Flotsam and Jetsom. An evolving cabinet of curiosities.

 

I am returning to this blog after a break of about a  year and a half, and reworking a series of paintings I put aside, abandandoned and forgot some years ago. They are roughly based around a process of collage and observation of still-life objects, and torn pages of old art history books. In reconfiguring objects and images dislocated from their original context I aim to explore new and unexpected juxtapositions, and find connections and meanings in what emerges mysteriously from the relationships.  I might also add further layers to 'frame'' what is already there, obscuring, or even obliterating what I have done in order to create stronger more abstract compositions, using trompe l'oeil 'windows' to block and obscure what becomes superfluous. I want to evoke a feeling or sense of desire and loss, and suggest the imposibility of recapturing the past, even as one attempts to reconstruct it in the present. 

Domesday Song

Jumbled in the common box
Of their dark stupidity,
Orchid, swan, and Caesar lie;
Time that tires of everyone
Has corroded all the locks,
Thrown away the key for fun.

In its cleft the torrent mocks
Prophets who in days gone by
Made a profit on each cry,
Persona grata now with none;
And a jackass language shocks
Poets who can only pun.

Silence settles on the clocks;
Nursing mothers point a sly
Index finger at a sky,
Crimson in the setting sun;
In the valley of the fox
Gleams the barrel of a gun.

Once we could have made the docks,
Now it is too late to fly;
Once too often you and I
Did what we should not have done;
Round the rampant rugged rocks
Rude and ragged rascals run.

W. H Auden 

Oh! dear me, the mystery of life; The inaccuracy of thought! The ignorance of humanity! To show how very little control of our possessions we have- what an accidental affair this living is after all our civilization-let me just count over a few of the things lost in one lifetime, beginning, for that seems always the most mysterious of losses-what cat would gnaw, what rat would nibble-three pale blue canisters of book-binding tools? Then there were the bird cages, the iron hoops, the steel skates, the Queen Anne coal-scuttle, the bagatelle board, the hand organ-all gone, and jewels, too. Opals and emeralds, they lie about the roots of turnips. What a scraping paring affair it is to be sure! The wonder is that I've any clothes on my back, that I sit surrounded by solid furniture at this moment. Why, if one wants to compare life to anything, one must liken it to being blown through the Tube at fifty miles an hour-landing at the other end without a single hairpin in one's hair! Shot out at the feet of God entirely naked! Tumbling head over heels in the asphodel meadows like brown paper parcels pitched down a shoot in the post office! With one's hair flying back like the tail of a race-horse. Yes, that seems to express the rapidity of life, the perpetual waste and repair; all so casual, all so haphazard....

Virginia Wolf. exert from  ' The Mark on the Wall.