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Final days of 2020 in Athens

little tree by e.e. cummings

little tree
little silent Christmas tree
you are so little
you are more like a flower
who found you in the green forest
and were you very sorry to come away?
see i will comfort you
because you smell so sweetly
i will kiss your cool bark
and hug you safe and tight
just as your mother would,
only don’t be afraid
look the spangles
that sleep all the year in a dark box
dreaming of being taken out and allowed to shine,
the balls the chains red and gold the fluffy threads,
put up your little arms
and i’ll give them all to you to hold
every finger shall have its ring
and there won’t be a single place dark or unhappy…

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In semi lock down….

“Margaret Atwood describes a similar process behind the genesis of The Handmaid’s Tale: a steady collecting of clippings, each real, all gradually coalescing into a pictureof rigidly enforced misogyny that wasn’t a figment of the future but obvious to her around the world, once she started to notice.”  Margaret Heffernan

Ι have run out of sketching paper. A small gouache pad has sort of come to my rescue. Sο, Ι am dabbling with water colours and pencils while continuing the maternal theme.

Meanwhile, in the background of my art making float extracts from Margaret Atwood’s 1986 book, The Handmaid’s Tale, which I am re-reading. On perspective she writes: “What I need is perspective. The illusion of depth, created by a frame, the arrangement of shapes on a flat surface. Perspective is necessary. Otherwise there are only two dimensions. Otherwise you live with your face squashed up against a wall, everything a huge foreground, of details, close-ups, hairs, the weave of the bedsheet, the molecules of the face. Your own skin like a map, a diagram of futility, criscrossed with tiny roads that lead nowhere. Otherwise you live in the moment. Which is not where I want to be.”  On the other hand, been fully in the moment could potentially become a more empowering place to be, even if, what is, is not what one might choose. Ιt provides a kind of freedom even in the context of the fundamentalist, totalitarian and deeply patriarchic society depicted in Atwood’s dystopia, where women are divided in functions and are punished, mutilated and killed for things like reading, expressing an opinion, breaching silence, forming friendships, and so on. If we look back in history and across the world it seems that there is not much in this unsettling fiction book that does not have some historic precedence. In her book, The Penelopiad, Atwood writes that water too lacks the solidity of a wall. She says: “Water does not resist. Water flows. When you plunge your hand into it, all you feel is a caress. Water is not a solid wall, it will not stop you. But water always goes where it wants to go, and nothing in the end can stand against it. Water is patient. Dripping water wears away a stone. Remember that, my child. Remember you are half water. If you can’t go through an obstacle, go around it. Water does.”

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“The more time we spend visiting places that others have described, the more we follow the paths others have made, reading what we’re told, seeing what the algorithm recommends, listening to what crowd-sources admire and eating what’s already been photographed, tasted, marketed and measured, the less capacity we have to see what we didn’t expect, to hear what we weren’t told about or to ask questions that haven’t already been answered. We lose our own perspective and imagination and in this everyone is impoverished: ourselves and anyone who looks to us in vain for fresh insight or understanding.” Margaret Heffernan

Three more charcoal and pencil drawings

 

 

And,  I’d also like to share a big part of Margaret Heffernan’s chapter around art and living with the uncertainty and ambiguity intrinsic in life with the title: Living the Questions from her book: Uncharted: How to Map the Future, in which she explores questions.

“How is it that Ibsen’s play The Wild Duck, written in Italy 135 years ago by a fussy, middle-aged Norwegian man, holds this cosmopolitan audience rapt? …….. Artists are frequently ahead – that’s what avant-garde means – but what makes that possible? How does art stay relevant in times and circumstances well beyond any future its makers could have imagined? What is it about the way that artists live and work that puts them in touch with ideas and themes that last so long? What lasts is, to some degree, random or accidental. We don’t know whether ancient Greece had greater playwrights than Aeschylus, Sophocles, Aristophanes and Euripides, only that they are the ones whose work has been discovered. You need only look at ads for wildly hyped but now forgotten authors in the back of old books to see how ephemeral art can be. But all generations go back to art, discovering or rediscovering sources of meaning and insight that their makers could never have planned. There’s no evidence that artists contemplate ‘future proofing’ – artists don’t see the future as something to manipulate or guard against – yet we look to them for insight, perspective, ways to understand our own times that they themselves did not know. And, in work made decades, centuries, millennia ago, we find what we’re looking for. Read more…. Notes