12/18/2022 0 Comments Jérôme jarre magic vines![]() ![]() ![]() Into this cultural atmosphere, Cucco and Miller joined their gifts to create a series of stunning and soulful nature-inspired children’s books. Those were the early 1960, when Rachel Carson - the poet laureate of nature writing - had just awakened the modern ecological conscience and was using her hard-earned stature to issue the radical insistence that children’s sense of wonder is the key to conservation. When Cucco moved to Rome as a young artist, he met the young American nature writer John Miller. Over the decades that followed, he grew volcanic with painting and poetry, with photographs and pastels, with art ablaze with a luminous love of life. Giuliano Cucco (1929–2006) was still a boy, living with his parents amid the majestic solitudes of rural Italy, when the common loneliness of childhood pressed against his uncommon gift and the artistic impulse began to emerge, tender and tectonic. Rilke, contemplating the lonely patience of creative work that every artist knows in their marrow, captured this in his lamentation that “works of art are of an infinite loneliness” - Rilke, who all his life celebrated solitude as the groundwater of love and creativity, and who so ardently believed that to devote yourself to art, you must not “let your solitude obscure the presence of something within it that wants to emerge.” If we are lucky enough, or perhaps lonely enough, we learn to reach out from this primal loneliness to other lonelinesses - Neruda’s hand through the fence, Kafka’s “hand outstretched in the darkness” - in that great gesture of connection we call art. One measure of maturity might be how well we grow to transmute that elemental loneliness into the “fruitful monotony” Bertrand Russell placed at the heart of our flourishing, the “fertile solitude” Adam Phillips recognized as the pulse-beat of our creative power. In this blur of being by ourselves, we learn to be ourselves. Childhood is one great brush-stroke of loneliness, thick and pastel-colored, its edges blurring out into the whole landscape of life.
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