16.6.15
I don’t much like my last picture – so neat and
tidy.
I prefer this.
In one of the infinite probabilities of the multi-verse,
scarily this is actually happening.
Flap Flap the Big Wings
I am a long long
way from squeezing oil paint in my fist straight from the tube onto a surface.
I don’t strike the
picture like a murderer stabs a victim, or crush the paint out into slashes.
Karel Appel did. He
paints like a well angry man. Not always, but definitely when he made The City,
letting go of the skills he surely had. He purposefully relinquished them, not
even allowing himself a brush in the old film I saw of him working.
Just the inch wide
top of a 10inch tube that he squeezed from the middle to the sounds of some
postmodernist jazz.
Cool. But I
wouldn’t want to share the toothpaste with him.
Attempting to
bounce off Karel Appel is like trying to share a head
Sharing a Head
Artistic Risk
Sounds ideal to me,
probably rarely fatal. But a cluttered mind provokes external hoovering. If
there were flies in your head as well as on the window ledge it would become
unbearable....
Got to remember –
however bad things are they can always get worse.
22July 2015
I just discovered
this word UHTCEARE
It means pre-dawn
anxiety in Old English and is nothing to do with ultra heat treated milk which
is also horrible and the ruination of tea. I could make good use of this word
most days.
A also just read
‘Fludd’ by Hilary Mantel – a perfect book. Strangely the main character is a
faux priest who may be an angel, or perhaps an alchemist, of possibly the
Devil.
And oddly, the
effect he has seems to be to rescue an unbelieving real priest and a sad
‘professed’ nun. But here’s a funny thing – nobody can say what he looks like
even while they’re looking at him, and the food on his plate disappears but
nobody sees him actually eat it. He drinks whisky but the level in the bottle
never goes down.
In the same way the
Appel woman and her creature stand over the city, and no one sees her coming
and no one sees her going. And she’s far too fey to eat anything I’m sure.
But suddenly she
comes and suddenly she goes.
Here she isn’t
1 Sept 2015
She’s an enigma to
me still
I saw her once, I can see her now
What’s with the
arms?
A magical gesture?
A congenital
malformation?
A peculiar
valediction?
A horribly secret
sign?
What do you
symbolise?
O Servant with
white gloves?
And where, may I
ask is everyone else?
18 Sept 2015
And what about the
skyline of the city? Like Venice, conjured but not understood. And what about
writing in the style of a forgotten poet, probably dead, whose work I knew well
when I remembered anything at all.
The world, my
world, my city, spins around me at night while I lie still. Or I spin and the
world doesn’t. Not good either way.
RELICS WILL DROWN
This may be my
final image.
The drowning city –
not a metaphor – a drowning city.
All relics will
drown.
The Appel woman and
her whatever-it-is survive to see the 11th Century abbey adrift and
awash. Lights still blaze from the wobbly gherkins of a flawed modernity. The
sea roils more as it reaches the walls.
You can be as solid
as you like – one day the waters will close over your spinning head.
All relics will
drown.
The Great Filter
may have already been and gone, or is waiting somewhere along Time’s Arrow.
Ponder the Fermi
Paradox.
Some relics will
drown before they even become relics because they didn’t have time to become
relics.
Waves come in
various forms. We have to watch out for them, mythic or mundane. Afterwards
there will be no relics, and not even a solitary angel with stunted wings to
worship, and no worshippers either.
There is another
witness who stands beyond the 4th wall, the invisible wall through
which the viewer gazes from a lofty place, with wisdom, indifference and
powerlessness in equal quantities.
THIS IS KAREL
APPEL’S WOMAN
I SUSPECT WE MOVE TOWARDS A TIME WHEN EVEN
IDIOTS ARE NO LONGER HAPPY
**********************************************************
So here I am, still in Appel land and trying to connect with my inner WILD.
But just standing
here trying.
I’m thinking about
Guardian Angels. What are they like?
I suspect they’re on
their i-phones constant, where all messages languish forever on unanswered
voicemail.
Do we each have one?
Or are they like the Macmillan nurse who never turns up? Where are they when
you need them?
Are angels impotent
like Appel’s viridian monstrosity?
continued on Gilly's page
No comments:
Post a Comment