The Human Scale

I consider it quite a blessing to have grown up and more basically have been living in a village for most of my life.

The spire and not a very huge one has always been the tallest building.

Thus it came to be when I was living in the city some buildings, especially the recent ones growing ever taller into the sky, seemed like giants lurking over the city and its streets of houses.

Imagine that.

PS: Barnadine's Straw

On yet another level it would be incredibly cruel to create a character, to breathe life into him, simply for the singular purpose of having his head.

Maybe, just maybe a comment on some Calvinist believes.

Barnadine's Straw

Even such a great juggler of fates like Shakespeare is sometimes not able to have his characters enact their destined fate.

Like Michael Pennington points out in his lecture "Barnadine's Straw: The Devil in Shakespeare's Detail", Shakespeare is unable to have Barnadine executed instead of  Claudio in Measure for Measure. Barnadine simply refuses to play along and Shakespeare has to come up with a different solution, or rather head.

Headstrong ;)!

There's Less Will in Will

or why prefer Shakespeare to Goethe, although I'm German.

The thing that really turns me off regarding Goethe is that he is very verbose in his plays. Probably because he wants to show off his artistry, thereby displaying his Kunstwille/ artistic will. Once I sat down to watch an unshortened performance of Faust II and after just a few minutes into Helen's unabbreviated lamentations about Menelaus' intentions, I wished that he would kill her immediately.

In contrast I once attended an unshortened performance of Hamlet, that lasted from 5pm until almost 11 pm including two intervals. And I was as alert at the end as at the beginning and everything just fell in place.

In Shakespeare everything flows quite naturally,  whereas in Goethe one also senses the enormous endeavour, his artistic will.

I wonder if being too verbose in order to be not misunderstood is a German trait.

A year ago I had a discussion about a book, "Er ist wieder da", featuring a resurrected Adolf Hitler - btw a wonderful satire that is so good that it scared me. My disputant, who did not like it at all, was complaining about the fact that it had to be Hitler who came back to comment on present-day Germany and not somebody like Immanuel Kant. I retorted that if somebody ventured to copy Kant's style it could never be a satire and people would grow pretty tired reading his style. His view that even Kant must take a breath every once a while, I could not share. Maybe there's the rub, some people never seem to breathe at all ;).

Only applies to Shakespeare ;)!

Alertness

"Readiness is all...Let be." - William Shakespeare, Hamlet

 

Draw(!)-ing

Immediacy

Regarding yesterday's post and Henri Cartier-Bresson's view I begin to wonder if it is just one side of whatever coin.

For drawing has also got an immediacy, especially since the medium is less technical than in the case of  photography, where one needs a camera, a device to assist the eye.

There are maybe two different aspects of immediacy and reflection.

On the one side the immediacy of the eye supported by the camera, on the other hand the immediacy of the stroke, the hand.

On the one hand the fact that one depends on the camera and the film (and as far as I know perception and the brain are always a little bit behind the actual moment), on the other the whole process of drawing, which certainly takes more time than to push the release.

Photography and Painting/ Drawing

- a comparison -

Photography is for me the spontaneous impulse of perpetual visual attention, that captures the instant and its eternity.

Drawing gathers through its line, what the conscience has conceived of this instant.

The photo is an immediate act, the drawing is a meditation.

Henri Cartier-Bresson


I wish it was as easy as it sounds, but then if I think about it neither sounds pretty easy to achieve.

There is sometimes a lot I see, but to get to the essence is pretty hard, especially if it's only a line, a stroke it depends upon.

Youth(ful)

It's all about body language.

Something that intrigues me and I hope to capture.

No matter what your biological age, when you are able to (re)act like this, you've got the essence of youth ;)!

Belief

"How wisely Nature did decree
With the same eye to weep and see!
That having viewed the object vain,
We might be ready to complain
[...]
Open then, mine eyes, your double sluice,
And practise so your noblest use;
For others too can see, or sleep
But only human eyes can weep.
[...]
Thus let your streams o'verflow your springs,
Till eyes and tears be the same things:
And each the other's difference bears;
These weeping eyes, those seeing tears."*

- Tears that see...Do you believe?

- I don't know, one has to believe. ...


(Jacques Derrida: Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and other Ruins)

*Andrew Marvell: Eyes and Tears

Contagious

Just like its opposite fear, confidence apparently is contagious.

Pull'em up, pull'em up.

We Are

by simply being, facing and loving, sharing our destiny, heroically meeting it, being curious
Oh the beauty of this wonder-ful world

"Ceci n'est pas une pipe"

or I'm certainly not your "Püppi"/ dolly!

When I was about five years old a girl greeted me with the word "Püppi"/ dolly. My reply was that I was not her "Püppi"! Something that felt quite natural and common sense at the time.

Magritte's painting points out the issue quite clearly, the image one has made up is not the thing or the person.

Nowadays I get the strong notion though that a lot of people hold a sort of reversed view on the issue. The symbol has turned on them and they tend to liken themselves to it. Out of sheer fear of the might of these symbols they will become iconoclastic, when all they should do is realise that the symbol never represented them.

Thanks

to everybody and anybody who's been an inspiration!

I could not be without you ;)!

C'mon

I'd love to.

Homo ludens, where are you today, when the rules are getting stricter and stricter. When discourse is shortened by morals that are too Puritan or Jacobinic at heart. Will you have the capacity to imaginatively  play and learn?!

"The End of Painting"

It's true, Kazimir Malevich painted his black square and  declared the end of painting, yet you would be the fool to believe him.

Firstly because this presents just one end if at all.


My feelings run deeper though. If humanity would ever quit painting, humanity would no longer be able to understand, to grasp painting. All would be lost and we would be the poorer for it.

Finally Malevich himself painted on after all ;)!

Artificial vs Artistic

Of late somebody trying to express himself in a very refined, intellectual way, confused while doing so the words 'artificial' and 'artistic' - at least that's the way I understood it as he was talking of the two sides to Banksy's art, the 'monetary' and the 'artificial'.

In German the word 'artistic/artistisch' bears a connotation that links it rather to the circus. Yet I would always rather be linked to a circus than to something artificial.

"I'm obsessed with life before death"... To the boredom dying slowly.

Sometimes

metaphors get very consequently drawn to a conclusion and then might become too real to bear.

Yet I like this weird stuff.

Like here where the lover is likened to a "dear little piranha" who is told to tear up the singer. Not just this, but the piranha is envisioned as drinking his blood and breaking his heart, that is beating just for this lover.



The effect is that this sterotyped metaphor of a broken heart is given new power, fresh meaning.

Similarly here : "You! You break my heart. You tear me up in so many parts. One part for you and one for me and that is how it ought to be."

Testing

to some people.

Quite paradoxically some traits only shine when the situation implies the contrary.

Hope only really is or can be tested in a hopeless situation.

This might be quite puzzling to some people as was Stromae to the New York Times.



Watch the video until the end. Nice twist ;)! And that's how it ought to be.

Brightness

"Those toys of the poor were like the children who buy them; they were all dirty; but the were all bright. For my part I think brightness more important than cleanliness; since the first is of the soul, and the second of the body. You must excuse me; I am a democrat; I know I am out of fashion in the modern world." - Chesterton, "The Shop of Ghosts"

I Wonder

and I don't care.

About the self-declared highbrow who disguise their being bored using highbrow words. It makes me yawn.

About those people who - as we put in German - have to go down into the cellar in order to have a laugh. It makes me feel rather sorry.

About those people who have a steadfast preconception on how things are and never will discover anything. I'm also very sorry for you.

Grasp

You are definitely the poet by grasping the sheer and simple beauty of it all ;)!


And yes, thanks for the inspiration!

I'd Rather Be The Fool

who has tried and failed.

'Sic tacuisses, philosophus mansisses' - feels sometimes just like the cold comfort of the self-righteous. At least when one should have spoken up.

I believe one should rather face the law than be Kafka's man from the country.

Zu-Fall

Coincidentally at least two abstract painters, Hilma af Klint and Barnett Newman, have reached abstraction through depicting something floral.

In Klint's case the images are more ornamental, in Newman's something simply grows.

Excerpt from Newman's CV as stated in 'Barnett Newman - Selected Writings and Interviews':
1940  Ceases full-time teaching, teaches night school instead. Pursues serious study of botany at Brooklyn Botanic Garden.
1941  Takes graduate courses in botany and ornithology at Cornell University.

A Most Peculiar Relationship

between the artist and the spectator as reported by Raimund Stecker when commemorating the art historian Max Imdahl - a translation:

How does one reach the spectator's very own expertise?! -That's a deeply artistic way of thinking. An artist, my god, an artist enters his studio in the morning. He wants to create something that nobody needs; wants to create something for which there is no market; wants to create something that nobody has assigned him to do. He simply does it. He must unbelievably believe in the fact that what he does is of interest to anybody apart from himself. That was (Max) Imdahl's approach to art: There is something. Does one have to understand it? No! But he wanted to understand it and he had the energy to share this desire to understand with his students, readers, the people who attended his lectures; to take them on this - I don't know what it is - this excursion, without knowing where one will end up.



Embrace it all!

Romantic At Heart

Boldly And Alive

draw the line. And wish it never stops ;)!

And then she went off to cook a soup.

Boldly

embrace it all ;)

Failure

is possible and as a concept not at all undesirable.

Here something unexpected may grow.

Those are the children one will love the most, for they are calling out to the heart.

To All Those Happy Pretenders

I've come across and still will hopefully encounter. Hit me by surprise.

I once came across somebody pretending to be an art historian, and some time later somebody pretending to be a philosopher. Looking closer into the matter I confronted the art historian and told him that I thought him to be rather an artist himself, which he flatly denied, but went on provoking people like an artist would do. The philosopher himself admitted that he only took up philosophy because he was jealous of his brother's talent for drawing.

Of late I've come about somebody pretending to be a star. And looking quite close I found that the art historian, the philosopher and the star were actually great artists.

Some Peculiar State

Admittedly there is a quite peculiar state I sometimes find myself in, when I'm smiling in order not to cry.

Nice to see Bent Van Looy showing the same emotion when asked about a news item that made him laugh or cry. He chooses the information that a lot of Belgian students from poor families do have either unhealthy food in their lunch box or nothing at all. He then begins to fancy that a lunch box in itself is  a very miserable object and does remember how he always preferred the unhealthy, more tasty stuff of his fellow students to whatever was in his own lunch box. Yet he concludes the image of this miserable lunch box being empty was even worse. And all the while this draws a smile on his face. I do understand...

Beware Of The Vampire

It's odd but seeing a person again after some decades and remembering the occasion some thoughts keep crawling up and they are not at all pleasant ones. Sometimes an intellectual feeds upon the living and when writing about some phenomena sucks out all the blood, though even in the late 1990s this particular person's great discovery that people wore (political) slogans on their T-shirts had been almost bloodless.

Beware of the vampire and even more beware of how he might get recognition and fame, for his touch might be infectious if you but would believe a single bit.

Alive

Burn, burn with your headstrong spirited gesture.

Prove all those stupid fools, who do not even believe in their own souls, wrong.

Outside in the red five-finger all the birds are singing, for it's time to harvest - a wonderful sound coming in through the bathroom window.

Take Care

I care a lot.


"Laughter is as divine as tears" - Chesterton

Pushing Limits

There is always the thin line an artist has to walk between doing too little and doing too much.

Staginess is certainly an option, especially if one is not afraid of it and is aware of the classical allusions like Daan.



Keep on throwing those plates!

Images

Do inspire, but it's best if I recall them in my head and not actually face them while trying to catch the essence.

James Ensor - A True Story

by Gerhard Theewen, at least he told us this one.

Once he was in the town of Ostende and there he noticed somebody handling an art print with no care at all. Looking closer he noticed that it was an original by James Ensor. When he asked this person about it, he got the following retort: "Oh that lunatic !"

And all the time a portrait of that lunatic was on the Belgian banknotes....

What A Piece Of Work Is Man

Sometimes I just have to be prepared to follow my very own follies....

Let's just see what will grow of it.

Utter Loneliness

The loneliest of artists is the painter in front of the canvas or sheet of paper. It is the utter horror and no wonder that some of them would resort to taking drugs or automatic drawing.

I suppose it's like flying a plane, the crucial moments are allegedly the take-off and the landing, meaning where to begin and equally important when to stop. Eventually these moments decide whether you are safe or you crash. That is by the way the reason I do not believe in  animals as painters, for all I know these most important decisions are not taken by themselves but rather by people. It is people who provide them with the material, it is people who snatch the painting away from them.

Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Abstract Art

but were afraid to ask



Barnett Newman here really gives a brilliant insight and idea of what abstract art may be able to achieve. Ever since my first encounter - and I deliberately use this term, because for me it was like encountering a person, something or someone I could not avoid due to the sheer presence - the same sensation of meeting someone has remained intact. For Newman's paintings this has turned out to be a blessing and a curse. A blessing, when, like it happened to me, total strangers meet in front of them and all of a sudden start exchanging there deepest emotions and thoughts. A curse, when there are people who cannot take this and rather would apply a knife to the painting than open up to it.

Barnett Newman - Some Quotes

from "Through the Louvre with Barnett Newman" by Pierre Schneider

- There is no true meaning. Historical reconstructions, in writing or on canvas as in stone, are an absurdity, because a work lives through its presence: The author gone, the presence must needs be ours. Iconology is for epitaphs.

- life is a spelling mistake in the text of death.

- Meaning is the viewer's business; but the incentive which makes him want to mean - that is the picture's prerogative.

Choices

Which one is the greater artist, respectively the greater wizard or monster? The one who manages to bring alive dead material like stone, or the one who turns a living, breathing being into stone?! Have a look at Bernini's sculpture and then have a look at Leni Riefenstahl's documentary on the Berlin Olympic Games.