I want to cut violently into my canvas, condemn to obscurity almost every mark I have made. There are days when all this groping around in darkness leaves you thrashed.
I step away before the next surge.
Represented by
“Concerning love, I had best be brief and say that when I read Bertrand Russell on this matter as an adolescent, and understood him to write with perfect gravity that a moment of such emotion was worth the whole of the rest of life, I devoutly hoped that this would be true in my own case.
And so it has proved, and so to that extent I can regard the death I otherwise resent as laughable and impotent.”
~Christopher Hitchens Love, Poverty and War: Journeys and Essays
…….because I find her, slumped there like that, odd. Her legs askew, sorrowful and silent like Morandi’s bottles.
Words to keep things moving…
Morandi’s “alternative to modernism corresponds with the temperature of our time because it is anti-heroic… it is against this backdrop of Fascism, Modernism and its opposition to a personal and private sense of poetry that Morandi made his small revolution.”
~ Sean Scully, Resistance and Persistence: Selected Writings
merge 112011 studies after seana, elle, samantha
order of experience
curiosity and inquisition
discovery and transformation
estrangement
fragility
chaos
I can’t recall the first time their eyes closed on the world like that.
I cannot be sure if…
It was the memory of you, Nestor, motionless in that coffin. We were only twelve.
Or a young father’s mien; anxiety and aspiration burning deep caverns of longing to relocate his wife and children, from one continent to another.
Or of watching the first woman of my adoration, asleep; drawing strength from an imagined night, free of labour and routine.
Or of discovering that our marriage had turned ghostly and arid; that our voices had lost each other amidst the clamour and abandon of our twenties.
Or of feeling the heat of creativity and paint swell back into my hands, of deriving new forms through human encounter and occasion.
No.
I cannot recall the first time their eyes closed on the world like that.
Photographing the work enables critical distance from the work; is akin to viewing the painting with senses disengaged. With this approach I am not distracted by the material and physical character of paint and surface. It’s useful because it allows me to assess the work in a new context, as if in a mirror. Inverted.
I am meeting new people, engaging in new projects. In the mind’s eye aspects of the world are being painted every day. Vigorously and intensely.
And they are finding their way back onto the easel.
