not a pretty picture. not a good. not a bad. picture. but an argument.

Monday, May 31, 2021

a persistence of colour

 


My intention in photographing the trillium was to get close to white on white, engage with a disappearance. And yet, here, with the trillium, a day after spending time with the works of Rothko, I can't help but be mesmerized by the ethereal nature, yet stubbornness of this colour.

“The recipe of a work of art – its ingredients – how to make it -the formula.

  1. There must be a clear preoccupation with death – intimations of mortality…Tragic art, romantic art, etc., deals with the knowledge of death.
  2. Sensuality. Our basis of being concrete about the world. it is a lustful relationship to things that exist.
  3. Tension. Either conflict or curbed desire.
  4. Irony. This is a modern ingredient – the self-effacement and examination by which a man for instant can go on to something else.
  5. Wit and play…for the human element.
  6. The ephemeral and chance…for the human element.
  7. Hope.10% to make the tragic concept more endurable. I measure these ingredients very carefully when I paint a picture. It is always the form that follows these elements and the picture results from the proportions of these elements.”

M.Rothko’s „Address to Pratt Institute”, November, 1958.



Friday, May 21, 2021

Canadian "cherry blossoms"

 


perhaps not quite as intoxicating as cherry blossoms, but (this far north) maple flowers are worthy of praise and meditation 


Thursday, May 13, 2021

against darkness



How It Got Dark by Don McKay

When the second stone
was cast, when Gatling
begat his gun, when to know
became to own—animals,
land, ideas, people;
when they piled the skulls
and posed for photographs, when
the fifth stone fell
like a schizophrenic star, like
an Airbus, like an angel
crashing into space-time;
when the red squirrel popped
out of the stew pot and
up a pine tree in a flash, then
paused to boast and scold us in that brash
staccato and I said that's it,
let's get the little bugger and picked
up the first stone.