It would be a lie to say that I don’t feel jealous when I see grand creations.
Most of the times the feeling evaporates too quick to worry about it truly. But then El Anatsui’s work never does. It stays glued in the heart.
…of Empress Alexandra Fyodorovna…
Oh, a dainty plant is the Ivy green,
That creepeth o’er ruins old!
A very sad day, for Greece lost its most cadenced elegiac voice, Theo Angelopoulos.
«Ξεχάστε με στη θάλασσα»
«Σας εύχομαι υγεία και ευτυχία αλλά δεν μπορώ να κάνω το ταξίδι σας/ Είμαι επισκέπτης/ Το κάθε τι που αγγίζω με πονάει πραγματικά/ κι έπειτα δεν μου ανήκει/ Όλο και κάποιος βρίσκεται να πει “δικό μου είναι”/ Εγώ δεν έχω τίποτε δικό μου είχα πει κάποτε με υπεροψία/ Τώρα καταλαβαίνω πως το τίποτε είναι τίποτε/ Ότι δεν έχω καν όνομα/ Και πρέπει να γυρεύω ένα κάθε τόσο/ Δώστε μου ένα μέρος να κοιτάω/ Ξεχάστε με στη θάλασσα/ Σας εύχομαι υγεία και ευτυχία».
Sadly, one of the characters of our film passed away the other day. His pessimistic and melancholic tone gave us one of the strongest bits of drama and served as a great inspiration to the rest of the film. For Aristotle, melancholy was the temperament of the creative artist, for creativity was thought to be driven by black bile. There could be, he suggested, a touch of mad genius in melancholia, and so melancholy was an enviable condition of the mind.
He made us laugh and he made us think twice.
May his heavy soul rest in peace.
Come play with me;
Why should you run
Through the shaking tree
As though I’d a gun
To strike you dead?
When all I would do
Is to scratch your head
And let you go.
W.B. Yeats
Unfinished amateur naive paintings are one of my soft spots. I rarely find any good ones but when I stumbled upon this portrait I decided it deserved a home. As I was paying, the old woman at the counter said “Who needs Lucian Freud!”. I didn’t quite get the comment until she pointed at the date on the top right corner, ’1977′, and added that it was a portrait of the Queen for the Silver Jubilee. As brilliant an artist as Lucian Freud might have been, I too agree that his effort to paint the Queen was one of the most horrific ones. Maybe it encapsulated his feelings for Her Majesty and the rest of the British Monarchy.
The crescendo in nature’s visual symphony occurs during the change of seasons. Both New England’s spectacular foliage transition and it’s vibrant colouration, and Caño Cristales’ paradise river with it’s colourful blooms are two almost incomprehensible natural masterpieces I crave to see.
One of the most beautiful of flowers, which is native to Greece, was illustrated in Dr. Robert John Thornton’s botanical illustrated project ‘Temple of Flora’. Of the plant he wrote:
She comes peeping from her purple crest with mischief fraught: from her green covert projects a horrid spear of darkest jet, which she brandishes aloft: issuing from her nostrils flies a noisome vapour, infecting the ambient air…
This print is part of an amazing collection of 33 drawings of stylised flowers superimposed on fanciful allegorical backrounds. Sadly, what is now considered one of the greatest botanical books of all times, failed massively at the time due to lack of interest from buyers. He died in destitution.
It was a common folklore in some countries that mandrake would only grow where the semen of a hanged man had dripped on to the ground; this would appear to be the reason for the methods employed by the alchemists who “projected human seed into animal earth”.
Chelsea Physics Garden, founded 1673
maggie and milly and molly and may
went down to the beach(to play one day)
and maggie discovered a shell that sang
so sweetly she couldn't remember her troubles,and
milly befriended a stranded star
whose rays five languid fingers were;
and molly was chased by a horrible thing
which raced sideways while blowing bubbles:and
may came home with a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone.
For whatever we lose(like a you or a me)
it's always ourselves we find in the sea
Download: watch?v=slhhg8sI6Ds
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message he is dead,
Put crêpe bows round the white necks of the public
Doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.
He was my north, my south, my east and west,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: i was wrong.
The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
song: Ave Maria, Alessandro Moreschi, Castrato
poem: W.H. Auden ‘Funeral blues’
My printed silk is here and boy is it exciting!
Human time does not turn in a circle;
it runs ahead in a straight line.
That is why man cannot be happy:
happiness is the longing for repetition.
Kundera: The Unbearable Lightness of Being
I cannot hide my envy.
Kate Mccgwire at Pertwee Anderson & Gold until 24.03.2011
“Machines were mice and men were lions once upon a time. But now that it’s the opposite it’s twice upon a time.”
Moondog.
regret is idle.
