Time-delayed study of the behavior of physical bodies when subjected to forces or displacements
For the stonemason in particular the death of his stillborn son felt like a betrayal. It was as if he had livd in the never acknowledged faith that his profession granted him some kind of special reprieve from death, that someone had agreed to that it was not to occur in his private life as long as he continued to carve memorials for the dead, and that this someone now had let him down. He was an atheist in the service of the church and loosing his unborn child felt like a disciplinary measure for his godlessness. Like many atheists he had a system of inner convictions that replaced religion. He did not believe in a creator, an organizer, a final judge, and yet he felt like he had fallen from grace.
Iris quietly lived in the shadow of their loss, simply mourning and nourishing the inconceivable thought that they should now never know him, their son, certainly not by the way of a new pregnancy as friends and relatives suggested. These well-meaning people did not realize that the depth of her grief was rooted in the very circumstances that they thought would alleviate the loss – the fact that neither she nor anybody else had ever seen this child alive; that it had in fact never been born in the true sense as he had died in utero. Her grief was that her child had lived, if ever so briefly, unknown to her, and that she would never know it. She sat at the kitchen table with her encyclopedia and with a three hair sable brush paint stamp-sized paintings on miniature panels of oak wood while thinking about all the small things she would not ever know about her son. She wouldn’t know his face. She wouldn’t know the sound of his voice. She would never hear him laugh. She would never hold him in her arms. And yet he had lived.
The title came as swiftly as the image and the artist obeyed both. The Mechanics of Longing.
This drawing concludes my twelve night drawing meditation. As the new year is already starting to make its demands, these drawings carry with them 12 nights of focus on a non-revealed question. Sometimes during those twelve nights I felt I could catch a glimpse of things yet to be. Now there will be time to look at these pieces for a while, maybe polish them a bit.I’ll keep you posted.
New artistic challenges are ahead for the year.
January 15th is the deadline for another Sketchbook Project of the Brooklyn Art Llibrary, check out the website if you haven’t yet. Their digital library is stunning.
http://www.sketchbookproject.com/library/13754 The link will take you to my previous year contribution “The Whisper”, a simple, wistful story about a childhood memory.
My new book, a young adult science fiction novel, is about to be finished and another one waiting to be continued on my desk.
In Fall I hope to open an exhibition of 41 canvases, acrylic on raw jute canvas (aka coffee and chocolate bags) in Berlin, 30 of which are finished by now. The 12 nights have strengthened my will to continue living in multiple universes.
Thank you for following my blog, this certainly is the day to acknowledge that my readers are an important part of my creative discipline. It is a good thought that someone may be going to weigh the outcome of a night’s work and maybe find some use for it, if only in the fleeting way that art, all art, can enrich a moment.
I am wishing you, my readers, all the courage, health and gladness necessary to live a meaningful New Year and if you should be lacking any one of these for some of all of the time the will to give it your best shot anyways!
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore …
I couldn’t make this the twelfth night theme. “Nevermore” is not the note I’d choose to conclude this season’s “Twelve Nights”. But on the eleventh night it brings together further elements of reading, words, images evoking coherent comprehension beyond words, night time, magic realism, dreams, illusions, delusions, sleep deprivation, time, meditation, past, progression,automatons, determinism, choice, knowledge, intuition, desperation, endurance …
Two weeks ago I listened to a musician on DRKultur (radio) talking about time and about the experience of time during extemporaneous composition and performance on the piano. He talked about experiencing eternity not as an endless repetition of events in a space of time never ending but about as an experience of time being suspended. I think about art – writing, painting and illustrating – as taking place in just that space of time being suspended, a space that I can enter and where I can linger at will.
I’d like to think of drawing as of transforming raw data with my pen to “mean” a specific thing and not another though it is not in the nature of data to actually be one specific thing to the exclusion of all other possible “things” (meaning, manifested form, reality) in all their variations (written and unwritten) any more than a child’s building block used in a fleeting structure soon to be knocked over is identical with that intended structure’s purpose or “meaning”. A building block stays a building block, a zero stays a zero and a one stays a one no matter what it is used to communicate. It assumes a participating function in the meaning of one thing ( and not another ) but it also creates that one thing without adopting its separate ( separate from other possible thing’s) nature simply by describing it. The “thing” actually has no separate ( from other possible thing’s) nature – it is but a description of the configuration of the raw data (building blocks) at a specific moment from a specific perspective. So that, at any given moment, any thing, rearranged, could be (and is) any other thing, idea, let’s call it “book”, existing or non-existing, written and unwritten, in all possible variations. I assume that would upon further reflection have to be one of the conclusions drawn of the cosmology principle but I am getting a bit out of my depth here.
All we ever do in life is to assume a specific perspective to describe what is really a homogeneous distribution of raw data – each one of us is, with other words, but a specific, erratic close up view of that homogeneous distribution. We have no separate nature. The “separateness” of our nature not only of one thing to the exclusion of all other possible things but also of the experiencing “conscience”, the “I” to the exclusion of all other possible perspective’s (you, the other) is clearly illusional, possibly delusional.
It is Borges’ library that makes another appearance in this drawing meditation. One of the themes that is never far off my mind. How does our mind chooses the images that are essential for its own comprehension of the world? How come an image such as Borges library can be so powerful that it assumes an reality of its own, in an alternate universe not so far of our own house number? Just try a different key, open a small door you have never quite paid attention to before and beyond you will find the octagonal library with all possible version of all possible books, written and unwritten … my kind of paradise.
During the night, while I draw, I do not necessarily know what it is that I am drawing. I wait until the morning before I add the collage elements and complete the drawing. By that time I see what I have done the night before with different eyes. Every drawing seems like a message send to my future self. As often as not, I am actually surprised what it is that I have been focussing on. Like many artist I confess not to know what occupies my mind while I am drawing, I am just drawing.
The twelve nights allow me to focus on drawing despite the continuing demands of my other work. I made it hard for myself this year by choosing a technique that requires a couple of hours for each drawing – but it quite satisfying as well.
Writing and drawing have been part of my life for as long as I can remember – I’d like to think that the dragons in their library lair are an inside view of that dominant part of my brain that won’t let go of ART despite incentives offered to lead another life altogether.
the shadows were moving slowly, swaying like branches in a light breeze or high buildings on a windy day. to detect purpose in these gentle movements required a slight degree of paranoia, and yet there was no apparent natural cause to explain the shift of the shadows away from their corresponding objects and towards the center of the village like water draining from upset glasses.
finally, there were just a bits of shadow left, like drops in a sink adhering to the enamel by their surface tension. these droplets of shadow were sparkling like rainbows, no grayness reflected. the air was still and non-expectant, noon in a depressed small town, and the realization that the world was without shadows had not yet sunk in. in a dirty jeep, parked close to the village center, a woman lit a marlboro
even those who had dismissed the shadows as inessential, felt disconcerted when the birds ceased to sing. on the morning of the third day, after a dawn without luminosity had given way to dull day light, small insects began their crawling procession towards the centers that had swallowed the shadows.
and someone laughed at the gray man in his wrinkle free woolen suit who solicited signatures on retro-active insurance policies. “one day only”, he implored, “an amazing offer”, but they shooed him away while watching the myriad of tiny, scarlet colored spiders tie a living ribbon between the outskirts of the village and the shadow drain.
and yet, the spiders said, too easily do you accept that we form a living ribbon, and wander into oblivion. one by one. what to your eyes a living ribbon is, to ours is a band of pain, and joy, and hope against all odds.
The Art of Psychogeography
Hinter den Kulissen des Hamburger Modelabel NUSUM.
A little something for you.
und die Armut des Geldes
I have people to kill, lives to ruin, plagues to bring, and worlds to destroy. I am not the Angel of Death. I'm a fiction writer.
Astronomy, space and space travel for the non scientist
I read whilst commuting and post the reviews here.
Stich um Stich. Mode und Handarbeit.
Arts, Crafts, Illusions, Photography, Surreality and Humanities
Blog zum Arbeitsrecht seit 2009 - Fachanwalt Andreas Martin
der inhalt meines buchregals
inger-kristina wegener, artist, writer, lawyer
Visual Arts from Canada & Around the World
Musings on a mad world
Lese- und Lebensdinge
Art & Writing 