How Green is My Valley

I just took this photo at the back of our property before heavy heavy rain arrived- the light was all golden and coppery- really unusual for this time of year without the sun shining.OK blogger won't let me- later...

I received a book in the post today entitled "The Ground of the Image" by Jean Luc Nancy ISBN 0-8232-2541-0 and published by Fordham. Part of the blurb says
"If anything marks the image,its a deep ambivalence.Denounced as superficial, illusory and groundless,images are at the same time attributed with exhorbitant power and assigned a privileged relation to truth.Mistrusted by philosophy, forbidden and embraced by religions, manipulated as "spectacle" and proliferated in the media,images never cease to present their multiple aspects, their paradoxes, their flat but receding spaces."

It has been said that the twentieth century saw the domination of appreciation of the world and thereby art through the process of vision- that vision is the most accurate and only way to perceive truth of the world- thereby relegating other senses to a lower echelon- for example touch. Textile is such a tactile medium in which to practice and it too has been relegated to the lower echelons of arts practice- is the relationship between touch and textiles a part of a push the privilege images only? I will be interested to read what Nancy's thoughts are on the image.

I have also found a an iffy assumption in the early chapter on Matisse- the type of sweets that he would have eaten; striped humbugs and twists of barley sugar. Given the diet my mother would have experienced in her childhood and something which is still common in Flanders- I think he is more likely to have had babbelaars ( a sweet made of butter and sugar and twisted) and kaneel stokken ( which i remember having at the kermis or fairs in my childhood and which were a treat as was sweet wood). It sounds like I am being a bit of a stickler but when i was doing my masters and my lacework I quoted some dutch and flemish authorities ( which I translated)- it was questioned - which started me looking in reverse as well- that is -what assumptions are made in english writing about europe?