Tag: Painting

Lightly Child, Lightly.

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I’m getting somewhere now, I’m feeling lighter. I’m coming unstuck from scrapbooks, from albums, from diaries, and journals, from space, from time. Only a paragraph left, only a sentence or two, only a whisper.

I was born.

I was.

I.

– Margaret Atwood, from “Life Stories,” in The Tent

Notes:

  • Painting: The Blue Hour by Jon B. Paulsen
  • Prior “Lightly child, lightly” Posts? Connect here.
  • Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.”

part of the painting’s magic is that it brings together its time and yours, its place and yours

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If you have ever stood in a room in front of a painting by Munch, or Van Gogh or Rembrandt for that matter, you will know that part of the painting’s magic is that it brings together its time and yours, its place and yours, and there is comfort in that, because even the distance that is inherent in loneliness is suspended in that moment.

– Karl Ove Knausgård, in a preface for a catalog for: Edvard Munch: Between the Clock and the Bed – an exhibition at the Met Breuer, New York City, November 15, 2017–February 4, 2018. (The New York Review of Books, Dec 7 2017)

Notes:

  1. Post Inspiration. Rainer Maria Rilke from The Poetry of Rilke: Nothing is too small: against a gold background / I paint it large and lovingly / and hold it high, and I will never know / whose soul it may release.
  2. Art: Edvard Munch, “The Sick Child” (1907) via San Francisco Chronicle
  3. Quote Source – ekphora.

Canvas once touched by the fingers of both Giorgione and Titian

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‘La Vecchia’ (c.1506) by Giorgione

We stand before a canvas once touched by the fingers of both Giorgione and Titian.

I know that restorers’ fingers may long since have erased all traces of the two masters’ palms,

still it’s difficult not to be moved.

~ Adam Zagajewski, Slight Exaggeration: An Essay

Notes:

Most of him is lost to us of course.

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Mike Lankford, opening lines in his biography titled “Becoming Leonardo: : An Exploded View of the Life of Leonardo da Vinci:

“Most of him is lost to us, of course. The timbre of the voice, the thoughts visible in his eyes, the physical gestures when happy or sad, the way he walked, his smell, his hands, the habitual grimace his friends knew all too well but no one bothered to record—all that is lost. When he was young there was no reason to write any of it down, and when he was old he became too hard to describe, too strange. What to do with Leonardo?”

Walter, Isaacson, author of Leonardo da Vinci, in an interview in By the Book in The New York Times Book Review, Nov 2, 2017:

Q: Which book was most helpful to you in working on your biography of Leonardo da Vinci?

A: Leonardo’s own notebooks. More than 7,000 pages still, miraculously, survive. Paper turns out to be a superb information-storage technology, still readable after five hundred years, which our own tweets likely (and fortunately) won’t be. Leonardo crammed every page with drawings and looking-glass notes that seem random but provide intimations of his mental leaps. Scribbled alongside each other, with rhyme if not reason, are math calculations, sketches of his devilish young boyfriend, birds, flying machines, theater props, eddies of water, blood valves, grotesque heads, angels, sawed-apart skulls, tips for painters, and studies for paintings. I love his to-do lists, which have entries like “Describe the tongue of the woodpecker.”

Painting: Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci

I Needed Color: Free from the future. Free from the past. Free from regret. Free from worry.

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What do you do when life chooses you? You can choose not to do it. You can choose to try to do something safer. Your vocation chooses you. When I really started painting a lot, I had become so obsessed, there was nowhere to move. In my home, paintings were everywhere. There were becoming part of the furniture. I was eating on them. I found myself looking around at one point, a really bleak winter in New York. It was just so depressing and I think I needed color. […]

You can tell what I love by the color of the paintings. You can tell my inner life by the darkness in some of them. You can tell by what I want by the brightness in some of them. […]

I think what makes someone an artist is they make models of their inner life. They make something physically come into being that is inspired by their emotions or their needs…

I like the independence of it. Love the freedom of it. No one else tells you what you can and can’t do…and, there’s an immediacy to it. Art has to be service, like you are servicing your subconscious…

When I was a kid I spent half my time in the living room performing for people. I spent the other half of my time in my bedroom by myself writing poetry and sketching. I was not the type of kid that you could say as a punishment: “good to your room” – because my room was Heaven to me. My isolation was welcome…

I don’t know what painting teaches me. I know it just frees me. Free from the future. Free from the past. Free from regret. Free from worry…

~ Jim Carrey, excerpts from  I Needed Color

Note to Self: Who knew that the star of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (1994), Dumb and Dumber (1994), The Mask (1994) – had this talent.