flesh and bone

the space inside a human being

lungs and heart working in unison

happy little landscape

shadow of myself

Selfishness

For me the risk does not come in making art, the risk is in compromise.

Don’t want to spend all my energy on sortof creative profession like teaching, for me that would be a kind of failure. I’ve done it before. My dilemma is to be unable to sacrifice the integrity of what I do. Selfish or maybe self -indulgent, isn’t it, to just want to create and live off the system.

‘The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about 30 they abandon individual ambition – in many cases, indeed, they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all – and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. But there is also the minority of gifted, wilful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end…’ Orwell

Sometimes it would be nice to write without having to censor. The thing about painting/ drawing is that it is total self -effacement, it is in and of yourself but not in a vain, fixed way. Writing about your self is much less satisfactory. Words are so strong and linear and I don’t necessarily think like that.

Songs and Sparrows.

I made my song a coat
Covered with embroideries
Out of old mythologies
From heel to throat;
But the fools caught it,
Wore it in the world’s eye
As though they’d wrought it.
Song, let them take it
For there’s more enterprise
In walking naked.

W.B.Yeats

Too often the contribution people have in them to make is not wanted

Or the contribution they make is misused or misunderstood..

Orwell ‘…if one wants to be primarily a writer, then, in our society, one is an animal that is tolerated but not encouraged- something like a house sparrow- and one gets on better if one realises one’s position from the start.’

One does, does one? Maybe this is something I needed to know.

Thanks E.E.

my mind is
a big hunk of irrevocable nothing which touch and
taste and smell and hearing and sight keep hitting and
chipping with sharp fatal tools
in an agony of sensual chisels i perform squirms of
chrome and execute strides of cobalt
nevertheless i
feel that i cleverly am being altered that i slightly am
becoming something a little different, in fact
myself
Hereupon helpless i utter lilac shrieks and scarlet
bellowings.

E.E.Cummings

This is more of a lilac shriek than a scarlet bellowing. I’ve been reading George Orwell’s essays ‘Why I write’ and looking at other artist's dilemmas and found some significance for myself there. However this does not make me feel particularly comfortable with the direction that this will give to my blurb particularly when unlike Orwell writing in hindsight, I am still somewhere in my ‘underwent poverty and a sense of failure ‘phase. Or perhaps I need to acknowledge publicly that this is my case. And also the case of others.

Like many gone before I feel disaffected by the world I find myself part of. Why make art? What is its purpose? I’ve been reading around this for a while trying to stay clear of the psychologists and have only scraped the surface of what is a deep mystery. I wish I could be more analytical about the process but there it is.

from the 'The Gardener's Daughter '- Tennyson

Such a noise of life
Swarm'd in the golden present, such a voice
Call'd to me from the years to come, and such
A length of bright horizon rimm'd the dark.

A recent fortune cookie

A bird does not sing because it has an answer.
It sings because it has a song.

the 3 a.m. wake up

been doing this too often of late

just a beginning

just a beginning

with a quote from e.e.cummings
'always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question'
or something like that

inspired to do this by my de fecto brother in law,
a man full of enthusiasms

lots of learning by doing