After a long nap
the cat yawns, rises, and goes out
looking for love
25 June 2015
23 June 2015
22 June 2015
19 June 2015
sparrows forever! Issa (1763 - 1827)
Wake up, wake up!
sparrows are dancing
butterflies frolicking
Sparrow chicks,
look out!
Mr Horse is passing by
Tired out
in a crowd of children
a sparrow
18 June 2015
17 June 2015
great books #7 (Tolstoy , Childhood, Boyhood, Youth)
This is wonderful book which he published when he was only 23. Anyone who loves History should read it, but also, those who might want to peer into the heart of a really great writer. He is a veritable poet disguised as a writer.
16 June 2015
Bashō, forever
This is the first paragraph from the journal he wrote entitled: The Narrow Road to the North.
'Months and days are eternal travellers, as are the years that come and go. For those who drift through their lives on a boat, or reach old age leading a horse over the earth, every day is a journey, and the journey itself is their home. Many people in the past have died on the road, but for many years, like a fragment of a cloud, I have been lured by the wind into the desire for a life of wandering.'
15 June 2015
Anaïs Nin
"Something is always born of excess,,,Great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them."
from her diary June 1945
13 June 2015
contest winner Elisa Villari! (Parthenon horse)
$64,000 question was quickly answered correctly by my dear friend Elisa Villari of Genoa Italy. From the Parthenon she speedily replied reminding me that there is at least one or two fully erudite followers of L'air de rien. This glorious horse head is on the far right side of the infamous Elgin Marbles display in the British Museum.
And so, for this she wins the $64,000 question which entitles her to receive a drawing from Morocco done a few years ago. This may or may not be worth $64,000 in 300 years.
Next week, another contest!
Next week, another contest!
12 June 2015
Sarah Manguso
I picked up a small book the other day by Sarah Manguso entitled Ongoingness. I had seen a review of it in the NYT, and it looked very interesting because it concerns her diary-keeping. Being a diarist myself since 1986, I was immediately sucked into it. It is tiny book of short entrees on each page in which she reflects upon her feelings about keeping a diary. For anyone interested in this personal form of narcism I highly recommend it.
But I mention it because I fell on an entry which speaks so clearly about what painting means to me in this period of my life. As these poor pages can attest I have tried to articulate this ephemeral idea. Ms Manguso expresses it perfectly.
"I often prefer writers' diaries to their work written intentionally for publication. It's as if I want the information without obstacles of style or form. But of course all writing possesses style and form, and in good writing they aren't obstacles.
Another friend said,
'I want to write sentences that seem as if no one wrote them.'
The goal being the creation of a pure delivery system, without the distraction of a style. The goal being a form no one notices, the creation of what seems like pure feeling, not of what seems like a vehicle for a feeling. Language as pure experience, pure memory. I too wanted to achieve that impossible effect."
This is most interesting for me. In Painting over the past 60 years there have been several waves in art which have come so close to this idea. (And of course, the Japanese!) Trying to achieve a painting which has no hand, in fact. Artists like Rauschenberg simply showed found objects rather dryly in the gallery space. Today, it is a generally accepted method of working (and exhibiting).
But what interests me is to hot-wire the system using paint to arrive at a feeling in a painting without that constraint of a stylistic form. (imagine details of a Van Gogh picture) Here (below) is an example of what I am after, although, it too, falls short. In the end, I do not want to imitate Nature so much as perhaps mimic it using a method of building up and destroying back down some ephemeral feeling. It is a process of editing; but also layering until that secret intuitive pool of meaning is pulled up from deep inside one. A writer might describe it as playing with the unconscious, manipulating it, and with discipline shaping it into something of form. And the choices involved in this process create the idea of the work in question unbeknownst to the maker.
more will be revealed.
more will be revealed.
09 June 2015
08 June 2015
06 June 2015
Roger Fry on IanFairweather
"I sometimes wonder whether it nevertheless does get its force from arrousing some deep, very vague, and immensely general reminiscences."
Roger Fry
02 June 2015
Ficre Ghebreyesus
Here is a real gem. Curiously, it reminds me of something which Henri Cartier-Bresson said about photography before he died:
My Passion has never been for photography “in itself” but for the possibility through - forgetting yourself - of recording in a fraction of a second the emotion of the subject, and the beauty of the form; that is, a geometry awakened by what’s offered.
01 June 2015
27 May 2015
Jacob Lawrence and Peter Schjeldahl
Today I was reading an art review by Peter Schjeldahl about the painter Jacob Lawrence. I like Lawrence's work very much and would like to see the show in NY if I could. At one point Schjeldahl described Lawrence's work as "world changing art" which pricked me with a kind of strange surprise. People often say things like that about art work and I am often rather astounded. Hyperbole is endemic in the Art world after all. One thinks of Picasso's Guernica and immediately thrown into a world of war. That it was about Spain is beside the point, which I guess is why the painting possesses such a universal appeal. And yet, what exactly has it changed? Has it awakened anyone to the brutality (often futility) of aggression on a national scale? (or even on a personal one for that matter) I doubt it. Can it shape a person's sudden decision to become an artist? Of course, but so can Monet's Hay Stack's or Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup Can although for different reason probably. But what does "world changing art" mean? Somehow I cannot understand how art can change anything except in a very deeply personal nature. I don't believe Schjeldahl means that. After all the title of the show in question is Migration and the paintings are illustrations on this theme of the great Black migration northward to the cities. It is a monumental theme but I love his work mostly because of the paintings themselves which I find graphically arresting. The theme, although important, isn't the reason I like the paintings anymore than I like angels painted by Giotto. The theme is secondary unless one is in the propaganda business. The real reason is because of the dramatic integrity of the art work which has a unified motion of its own after the work is finished.
22 May 2015
Chris Burden, made in America
This was a pivotal moment in America's art movement. At the height of the Vietnam War this piece moved the complacency of the Art world into another dimension; into the world of theatre and performance from which it rooted and has blossomed ever since.
I don't know how to think of it other than as a political piece, but then, I know little of Chris Burden.
As Rod Serling would often say:
"for your perusal in the twilight zone"
16 May 2015
apropos Yoko
Stig
Art makes people think. Yoko makes people think. Whatever you think of Yoko is art now. Thank you for your participation.
14 May 2015
Peter Bruegal, still alive
In our time of terrible, indiscriminate madness wreaking havoc in the Middle East, Africa and even on our own 'civilized shores', I cannot think of an image which best renders the actual horror of what some men do to others. It is a reminder that violent insanity isn't just a signature of our epoch, something which I confess I sometimes I believe because through the internet it feels like an onslaught 24/7, as they say these days.
In this painting is that terrible beauty; one which only artists of rare ability seem capable of making in any epoch. Bruegel shows us that there is such a grace even in darkness. I sometimes do not know where to put this awful sense of guilt for having such an easy life while so many others on this earth seem to be destined for inexhaustible sorrow. I live in a land wherein clean water is taken for granted and food plentiful. And then, there is this shame for feeling incapable of doing anything for them. Only a handful of painters are able to do this, Goya comes to mind. All the exquisite handling of paint (behind the 'motif') reminds me that to get to the 'whole' of an unified image one must past through the details as gruesome as they may be.
13 May 2015
11 May 2015
09 May 2015
Hakuin Ekahu (1686 -1768) #2
Here are two more exquisite works by Hakuin Ekahu. The first is on the theme of 'one hand clapping' which is the most famous of Japanese koans. The second one is perhaps another koan but I don't know the motif. It is simply called 'mortar and bush warbler'.
These are interesting for me, notably when one thinks of the struggle of the Contemporary painter in his/her search for meaning in the surface especially after someone like Matisse for instance.
07 May 2015
Hakuin Ekaku (1685 - 1768)
This is a wonderful ink wash by one of the really great, great poet/artists of Japan. Superlatives aside, he is for me inspirational in the sense that his pictures teach me about pictorial form in this Contemporary world. He uses the space of the paper in a very particular way and his pictures seem to defy logic which is an enviable aspect of his originality. A great unified picture plane is evident while at the same time it is built using all of its few elements necessary to complete the poem at hand. 'cows, 'ants, 'spoons', 'cups', 'crows', 'bamboo' 'waves', 'Mount Fuji"...
This mix of elements and ideas in a unified picture plane is for me the "Holy Graal" of painting.
04 May 2015
ciné-échange! (les livres à pattes)
There is a Cinema just a stone's throw from the Gare Saint-Lazare aptly named Cinema Caumartin because it sits on the rue Caumartin (Duh!). In the lobby, to my surprise, when I went to see a film there a few months back, I discovered several large shelves overflowing with books of all shapes and sizes. The idea is simple: One is encouraged to take a book home but on condition that one replaces it with another one. The idea for this comes from Russia where apparently (so reads the small sign below) when Russians lose personal papers (of any sort I presume) they are called "des papers à pattes" (papers with legs!) and they are not considered lost at all, but are deemed to have a life of their own as they simply go their own way leaving their owners forever perplexed. So in this spirit the Cinema Caumartin offers "Les livres à Pattes!"
pretty cool (très chouette, en fait!)
pretty cool (très chouette, en fait!)
03 May 2015
Geoffrey Lehmann, Australian poet
Getting started
When we first came our house
was two weatherboard rooms
in a bare paddock.
I was just back from a war.
There were no trees
and I chose the name "Spring Forest".
It was dark when we drove up
and lit our pressure lamps and unpacked.
Our children found potatoes sprouting
on the wire mattress of a large iron bed.
What were they doing there?
my daughter kept asking.
We burned ironbark
in the old brick fireplace,
rubbing etherized hands into warmth.
At dawn Sally and Peter were out
calling in the frost, exploring.
A long icicle hung from the tank.
That day five cars passed on the road
and the children ran out every time.
02 May 2015
01 May 2015
Jasper lips
A dear friend has sent me a wonderful book entitled "Rendez-vous with Art". It is essentially a dialogue between Philippe de Montebello and Martin Gayford as they travel through museums, churchs and art galleries around the world.
(Just the early introduction is already captivating)
Philippe de Montebello pauses in front of a shattered yellow stone. 'This', he exclaims, 'is one of the greatest works if art in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, indeed in the world, of any civilisation!' The object we are looking at is part of a face, the lower section. Of the upper portions - the brow, the nose, the eyes - nothing remains.
'If you told me you'd found the top of the head', he continues, 'I am not sure I would be thrilled because I am so focussed, so absorbed and captivated by the perfection of what is there; that my pleasure - and it is intense pleasure - is marvelling at what my eye sees, not some abstraction that, in a more art historical mode, I might conjure up. It's like a book that you love, and you simply don't want to see the movie. You've already imagined the hero or the heroine in a certain way. In truth, with the yellowed jasper lips, I have never really tried to imagine the missing parts.'
I remember this small fragment in the Met because I prowled the Met every friday afternoon for years when I lived in New York. And, how I miss those excursions!
(More to be revealed)
29 April 2015
Katmandu and the trench
These little souvenirs came from Nepal. The little rat is a tourist copy from the museum in Patan where the original is quite compelling. I fell in love with it and of course, I wanted a smaller replica so I searched high and low for just the right one with that child-like expression. It must be a popular item because this motif is made by so many craftsman in town, alas, many of them quite sterile, but this one had just the right simple feel to it expression. It sits in my bathroom and stares up at me when I brush my teeth. Its the small rat which offers up food to the giant elephant Ganeesh.
This is a small figurine (terre cuite) which was made by the tribal artists in the hills all over Nepal. I bought several but gave the rest away as gifts.
This was painted by a young man who made them in his tiny studio off one of the main squares. I cannot remember which temple but it was a large and very popular one with the tourists. He and his wife lived and worked in this tiny studio/apartment with a makeshift kitchen. In the front were his paintings which he made for the tourists. I bought several, and still have a few. Really lovely (and, lively things) which still move me. They were such a kind, modest and unassuming couple. He was (is, I hope) a very talented painter. It was easy to see. He painted lots of different animals with a great animation which appealed to me, and for each one he made a small wooden frame. I think that all 8 were the price of a meal. I have often thought of them since my visit there. Now, I wonder where they are,.. and if they survived the earthquake? They had so little before, now what?
These last few days as the tragedy unfolded I was digging a trench (mostly by hand) for electricity and water to be moved to a small studio behind my house. The whole time, I couldn't stop thinking about all that digging going on all over Nepal.
26 April 2015
25 April 2015
24 April 2015
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