If you didn't see that BBC interview it's available at this link for another five days. Try watching it while playing Leonard Cohen's The Future.
Wednesday, September 08, 2010
NOT THE BLAIR INTERVIEW SHOWN ON THE BBC ON SEPTEMBER 1, 2010
but my altered version, inserting a
different view from those spectacular windows and a more
appropriate soundtrack. Unfortunatley the sound doesn't come up on my video below but it's working fine on the main Blaugustine and also at blip.tv
If you didn't see that BBC interview it's available at this link for another five days. Try watching it while playing Leonard Cohen's The Future.
MORE
If you didn't see that BBC interview it's available at this link for another five days. Try watching it while playing Leonard Cohen's The Future.
Thursday, September 02, 2010
RECENT PORTRAITS
Just to show I'm not sitting
around brooding guiltily all the time, heh heh, here are
some recent portraits done for the ongoing Julia
Kay's Portrait Party. If you go to my Flickr
page there
you can see bigger versions by clicking on each picture.
And I'm nearly nearly done with the big Prism painting.
MORE
MORE
Wednesday, September 01, 2010
GUILT PURSUED
The thoughtful comments to the last
post here and at my main blog are forcing me to look further into this murky topic.
Having established that what my own particular guilt-harpy
keeps harping about is that I'm guilty of Squandering
My Gifts and Not
Living Up to My Potential the logical next question is:
what exactly are these gifts or potential which I'm supposedly
not living up to? Do they exist at all or are they yet another
mirage? Another false concept plugged into my brain by the
competitive, egocentric, celebrity-obsessed culture we live
in?
Well, you know, maybe. But I don't think so. What I think, what I know gut-wise, is that I really do have gifts I'm not using. It's not vanity or arrogance to say so because gifts are gifts and the real reason why the exasperating little guilt-bug keeps buzzing around me is because it knows that I know that I'm built to fly but settle for crawling - I crawl very well but that ain't flying - and I'm designed to burn bright but settle for flickering, a flicker flicker here, a flicker there.
You may say ah, but that's what we are: crawling, flickering creatures, doing our best against all the odds. Well if that's what you'll say, I'll have to disagree. Because what I really know down in my deepest of deep guts is that many of us have a locked cellar full of unused gifts - or maybe just one unused gift. It's not a thing, not even a talent, but a degree of feeling. It doesn't necessarily mean achievement or success in worldly terms. It means being willing to risk flying, Icarus-like.
MORE
Well, you know, maybe. But I don't think so. What I think, what I know gut-wise, is that I really do have gifts I'm not using. It's not vanity or arrogance to say so because gifts are gifts and the real reason why the exasperating little guilt-bug keeps buzzing around me is because it knows that I know that I'm built to fly but settle for crawling - I crawl very well but that ain't flying - and I'm designed to burn bright but settle for flickering, a flicker flicker here, a flicker there.
You may say ah, but that's what we are: crawling, flickering creatures, doing our best against all the odds. Well if that's what you'll say, I'll have to disagree. Because what I really know down in my deepest of deep guts is that many of us have a locked cellar full of unused gifts - or maybe just one unused gift. It's not a thing, not even a talent, but a degree of feeling. It doesn't necessarily mean achievement or success in worldly terms. It means being willing to risk flying, Icarus-like.
Monday, August 30, 2010
GUILT
Are you pursued by it? Does
it wake you in the morning and stand over your bed at night,
sometimes even following you into your dreams? Is it beside
you as you sit at your computer screen right now, asking
why you're not doing something you should be doing? Has it
whined inside your head so often and for so long that you
take it for granted, like the ticking of a clock or a tickle
in the throat? Very like the ticking of a clock since it
keeps on nagging about all the time you've wasted in
the past, are wasting now and will waste in future.
Can you tell that by YOU I mean ME? Does your guilt ressemble my guilt? No? If you are one of the fortunate few who can do that living-in-the-now thing without feeling guilty, then arrivederci: go and smell the roses while I and the rest of us guilt-prisoners examine the walls of our cells and ponder our escape.
Let me make clear first of all that I don't want to get rid of guilt completely. I just want it to stay in its place and speak only when necessary. For example to indicate politely that the stone I've just tripped over is exactly the same one I tripped over last week or last year. A kind of unobtrusive, gentle Dr.Watson to my dynamic Sherlock Holmes. What I don't want is to be dominated, harassed, bullied, interrupted and nagged by a mere concept, a chimera, a mirage.
What does it look like anyway? Has anyone ever seen a Guilt? I don't mean the kind that could be and should be haunting you if you've done something really really bad, but just the average, non-descript, irritating voice-over which never stops droning that....uh....what exactly is it droning?
Can you tell that by YOU I mean ME? Does your guilt ressemble my guilt? No? If you are one of the fortunate few who can do that living-in-the-now thing without feeling guilty, then arrivederci: go and smell the roses while I and the rest of us guilt-prisoners examine the walls of our cells and ponder our escape.
Let me make clear first of all that I don't want to get rid of guilt completely. I just want it to stay in its place and speak only when necessary. For example to indicate politely that the stone I've just tripped over is exactly the same one I tripped over last week or last year. A kind of unobtrusive, gentle Dr.Watson to my dynamic Sherlock Holmes. What I don't want is to be dominated, harassed, bullied, interrupted and nagged by a mere concept, a chimera, a mirage.
What does it look like anyway? Has anyone ever seen a Guilt? I don't mean the kind that could be and should be haunting you if you've done something really really bad, but just the average, non-descript, irritating voice-over which never stops droning that....uh....what exactly is it droning?
Saturday, August 14, 2010
PRISM PAINTING IN SLOW PROGRESS
I've been working on it and staring
at it so much that I decided to take time off and
make a slideshow of some of the stages up to now. There comes
a time in every painting, for me anyway, when every part of it is frozen and something radical must be done in order
to get the flow going again. That's where I am at the moment
but I haven't yet taken any radical steps.
Do you see a black rectangle? The slideshow will start playing in a minute or two. If it doesn't, you can watch it over at my blip.tv page. Unfortunately, the shape of the video screen doesn't allow for the whole height of the painting to show and the panning effect distorts it even more. Ach! Next time I won't use it.
For some reason, the music doesn't play over here but it works on the main Blaugustine and at blip.tv.
MORE
Do you see a black rectangle? The slideshow will start playing in a minute or two. If it doesn't, you can watch it over at my blip.tv page. Unfortunately, the shape of the video screen doesn't allow for the whole height of the painting to show and the panning effect distorts it even more. Ach! Next time I won't use it.
For some reason, the music doesn't play over here but it works on the main Blaugustine and at blip.tv.
Saturday, August 07, 2010
Tuesday, August 03, 2010
LATEST STATE OF DNA PAINTING AND PRE-BIRTHDAY REQUESTS
I've been working on it, hoping to
finish before my birthday (August 7) but I can't predict
what the painting wants to do. Here you see it in my studio
and how it sort of flows into the surroundings. I think I'm
going to change the title to PRISM . The colours in
this photo do not accurately represent the real thing.
Speaking of birthday: can I have some requests as to what you, my loyal visitors, would like as my birthday post? You know, like those radio request programmes. I will try to comply with your wishes, unless they are awkward questions like, how old are you?. The answer to that, my friends, is blowing in the wind.
MORE
Speaking of birthday: can I have some requests as to what you, my loyal visitors, would like as my birthday post? You know, like those radio request programmes. I will try to comply with your wishes, unless they are awkward questions like, how old are you?. The answer to that, my friends, is blowing in the wind.
MORE
Monday, July 26, 2010
LUCIEN FREUD (et moi) AT THE POMPIDOU
I'm about to make sweeping statements
but this is my blog and I'm allowed to sweepstate as much
as I like. You are encouraged to refute, agree, elaborate,
contradict, and I hope you will do one or more of these things
because, frankly, comments are few and far between over here
lately and I'd like to boost the participatory factor. So,
here goes.
There are two types of creatives: receptives and obsessives.
Receptive-creatives have hyper-sensitive antennae which are continually picking up visual, verbal and subliminal information and sensations from the surroundings. Receptive-creatives are easily distracted because of the abundance of stimuli bombarding them. When an object or subject captures their attention, they will give it total concentration but only until the next stimulus becomes impossible to ignore. The variety and intensity of input vibrating their antennae is such that the degree of success (in worldly terms) which their creativity achieves depends on the amount of time they are able and willing to give to any particular message the universe sends. A state of readiness to absorb, combined with uncertainty about whether the material really merits absorption, is the receptive-creative's normal modus vivendi. I, ahem, am among those who fit into this category.
Obsessive-creatives are driven by a compulsion which demands single-minded focus on a chosen path and the avoidance of anything which might disturb, distract or question this choice. They too are receptive but in a one-track way and they arrange their lives so as to feed their compulsion and insist that anyone who comes close should either support it or stay out. Dedicated, opinionated, blinkered, uncompromising, workaholic, eccentric, egocentric, extraordinary, are some of the adjectives frequently used in describing them. I would prefer to be an o-c rather than an r-c but I have never succeeded in remodelling myself. Lucian Freud is among those who are probably born into this category.
I have not been one of the many admirers of Sigmund's grandson's painting (or of his grandad for that matter - don't let me get distracted!) but I didn't want to miss this exhibition because I hoped to be goaded into pursuing a completely contrary path. So I took my lethargic body to the Pompidou - nowadays ressembling a decaying community centre designed by committee - and escalated, via a bird's eye view of the Rue Beaubourg, to the sixth floor galleries where Freud's Atelier paintings were impressively hung.
Pompidou Centre entrance hall.
View from sixth level
of the Pompidou Centre.
I did not expect to be impressed. But I was. Not impressed as in awestruck but as in, this is important stuff - must sit down and take it in slowly.
First of all, his colours. They are greys, browns, ochres, meat-red, black and the occasional dusty yellow-green. They are Old Master-ish, museum-ish colours, destined for posterity and weighty gold frames, defiantly academic, you could even say anti-modernist.
Then there's the light. The grey light of London bed-sitters in lonely winters and sweaty summers. The cold light of dawn, post-coitum triste. The sleepless night light of regret, apathy, desperation. The merciless light of hospitals, morgues and bus stations at 4 am.
Then there's the flesh, his subject. Passive flesh offered up to be penetrated by his dominant, hypnotic gaze. Naked but not erotic bodies splayed in apparent abandon on the bed, sofa or floor, seemingly obeying the master's stage-instructions to "be themselves" but, in truth, being only what he requires them to be. He says that what interests him in people is their animal side and that he likes seeing his subjects "as naturally and physically at ease as his dog." However, far from being at ease in their theatrical set-up, Freud's actors are more like tranquilised laboratory animals, their vitality suppressed, coerced by the painter's will into becoming still-life - even the dog must relinquish all doggy energy if he's to play a part in a Freudian tableau. But in the coruscating self-portraits, perhaps the only time the artist allows his model to confront him as an equal, Freud achieves magnificent, courageous insight.
I understand the necessity of establishing rules of engagement when absorbed in the intensely difficult process of looking at and transcribing a human presence. The artist may be inwardly saying to his subject: go away! I mean stay, but don't talk, don't move, don't interact, just be still so I can observe you without being observed. So it makes sense that Freud prefers his models to be asleep or in a kind of trance induced by long hours of posing, but his determined focus on flesh as meat, to the exclusion of any other aspect of identity (as far as he's concerned, the matiére of his portrait of a person is that person) must be the reason I left Lucien Freud's Atelier very impressed, but ultimately disappointed. The old Peggy Lee song ran through my mind..........Is That All There Is?
MORE
There are two types of creatives: receptives and obsessives.
Receptive-creatives have hyper-sensitive antennae which are continually picking up visual, verbal and subliminal information and sensations from the surroundings. Receptive-creatives are easily distracted because of the abundance of stimuli bombarding them. When an object or subject captures their attention, they will give it total concentration but only until the next stimulus becomes impossible to ignore. The variety and intensity of input vibrating their antennae is such that the degree of success (in worldly terms) which their creativity achieves depends on the amount of time they are able and willing to give to any particular message the universe sends. A state of readiness to absorb, combined with uncertainty about whether the material really merits absorption, is the receptive-creative's normal modus vivendi. I, ahem, am among those who fit into this category.
Obsessive-creatives are driven by a compulsion which demands single-minded focus on a chosen path and the avoidance of anything which might disturb, distract or question this choice. They too are receptive but in a one-track way and they arrange their lives so as to feed their compulsion and insist that anyone who comes close should either support it or stay out. Dedicated, opinionated, blinkered, uncompromising, workaholic, eccentric, egocentric, extraordinary, are some of the adjectives frequently used in describing them. I would prefer to be an o-c rather than an r-c but I have never succeeded in remodelling myself. Lucian Freud is among those who are probably born into this category.
I have not been one of the many admirers of Sigmund's grandson's painting (or of his grandad for that matter - don't let me get distracted!) but I didn't want to miss this exhibition because I hoped to be goaded into pursuing a completely contrary path. So I took my lethargic body to the Pompidou - nowadays ressembling a decaying community centre designed by committee - and escalated, via a bird's eye view of the Rue Beaubourg, to the sixth floor galleries where Freud's Atelier paintings were impressively hung.
Pompidou Centre entrance hall.
I did not expect to be impressed. But I was. Not impressed as in awestruck but as in, this is important stuff - must sit down and take it in slowly.
First of all, his colours. They are greys, browns, ochres, meat-red, black and the occasional dusty yellow-green. They are Old Master-ish, museum-ish colours, destined for posterity and weighty gold frames, defiantly academic, you could even say anti-modernist.
Then there's the light. The grey light of London bed-sitters in lonely winters and sweaty summers. The cold light of dawn, post-coitum triste. The sleepless night light of regret, apathy, desperation. The merciless light of hospitals, morgues and bus stations at 4 am.
Then there's the flesh, his subject. Passive flesh offered up to be penetrated by his dominant, hypnotic gaze. Naked but not erotic bodies splayed in apparent abandon on the bed, sofa or floor, seemingly obeying the master's stage-instructions to "be themselves" but, in truth, being only what he requires them to be. He says that what interests him in people is their animal side and that he likes seeing his subjects "as naturally and physically at ease as his dog." However, far from being at ease in their theatrical set-up, Freud's actors are more like tranquilised laboratory animals, their vitality suppressed, coerced by the painter's will into becoming still-life - even the dog must relinquish all doggy energy if he's to play a part in a Freudian tableau. But in the coruscating self-portraits, perhaps the only time the artist allows his model to confront him as an equal, Freud achieves magnificent, courageous insight.
I understand the necessity of establishing rules of engagement when absorbed in the intensely difficult process of looking at and transcribing a human presence. The artist may be inwardly saying to his subject: go away! I mean stay, but don't talk, don't move, don't interact, just be still so I can observe you without being observed. So it makes sense that Freud prefers his models to be asleep or in a kind of trance induced by long hours of posing, but his determined focus on flesh as meat, to the exclusion of any other aspect of identity (as far as he's concerned, the matiére of his portrait of a person is that person) must be the reason I left Lucien Freud's Atelier very impressed, but ultimately disappointed. The old Peggy Lee song ran through my mind..........Is That All There Is?
Monday, July 19, 2010
HOT PARIS AND A COOL RUSSIAN
The purpose of this trip was
to accompany my sister to a worrisome medical
appointment
which, thankfully, turned out not to be as worrisome
as expected.
She went back to Rome the next day and I decided to
stay on for a few days. Unfortunately, some time
between
arrival and departure I was caught by one of those
bugs (not les
moustiques:
in addition to les
moustiques) which gets you by the throat, nose,
lungs,
limbs, intestines and joie de vivre. What with the
heat-wave
and intense pollution, joie was
drastically reduced and vivre consisted in
shuffling
very very slowly between cafés and
any place with conditioned air, a modern convenience
which
in normal times I shun, but these are not normal
times.
I had made an appointment to visit Andrei Korliakov as I was eager to meet the Russian historian who had found a long-lost painting of mine (see January 20, 2010 ) and I brought my camera but, engrossed in conversation, stupidly forgot to record this encounter. Never mind, I'll do it next time I'm in Paris. Seeing again my bold, enthusiastic painting of cypress trees in Florence after all these years was a big thrill and I happily complied with Andrei's request that I write on the back to confirm it really was painted by me. It is now part of his very interesting collection of works by Russian (or Russian-connected) artists, most of which he discovered by chance during forays in the marché aux puces.
Korliakov is a genial and dedicated researcher who has made it his life's work to build a record in photographs and documents of a fascinating slice of human history: the exodus of thousands of Russians from the cataclysmic revolution in their homeland to the many other countries where they started new lives. Working alone in his well-equipped Paris studio (state of the art scanner and computers) with the dogged patience and astute persistence of a detective, Andrei assembles the information which he finds or is sent to him by exiled Russians and their descendants, into impressive albums that are produced, published and distributed by himself. His next volume will be about Russians who went to South America and I promised to send him all material I have about my father's experiences in Paraguay and Brazil. If anyone reading this has Russian relatives or friends with connections to South America, or anywhere else in the world, do get in touch with Andrei (email and postal address are on his website). Such fortuitous links are the raw material his research depends on.
I mentioned a painting I did long ago of an old man, Colonel Kermanoff, who lived near my father's property outside Asunciòn and to my astonishment, Andrei instantly located a photo of Kermanoff as a young man: it seems he was an important person in the pre-Soviet army and the records show he eventually ended up in Paraguay. Who knew? Another serendipitous happening!
Colonel Kermanoff by NdA. Oil on canvas.
MORE
I had made an appointment to visit Andrei Korliakov as I was eager to meet the Russian historian who had found a long-lost painting of mine (see January 20, 2010 ) and I brought my camera but, engrossed in conversation, stupidly forgot to record this encounter. Never mind, I'll do it next time I'm in Paris. Seeing again my bold, enthusiastic painting of cypress trees in Florence after all these years was a big thrill and I happily complied with Andrei's request that I write on the back to confirm it really was painted by me. It is now part of his very interesting collection of works by Russian (or Russian-connected) artists, most of which he discovered by chance during forays in the marché aux puces.
Korliakov is a genial and dedicated researcher who has made it his life's work to build a record in photographs and documents of a fascinating slice of human history: the exodus of thousands of Russians from the cataclysmic revolution in their homeland to the many other countries where they started new lives. Working alone in his well-equipped Paris studio (state of the art scanner and computers) with the dogged patience and astute persistence of a detective, Andrei assembles the information which he finds or is sent to him by exiled Russians and their descendants, into impressive albums that are produced, published and distributed by himself. His next volume will be about Russians who went to South America and I promised to send him all material I have about my father's experiences in Paraguay and Brazil. If anyone reading this has Russian relatives or friends with connections to South America, or anywhere else in the world, do get in touch with Andrei (email and postal address are on his website). Such fortuitous links are the raw material his research depends on.
I mentioned a painting I did long ago of an old man, Colonel Kermanoff, who lived near my father's property outside Asunciòn and to my astonishment, Andrei instantly located a photo of Kermanoff as a young man: it seems he was an important person in the pre-Soviet army and the records show he eventually ended up in Paraguay. Who knew? Another serendipitous happening!
Colonel Kermanoff by NdA. Oil on canvas.
MORE
Friday, July 16, 2010
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