Leonora Carrington

And we were going through ideas and this idea of maybe hosting a seance came up and that we might be able to speak with Yolo or somehow converse with people across time and place.

And Leonora Carrington had come up as well as someone that was influential for us.

Again, kind of like a British-Irish hybrid figure, like someone who was born in England but who had Irish connections and then went to Europe and then went to Mexico.

We were kind of thinking the fact that we were kind of speaking across time and place with the two of us between Wales and Ireland through the internet, through post that it could even expand further and it could include historical people.

Yeah.

A-U-M A-U-M

Yeah, I think I was surprised at how easy it felt and how quickly, you know, I was hanging out with Yolo Morganog and Leonora Carrington and Brian Friel on a trampoline.

Brian Friel giving out sweets with Irish words on them from his socks.

Okay, all right.

but like it continuously happens to an adulthood, like Leonora Carrington, um, the Mi'kmaq poet, Rita Jo, um, lots of people, um, have showed me different paths I could take with writing.

Um, it's, it's been a wonderful experience, but yeah, I think Sylvia Plath was really like the first time I read an author and kind of had my mind truly blown and yeah.

I love what you said.

So Lost Films of Hollywood is a book from a parallel universe.

And this is a book, I was really obsessed with surrealism and the painter Leonora Carrington.

I wanted to write a book about someone, a surrealist painter, a woman who lived through the 20th century and saw all the weirdnesses of art and never made it.

Because that was just really appealing to me.

Oh, it's so perfect, isn't it?

It's a bril- And also, really weirdly, the character's based on Leonora Carrington, and Deborah Parkinson, Leonora Carrington, they sound...

They're the same amount of syllables and stuff like that.

So it's-

... as I say.

And, um, and doing things like, uh, like, you know, so like I'm going to go and see, um, uh, like, um, the Leonora, Leonora Carrington exhibition-

Mm

... that's over in Paris.

Images of grapefruit leaves also adorn the cozy kitchen above a mural of fluttering birds discovered beneath a layer of white paint, possibly done by Kahlo herself.

An inscription reads, el maison de los guerriones the sparrows inn it's easy to imagine the family gathering around the table perhaps the most striking space is downstairs where a small easel stands on a desk in a bare brick room surrounded by dolls callos shipped home from san francisco's chinatown around nineteen thirty because camacho told me she wrote to her sister that they reminded her of mexico standing there i felt a satisfying intimacy from encountering the everyday lives of larger-than-life figures which both demystifies them and makes us appreciate their extraordinary achievements all the more i had a similar experience in the former home of an acquaintance of callow's the prolific english-born painter sculptor and novelist leonora carrington one of a coterie of surrealist artists who fled europe for mexico carrington produced nearly a dozen books and more than two thousand visual works during a long and colorful life mysterious creations often hybrid humans and animals that were once said by contemporary admirer edward james to have quote, materialized in a cauldron at the stroke of midnight, end quote.

Carrington's Journey to Mexico reads like an adventure novel.

In the 1930s, she turned her back on the aristocratic comfort of a conservative Catholic upbringing in Lancashire to study art in Florence and live as a bohemian in Paris, where she became romantically involved with Max Ernst, the German-born pioneer of Dadaism and Surrealism.

she narrowly escaped the nazi invasion in nineteen forty fleeing to spain where she strategically married a mexican diplomat then traveled underground to portugal and new york eventually finding refuge in mexico city in in nineteen forty eight carrington moved into a house in the roma neighborhood with her husband a hungarian-born photographer and she remained there for twenty years before moving to the united states in her last decades she returned to the mexico city house to live and work Today, the district is filled with CDMX's trendiest cafes, bars, and restaurants, but a sense of its quiet charm a few decades ago can be gained from Alfonso Cuaron's Oscar-winning 2018 film Roma.

Once obscure, Carrington's artistic reputation has soared since her death in 2011 at age 94.

Plans to open her three-story Bauhaus-inspired abode on Chihuahua Street as a public museum faltered in 2024, but it is now preserved by the Metropolitan Autonomous University as a research center, the Leonora Carrington House Studio.

true devotees can visit by appointment and by paying a hefty one hundred dollar fee the homey lived-in rooms have hardly been touched since carrington died and they are adorned with original bronze sculptures creating a mythical bestiary cats with human faces a life-size horse with the head of a crescent moon a crocodile with baby crocodiles riding on its back a larger version of which can be seen a few blocks away on insurgentes avenue the most intimate space once again is the kitchen with spices still in their racks a half-smoked cigarette in an ashtray snapshots stuck casually to the cupboard doors and a dark sculpture of a fantastical beast hunched by the sink Mexico City reveres its writers as much as its visual artists.

also just using the imagery.

So we have a drawing in the show by Leonora Carrington called Two Dogs Howling at the Moon, which is coming to us from Princeton.

It's absolutely gorgeous drawing.

If you didn't know anything about tarot, you wouldn't know that this is basically a direct translation of the Rider-Waite-Smith moon card.

So I'm writing this book right now that is about an exhibition that was organized by Peggy Guggenheim in 1943 called Exhibition by 31 Women.

And it included people like Frida Kahlo and Leonora Carrington and Merit Oppenheim and Louise Nevelson, but it also included people you've never heard of.

And so it's been an interesting deep dive into a group of femme artists who were grouped together, I think, actually in exhibition form, possibly for the first time.

I mean, I'm not really an art historian.