Thursday, 14 February 2008

Hold Infinity




To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour

William Blake
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14 comments:

  1. swiss14 February 2008 at 18:43

    loving these! i really liked the tea pictures also. so much so i thought i'd have to be using those colours. one of these days i'll post a picture

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  2. Roxana14 February 2008 at 21:41

    which colours exactly? I'll be waiting for the painting. You've made me very curious :-)

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  3. Anonymous14 February 2008 at 23:24

    i have to say i entirely agree with the swiss and look forward to his picture too.

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  4. Roxana15 February 2008 at 01:55

    when chosing the pictures I thought of you talking about the world of colours, that you knew it was there but you had no longing for it. and then read Bachelard, for whom the colours were only an easy seduction of the surface. without pervading the depths of the matter, the colour cannot be really active, alive, in the imaginative act. we need the sky or the water to get soaked in blue.

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  5. Szerelem15 February 2008 at 04:38

    lovely, lovely, lovely! These remind me so much of Monet!
    (Would it be impolite to ask where these were taken?)

    (P.S: talking about tea, I loved the scoop of green tea picture :))

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  6. lotusgreen15 February 2008 at 06:55

    it feels like a dream

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  7. swiss15 February 2008 at 18:44

    colours and bachelard! i could go on!

    anything with blue and indigo in it particularly in the tonal range that you've used these last few pictures. sometimes i feel i use these too much tho and the house is full of blue and indigo pictures even when it isn't. so while these are in genesis what i'll be starting with is the orange of the leaf/petal in the tea pictures

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  8. Susan Kruse15 February 2008 at 21:27

    Thank you for the William Blake qoutes. I had forgotten how much I like his work. Today, quite by chance, I came across a quote of his I had written a couple of years ago in my sketchbook.
    "There are things that are known and things that are unknown; in between are the doors."
    Beautiful.

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  9. Anonymous15 February 2008 at 23:00

    I'm with you re Bachelard, with everything he wrote and the colours...it's so difficult to find words and colours that do not weight each other down, but then again....i like the idea of how she speaks about writing, bt this just as good could be about choosing the right colours, or better, feeling the right colours.

    “The process of writing consists of errors - most of them necessary - of courage and indolence, despair and hope, of growing awareness, of sustained feeling (not thought) which leads nowhere, and suddenly what you thought was 'nothingness' turns out to be your own terrifying contact with the fabric of life. That moment of recognition, that nameless submersion in a nameless fabric, that moment of recognition (akin to revelation) must be received with the greatest innocence, with the same innocence with which we are born. The process of writing is difficult? That is like defining as difficult the extremely capricious and natural manner in which a flower is formed.”

    Clarice Lispector

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  10. Roxana16 February 2008 at 01:17

    *szerelem: of course, impolite! just kidding :-) it is the pond of the Ryoanji Temple, in Kyoto. your enthusiasm is contagious :-) I feel suddenly much better.

    *lotusgreen: I was so curious to see if you liked them!

    *swiss: they are petals, dry rose petals. I read your older posts about Bachelard and the blue and Klein, yes, you know of course how much Klein was influenced by Bachelard, he even quotes him, if I recall correctly “First there is nothing, next there is a depth of nothingness, then a profundity of blue.” there is also this interesting book, if you are interested - and can read french :-) Barbara Puthomme : Le rien profond. Pour une lecture bachelardienne de l’art contemporain.

    *kruse: yes, he is awsome. but so difficult to understand, so often.

    *antonia: I like Bachelard so much. thank you for the beautiful quote, it's been some time that I've wanted to read her, but still couldn't find the time.

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  11. swiss17 February 2008 at 14:48

    thanks for the reference. i think i'll be geting that. t is currently working on some japanese felt thing in connection with klein. lots of dying, doesn't smell nice. will post the results.

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  12. Anonymous17 February 2008 at 19:19

    i wanted to ask you, do you like Herta Mueller's books? Thez are sometimes bleak, but i like the sharpness.

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  13. Roxana18 February 2008 at 02:11

    oh I haven't read as much as I should I know it is a shame - I thought das Herztier was wonderful, bleak, yes, but she manages to conjure such striking images. hofmannsthal talked somewhere about art, that it should achieve eine Synthese von brutaler Realität und lyrischem Raffinement (and how could he have imagined how brutal it would get), I thought about it when reading her. It is still the best thing I've read - and the most beautiful - about that "brutal reality" which was ours, even if there have been many attempts to confront and deal with that past somehow... still it is so difficult to find a way, and the appropriate form to do it. the only thing which bothered me a little about her style was that this raffinement was sometimes ueberspitzt, so dass manches etwas kuenstlich erscheint. aber immer noch grossartig.

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  14. Anonymous18 February 2008 at 14:09

    yes i entirely agree with what you say. I liked her essays too, for they were so unapologetically and uncompromised. i agree too with the ueberspitztheit, i thought that too, which is why i like her poetry less. i thought there is always a ruthlessness in her writing, but which is in some sense so very necessary. a ruthlessness and an unprotectedness. and then you have these books that just are theree, proud, you can read them, or not. yes i can imagine that it is difficult to find ways to deal with such a history. maybe one can only wander around it and look at it from different sides and hers is one approach...you know, i always think, when she get's older she writes the one big book, full of refined & concentrated impact.

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