Did you see the moon over the weekend? Wasn't it great. Also a little freaky.. so waxy and full and emanating..arrr woooo! I climbed up a tree nude with all my hipster mates..hehe not really.. it would've been nice though.. Anyway it put me in a peculiar mood and i feel a bit dumb and spacey so lets just look at pictures and pretend we've taken too much acid and we're just going chill and talk about the cosmos and pretend we're on shaman journeys..is that ok?
maybe we live in the woods and live mainly on a diet of river fish and mushrooms and wild honey. We catch the fish with our bare hands cos we've made friends with all the forest creatures..not like in disney films but on our vision quests...remember? you turned into a wombat. i turned into a regal queen
but then you got sick of being a wombat and decided to become a man bear instead... wowee you look quite dashing. You also fashioned a canoe so we could find some ocean fishies too...mmmm ones that have been hanging out with coral friends
"100 Years Ago" , Peter Doig,2001
"Gasthof", Peter Doig, 2004
I like Peter Doig's work very much. He ties into this spacey feeling really well but also conjures up weird nostalgias, displacement and alienation. Dream spells, quasi spritual feelings, faux naivete. He's also an amazing colourist but in a slightly offbeat and uncanny way . He's one of those painters who I probably would like to stand in front of for ages to absorb the colour frequencies...like Matisse and the Fauves and Rothko and all the usual suspects. Not bright geometric fractal contemporary things (which I like also) but moody emotive colour ones. Here are some other ones I fancy when I'm in this mood
Le Corbusier produced this colour manual in 1920 which charted an amazing system of matching colours which he invented and developed from non toxic natural pigments ie: lapis lazuli,"green umber from ancient sources on the island of cyprus". It makes apparent the exactness of colour, the rightness of certain hues in combination, like notes and scales of a musical chart that we all recognise. It's a strange point to end on..and the anarchist inside me would like to dispute any fixed order but then I remember that anarchy too is quite organised..and so is chaos. Ha ha... want to join my cult? Our posters and pamphlets can look this....
"Wandervogel" Kaya Donachie, 2005
Ohh i know this image is so tiny but I couldn't get it any bigger!?...anyway it's from Kaye Donashie's Mount Verita exhibition which took its name from a mountain in Switzerland where "anarchists, theosophosts, vegetarians and Dadaists poets and bohemians" settled in the early 20th century establishing a colony of free love and communion( I did warn you I was in a slightly hippie mood)
Michelle Ussher, 2010
When I talk about colour, emotive colour, it doesn't even have to be that colourful. I guess it's depth and fragility... mystery.There is nothing more fundamentally dissapointing in looking at a painterly work when it just seems muddy and inert. Colour is a rush, surprising colour makes your eyes open really wide... colour that's off or crude just reminds you of a tsnami debris wash..brown and foul (although this is pretty bad analogy as A) it would probably look pretty interesting B) its in fairly bad bad taste to use a current natural disaster to illustrate good and bad painting techniques)
"Everglade Cavalier" , Ryhs Lee, 2010
Things can get a little funny when you start riffing on spiritual agency within artworks, which is not surprising when you recognise the oppressive control religion once had on artists. It's almost embarrassing to have an emotional or visceral response to artwork these days ( " I don't know much about art but I know what i like"). Of course everyone does...but there seems an increasing reliance on wall texts and self important (often cryptic) catalogue essays to tell people what they should be experiencing. Sigh...It's just nice being dumb sometimes. Or scientific and architectural perhaps!!
hello lovely...
"Several Circles" (Einige Kreise) Wassily Kandinsky, 1926
Nice. Can't wait.
