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Zur Natur des Rats der Könige und Kriegstreiber – on the nature of the council of kings and warmongers

 

Once they realized that there was not one king or one queen, but a succession of kings and queens each of whom was “the” king or “the” queen regardless of their individual identity, so that in fact, the king or the queen was not only unconquerable but  actually immortal, that times might change and ideas might change but “the” king or “the” queen” would not, so that one revolutionary, one upraising idea might threaten an individual queen or king and even overthrow them, garrote them, end them, but would have to accomplish this task within one lifetime, while “the” king or “the” queen had all the ages of the world  to wait, witness and rise again, once they realized that “the” king or “the” queen might use this or that war monger to clear the way once time was good and ripe and yet would discard of the warmonger as easily as of the revolutionary as soon the need was satisfied, once they realized that this was so, they also realized that it was not their task to interrupt the fleeting council of kings and queen and warmongers but use their one lifetime to conjure up from the source, the holy grail, a people that were as unconquerable as the grail, giving a random gathering of people a binding, unifying reason to be, to defend their freedom against the usurper through all the ages and to recognize their freedom as not a consequence of liberation but as an unalienable right and quality.
Rat der Kuonige und Kriegstr

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Celebration

Celebration

I like this illustration for it’s neither jolie, pretty, nor ugly, it’s a celebration, a meeting of some of the characters that constantly remind me that I want to draw instead of doing whatever else it is I have to do. It’s probably actually a fairly accurate illustration of my (non-verbal) thoughts when I am not focused on law or writing and it explains why it sometimes costs me quite some effort to focus on the mundane aspects of life when all these people are spoking around in my brain.

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trop jolie … too pretty

trop jolie ... too pretty

Back to the subject of pretty: Even after granting myself the liberty to let go of my need to create things that are at least scraping on the verge of comical, ugly, surreal, infantile I still do get a slight stomach ache looking at these new works. The drawing you see here at least is a bit dark, the creature in the front displaying its rib-cage like an x-ray – but the execution is doubtless pretty, shining dark (Edding marker and Poyurethane) and gold with snippets of legal text incorporated on glass.

I have two large, eight medium and multiple small acrylic plates waiting for me, and I think I will continue drawing in this very calm and slightly upsetting manner of “pretty” even if it is just to find out WHY it matters so much. Maybe it is the surface itself, the ephemeral, light quality of the glass pane rather than the coffee and potato sacks I was layering paints and disposed off objects on before.

The only rule I play by is that there must be no preliminary drawing, no careful execution – and I am thinking about incorporating more precious materials (chocolate wrappers, glitter etc.) to make it even more intolerable to my eyes.

Yes, there is a fun element here, observing myself how much “pretty” I can take.

Interestingly, parallel to these glass drawings I am working on a translation from a small English novel I have published some years ago into German, and I find that this folk-tale that sounded sober enough in English to work for me now has a pretty ring to it in the translation, too, as the words just have different associations (while pointing towards the same thing).

Ideas about that difficult relationship between pretty, sober and ugly, would be very welcome at this moment.