Building site..........

The following works are all made with a mixture of acrylic on wood prepared with a sanded gesso base with Indian ink and text using gel medium transfer technique. Like the oil on wood paintings in the fugitive image series they explore the landscape of desire and loss, evoking memory and history through fragments of forgotten photographs and torn pages of art history books in the shallow illusionist surface of still-life trompe l' oeil. However they remain unresolved for the time being. Hopefully I will be able to return to them with a fresh eye in the near future. 

Going round in circles - going somewhere or going nowhere ?

Thomas Mc Evilley makes the point in his book,  'The shape of Ancient Thought, Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies' that for the ancients in both East and West, time and space were circular. On Page 91 and 92 he says: 

What shape is ancient thought? Round. At least in the Mesopotamian lineage, which includes Greece and India, it was round. The spherical cosmos rolling in cyclical time - wheels within wheels,  Parmenides showed with his goddess-the Great Wheel of the Processional Year, united with the pitch wheel of the song that reaches back to the beginning- the twelve tone chromatic scale like the twelve -spoked-wheel - these round constructions of the real gave birth to others, greater and smaller wheels some inside them, some outside them, some linked axially, some touched and spun peripherally. The wheel of cycling time sets going a smaller wheel within itself: the wheel of the transmigration of souls. How do these two wheels relate to one another -

Some have thought that the myth of cyclical time was inherently bound up with the re-incarnationist view of human destiny - that the two doctrines form a syntactical complex. Aristotle, for whom all perfect motion was circular, thought the same about the archaic gear construction of the cosmic machine: " In the movement of the heavens and of each star," he wrote, "there is a circle; so why shouldn't  the birth and death of people be circular too, so that they are born and destroyed again (and again) "(Problemata 17.3)

Chartres Labyrinth 

Although there may be no permanent 'soul' or 'self' to be re-incarnated the continuing present moment we experience as reality is both cause and effect of the arising or cessation of conditions, past, present and future in an infinitely complex web of interdependence in which our own actions are agents for which we are responsible to a greater or lesser extent depending on our intentions. 

                                                                                                                    

My mind inclines towards these shapes as I prepare for departure to Delhi on Sunday and travel through Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and just over the border into Nepal to make the round trip of the eight great places and events of the Buddha's life and death, The Astamahapratiharya At the axial point of the trip is The Bodhi Tree, embodying  time and space in cycles of growth and decay in the concentric circles of its tree rings.

Anyone who undertakes a pilgrimage travels inwardly as well as outwardly and the journey is as much about states of mind and heart as it is about crossing borders between geographical, political and cultural states.  Imagine on a clock face the day from 6.00am until midnight as representing the full potential cycle of a human life of around 90 years, in a ratio of five years for each hour.  As I approach my 50th year I am coming to 4.00pm in the afternoon - the 'teatime' of my life. This seems like a good time to pause and actively consider the tiny circle of my own life, breathing and walking within the countless concentric rings of other pilgrims lives as they have traversed over two millennia and continue to traverse the path leading between the key events and places in the Buddha's life, a life which represents an optimal existence, lived across the plains of North India from Lumbini to Kushinagar.  

01^st Dec: Arrival / Delhi

02nd Dec: Delhi  Visit Akshardham Temple. 

03rd Dec: Delhi

Visit the Laxmi Narayan Temple, the India Gate, Jama Masjid, Red Fort and the Gandhi Memorial. Also see embassies and the Parliament House, Humayun’s Tomb and the Qutab Minar.

04th Dec: Delhi / Agra   visit Agra Fort and and Id-Mat-Ud-Dauhla’s
tomb

05th Dec: Agra / Varanasi 

visit the Taj Mahal 

06^th Dec: Arrival / Varanasi

visit Sarnath 

07^th Dec: Varanasi

Boat ride on river Ganges - Alamgir Mosque or Beni Madhav Ka Darera, Dasaswamedh Ghat, & The Bharat Mata Temple. Evening visit to the Ganga Aarti

08^th Dec: Varanasi

09^th Dec: Varanasi / Bodhgaya

10^th Dec: Bodhgaya

11^th Dec: Bodhgaya

12^th Dec: Bodhgaya / Rajgir / Nalanda / Patna

 Drive to Patna en-route visit Nalanda & Rajgir 

13^th Dec: Patna

Visit Patna Museum

14^th Dec: Patna / Vaishali / Khushinagar

15^th Dec: Khushinagar

16^th Dec: Khushinagar / Lumbini

17^th Dec: Lumbini / Sravasti

18^th Dec: Sravasti

19^th Dec: Sravasti / Lucknow

Visit Bara Immambara, Chhota Immambara, Rumi Darwaza, Jama Masjid 

20^th Dec: Lucknow / Delhi 

visit National Museum

21^st Dec: Delhi / Departure


Chrsitian Marclay's The Clock is a montage of thousands of carefully spliced and edited clips of films and soundtrack which reference time either in dialogue or on a watch or clock and are edited to play so they are synchronised to real time throughout 24 hours. Homage to a century of cinema and a memento mori, it reveals our complex emotional and psychological relationship to time and memory captured in moving images and reconstructed into the absurd logic of a numerical rather than narrative sequence, which non the less flows with a kind of logic. Time seems to have no absolute or fixed dimensions appearing to speed up or slow down depending on our own engagement. It recalls for me, in cinematic form, Proust's  great novel of about time 'A la recherch du temps perdue'  

The Fugitive Image.

Oil on Wood 30X40cm

Completed the third painting which is the left hand panel in the triptych below yesterday. By painting a triptych the theme of the image, the frame and picture, both present and absent, and the surface itself, which makes the image an object in a still-life can be explored with different nuances and shifts of emphasis across the format from left to right and right to left. The abstract rhythms of vertical, horizontal and diagonal movements and the repetition of rectangular and square shapes and spaces can resonate with each other like a musical counterpoint. It is interesting to me, working each day in the same position with the natural light from the window to my left how this and the collage itself creates quite different and subtle changes in the balance of tones and the relationship of colours within each painting, despite the fact that they have all been painted with only ultramarine blue, cadmium orange and white with occasionally a little yellow ochre. 

Triptych. Oil on Wood each panel 30x40cms

The

Abstract Realism ?

Oil Paint on Wood 30x40cm

Have just completed the second in a series of three paintings (the central part of the unfinished  triptych below) that explores both positive and negative space, asserting and negating both the picture and the frame simultaneously as the image of the work. Strangely it has a very formal abstract quality despite the trompe l'oeil realism. 

'Vanitas' Revisited

Antione Steenwinkel. 17th cen. Vanitas portrait of the painter   

Museum of Fine Art.  Antwerp 

I bought a copper plate and steel burin a few weeks ago with a view to making a dry point engraving  to print up in the printmaking studio at Uclan in November when I head back to make research and studio presentations. As an extension to the drawing based on flowers and bones made on a paper a month or so go I decided to work from direct observation of an old skull,  a classic 'memento mori' still-life object,  especially favourite of artist's painting vanitas portraits in the 17th century and a timeless and universal subject of meditation in Buddhist, Classical Greco-Roman philosophical and Christian traditions of reflection. More recently contemporary artists like Ricky Swallow, who represented Australia  at the Venice Biennale in 2005, have explored this subject and the tradition of crafted realism in woodcarving.

YOUNGER THAN YESTERDAY

ENGLISH LIMEWOOD, 2006
8 X 8 X 8 INCHES Ricky Swallow

http://www.rickyswallow.com/ 

Also made two more small studies of photographs as three dimensional objects, tied up in a bundle and in a torn fragment painted on top of hand written notes in the sketchbooks - real and illusory paper........

Acrylic on paper, 24x24cm 

Acrylic on paper, 24x24cm 

Packaging collage as a still-life object.

'collage' package as a still-life object 

Another photograph of a 'package' of art historical fragments 

I am interested in continuing to explore this idea by creating and painting from observation further three dimensional packages of two dimensional images with fragments of text in the pages of my sketchbooks on top of existing sketches and drawing. Also like the way the human form can be incorporated into a bundle of still-life in thoughtful and  provokative ways.  

Small acrylic painting in the sketchbook roughly 20x30cms 

More examples accumulative layers in the pages of the sketchbook...... 

Fragments of an ephemeral art history....

Oil on wood. 30x40cms 

Another painting finished today, a homage to the lost worlds of stone, paper, photography and oil paint hosted here in the even more ephemeral medium of digital technology. What is so difficult to communicate is the physical quality of the painting as an object with a tactile surface and the context of the real frame boxing the object inside a glass case which is surely part of the meaning of the work.