testing…
it’s very hard for me to explain this notion i have of dancing bears… it being too ludicrous, & grotesque.
they represent something for me though, something contemporaneous (hee), i mean they represent many things and being abstract of themselves (i have yet to meet one) are abstract notions themselves.
but representative because they elicit a reaction.
this one is even less finished than the last one.
it needs a coat of gesso, painting, sand paper(ing) and more painting.
& pinning to the wall.
another unfinished piece. one of a pair. the other being even less finished.
‘dancing bear’:
it should be attached to the wall.
it should also be painted.
obviously it is only the face of a dancing bear (descended from a bear i found in the british museum – not dancing mind).
the sphinx seems to remain something of a mystery.
a cypher.
my own notion is that a sphinx is a guardian of sacred mysteries.
that space or that a space can hold these mysteries has been essential to all previous cultures.
now people are thinking in terms of the ‘liminal’ or ‘negative space’.
‘between spaces’
(confusion: between mystery and ignorance.)
*******
the following is a sphinx:
each of my prints are different. it’s all in the inking.
the inking is just another way to bring out different textural effects – i think each has to be different.
No. People never run away from anything. The rain didn’t last long did it. You know what I think? I think that we’re all in our private traps–clamped in them. And none of us can ever get out. We–we scratch and claw but only at each other. And for all of it, we never budge an inch.”
Norman Bates, ‘Psycho’. screenplay by Joseph Stefano.
this is a common enough view of life.
norman bates was merely playing a role though.
speaking in the way he felt people spoke.
hitchcock called the film a comedy.
the logic of its narrative is beautiful; much like ‘alice”.
if we limit ourselves to exact reproduction,
we halt the evolution of the spirit.
if the thing we make is not connected to
the absolute necessity of evolution, it is
useless and harmful.”
Constantin Brancusi, ‘the Essence of Things’ Guggenheim Museum.
i include these because i am quite tempted to leave them as they are.
i intend to build it up using papier-mache – into a head.
i like it as it is though.
The cause of lightning,” Alice said very decidedly, for she felt quite sure about this, “is the thunder-no, no!” she hastily corrected herself. “I meant it the other way.”
“It’s too late to correct it,” said the Red Queen: “when you’ve once said a thing, that fixes it, and you must take the consequences.”
Lewis Carroll, ‘Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There.’
to be literal.
to take things purely at face value and proceed accordingly. & rationally.
that’s when it can get really weird. regarding drawing. not sure i would like to draw any other parallels.
lets see how minimal we can go – this was done last week.
i think at present this is the only response which makes any sense. forget assumption & previous experience and act. inactivity is the problem, only in action does experience become potent.
in pantheistic terms. naturally.
i’ve been returned, again, to my beginnings.
negative space.
the dissolution of my drawings, the fact that many of them dissolve into messy smears, is a natural fact that i have had to come to terms with.
the use f negative space is a large contributing factor. from the beginning my policy was to regard shading as neutral: used to build mass with no regards to shadow or light.
or even whether it be person or chair, surface or empty space. hence negative space is as important as mass.
this picture is from 2008 (or 2007).
the drawing emerges from the paper. the white acquires the weight of the black – it all equals out.
if we have no heretics we must invent them, for heresy is essential for health.”
yevgeny zamyatin.
a story written by Yevgeny Zamyatin entitled ‘The Dragon’ translated and edited by Mirra Ginsburg.
‘Gripped with bitter cold, ice locked, Petersburg burned in delirium. One knew: out there, invisible behind the curtain of fog, the red and yellow columns, spires, and hoary gates and fences crept on tiptoe, creaking and shufling. A fevered, impossible, icy sun hung in the fog – to the left, to the right, above, below – a dove over a house on fire. From the delirium-born, misty world, dragon men dived up into the earthly world, belched fog – heard in the misty world as words, but here becoming nothing – round white puffs of smoke. The dragon men dived up and disapeared again into the fog. And trolleys rushed screeching out of the earthly world into the unknown.
On the trolley platform a dragon with a gun existed briefly, rushing into the unknown. His cap was down over his nose and would have swallowed the dragon’s head but for his ears; on the protruding ears the cap had come to rest. His army greatcoat dangled to the floor; the sleeves flapped loosely; the tips of the boots were turned up, empty. And inthe dimness of the fog – a hole: the mouth.
This was now in the leaping, rushing world; and here the bitter fog belched out by the dragon was visible and audible: ‘So I was taking him along, the bastard: an intellectual mug – it turned your stomach just to look at him. And it talks, the scum! Wouldn’t you know? it talks!’
‘And did you bring him in?’
‘I sure did – non-stop to the heavenly kingdom. With the bayonet.’
The hole in the fog closed. There was nothing now but the empty cap, empty, an empty coat. The trolley, gnashing, out of the world.
And suddenly – from the empty sleeves – from out of their depths, a pair of raw, red dragon claws emerged. The empty coat squatted down on the floor, and in the paws there was a tiny, grey, cold lump that had materialised out of the bitterly cold fog.
‘Mother in heaven! a baby starling – frozen stiff! Just look at it!
The dragon pushed back his cap – and in the fog two eyes appeared, two small chinks from the nightmare world into the human.
The dragon blew with all his might into the red paws, and there were clearly words, spoken to the starling – but in the nightmare world they were unheard. The trolley screeched.
‘The little bastard: he gave a flutter, didn’t he? Not yet? He’ll come around, by Go… Just think!’
He blew with all his strength. The gun dropped to the floor. And at that moment ordained by destiny, at a point ordained in space, the starling gave a jerk, another – and flutterd off the dragon’s paws into the unknown.
The dragon’s fog-belching maw gaped open to his ears. Then slowly the cap slid down over the chinks into the human world and settled back on the protruding ears. The guide to the heavenly kingdom picked up his gun.
The trolley gnashed and screeched and rushed into the unknown, out of the human world.’
the original story in it’s original russian seems have been written not long after the first world war.
o 