Gursky

'Thebes, West' 1993

Andreas Gursky
Biog here: http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/andreas-gursky-2349

There are some ongoing questions or queries that arise as I think about posting this:



* affinity - seeing connections and similarities; is this truthful or just the need to see myself in everything?

* Tate says: "Gursky uses a bird's-eye view to portray the collective behaviour of large social groups." I wonder about abstraction and distancing - the aerial, distancing, over views, seeing patterns and form, being far from the action.

* abstraction and the meditative, calmness, order. Still images, reflection, meditation, only by removing ourselves?

* the need to explain, a way to explain, using language to images, posting with language, how to passage from the production and the reception, packaging. Staying truthful to the intention. Telling you this.

affetti again

affetti (uncountable)

1. (art) Human passion and feelings expressed through gesture.

(I had forgotten what it means)

Birthday Sunflower

Through various practices in my life at the moment, I am getting better at understanding what it means to meditate - or what it means to me: going into myself, searching for the quieter tuned in side of existing. I am thinking about how this state has happened by itself in my past, and always accompanied by great creative inspiration. When that feeling of inspiration and connectedness with the world is not there, I wonder what happened.

So, I am getting better at seeing that stresses and worries, too many distractions etc. etc. are what take us away from that quiet space, but it takes experience to be able to recognise it in order to learn to prioritise it.

Which comes first - the quiet connectedness with the world or the looking? Looking - a concentrated focusing on the things in the world, probably through beauty, though I don't think beauty has a fixed meaning - I am talking about the feeling of the beautiful whereby feelings come with and cause actions from us. The inside/outside thing again, human skin as interface: do we find beauty in looking or does the beautiful find us?

These are of a sunflower that a dear friend gave me for my birthday.

Framed

First you take a photograph because the image inspires you - you see something in that particular view that suits being photographed.
Then time passes and when you return to the image it seems uninteresting. Disappointingly, you cannot remember why it seemed a good idea to take this photograph.
Then, you find the image when you go through your photographs from the past and it interests you again - look! A photograph framing an object framed, by an accident of how these objects occurred in the world. Beautiful fruits framed by a grey box, as I saw them in that moment.

Seeing Swifts

Common sense and a sense of humour are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humour is just common sense, dancing.

William James

14 July 2014

Watching swifts far above me, against a hazy blue sky. It is early morning and this blue sky is a sign of a beautiful day to come.

Swifts, tumbling, soaring. Their flight is elating. They fly so high that they come in and out of my range of vision, sometimes they're there, sometimes they're not. Tiny tumbling black spots in my eye. When they're closer I can see the crescent arc of their wings.

When they're gone my eyes are searching and the tiny shapes of stuff on my eye and the imaginary residue of stuff in my eye and on my brain become visible in the searching, against a blue sky. Barely discernible shapes and fuzzy motions that I may or may not have invented. Tiny shapes moving in my eyes, tumbling and elating in their freedom and flight, and the flight of the swifts blur with my own looking – all that activity. Swifts of and in my eyes, my flight with them.

There's nothing passive about seeing.

home space

There's been a process unfolding within and around me, as I adjust to having a new home, and fill it physically and psychically.
Encouraged by a lovely compliment from Rita Evans - I begin to let more of the fruits of this process appear on here.
I have felt as if my home space has become the outer limits of my psyche, and within these walls all is creativity and play. To take it beyond these walls is to make it something else, but that's ok, I have encouragement.

(below) Shapes intersecting, things intersecting as they are in this particular moment.

Chillies and umbrella 

and bananas and daffodils

colour connections

and sunshine