'Vergangkelijkheid' in Antwerp.

'Chapter 2' Koosterstraat 106, Antwerpen 

The Buddhist Pali term 'annica' often translated into English as impermanence would be  'vergangkelijkheid' in Dutch which means perishableness, transitoriness and instability. 

Riding down the Kloosterstraat in Antwerp on Friday I came across a temporary exhibition in a rented gallery space that captured my attention by both its strong visual and conceptual unity, creative economy of means and by its quality of  'Vergangkelijkheid'.  

The apparent fragility of the two and three dimensional materials and the seemingly bleached and faded quality of the colours with their luminous layered and transparent 'skins' evoked a similar feeling to the one I get when I see bones or shells. It was as if something living and human had shed its skin, leaving behind an outer layer, an implied presence, an impression or a stain which was both personal and impersonal, animate and inanimate at the same time. It seemed also as if something was simultaneously being created and dissolving and disappearing.

 As Gert Van Dessel, one of the three artists in the exhibition explained to me, this kind of work is not to every one's taste. For me it seemed to undermine the very idea of satisfying the constantly fuelled desire for the bright shiny, new and 'permanent' objects of our advertising driven consumer culture even while it appeared to conjure this context in a shop-like space.    

The exhibition runs from 4th April until 3rd June 2015 and is open Wednesday to Sunday from 11-18 hrs. This Gert's website http://gertvandessel.be/

Towards a Buddhist Aesthetic.......

The American painter and 'mystic' Morris Graves, with his preoccupation with birds and still-lives as subjects for paintings informed by a fusion of Eastern and Western influences, seems to have been intuitively drawn to Zen Buddhist sources like so many of his artistic and literary contemporaries in  America in the mid 20th Century.   

' Better than any other American he could reveal to the Far East that we of the Western world also have our mystics who feel, in the contemplation of nature, the relation of man's life to the poetry and meaning of all life........'

Duncan Phillips in the introduction to 'Morris Graves, Vision of the Inner Eye' published in conjunction with the exhibition in Washington in 1983

Morris Graves. Winter Bouquet #4
(seedling chrysanthemums, astrantia and helebrore), 1976.

Thich Naht Hanh has said that any teaching that does not bear the three Dhamma seals- impermanence, (anitya), nonself (anatman) and nivana - cannot be said to be the teaching of the Budhha. Any Buddhist aesthetic must surely correspond to these Dhamma seals. 

     'We think that being born means from nothing we become something, from no one we become someone, from nonbeing we become being. We think that to die means we suddenly go from something to nothing, from someone to no one, from being to nonbeing. But the Buddha said, "There is no birth and no death, no being and no nonbeing," and he offered us impermanence, nonself, interbeing, and emptiness to discover the true nature of reality 

Thich Nhat Hanh. The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching. 

Thrush's nest discovered on the floor of the forest during a walk in the Ardennes.

Applying these insights towards observing the inter-dependant arising and cessation of things could make the transition/translation of nature into art and art into nature appear a seamless continuity in which boundaries are blurred or simply evaporate and the seeming duality is returned to one whole entirety which can be simultaneously as small as a nest, a tea bowl, a leaf or a flower and as big as the world and the cosmos, and whilst retaining human proportions, as dimensionless a space as both point and infinity. 

Tenmoku Teabowl with leaf decoration in the glaze. 

 Impermanence, change and transience surely must be part the process of making. It defines the very nature of the emergence, growth and maturity and the final decay and disintingration of a work of art, or indeed of any thing. This quality of change need to be allowed to be seen, integrated into and openly acknowledged by the work itself rather than denied or suppressed. The ageing process, like its growth, is part of both the beauty and truth of any work. 

Pinch pots drying ready to bisquit fire -made as demonstrations for a 9th grade ceramics project 'Empty Vessels'. In making these bowls I am not trying to impose a 'design' on them but let them emerge out of the hand to take the form they will naturally assume through the process of pinching in a revolving motion.

  In the same book he goes on to talk about the three doors of Liberation.

 'The First Door of Liberation is emptiness, shunyata. Emptiness always means empty of something. A cup is empty of water. A bowl is empty of soup. We are empty of a separate, independent self. We cannot be by ourselves alone. We can only inter-be with everything else in the cosmos.'  

Is the nature of both absence and presence implied by both form and space as indeed the great 'Heart Sutra' refrain puts it  'form is emptiness, emptiness is form' which resonates with this apparent awareness of 'shunyata'?  Perhaps when there is a presence to 'emptiness' there is no absence of light, space and consciousness........ indeed with emptiness it might be possible to form an appropriate receptacle in which to appreciate their true qualities as they constantly unfold and change in unlimited ways. 

Early stripping back and cleaning of the bedroom  in Bruges.

later on after some patching and priming in a breathable white clay paint ......
.....still much more to do to create 'nothing' out of 'something'.  

Stripping, cleaning, patching, repairing and sanding the lime plaster surfaces of these walls ready to take a neutral white paint is a process very similar to making the oil paintings for the series 'The fugitive Image'. Both are concerned as much with the inner and outer boundaries of space, light and colour and the scale and proportion of the human body and the experience of sensory perception. Both are not so much about making or filling space as revealing and defining it by 'emptying' it, in the latter case making the absence of the image the image itself.   

The Fugitive Image:  Title: Fugitive 5 Size: 40 x30cm  Media: Oil on wood. 

The Second Door of Liberation is signlessness  animitta..........The greatest relief is when we break through the barriers of sign and touch the world of signlessness, nirvana.  Where should we look to find the wold of no signs? right here in the world of signs.

Does this mean that we should see all conceptual formations in art and language as just that and not get caught by them into thinking these conventions are any more than that - rather like the Belgian surrealist painter Magritte suggests we do in his famous image of a pipe?

     "The famous pipe. How people reproached me for it! And yet, could you stuff my pipe? No, it's just a representation, is it not? So if I had written on my picture "This is a pipe", I'd have been lying!"

La trahison des images, Rene Magritte, 1928-29

Elsewhere in the same book Thich Nhat Hanh has said that, "Things in their true nature and illusions are of the same basic substance" suggesting that both the pipe and the image of the pipe are 'empty' of any absolute essence or reality even while they exist in a relative way as part of our day to day conceptual and perceptual construction of conventional reality 

In the Third Door of Liberation it seems that what Thich Nhat Hanh is saying is that whether sitting still and breathing or walking backwards and forwards in meditation, settled or nomadic, rooted to the spot like a tree or making the round trip from home to work and back again, the journey is the destination. The present time and place, here and now, is sufficient in and of itself and can encompass all that is necessary to take care of the past and future.

The Third Door of Liberation is aimlessness, apranihita. There is nothing to do, nothing to realise, no program, no agenda. This is the Buddhist teaching about eschatology. Does the rose have to do something? No, the purpose of a rose is to be a rose.   

Mulagandhakuti  - the remains of the Buddha's hut at Jetavana Monastery, Savatthi, Bihar,  India.  

      'The four establishments of mindfulness are the foundations of our dwelling place without them our house is abandoned, no one is sweeping, dusting, or tidying up. Our body becomes unkempt, our feelings full of suffering, and our mind a heap of afflictions. When we are truly home, our body, mind and feelings will be a place of refuge for ourselves and others.'  

The heart of the Buddha's teachng, Discourse on the Four Establishments of Mindfulness (Satipatthana Sutta)

The Chinese Tang dynasty poet and painter Wang Wei clearly sought to integrate his artistic practice with his Buddhist practice of the way increasingly retreating into greater solitude after the loss of his wife and his retirement from court duties.

Lamenting white hairs. 

Once a child's face

                  now an old man's

White hairs soon replace 

                        the infants down

            How much can hurt the heart

in one life's span

                 We must turn to the gate to Nirvana 

                       where else can we end our pain 

Translated by G. W. Robinson 

Poems of Wang Wei. Penguin Books 1973

Omnia Vanitas....

Saw Emma Kirkby and Jacob Lindberg at the Concertgebouw last Sunday with R and K. Despite having a leg in plaster she was stoically wheeled on stage in an office chair and went on to sing an  animated and expressive selection of 16th cen. English songs and aires accompanied by the lute, explaining the classical references in what was a scholarly and spirited performance. The lady seated on my right explained in the interval that she had heard Emma Kirby 30 years ago and although the voice was different now it still retained that clear pure quality for which she is so well renowned. Many of the songs had a philosophical quality and some, like 'Dido's Lament', were directly concerned with mortality. 

Dido's Lament, York 2007

The MA festival  http://www.mafestival.be/  of Early Music in Bruges has a series of concerts planned for the summer with a focus on the vanity and transience of life. This was a theme throughout the 16th and 17th century in both music and painting, like in the self-portrait/still-life painting below by David Bailly, a Dutch artist from Leyden whose father was a Flemish calligrapher. 

David Bailly Self -Portrait with Vanitas Symbols 1651

Among the several portraits within this portrait the young artist holds one especially for our contemplation on the table laden with roses, wine glasses, pearls, pocket watches, coins, a pipe, books and sculpture. This is a portrait of the artist at the date that the painting was actually made in 1651 when he was in fact 67 years old. Thus the young man he imagines he used to be holds the image of the old man that he has become, which along with the bubbles, candle, hour glass and skull remind us of life's fleeting nature despite art's apparent capacity to capture and conflate time past and future in the enduring present moment. 

I heard Vox Luminis at the Concertgebrouw in February singing this captivating polyphony. 

Vox Luminis sings Henry Purcell Funeral Sentences 

         Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up and is cut down like a flower; he flieth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay. In the midst of life we be in death:   

 Book of Common Prayer 1559

Ars Longa Vita Brevis

Today is yesterday's tomorrow......

The 'Faces Then, Faces Now' exhibition at the Bozar, which I visited on the 10th February with 30 students and two colleagues, made the personal and emotional experience of time and space tangible in the contrast between the selection of contemporary European photography since 1990 and the smaller collection of Renaissance portraits from the Low Countries. 

Polish photographer Adam Panczuk's series of large black and white photographs entitled 'Karczeby' struck me as particularly evocative and powerful.  Karczebs, according to his website,  http://adampanczuk.pl/ is both the dialect of this region of Poland as well as the people who have farmed it for generations. These strange surreal, scarecrow like figures were posed centrally within the square format of the picture between the sky and the earth, rooted as it were, to the ground with iconographic attributes suggesting their ancestral connection to the soil. 

This relationship between the realistic image of an individual face and person and a particular place, suggested by trees, houses, churches or landscapes with rivers or mountains, like in the self portrait of Simon Bening below, whose gaze and gestures suggest an existential awareness of time, past, present and future, was also clearly an important element of portraiture in Northern Europe in the Renaissance.

These often very real painted illusions, small worlds, entire and self-contained, set within the mirror like frame and its referents, like continuing events create a set of visual co-ordinates that help us to map our own cultural and emotional memory across the centuries always, paradoxically, within the present moment.  

Simon Bening. Self portrait aged 75, 1558. Watercolour on vellum laid down on card. Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Our ancestors carefully chose the optimal moments of their lives to be painted. This was not a cheap or easy thing to have done in the 15th, 16th and 17th century and only really an option for the elite. Whilst they presented themselves looking their best as potential lovers, or as respectable, prosperous and well established individuals or thoughtfully reflecting on the vanity of this live and the inevitability of the next with objects of memento mori, we in a more democratic age, when the projected self-image is ubiquitous and inescapable, seem to kaleidoscope thoughtlessly through a hall of digital mirrors recording our every impulse of vanity in instant fragmentary moments self-gratification and self-affirmation posted in the electronic ether of the virtual architecture of our unlimited desire 

The present moment is the future we dreamed about in the past and both the past and future can only be imagined and remembered in the present moment and it is always the present moment. 

A couple of weeks ago I went into St. Jacob's in Brugge to see a small panel painting representing the Legend of St Lucy by the appropriately named 'Master of the Legend of St Lucy'. 

Master of the Legend of St Lucy (active c. 1480-1510 in Bruges) 

Apart from the jewel like realism in the skilfull rendering of fabrics and flowers and the strange impassivity of the faces of the main characters in this quiet drama, what struck me was the way that we can read the operation of space and time within the painting and its conventions of representation. The main episodes of the story of St Lucy's life all take place simultaneously within the same frame separated only by the fragile emblazoned trompe l'oeil columns that  divide the narrative into sections like a cartoon strip read chronologically from left to right, suggesting both interior and exterior spaces, rather like I suppose theatrical staging might operate in a mystery play or a performance in Shakespeare's Globe. 

The two details below offer us windows into the depth of the picture and through time and space, bringing back to the present moment. The door is both a real and symbolic threshold between worlds, framing the walled garden and suggesting both the mysterious and perhaps unknowable city and the country on the horizon hidden behind the furthest door. The frame of the picture is the threshold from our own real world of the present into the convincing illusion of the tangible and symbolic world of the past both observed and imagined by the artist.   

The second detail shows the still recognisable tower of the Onze Lieve Vrouwekerk bringing us back to the familiar and knowable present via a landmark which we can still locate in our real experience and making us still active participants in this visually re-imagined story of a virgin martyr from late antiquity, full of virtue and violence, money and power, sex and death, continuing to unfold for each generation in the picture before us.  

As soon as we imagine it the anticipated future is upon us in the immediate present and the moment we are conscious of it in the present it is already in the past.  Only images, places and things which outlive us with their longer cycles of growth and decay seem to fix or even transcend time, giving the illusion of stability, but these too are fragile and transitory, subject to the same uncertainty of flux and change and inevitably they too will eventually fade and disappear. 

In the mean time they are a comforting contingency ........ 

Horace and the economics of sufficiency.......

I first read Horace's odes at school but have enjoyed re-reading his Epistles on the train recently on my daily commute in David Ferry's excellent bilingual translation published in 2001.  Total self sufficiency is perhaps an impossible dream for most of us as our lives are interconnected and interdependent with everything else in multiple and complex ways but the sense that there is an optimal 'economics of sufficiency' supported by right attitudes of mind and heart is worth cultivating if it 'brings tranquillity' and 'makes cares less'. 

......Where is it virtue comes from, is it from books ?

Or is it a gift from Nature that can’t be learned?

What is the way to become a friend to yourself

What brings tranquillity? What makes cares less?

Honor? Or Money? Or living your life unnoticed?

Whenever I drink from the cold refreshing waters

Of the little brook Digentia, down below,

Our local hill town, what do you think I pray for?

“ May I continue to have what I have right now,

Or even less, as long as I am self-sufficient.

If the gods should grant me life, though just for a while,

May I live my life to myself, with books to read,

And food to sustain me through another year,

And not to waver with the wavering hours “

But Maybe it’s enough to pray to Jove ,

Who has the power to give and take away,

Simply for life and for the means of life;

I will myself provide a steadfast mind.

To Lollius Maximus  Epistles of Horace  i.18

Bilingual translation   David Ferry

This week the bicycle, the walking boots and the lunch box have with the support of the tram, the train and some very nice friends with cars helped me to be self-sufficient in various ways with regard to food and transport,   but without inter-dependence we could not function independently and without friendship we could not enjoy the pleasure of shared delights like this walk in the snow in the Ardennes on Sunday with Alex. For all his Stoic philosophy Horace had enough self deprecating humour and self-knowledge to admit his human failings and was worldly wise enough to enjoy the good things if they came his way even whilst preparing himself psychologically for the uncertain and unreliable in life and its ultimate inevitable end. 

 

Respiration.......

         The way old buildings work is incredibly simple. Before the days of cavity walls, structures had 'solid' walls built of breathable materials. Where bricks and stones were used, they were generally bonded with weak and permeable mortars made of lime and sand. the external walls were often coated with lime render which was lime-washed so the structure was able to 'breath'. When it rained, moisture was absorbed a few millimetres into the external surface but was able to evaporate as soon as the rain stopped, helped by the drying effects of the sun.   

              Old House Handbook, A Practical Guide to Care and Repair. Roger Hunt and Marianne Suhr (Francis Lincoln Ltd) 

In 'The Wisdom of Sustainability, Buddhist Economics for the 21st Century'  Sulak Sivaraksa says 

If I were to go to the Buddha and ask for a simple formula to resolve our modern dilemmas, he might say: " I breathe, therefore I am." Breathing is the most important element in our lives and in the life of every living being. Without breathing, we die. Breathing goes on day and night, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. 

Ice from the top of the rainwater collection tank's bucket used to flush the outside toilet

During the February break I plan to take delivery of a quantity of 'breathable ' hemp, to insulate the attic room between the roof joists, and lime mortar and sand to begin patching up interior walls where necessary ready for a final coat after all the rewiring is done. I will also use this lime mortar to point the exposed exterior walls of the small terrace ( binnenplaats) weather permitting. 

Upstairs the remodelled door is finally painted with a coat of white primer and set in its frame - it just needs the hinges screwed in. I have used a fully 'breathable' clay paint in a matt broken white on the walls which seems to both absorb and reflect light on the uneven surface. Exploring the nuanced qualities of various different whites and other natural muted colours and textures which complement them within various frames and spaces is a preoccupation both of my painting and decorating.  

Fugitive 7, 40x30cms. Oil on Wood 

Geometric Neo-Abstractions...

Have just this week finally completed a series of playful neo-abstract works for F.  Each one measuring 30 x 30 x 0.5 cm is painted with acrylic on a prepared gesso panel using layers of transparent glazes and a masking technique. By combining abstract shapes in dynamic compositions with elements including primarily the circle, square and the triangle, they explore both the tension and harmony between forms and a range of relationships of balance and contrast between complementary colours and light within the spectrum.

Elsewhere, in Bruges, I have been stripping walls back to masonry in preparation eventually for a fully breathable lime morter/plaster which I will be using both inside and out to patch, render and re-point walls as well as consolidate the surface of composite walls with a range of historic layers of lime, cement/lime mix and gypsum.  This kind of 'domestic archeology', stripping back, subtracting layers in order to build up a neutral space is all about surfaces and materials but with an entirely different range of natural materials, earth colours, textures and qualities  

Sample of Unilit lime plaster 'chaux de finition' from Ecobati

In some areas layers of history in the form of newspapers and decoration forming 'collage' on various walls have been peeled back and revealed before being replaced by a white clay based breathable paint as a unifying primer. 

 I have tried to remodel and refit existing doors, rather than replacing them with new - here is a work in progress before being scraped back, sanded and re-painted. 

Reading the following words this weekend by Thich Nhat Hanh they will perhaps be helpful to recall when I am 'absent', 'loose it' and am 'not at home' in either sense of the term.  

The four establishments of mindfulness ( Satipatthana Sutta)  are the foundation of our dwelling place, without them our house is abandoned, no one is sweeping, dusting, or tidying up. Our body becomes unkempt; our feeling full of suffering, and our mind a heap of afflictions. When we are truly home, our body, mind, and feelings will be a place of refuge for ourselves and others.