own design, Sheppard says he left the contours of the land undisturbed, and that this is the difference between land art and garden art. But he does like to play with perspective as well as perception.

“I didn’t know what it was going to be. I just started drawing lines on the ground, and then I started to make it. And as it got made, it changed itself.”

Sheppard is married to fellow artist, Frances Lansing, whose clay sculptures are also to be found throughout the park. You never quite know what you’re going to come across next—a quote from one of my favourite poems, to a David Mackie metal sculpture ‘Etruscan Chariot’. The addition of the fallen leaves only seemed to enhance it.

Much like a novel, Sheppard’s garden is telling you a story, even if you don’t entirely grasp what that story is. Nevertheless, it stays in the mind long after you’ve closed the pages, and makes you want to go back to it on a regular basis, just to see how everything has changed.

The good news for others hooked by Sheppard Craige’s garden is that it is free to enter and enjoy. Go take a stroll that’s a workout for the imagination.

Just watch those mosquitoes…

This week’s Word of the Week is shilly-shally, a contraction of shall I, shall I not. To shilly-shally is to hesitate, to vacillate, a state of mind familiar to writers everywhere when they procrastinate. Its close cousin is dilly-dally, which suggests physical dawdling rather than indecisiveness.

Monday, June 25, 2018

In Montisi

Annamaria in Chiantishire

Thanks to the good offices of John Lawton--fellow crime writer and dear to many of us MIE bloggers, I have had my first visit to that part of Tuscany preferred by visitors from the British Isles: the Crete Senesi, the hills southeast of splendid Siena. Nicknamed Chiantishire because of its density of English population.

Montisi is a beautiful medieval hill town. The atmosphere is nothing short of splendid. Viz--

What impressed me most about the ambience of Montisi were the relationships between the locals and the expats--whether seasonal or year round. I saw no divide between the resident Italians and the resident imports. They all seemed capable of sliding between English and Italian, sometimes within the course of a single sentence. Much more telling: they took a kind and caring interest in one another--who was sick, who needed extra company because his wife was away, whose chid was nervous over a university application. All the kinds of things one might expect in the life of a small village, but with none of the "us/them" dichotomy typical of say a town in Florida where northerners show up only in winter. With the people of Montisi, there is only "us."

My host was Ugo Mariotti who was a producer and casting director for the movie "Don't Look Now" with Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland.

Lawton (my term of endearment for him) told me about the artists and writers who call the town their full or part-time home. Among Ugo's neighbours are painters Liz Graham-Yooll (who also illustrates children's books), Elizabeth Cochrane, and Sue Kennington. And sculptor David Mackie.

Mackie's magnificent bird house.

Mackie's avian neighbor, but presumably not a resident of the above.

Mackie's sculpture of Caliban, which figures in John Lawton's
brilliant "Friends and Traitors."

In addition to John, Montisi has hosted authors Rupert Thomson and at one point a few yers ago, our own Zoe Sharpe.

The area is home to Bruce Kennedy, a world renowned maker of harpsichords and clavichords. He is also the executive Director of Picolo Accademia, a music school in Montisi, which jointly with my hometown favorite Julliard School of Music, hosts an annual festival of baroque performances. I am missing it by a week. Next time, I plan to be there to hear the music.

In the meanwhile here is a sample of the playing of this year's star performer: Skip Sempe'--playing one of Kennedy's harpsichords: