Ascetic Aesthetic

Saw the Zurbaran exhibition at the Bozar in Brussels with friends and colleagues on Sunday. The Caravaggesque dramatic play of light and shadows across fabric and flesh, contrasting deep almost black shadows with pale translucent skin and crisp white linen folds with dark warm browns and cool greys resonated in the best works. Occasionally there are intense reds, pale pinks, dusty blues and golden ochre in the expressively creased and animated surfaces of different fabrics from rough woollen cowls to rich brocades and embroidered vestments. This sensual and aesthetic delight in the tactile, visual characteristics of various material forms transmuted into painterly qualities contrasts with the ascetic other-worldly gazes of the Dominican and Franciscan contemplatives who have renounced the world and seem to be almost exclusively focused on transcendent spiritual realities that appear dramatically immanent to them in the objective world they inhabit, which is presented to us within the conventions of the picture frame.  

Zurbaran Expo Bozar Brussels

 Fracisco de Zurbaran.  St Francis. 1660

Despite some rather sickly, saccharine and unconvincing representations of the Baby Jesus and some frankly bizzare representations of cherubim and seraphim as disembodied babies heads in clusters like balloons at a children's party, usually designed to support a floating Virgin Mary, there were a significant number of paintings that held ones attention, the most powerful of which dealt with the existential realities of suffering and death and these pinned one to the space in front of the painting to engage in a parallel fixed contemplative gaze. 

Elsewhere the small, familiar, unassuming and ordinary objects of everyday life, a flower, a silver platter, a basket of fruit, and a cup of water and saucer, were charged with an intense silence and stillness that transformed the simple act of observation into a meditation on the ultimate nature of time and space. 

A Cup of Water and a Rose, 1630
Francisco de Zubaran

'Dem Dry Bones.........'

Finished the chalk and charcoal drawing below last week ...........

Intro 1 Ezekiel connected dem dry bones, Ezekiel connected dem dry bones, Ezekiel in the Valley of Dry Bones, Now hear the word of the Lord. Verse 1 Toe bone connected to the foot bone Foot bone connected to the heel bone Heel bone connected to the ankle bone Ankle bone connected to the shin bone Shin bone connected to the knee bone Knee bone connected to the back bone Back bone connected to the shoulder bone Shoulder bone connected to the neck bone Neck bone connected to the head bone Now hear the word of the Lord. Chorus Dem bones, dem bones gonna walk around. Dem bones, dem bones gonna walk around. Dem bones, dem bones gonna walk around. Now hear the word of the Lord.

Intro 2 Ezekiel disconnected dem dry bones, Ezekiel disconnected dem dry bones, Ezekiel in the Valley of Dry Bones, Now hear the word of the Lord. Verse 2 Head bone (dis)connected from the neck bone Neck bone connected from the shoulder bone Shoulder bone connected from the back bone Back bone connected from the knee bone Knee bone connected from the shin bone Shin bone connected from the ankle bone Ankle bone connected from the heel bone Heel bone connected from the foot bone Foot bone connected from the toe bone Now hear the word of the Lord. Chorus Dem bones, dem bones gonna rise again. Dem bones, dem bones gonna rise again. Dem bones, dem bones gonna rise again. Now hear the word of the Lord. Finale Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones. Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones. Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones. Now hear the word of the Lord. Text from  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dem_Bones

Articulate spaces and eloquent silences....

Listening yesterday evening to a BBC radio 4 programme about the late English composer John Tavener I was struck by something he said in a recorded interview about the relationship between music and ikons, sound and images.  

  This quality of stillness is something that I think is essential to any music that aspires to the sacred and I think the analogy with the Ikon is a very striking one because the Ikon changes you. By looking at the Ikon one is changed, by looking at the Ikon one is reduced to ones knees - and this is the quality that all sacred art has - this quality of silence. I want the music to be a kind of sounding Ikon 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03tr295

Tavener's religious and musical influences were clearly wide ranging from his Prebyterian roots to his interest in modern music, like Stravinsky, and medieval Western religious music, Eastern orthodox chants and liturgy and Indian musical traditions.

The American composer John Cage, famous for his iconic minimalist piece 4'33", also talked about silence in his book of lectures and writing entitled 'Silence' ( Wesleyan University Press 1961) and here in a youtube recorded interview uploaded in 2007. 

When I hear what we call music it seems to me that someone is talking and talking about his feelings or about his ideas of relationships, but when I hear traffic,  the sound of traffic here on Sixth Avenue for instance, I don't have the feeling that anyone is talking. I have the feeling that the sound is acting and I love the activity of sound. What it does is gets louder and quieter, it gets higher and lower, and it gets longer and shorter, it does all these things, which I am completely satisfied with that I don't need the sound to 'talk' to me. We don't see much difference between time and space. We don't know where one begins and the other stops - so that most of the arts we think of as being in time and most of the arts we think of as being in space. 

Marcel Duchamp, for instance, began thinking of time, I mean thinking of music, as being not a time art but a space art and he made a piece called 'sculpture musicale' which means different sounds coming from different places and lasting, producing a scupture whch is sonorous and which remains. People expect listening to be more than listening and so sometimes they speak of inner listening or the meaning of sound. 

When I talk about music it finally comes to people's minds that I am talking about sound that doesn't mean anything, that is not inner but is just outer, and they say, these people that understand that finally say, - 'you mean its just sounds' thinking that for something to just be a sound is to be useless, whereas I love sounds, just as they are and I have no need for them to be anything more than what they are. I don't want them to be psychological, I don't want them to pretend to be a bucket or the president or that its in love with another sound, (laughing) I just want it to be a sound and I am not so stupid either. 

There was a German philosopher, he is very well known, Immanuel Kant and he said there are two things that don't have to mean anything, one is music and the other is laughter (laughing)..... don't have to mean anything that is in order to give us very deep pleasure (addressing the cat) and you know that don't you... (laughing)

The sound experience which I prefer to all others is the experience of silence  and the silence almost everywhere in the world now is traffic; if you listen to Beethoven or to Mozart you see that there always the same but if you listen to traffic you see that its always different.   

John Cage interviewed in his New York apartment talking about silence  

The following description of the last moments of the Greek Poet C. P. Cavafy, resonate for me, with what Elliot calls in 'The Four Quartets', 'the point of intersection of the timeless with time' which Luang Por Ajahn Sumedho has referred to in his Dhamma talks in relation to the 'deathless', 'unconditioned', 'unborn' or 'uncreated'.   

He continued to live in Alexandria until his death, from cancer of the larynx, in 1933. It is recorded that he received the Holy Communion of the Orthodox Church shortly before dying, and that his last motion was to draw a circle on a blank sheet of paper and then place a period in the middle of the circle. 

C. P. Cavafy. Collected Poems, Edited by George Savidis. 

Greek (possibly Corinthian) Kylix from 400BC 

Spontaneous beach pebble art made in Crete a few years ago

   

Serial collage cont. Part 5

Serial collage cont. Part 4

Serial collage cont.Part 3

Tactile Time and Space

Howard Hodgkin's playful post pop abstract expressionist explorations with the painting as both window and frame challenge us to consider the illusion of space as opposed to the flatness of the surface and the power of the paint simultaneously to  reinforce and subvert pictorial conventions. They tease us with titles which make specific allusions to times and places. These cryptic word clues to possibly meanings challenge the viewer to 'read' these abstract brush marks and seemingly spontaneous gestures (apparently they are worked on over long period in successive layers) as bearing some significant relationship to a reality other than their own as 'painting'. Is this the blue of the sky or sea seen through an open window - although clearly not any literal or realistic representational sense? The titles provide a context which anchors the viewer's attention, pulling them back from otherwise potentially unfocused range of responses to pure abstraction and pointing to a specific stimulus to consider and empathise with and its apparent connection to painted colours, shapes and marks.  

Howard Hodgkin Early Morning  2010-11

We stayed on Naxos a few years ago.  Every evening we took a stroll to Chora for dinner in a seaside restaurant and would first walk around The Portara, which is the frame of giant doorway, all that remains of a 6th century temple dedicated to Apollo facing out to the sea and the setting sun.  At the time I found this ancient doorway, framing the elemental realities of earth, air, fire and water, to be a fascinating challenge to my contemplation of time and space. The past and the future always exist as either memory or imagination in the eternal present. The space inside the proportional frame and the space outside it are part of the same dimensionless infinity. Somehow this rectangle of 'nothing' framed by 'something', or this form made of emptiness, silently witnessing the ever changing cycles of night and day, sunrise and sunset and the generations of people being born and dying on the island, and the all the comings and going of visitors in ships over the centuries seemed to absorbed into the simplicity of its just being there.

The Portara, Naxos. Greece

I always experience something of the same sense of occilation between form and space, shadow and light in the Seagram Mural paintings of Mark Rothko which I saw most recently at the Tate Modern's Rothko  exhibition in 2008. 

Mark Rothko Red on Maroon 1959 Mixed media on canvas

In 'The Artist's reality, Philosophies of Art by Mark Rothko',  Published by Yale University Press in 2008 and based on the writing of the artist Rotho says this in a chapter headed 'Space' and subheaded  'Different Kinds'.

Tactile space, or, for the sake of simplicity let us call it air, which exists between objects or shapes in the picture, is painted so that it gives the sensation of  solid. That is, the air in a tactile painting is represented as an actual substance rather than as an emptiness.