Drawing out meaning...

I can't honestly remember what I was working on.

It was late in the evening after a long day.

And then....

Accidents will happen...

A three quarters full mug of coffee was spilt over the table, the sketch book, narrowly missed the phone.

It was a sketch book that had already suffered having numerous pages ripped in two.

All that bloody art...lost.

A flight of birds shredded...

I find some consolation and inspiration in Kintsugi.

"Translated to “golden joinery,” Kintsugi (or Kintsukuroi, which means “golden repair”) is the centuries-old Japanese art of fixing broken pottery with a special lacquer dusted with powdered gold, silver, or platinum. Beautiful seams of gold glint in the cracks of ceramic ware, giving a unique appearance to the piece."

https://mymodernmet.com/kintsugi-kintsukuroi/

A moment of joy, a moment of anger, a moment of grief...

In taking the time to gild the grief, I find new meaning in my relationship to what was and what is.

"You lose only what you cling to." Buddha.

Working regularly has made me less concerned about what has been done before.

I note that many artists destroy their artwork.

Deliberate destruction.

I find an article in ART  telling a notorious story of destruction:

"Our favourite story in the long history of art destruction concerns American pop/conceptual artist Robert Rauschenberg. Early in his career, inspired by the work of Marcel Duchamp, he decided he wanted to test the boundaries of what could be deemed a work of art. Could a work of art be created, he wondered, through the act of erasure? He started out by rubbing out one of his own drawings. It didn’t work. He felt that the destruction of a not very important work by a then not very important artist didn’t really test his idea sufficiently. Rauschenberg decided the only thing to do was to destroy a significant work of art by a significant artist. And so, he gathered up the courage to show up at the studio of Willem de Kooning, a Dutch-American painter. De Kooning didn’t approve, but still provided a selection of his paintings to choose from, believing that young artists should be allowed to experiment.

Rauschenberg then took one of the master’s paintings away and tirelessly worked on the act of destruction, eventually erasing all visible traces of De Kooning’s image. He then took the now blank paper to Jasper Johns, his great friend and fellow artist and asked him to create a frame for the piece. Johns did as he was asked and produced a label which read:

‘ERASED de KOONING’ ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG, 1953"

No use crying over spilt coffee...

I sponged up the coffee, put the sketchbook on the radiator to dry.

A couple of days later and I took time to inspect the damage.

Pages stuck together,

Sepia coffee stains had dried in weird patterns.

Suddenly I see the sketchpad and the accident in a new light.

Suddenly I see stories, landscapes, potential for play.

The deliberate accident in art.

After a couple of days of play, I find an article from the Tate museum on deliberate accidents and share it with my friends.

The deliberate accident in art | Tate #clmooc ⁦@NomadWarMachine⁩ ⁦@dogtrax⁩ ⁦@telliowkuwp⁩ ⁦@wentale⁩ ⁦@ronald_2008⁩ ⁦@amyburvall⁩ #febdoodle https://t.co/dSffN6rdgh

— Simon Ensor (@sensor63) February 1, 2019

I realise that I have always worked partly in this way looking for meaning in apparent chaos.


I remember writing about how my mother would collect all sorts of objects with no obvious intrinsic value because she saw something in them., here in Driftwood curiosity:

"I am content you see no value.

I see myself standing on a beach.

You have left me quite alone.

Objects are washed up by the ocean.

Something catches my eye.

I bend down to pick it up."

Drawing means and drawing out meaning.

I am torn between drawing "well" from life and drawing out meaning from the abundant well of life.

I am torn between deliberate and accidental in my artistic acts.

I feel comfortable with what is accidental but also love the discipline of technique.

I find a quote of Camus.

"I said that the world is absurd, but I was too hasty. This world in itself is not reasonable, that is all that can be said. But what is absurd is the confrontation of this irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart." 
Albert Camus

Random Eyes

It's Sunday 21st December and I am on my way to the shops.

I have my shopping list, I have a pair of odd socks to wear.

Routine autopilot is on green.

Then something stopped me in my tracks.

A fleeting scroll on an ipad, I fell upon a word which caught my attention: 'Random.'

It was a post of Alan Levine entitled 'Randomly Yours.'

It was enough to impel action, it was the reason for this rush.

I am writing this before the shops close.

Skimming.

I only skimmed it.

I had no time for reflection.

I remember the mention of serendipity.

I love the word serendipity, a concept so embedded, a word unknown to me before quite recently.

Randomise, random eyes, only a fortunate misspelling.

It is enough to start the top spinning.


Spinning Top.

I find an image.

It is an image that I remember.

It is an image that the Zeega master Mr T. Elliott uses.

There is the element of time.

There is a some unknown wilful spinning impulsion.

There is curiosity.

Spinning stopped

It is captured in this page now, spinning but never stopping.

I go back and embolden a few lines which catch my attention.

They are the bones of the piece. They hold it up, they hold it together.

I am not sure why these lines more than others.

I will go back and read closely later.

I pause, I resume typing, typing ever rightwards, ever downwards, on this page.

Where is this leading?

I come to the edge of the page.

Index card.

I scribble a few references on a card.

I open the library index drawers, I look for the title.

'The Edge of hopelessness'

However long I spend looking for the book reference, I come back to the same conclusion.

The 'Edge of hopelessness' doesn't exist here.

It came from a comment on a Facebook rhizo14 stream by Scott Johnson.

It is the title of a piece of work that needs to be written, that is begging for an author to give it a place some place in the 'Thes'.

How do  I punctuate a plural the?

Random Eyes

No matter. I am now looking at this page anew.

It is blank,  crying out for a release from its mutism.

It is a dumb waiter.

I am flying down to a basement.

If only the top will keep spinning.

I will write before it is too late.


Image from Inception.

Gif by Timetravlin
 http://timetravlin13.tumblr.com/post/23193550687

Meme and mutation.

"Are we as persons not capable of transcending the social structures in which we find ourselves." 

Gardo
via @GardnerCampbell and @FrancesBell





The child picked up the object, turned it around in his hands and tossed it into his basket.

It had caught his curiosity. It was enough for him to reach out his hand.

Quite what this object was was a mystery to him.

It looked like it might be a source of conversation in the tribe.

If only he could think up a good story.

He was sure that the object would attract the others' interest and he would, for a moment be the centre of attention.

If only he could think up a good story.

I was fed up with monuments, in the space of four months, I had been stunned by Venice, exhausted by not finding the front door of the Vatican (even the smallest state in the world is tiring circumnavigated on foot), wowed by the Colisseum, bored by Geneva, stuck in a lift in a Budapest tower block,  whirled around Vienna by Ramses....

I was fed up with monuments.

I decided to introduce randomness into my travelling.

The Grand Tour was all very well but it wasn't all that adventurous.

I took out my map and found a pin, (stretched out paper clip).

I closed my eyes and whirled my hand expansively around the map.

With a determined movement of my finger and thumb I thrust the pin into a place on the map.

PISO. in Southern Italy.

Where on earth, what on earth was Piso?

I promised myself that no matter the place on which the pin would land, I would go there, that day.

PISO or bust. 

When I got off the train, it was late, it was dark, I was alone.  I trudged up a long slope to what appeared to be a village.  On arriving there appeared to be a group of people sitting around a light in  a square.  I didn't have a clue what would happen next.

I didn't speak Italian, they didn't speak English.

Our inability to communicate brought us closer. 

Somehow we managed to understand that I wanted to find somewhere to sleep for the night.

They had a sort of hotel even if there was no 'hotel sign'.

They found someone to open it up for me at five past midnight.

The following evening, I met the locals, we managed to recognise a common interest in football. We shared a number of names of footballers and they translated them into players for AC Milan, Roma, Sampdoria.

The small connections were greeted on both sides with laughter and joy.

We were starting to become friends.

A few hours later, the village girls came over to promenade, they could not believe that anyone English would choose to come to their village, therefore they decided it was a joke set up to trick them.

I was officially Italian. I was an annoying Italian pretending to be English.

They didn't have the means to check out their hypothesis.

It didn't matter, the joke added to the feeling of becoming a part of a story.

What do you do? 

I am a teacher.

Immediately there are associations which are made with others who understand this word. I work in a classroom. There is a blackboard, there is a whiteboard.

Where are you from?

I am from England.

Immediately there are associations which are made with others who understand this word. I live in a country with a Queen, with people who drink tea and don't know how to cook.

Little mutations of the memes

• Grand Tour
• Teacher
• Classroom
• England

can arouse peoples' curiosity, can change the stories that they will tell.

# What is that? 

It is a hashtag.

Immediately there are, or there are not (most likely) associations which are made with a tag.

A hashtag is what we make of it.

It is an empty basket into which we can toss our differences.
It is an empty basket into which we can toss our stories.
If we are curious, if we develop our imaginations, we can perhaps avoid recreating our own monologues.

A hashtag is like a child, it is what we enable it to become.

A child is more than a basket.

It has the potential to change our world with its stories.

 If only we would stop to listen.