testing…
As the air to a bird or the sea to a fish, so is contempt to the contemptible.
The crow wish’d every thing was black, the owl, that every thing was white.
Exuberance is Beauty.
William Blake from the ‘Proverbs of Hell’ (excerpt), ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’.
this series is becoming less easy to interpret:
but that’s okay.
Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead. The road of excels leads to the palace of wisdom.”
William Blake from the ‘Proverbs of Hell’ (excerpt), ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’.
i am quite distracted by these.
the guache is lovely to use & the paper is fantastic. ‘truth to materials’ is a tremendous philosophy – helpful. use everything for its strength. the purpose it is fit for, perhaps (with wittgenstein in mind) according it to ‘active’ or actuality.
Prisons are built with stones of law, Brothels with bricks of Religion.
The pride of the peacock is the glory of God,
The lust of the goat is the bounty of God.
The wrath of the lion is the wisdom of God.
The nakedness of woman is the work of God.
William Blake from ‘The Proverbs of Hell’ (exert), from ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.’
i love painting these.
both ‘copied’ off william blake. couldn’t tell you which.
A voice comes to one in the dark. Imagine.
Samuel Beckett, Company.
to pare everything down to null and look…
or
accept that what we see makes no sense.
[we force sense upon our sight but sight is sense – we force rationality on our sight & rationality is frequently nonsense]
rationality will not help you understand the world because the world is not rational. we are not rational. there maybe cause and effects but rationality seems to be on hand to help us ignore these things. you can easilly find a cause without finding an effect and an effect without finding a cause.
the two paintings are of the same still life. both done within a week of each other – there is another too.
the second came as i was try to see the the first, the third came as i was trying to see the second.
But the poisonous ingenuity of Time in the science of affliction is not limited to its action on the subject, that action, as has been shown, resulting in an unceasing modification of his personality, whose permanent reality, if any, can only be apprehended as a retrospective hypothesis.”
Samuel Beckett, from ‘Proust’
the phrase ‘fit for purpose’ is a legal phrase.
the success of an action according to its method and materiality & philosophy ‘wholly’ successful in achieving what it is meant to achieve. ‘wholly’ – understanding that it is a constituent of a ‘whole’.
a quick scroogle search gave me the definition as a ‘consumer rights’ issue…
ah well.
there is no escaping irony.
take the beckett quote into account when viewing ‘fit for purpose’. consumerism (at its most cynical) appeals to fluid identity by insisting that identity asserts its importance and stability (even profundity) while relying on the fluctuations inherent in identity to sell to the person the next item…
all the while really it is identity which is being marketed or at least an identity which is stable secure and confident. an identity becomes something which holds back Time. conceptualy.
Very true,” said the Duchess: “flamingoes and mustard both bite. And the moral of that is – ‘birds of a feather, flock together.'”
“Only mustard isn’t a bird,” Alice remarked”
Lewis Carroll, ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.’
when one looks at a thing one can move from merely identifying it to attempting to understand what it is; how one sees it; what it is in relation to oneself; what oneself is; how one should act in the face of the object; whether one should respond to any impulse coming from the thing; what response would be reasonable; what response comes from compulsion? from rational? conditioning?
whether any of these things are in fact illusory or in any way different?
are they physical? mental? when do they bleed into psychosis?
which impulses do we listen to… which sensations are the ones which give the greatest insight – are truly fit for purpose.
what questions actually have active meaning? and why?
i think these are at the core of any activity incidentally. but maybe i say too much.
i was walking from deptford to peckham. via new cross.
approximately one month ago i walked from my studio in deptford, though new cross, to meet a friend in peckham. he has a flat & a studio there.
before i left another friend recommended that i not catch the bus – the roads were blocked. he need not have bothered because i was wanting to save the bus fare.
he was not in. my friend in peckham was not in.
peckham was jammed with cars and police & elderly crowds of onlookers.
the previous few weeks had seen the closing of area 10 and before that an incoming tory government. since then – about a month later – we have heard that goldsmiths college was losing all its funding and also that most other educational institutions would too. goldsmiths college was on my left as i passed through new cross.
deptford – one of the poorest areas of london / england will lose its jobcentre. the next nearest is a good three / four mile walk away. in peckham. most of my friends are being sent to a place near catford. the deptford jobcentre will become a restaurant.
i wanted to check on area 10 to see if the artists who had been working there were being allowed to reclaim their work. the notion of negotiating police persuaded me to leave it alone.
i would have liked to have stopped for pie & mash but money is short.
the audience around the police line were smiling toothlessly. i think i hear one of them talking about a suicide / someone had jumped from a building.
i think that it is a short time after this i call another friend to offer them our living room to sleep in for a time. but for the moment i just walk home with a view to making pie and forgetting about the suicide. i failed so i wrote this. it has been on my mind for a while because i wanted to do it justice – i will probably continue to re edit.
identity is a nasty fluid thing.
it succeeds in being the least interesting, most debated and the major motivation for action / inaction in this age (age of kali according to what i have been reading). & if there’s one thing in this world i am trying to avoid depicting in my work it is psychological realism.
which makes me wonder whether these can really be called portraits.
but i am not fussy.
what is in a name?
the oil painting will crop up when i have finished it.
i am a little obsessed with these.
though it may not be apparent they vary quite dramaticaly. i will focus on a particular brush stroke and attempt to accentuate it, attempt to capture a particular shape with mass and form
or being seduced by the colour. leave the paints to float.
occasionally all the above.
If you think we’re waxworks,” he said, “you ought to pay, you know. Waxworks weren’t meant to be looked at for nothing. Nohow!”
“Contrariwise,” added the one marked “DEE,” “if you think we’re alive, you ought to speak.”
Lewis Carroll, “Through the Looking Glass and what Alice found there”.
i go back to the british museum again and again & it never fails me.
charmunda, a sandstone sculpture.
the british museum lists this as chamunda an aspect of the mother goddess devi. she haunts cemeteries & carries a severed head.
chamunda (like kali) dances a dance of destruction.
[i am afraid i am quoting the british museum website wholesale & they credit: T. Donaldson, Hindu temple art of Orissa, (3 vols.) (Brill, Leiden, 1985-87) i can not find any reference to her in my book of hindu myths – but wikipedia has a lot to say on her. it seems that she is old – older than her place amongst the other hindu goddesses]
my drawing seems to be losing all coherence. it is very hard to see – very hard to exposit.
o 