I can't sleep…
Quiet has many moods. When our sons are home, their energy is palpable. Even when they’re upstairs sleeping I can sense them, can feel the house filling with their presence, expanding like a sail billowed with air. I love the dawn stillness of a house full of sleepers, love knowing that within these walls our entire family is contained and safe, reunited, our stable four-sided shape resurrected.
~ Katrina Kenison, Magical Journey: An Apprenticeship in Contentment
Notes: Photo: Mennyfox55
When I look at a work of art I ask myself: does it inspire me, does it touch and move me, do I learn something from it, does it startle or amaze me…do I get excited, upset? That is the test any artwork has to pass: can it create an emotional impact on a human being even when he has no education or any information about art? I’ve always had a problem with art that you can only understand if you have a degree in art history, and I have a problem with theories. Most of them are bullshit anyway. Real art is intense, enchanting, exciting and unsettling; it has a quality and magic that you cannot explain. Art is not logic, and if you want to experience it, your mind and rational thinking will be of little help. Art is something…that you can only experience with your senses, your heart, your soul.
— Gottfried Helnwein, from “Interview with Gottfried Helnwein“.
Helnwein, 69, is a visual artist who lives and works in Ireland and Los Angeles. He has worked as a painter, draftsman, photographer, muralist, sculptor, installation and performance artist. His work is concerned primarily with psychological and sociological anxiety, historical issues and political topics. His subject matter is the human condition. The metaphor for his art is dominated by the image of the child, particularly the wounded child, scarred physically and emotionally from within.
Notes: Art by Gottfried Helnwein on Pinterest by Rocio Jarabo 1; Quote via TheMindMovement.
It was a week ago. An otherwise unforgettable day, but for a moment, a single firefly with its other worldly bioluminescence, which keeps circling back.
“Do you want a ride home?”
It’s a short walk home from the train station, ~2000 steps. One hour in the quiet car on Metro North didn’t quench it, the thirst for more solitude, more Alone, more decompression. I walk.
The torso leans forward, the feet step one-two-one-two. Lean forward? A tip from a Youtube fitness coach who explained that it propels you forward. So I lean forward. If he told you to hop on your right foot and rub your stomach round and round with your left hand, you’d do it.
It’s humid. God, it’s Humid. Torso leans forward, thick air pushes back, slowing forward motion. Thunderheads build in the distance.
The neck tie is in my brief case. The slim fit button down shirt soaks up the sweat on back, arms and neck.
Black leather lace-ups wrap tighter and tighter, and pump like pistons (up, down, up, down) – a squishy, pus filled blister, like the thunderheads, is ready to explode. Humidity. Sweat. Blister. It’s a scene out of Beau Taplin’s “Run Freely“: “Human beings are made of water. We were not designed to hold ourselves together, rather run freely like oceans, like rivers.” Continue reading “Walking. Solus, with the Light-House.”
