Category: Art

Brittle Cold Metal Spire

On By cjx07sterIn Art, Dreaming, Existentialism, Love StoryLeave a comment

The photograph crackled when i looked at it the second time. The first glance was fine.  I had printed a heap of them, only to find this one of a tree with a blank grey Northern sky of late winter. I’m sure the photo was fine, but then a great metal crack appeared zooming through it. Like it couldn’t restrain itself. It just had to be. Life is so like that at times, everything seems fine and then an irreversible crackle sounds suddenly and you struggle to mend the cold enormity of it and maybe even pretend it is not there.  But it is, real and larger than the tree you so carefully cultivated for years.  You see that evident sometimes, divorced people tear their brittle life photo memories apart, or fold then in half and keep their ex facing the hardboard of the picture frame, while they cheerfully look out into the room from a scene from way back. Perhaps the folding types want to keep the ex there, just in case – perhaps they can mend the whole thing somehow.  Hope to mend the love that was, now lost in an instant.

Still the crack itself is not a gap, it’s a thing dividing the brittleness of the scene.  I went back there, to the park with the tree in it.  And yes, i felt i had to go an touch the metal of the tear in the air, spiking up like lightning in reverse.  It was cold and heavy with condensation to touch and I felt no calm with its seemingly infinite jagged height. Made of hardened stainless steel and welded together, it’s permanency in the face of future storms looked assured. The rent in the photo had turned into a real thing.  A spire of substance, permanence and worth.

Still there is hope and a faith in mending. Love is something which can be rebuilt and mended. There is still time to take another photo of the tree. Just the tree this time, steady in focus with my back leaning on the cold of the spire. And so the new photo shall not crack.

Tear the Air

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The shadow canvas

On By cjx07sterIn ArtLeave a comment

Yesterdays Project - TersiiskaIt’s a hard reality like compact snow in a clear air.  White and static in my mind.  I had shut the door and a thought to make a work of art.  Something big man.  A big canvas.  I’d read books biographic with grainy photos and small prints in blunt terms about artists who all seem to start with a canvas.  Picasso and Leonardo, Leonardo for sure, used to paint on walls, big walls.  Somehow I never never got started because it always meant having a canvas or a wall free of bookshelves and drawers of things leaning up against.

I visited the Menil collection and of course what you find are beautifully arranged rooms with big big canvas on the walls or big painting on the wall itself.  Cy Twombly must have thought – is it possible to make a bigger painting.  Thankfully he must’ve had heaps of rooms and room available for that awesome collection. But in addition there was an exhibition of Arctic art, lots of small things made of ivory or bone, like Netsuke from Japan, but different and ancient.

Between white and color, and possibly black or even photo black, the color of shadows.  How much a shadow can be art depends on the texture of the paint or the relief of the sculpture in the paint.  What better paint to make great shadows than white.  White is a beautiful shadow color.

Naturally for white to create shadows you need light off to the right and darkness on the other side of the door.  This way even with the door closed, you know you can see a blinding shadow at any time the door is opened, such is the strength of the white.

So with a little imagination I converted my wall to a canvas.  Not quite a Rothko.  Not anything like a Twombly.  Perhaps not even Picasso. It was easy really.  Just a can of thick ivory arctic white.  I started painting and having done the first coat it was just so great.  Shadows of chaos crept into my mind and introduced the concept of the art. Chaos and the butterfly fluttering through my imagination and Voila !! Frightening the imagination and trapping that fluttering pattern into the shadows of the wall. The canvas of shadows the butterfly behind the door.

Photo: Tersiiska:Flickr, All rights reserved.  Used with Permission.

The Menil Collection:

The Never Never

On By cjx07sterIn Art, Australia, Dreaming, TravelLeave a comment

ULURU

Australia, Girt by not just the blue ocean, but by it’s inner unknown sea. All red dirt and tufts of grass for the ‘roos to eat and the lizards to hide. A car drives past. At night the sky’s milky light from millions of stars above.

there a tracks in the earth

of red at this center of mine

under the milky black galaxy’s face

where the night owl’s pass the time

my country where the gravity pulls

hard and hot to Uluru’s place

there the never never lies sublime

 ever in timeless endless space