Three drawings, three years

these drawings done over three years about a year apart

The Ivory Tower

opening

gouache on canson dessin paper 75 x 108 cm

Victory

a work in progress

Footscray

Note the ivory tower in the top left corner, while the city seethes.

Starry night

All flesh is grass

somewhere

somehwere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me,i and
my life will shut very beautifully,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain, has such small hands

 e.e.cummings

At the end of a long week

"The world stands out on either side
No wider than the heart is wide."
- E. St.Vincent Millay

"As far as a man's view ranges, as he sits in the haze on a point of outlook and gazes over the wine-dark sea, so far at a spring leap the loud -neighing horses of the gods." - Iliad

I walked up the mountain this morning.
I've been talking all week and now I have run out of words.
Some things are better left unsaid, just understood.
I've been looking for another quote but can't find one to speak for me.
I'll keep looking.

"...the conception of a simultaneous vision; a wide stretch of countryside where various incidents take place at the same time, as indeed they do in life. This simultaneous vision is particularly associated with Oriental thought, where the emphasis is on the whole picture - on what we know to be there, not only on what we see with our eyes, for 'the eyes can only see the limits, but not the whole thing.' Everything 'moves as time moves, but caught and captured as it moves through space, like a symphony: the mind plays an essential part, it is stirred by indefinable longing' " Waley in The Art of Chinese Landscape Painting in the Caves of Tun Huang - De Silva 1964.

"Life is treated neither as an instant of time nor the reflection of light from a given place at that moment, but as a continuous process working in the heart of man. -De Silva.

"Those of the audience who are appreciative are content to perfect the song in their own minds by the force of their own feeling," -Tagore

and some more

"The song that I came to sing remains unsung to this day.
I have spent my days in stringing and in unstringing my instrument.
The time has not come true, the words have not been rightly set;
only there is the agony of wishing in my heart.
The blossom has not opened; only the wind is sighing by."

Nina Ballerina

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an interesting read circa 1939

This is my week for houskeeping, and I usually find him and his assistant in a far corner of the kitchen squatting over a book of qasidas while the meat boiling itself to toughness, bubbles in the middle of the floor. A servant in England would be abashed when surprised in literature, but Qasim leaps up delighted to show his poems, beautiful in red and black script. To have him and us in the same house, is like the Orient and the Occident under one roof. The Orient does not get much done: it looks upon work as a part only - and not too important a part at that - of its varied existence, but enjoys with a free mind whatever else happens besides. The Occident, busily building, has its eyes rigidly fixed on the future : Being and Doing, and civilization, a compromise, between them. There is too little of the compromise now. Too much machinery in the West, too little in the East, have made a gap between the active and the contemplative; they drift ever more apart. Woman hitherto has inclined more to eastern idea – the stress being laid on what she is rather than on what she does; and if we are going to change this, taking for our sole pattern the active energies of men, we are in danger of destroying a principle which contains one-half of the ingredients of civilization. Before ceasing to be, it is to be hoped that our sex will at least make sure that what it does is worth the sacrifice.

from ‘A Winter in Arabia’ by Freya Stark, first published 1940.

three drawings of the same thing

Tonghai

incomplete version - relates to drawing

Erected

section of drawing made with rubbings from headstones in local cemetery, and tracings from characters on rice paper together with scribble.

Come Undone

Some new drawings for new paintings

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.