Dennis Creffield - FOR REGINA
/an excerpt from anthology "Curator Aquarum:
In Memoriam Regina Derieva", 2015.
http://arsint.com/book_c_a.html
/
In every day terms we hardly knew each other. I met Regina
and
Alexander in Jerusalem in 1993—at St. Peter in Gallicantu—where
the
’Cock Crowed Thrice’. Alex ran the bar and I was
outside painting the
Holy City. Later I remember Regina here in Brighton writing
at the
wooden table in my kitchen—wreathed in a cloud of cigarette
smoke.*
We didn't speak much each others languages but we communicated
through our better tongues—poetry and painting. I made
an inspired
group of small drawings of her. ** And she wrote a remarkable
poem
about me. She wrote it for an exhibition I was about
to have—
’Impressions of Castles’—and it was printed in the catalogue.
In it she
explores the inner and outer doings of my itinerant work.
Most
importantly for me was that she called the poem ’Necessary
Overseers’
which puzzled me until I understood it—and shall always
be grateful to
her for a fresh vision of what I have long believed.***
On reflection the Necessary Overseers are of course the
Angels. Not
the beautiful winged creatures or heavenly messengers
of scripture—
though they are those as well. Here they are seen as
the very life and
being of the physical world—there is no reality other
than them. This is
very like what my teacher David Bomberg used to say to
us that the
artist must seek to catch the ’spirit in the mass’. ’Necessary’
because
without them there is no reality—just a waxworks of externals.
And
’Overseers’ because we need their help to experience
this reality—
Regina had this vision for sure.
For ’Necessary Overseers’—thank you Regina.
August 15, 2014
---------------------------------------------
*For a bit more than a week, Regina and I stayed in Dennis
Creffield’s apartment in Brighton in
August of 2003. As the result of that short visit
to the UK, Regina’s long poem, “Archangelengland”,
appeared later that same year. Dennis was depicted
in the eighth section of this poem. —A. D.
____
** A group of a total of ten portrait drawings was made
by Dennis Creffield in 1994. A series of
fourteen drawings intended to illustrate Regina’s poems
for the book, Wintertime Lectures for
Terrorists, was also created. The themes of these
drawings, all of which are dated 1994, include the
Crucifixion, the Tower, the Star, and the Sea.
There is an inscription on the back of one of these
drawings—two lines from Yeats’ “Byzantium”, which are
evocative of the first conversation of
Regina and Dennis in East Jerusalem in 1993.
“Towers for Regina. 1994”
“That dolphin-torn,
that gong-tormented sea” —A. D.
***Six of Regina’s books include paintings and drawings
by Dennis Creffield: one published in
Jerusalem, three in Sweden and two volumes of Selected
Poems and Essays, in Russia. Plus to the
above mentioned “Necessary Overseers”, Regina also dedicated
one of the poems in her book,
The Last Island, to Dennis. —A. D.
