Category: Uncategorized

Nature is complaining as it goes into decline.

“AUTUMN”, the opening word of Joaquim Ruyra’s short story ‘Jacobé’, a period of shedding, dying back before hibernation and then (later) rejuvenation. Immediately you are transported to the season where the natural world is shedding its vibrancy.

…it is something death-like which moves through the land in accordance with an annual rhythm.

As the author biography tells us:

Joaquim Ruyra was a short story writer, poet and translator, considered a key figure in modern Catalan literature and one of the great narrators of the 20^th century. He was in the vanguard of the Catalan Modernist generation as they constructed a new literary model after 1860, when the Catalan language became the vehicle of cultural nationalism. Although he did not produce a large body of work, his short stories set a stylistic benchmark for Catalan literature, including the shaping of a ‘landscape…

Day and Night – (Max Ernst)

“Absence is a house so vast that inside you will pass through its walls and hang pictures on the air.”

Pablo Neruda

Unlike peace and solitude, a sense of absence can be powerfully disturbing and deeply emotional. What does the concept of absence mean to us? It touches all of us at some points in our lives, in different ways.

Below are 5 interesting thoughts about absence……

1. Neither Presence Nor Absence: Traces.

Traces. Abstract Painting 780-1 – Gerhard Richter. Wikioo.

“To live means to leave traces.”

Walter Benjamin

Absence and presence are not always clear cut and they do not have definitive boundaries. There is certainly something in between both of these opposites, and it sometimes feels quite mystical, affecting the atmosphere in a room.

Sun in an Empty Room.Edward Hopper. 1963. Wikiart.

“People also leave presence in a place even when they are…

A random survey of self-portraits created by women through the centuries

Scottish painter Dame Ethel Walker DBE ARA (1861-1951)

1. Self Portrait in a Green Blouse, ND / Oil on canvas / Private collection

2. Self-Portrait, c.1925 / Oil on canvas / National Portrait Gallery, London, UK

3. Self-Portrait, c.1930 / Oil on canvas / Tate, London, UK

[4 embedded links above]

The Day is Done

The day is done, and the darkness
 Falls from the wings of Night,
As a feather is wafted downward
 From an eagle in his flight.

I see the lights of the village
 Gleam through the rain and the mist,
And a feeling of sadness comes o'er me,
 That my soul cannot resist:

A feeling of sadness and longing,
 That is not akin to pain,
And resembles sorrow only
 As the mist resembles the rain.

Come, read to me some poem,
 Some simple and heartfelt lay,
That shall soothe this restless feeling,
 And banish the thoughts of day.

Not from the grand old masters,
 Not from the bards sublime,
Whose distant footsteps echo
 Through the corridors of Time.

For, like strains of martial music,
 Their mighty thoughts suggest
Life's endless toil and endeavor;
 And to-night I long for rest.

Read from some humbler poet,
 Whose songs gushed…

In the previous post I mentioned playing around with a “concertina” art journal project that I learned about from a Betty Franks Youtube video. The picture here is another section of my version of this project. It struck me while watching Franks’s video that these panels (which can be arranged in different combinations) provide ways of trying different ideas for composition. These could be abstract, decorative compositions. Or, they could (in some cases) apply to inventions of naturalistic looking pictures — mostly in the realm of landscape.

I like to try out different color combinations. I wasn’t being particularly clever with this image. (I’m still getting used to the whole business of making things up out of thin air.) However, I did have the sense that for this section I would use yellows just to be using the color.

These pictures made using neocolor…