The spectrum of possibilities is infinite, as combining different aspects of life, you can create totally unexpected results that you can measure with the five senses. The senses in the most elemental form. Sight, Sound, Touch, Smell, and Taste. There are those that claim many more senses, including the sixth sense, but as such it is on a different measuring scale. The parameters of the direct effect on the body AND mind leave this one aside for the moment. Even blindness is a sense that interacts with all others. The absence of any one of these will still be a determinant factor in the interaction process.
A Chat in the Pizza Parlour.
This summer, a good friend of mine came to visit with his wife and children. It was clear from the start that we would be having a lovely time together, and that the days would pass without incident or argument right until the end. Eric is a steady cam operator, has a wicked sense of humour and is still wonderfully in love with his wife. She has the best hairdo, always crookedly cheerful in the wind, wonderful lips and a laugh that chirps and gurgles. She is smart. A Steiner-school teacher, she has never swallowed a drop of antibiotics, and is somebody you can rely on to be competent and caring, busy as a bee, but calm. Their two girls are angels dropped from heaven.
While eating a pizza with the kids yesterday, it became clear to me that dialogue was the essential business of everything we are surrounded with. I came to this when she mentioned the mystery of life and everything in between, the essence of what holds everything together, and how we all depend on one another. I agreed with her, however, the postulation sounded too trivial to me. I told her that dialogue, not communication was the most essential element in the universe. To me there was no longer a mystery. A mud brick had to dialogue with fire in order to become a brick. Hydrogen and oxygen would have to dialogue on how to become water. If the word is what we are, and this allows us to be conscious, then the hydrogen and oxygen molecules would have to have a consciousness as well! In any case an awareness of each other. I say the pizza into existence, but it has to be aware of itself as well, otherwise, it does not exist. It is having a dialogue with me, I think, therefore I am. The pizza thinks therefore it is. It brings me into existence.
ON MEETING LORENZO LOTTO IN PARIS
10.10.1998
A user-friendly painting is a paradox. Be moved or move on. Catch it while you can. Do not shock, be shocked and let it be at that. Purpose and intent. Colour and surface. Colour and paradox. Be moved by colour. Catch it while it moves. A user-friendly shock. Intent to move. Shocking purpose. Colourful paradox, colour paradox. Colour intent. Let it be at colour. Catch colour, catch intent, catch a user, shock a user. Shock paradox.
Purpose: colour: shock: paradox: move.
Lorenzo Lotto did not put it mildly when he and his assistants decided to cover a canvas with nothing but pigment and oil. In his adoration of the shepherds, the exquisite tenderness with which Christ holds the head of the lamb in his hands is the plot point in the picture. He already knows it is he, the one for the sacrifice. The shepherds are brothers. He sees them upside down.The Virgin and child sitting in the shade of a tree next to saint Catherine of Alexandria and Saint Thomas, the blue painting, and probably one of the most beautiful paintings I have ever seen. This renaissance master reminded me of the importance of colour. It is impossible to think of colour or to see colour in its most pure form as he did, in today’s context. It is perfect.
What happened to colour? Why do we not see it as they did back then? His colour is positive. It is not diluted or faded. It is focused. When he puts together a prune red, apple green, and scarlet red with brown, all in one corner of the painting, it is pure madness. There are no brush strokes. At the edges, where the colours meet, they blend into one another when you get close. How did he do it? A clean palette, separate brushes for each colour and lots of patience. He also knew what he was going to paint before touching the canvas. There are no corrections. Just like Mozart. His grey breathes and you sense the air around the figure. Drop dead fabric treatment.
Colour is difficult. We seek the easy way out these days. Good taste is difficult because it requires discipline. The Machine.
We are surrounded in the west by images that are colourless. The modern buildings in cities are colourless, the roads are colourless and people dress without colour in mind. People do no longer consider colour to be of importance in their lives. Wherever there is colour, suddenly a higher mood is in the spirit. It brings us closer to life and its purpose. Life aesthetic is colour aesthetic.
THE FIRST TIME MY DAUGHTER DISOBEYED ME
16.11.1998
Disobedience is a primary hallmark of freedom. It is difficult to attain. It is closely linked to law and order, which are generally considered to be the basis for a balanced society where nothing is left to chance. There would be no need for law and order if there were no disobedience, which by its very nature, only humans are capable of. Chaos could be the result of continuous disobedience, or enlightenment. It has nothing to do with discipline. Disciplined disobedience could be considered a virtue in itself.
Disobedience is a way to advance; embedded in the mind of the child, it becomes a yardstick to measure its survival capabilities in society and nature. We assume that once we become adults, we no longer need to use this method for advancement. We therefore come slowly to a standstill. It is only after many decades, when old age starts to set in, that we try to look back at this, for it is needed again, to confront death and survive once it is upon us.
Disobedience is unexpected and awfully irritating when you are confronted with it. On the other hand it can be a source of infinite delight; humour, the charming sister of disobedience makes her appearance felt when properly introduced.
Disobedience is never boring. Specially when used with flair and daring. All the prophets, religious, artistic or poetic, were and are masters at this. It is painful to hear blame piled on disobedience for being the undoing of our so-called law and order abiding society.
Winter of 1993
When asked why I paint Ships.
It is a symbol of The Voyage. It is the crossing accomplished in life or death by the living or the dead.
In the pacific islands there are native religious myths that imply the use, real or symbolic of the vessel. A vessel to expel demons and disease from the body. A vessel used by the shaman to reach for the soul or spirit of the ill person. A vessel that transports the soul of the dead to the netherworld.
The vessel that transports the dead is a symbol found in all civilisations and is well known in ancient Egypt where the enormity and poetry of death has always made Pharaoh prepare for death during his lifetime. At the end of the arduous voyage to the underworld, the soul passes many tests, and is now free and can say:
“I have shed that to which I was attached. I have cast to the ground all evil that was within me! O mighty Osiris, I am born, look at me I am born!”
The vessel that leads to this birth also represents the cradle; it represents the sense of mother and womb. The coffin.
If death is the first navigator, then, in this mythological hypothesis, it would not be the last voyage, but the first. It would be for some, the first real voyage that leads to birth.
In Greek mythology, Caron takes you only to hell. In this case the voyage is one of sadness and loss.
Life is a voyage that is undertaken with many perils. From this point of view, the ship is a symbol of security and makes the existence on these voyages possible. There is great joy and relief at the end of the trip. Pascal says that it is always a great pleasure to navigate on a great ship, for you know it will not perish.
July 2002
Work ethic. While watching Fernando carve stone.
Work, or -one has to-, is by no means a negation of existence. -To be able to-. The state of working is driven by a need for busyness, or at least the driving force to buy the daily bread doing something for someone else. To be for oneself is to be for someone else. The rock in the field that has to be removed by the farming hand to pass with the plough, is there, by definition, to be removed. The obstacle, as it has become, or into which it has been transformed could be the definition for work.
The unending chain of obstacles that confront us in our lives could be defined as work. Work = Obstacle. Only in eradicating these obstacles do we build a society. We are not concerned with adding, but by definition, removing.
This accounts for what we see as consumption. In the need to stay alive, we remove from nature what we want, to stay alive.
This obstacle race will leave the field free of rocks so the plough can do its job of turning the earth to place the seed, which will in turn remove water from it to grow. The crop will in turn be removed, and also whatever envelops the crop itself.
To get this food to your table, we remove oil from the earth to drive the engine, removing rubber from its tires, we remove clay from the earth to bake the plate from which you will be removing the crop/food.
Your body will then remove what it can’t use, which in turn your bowels will remove.
The act of negation, or the positivism of the negative act in order to survive, is paramount.
It is however, an entirely different question if we consider the act of removal as progress, art, or creation.
Adding to, in fact becomes an absurd concept, as adding becomes an impossibility. The camouflaged expression “transformation” in this idea, could only take place if we consider water becoming steam, blood pigment, or stone dust. The act of transformation can’t involve removal. If we carve a rock to make a cube, we are not transforming the rock into a cube, but taking away from the rock in order to make a cube. This is not transformation, this is change. This consistent application, does what it does to our minds, bodies and environment. The act of transformation becomes pure utopia, where change is the only rule, where change implies removal and therefore destruction of the whole. If we are living in an environment where destruction is a necessity, then why are we worried? If necessity dictates that destruction is simply a form of continuity, then where is the problem? To define destruction as taking from, change of state or necessary to sustain life, then what other form of life sustaining method is there?
The search for this non-destructive state, goes on in the spiritual realm, the only place where true transformation can be found and where change can be ignored.
The spiritual act of non-removal, is the acceptance and denial of a pure state of mind. The Nepalese monks involved in levitation and total self-denial, can be bricked in without food or air, this is in fact the solution we seek, for that state of pure non-removal. This also implies a total absence of work, for their needs are nil. They reach for this with all their senses. Touch, smell etcetera. But then, are we designed to do this? Are our senses there, to make this self-denial possible? If that is the state they find their selves in, are they seeking?
If we look at the heavens for a solution, it seems that the sun burning fuel is taking away, or removing. Stars are changing from dust into suns. This does not seem to be the state of non-removal nor the state of transformation. It seems to be a state of destruction.
One thing forcing another to change so it can survive. The threat of destruction forcing change, not the state of nothingness.
This paradoxical situation calls for whatever act to be reconsidered, as nothingness seems to be the only non-destructive position to be in. Work involving a state of nothingness? The meaning of this should be examined, as not removing the stone for the plough to pass will make it impossible to plant the seed. Planned destruction as Tingely saw fit to do, with his nihilistic sculpture is a state of mind. It is in the mind where this concept functions and communicates itself as an art form. His self-destructive ensembles, in a way not-taking (recycling rejected material) are the pure form of a spiritual art. His own immolation in one of his productions, again confronts us with the necessary destruction image to prove the point of the need to self destroy. Life therefore becomes a destruction chain. Then, do we go about it beautifully, or in ugliness? Would you like to define these? Does it matter?
