The colour blue
‘The colour blue – that is my colour – and the colour blue means you have left the drabness of day-to-day reality to be transported into – not a world of fantasy, it’s not a world of fantasy – but a world of freedom where you can say what you like and what you don’t like. This has been expressed forever by the colour blue, which is really sky blue’ Louise Bourgeois
Our wondrous mind or the golden triangle
“Art is restoration: the idea is to repair the damages that are inflicted in life, to make something that is fragmented – which is what fear and anxiety do to a person – into something whole.” Louise Bourgeois
It’s a pity we are not raised in reflective cultures because increased capacity for presence and inner clarity would make a huge difference both in our personal and collective lives. Meditative practices have the potential to bring forth all that we have not fully felt and headed adequate attention, and thus, give us a second chance at understanding events and releasing trapped emotions. It is like re-reading our life story in a less hurried and distracted way making it our own again.
A few days ago I made the ink drawing posted here today. During the night the red tightrope became salient in my dream. However, in the dream I drew two vertical lines from the top and bottom corners that met the diagonal red line in the drawing. On waking up I did not heed my dream much attention and engaged with my usual mediation practice and sure enough memories of past art history lessons arose. Our professor was obstinately passionate about the golden triangle, which is a compositional element used in visual art. It is based on a triangular theory of vision where lines recede to a point to imply depth and is considered as a geometrically validated subject placement rule. A triangular composition is a classical way of composing an image because the triangle is considered a harmonic structure. The frame of the image can be divided into four triangles created by drawing a diagonal line from one corner to the other and then two lines from the other corners touching the first line at a 90 degree angle. For a while I had gone around trying to discern the golden triangle in every bit of art I saw.
He had also told me that my pencil drawings were like fine needle work. Some years down the road I started sewing words and phrases on bits of fabrics and then stitching the bits of fabric on drawings. Actually, I was making a collage of my drawings, bits of fabric, photos and other things as if desperately trying to sew together something torn. Through meditation all these neglected scraps of lived experience came together and became a story again.
“The spider is a repairer. If you bash into the web of a spider, she doesn’t get mad. She weaves and repairs it.” Louise Bourgeois
I have been spending time organizing artwork, putting it in files, scanning samples to expand the artwork part of the website. This editing process is emotional and quite time consuming. One thing I have realised is that making art has to some extent also been my ‘crutches and wheelchair’ in times of distress or physical collapse. Today’s ink sketches were made in the last part of 2015 when it felt as if I was crawling back to prior levels of functioning. It seemed as if it was asked of me to learn to breathe, eat, write and draw again. During that taxing time making these rough sketches facilitated processing, expression and I often think also cognitive healing. I call them my ‘rehabilitation sketches’ and to be honest part of this ‘awakening journey’ has required some level of rehabilitation of things I could not take for granted anymore and a reclaiming of aspects of myself.
Also, I’d like to share a short film I watched a few days ago made by artist, Tracey Emin, at: https://whitecube.com/channel/channel/tracey_emin_on_how_it_feels