Patterns of Paris




      


 




Patterns seen in Paris: the stained glass windows at the Château de Vincennes Chapel / Particle board & the ornate doors of Notre Dame / the grid within a grid covering a well / marble facade outside of a special wine bar / large dappled folios holding posters everywhere / a slab of marble as a table top at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs

From the photo collection 'In Paris'.

This is a spotlight that can be fixed to any appropriate surface, even the user's forehead.





Small things - clever, perfectly formed. Simple ideas, functional.
I want to simplify everything. I use so many words, smother works with a deluge of different ideas, theories, concepts each trying to justify the other while at the same time elbowing to the front of the queue.
I want to employ a new simplicity in my work - pare things backs, no over-involved plotlines; but to remember important phrases: a wild sheep chase; the macguffin; tangled threads of crime.

Just make statements. Of intent. I feel like I have been drifting aimlessly along for the past while (I don't even know when this feeling set in).
I found these lights in a book I was processing at the library. Great idea, suction cups! Beautiful and useful.
I am particularly partial to the light suction cupped to the forehead.

I want to put caster wheels on all my pieces of furniture so things can be easily moved around. I used to call these wheels 'coasters' because that is what they did, coast around.
Lights/Bookshelves/Cabinets not just tables and chairs. The ability to reassemble your living spaces. Living in movement.
Inspired by book trolleys at the library and a lamp suction cupped onto a dude's forehead.

Surface details.





























Kilmartin House Museum, 2013, Bronze Thirteen pieces, overall size 3 m diameter / The Perpetual Plannist, 2012, Artist’s pages for Un Magazine 6.2, December 2012 / Floor Work, 2012, Acrylic, Dimensions of the floor, less 30cm at each edge

 All works by Ash Kilmartin.

I love these three details of works by my clearly talented good friend Ash Kilmartin, which I have blatantly thieved from her website with only the best intentions.  The separate works were made over a  period of two years, but the repeated use of specific colours, shapes and scale create a sense of a continuation or investigation of a larger theme or project; ongoing research which manifests itself in different but familiar ways as her practice evolves.
The considered interferences on floorboards, the oval shape of the front pad of a shoe sole is mirrored in the stripped back paint surfaces which surround the embedded key. All surrounded by a particular shade of orangey pink, which sooner or later could be known as 'Ash Kilmartin Salmon' (which doesn't really sound like a colour at all but hey) in a similar vein to Yves Klein Blue.

Possible colour names for that particular shade welcome.

In my own backyard

images via we find wildness, but really via neeve

It is odd when you discover things happening a stone's throw from your house on the internet. I was stopped in my tracks on a daily scroll through my reader, by the captivating image by Georgian artist Thea Djordjadze. The images are brief glimpses of her exhibition 'Our Full', showing right now at Malmö Konsthall. Right in my back yard.

Tomorrow I will take an hour out of last minute christmas shopping and the like to chill out in what seems a really fascinating show. The more shows like this I see the more excited I get about my own art practice, and my efforts to uphold it against rather minding numbing library drudgery.

Gaze and Glaze

Ceramic cups and teapots by Isobel Thom as part of the exhibition 'The Berlin Years' with Saskia Leek, shown at the Hamish McKay Gallery 18 October - 10 November.

Sometimes objects are so beautiful their presence overwhelms their functionality. I have always liked to think that I would be the person who would use such things in my everyday life - and thus get the most pleasure out of them, having been incorporated into the drudgery of my routine. Then again, I broke one of my prized glasses with a picture of a vintage car on it, and am still ruing my carefree attitude towards possessions I do actually care about.

The angular shapes of the tea sets and the stackable nature of the cups are so alluring - all those modernist sensibilities captured and executed on a small scale, while imbued with a sort of zen calmness and the practiced movements of the Japanese tea ceremony. The tea pots themselves have an almost Communist feel about them, their shape and twisting lid seemingly reflecting the hammer and sickle.

I am drawn more and more towards art and designs more closely aligned with craft arts - textile crafts such as embroidery and knitting, ceramics, whittling, jewellery, the making of objects. I am at a sort of cross roads in my life at the moment, and I am not sure what I am wanting to do. All I know is that I do not want my career to be 8 hours a day sitting stationary in front of a computer, and I want to do something with my hands. I believe this is why my artworks are delicate, time consuming and hand made. It is a way of combating the pull of the internet - a direct backlash to the power of technology. Crafts seem to defy the claims that everything can be done on a computer.

Dust settling




Dust Breeding, 1920, Man Ray

Man Ray's 2 hour long exposure of Duchamp's masterpiece The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915-1923), covered in a years worth of dust.

I am at present reading Man Ray's autobiography, appropriately titled Self Portrait, published in 1963. My favourite passage so far concerns his first meeting with Duchamp, around 1915.

"Visitors continued to descend upon us, one Sunday afternoon two men arrived - a young Frenchman, and an American somewhat older. The one was Marcel Duchamp, the painter whose Nude Descending the Staircase had created such a furor at the Armory show in 1913, the second a collector of modern art, Walter Arensberg. Duchamp spoke no English, my French was nonexistent. Donna acted as my interpreter but mostly carried on a rapid dialogue with him. I brought out a couple of old tennis racquets, and a ball which we batted back and forth without any net, in front of the house. Having played the game on regular courts previously, I called the strokes to make conversation: fifteen, thirty, forty, love, to which he replied each time with the same word: yes."

The Large Glass is most likely the one work of art I ardently desire to see in the flesh in my lifetime. 

Den nakna ön









Hadaka no Shima (The Naked Island), has been one of the highlights of this season's Cinemateket programme so far, and it was spellbinding viewing tonight. I look eagerly forward to the remainder of the Japanese New Wave selection.
Kaneto Shindo's 1964 film centres on the continuous uphill struggles, living in isolation on a small island in the Seito Inland Sea.
Shot in black and white, and almost completely void of dialogue, Shindo uses repeated daily actions to spell out the monotony of hardship - the breaks from the constant work (a family trip to the mainland, local celebrations) stand out in stark contrast as short interludes of spontaneity. Dialogue is not necessary; even if there had been a script, it doesn't feel like family would have anything to say to each other that could be conveyed with language.
Accompanying the daily farming grind is an incredibly moving soundtrack by Hikaru Hayashi, perfectly reflecting and enhancing the back-breaking labour, one repeated motion after another. Tending to their precious crops, staggering up the rocky, precarious slopes of the island laden with full buckets of precious water - there is a certain elegance to the characters movements, as the gingerly place one foot in front of the other, sinewy arms supporting the yokes across their backs and shoulders in a delicate tightrope balancing act.

Films like this continue to fuel my love of, and fascination with, islands.

4 things




 

4 images that I have been really drawn to of late. Firstly a lovely colour page from my excellent book 'The Lore of Ships' -  the flags make me want to write out mantras to live by in a sort of drape-y semaphore as a hanging soft sculpture. A wonderful knotted sponge-like form, created by Jens Risch, twisting and contorting upon itself in painful confusion. TV series 'Psych' parody Twin Peaks, and include many of the original cast. Here Dana Ashbrook (Bobby Briggs), Sheryl Lee (Laura Palmer) and Lenny Von Dohlen (Harold Smith) discover the body of 'Paula Merrel' "wrapped in plastic". And fourthly, a very large palette with (in hindsight) a rather Audrey-ish looking girl) found in the wonderful image archive that is Old Chum.

Warm knits

One of perhaps three or four large knitted lampshades hanging over the bar at the Grill Room, Barcelona. Evocative of bait catchers and fishing nets, made with slightly fraying twine, it looked much more robust in real life. They immediately caught my eye due to the current knitting work I am making at the moment, one of those pleasing coincidences in life. The wooden frame and brown twine complement each other nicely with the natural colours and materials, I am thinking of marrying my fishing line knitted pieces with the shiny copper wire, for a more sparkly effect.
From the restaurant's menu I chose their 'Japanese burger' - a pattie marinated in soy sauce, accompanied with Japanese mayonnaise, and the usual salad-y suspects. There was meant to be tofu in it as well but I couldn't see any (the possibility I ate it without realising cannot be ruled out). It was pretty damn delectable, but anything with Japanese mayo in it generally is. 

patterns within everyday life


Patterns are present in every facet of our daily life, tangible ones and abstract. Patterns can be chaotic or reassuring - a hectic psychedelic kaftan or the simple routine of repeated motions.  I have always held an interest in patterns - how can one not when the are the very building blocks of our lives so to speak. Patterns are like clues - to a life/style, in a detective story. One is always looking out for patterns in a hope of building up the larger picture.

I have long thought about creating patterns myself, patterns that can be multiplied and replicated and printed on material, a thought that has wandered in and out of my consciousness intermittently throughout my teenage and adult years, and something I have tried to integrate into my art practice both conceptually and in more literal forms.
Above is a sculpture I made as part of my graduating installation at Elam. Apart from the sculpture papier machéd in fake marbled Formica, on the floor lies a piece of paper - a pattern I made stamping a letter W across the page, first right way up, then the wrong, creating a sort of diamond/chicken wire pattern, though one that was shaky, riddled with errors, obviously executed by hand. The result (virtually indistinguishable in the poor photo above) was a little similar to Latvian artist Viktor Timofeev's 'WWW', which I stumbled upon by chance on the website PATTERNITY.

It was from seeing the designs of Sonia Delaunay as part of an exhibition at Louisiana about Avant-gard in the early Twentieth Century. The designs we simple and intriguing, her involvement with the Orphism movement clearly influencing her use of colour and circular motifs, as well as using rectangles, forming patterns like parquet floors. And while seeing these patterns manifest themselves as clothing and fabric was beautiful, I was drawn to her original drawing and sketches, watercolour and gauche on paper, the illustration of the first hint of the idea. It all seemed so casually executed, yet with great finesse.

"I have done fifty designs, relationships of colour using pure geometrical forms with rhythm. They were, and remain, colour scales - really a purified version of our concept of painting. (...) The rhythm is based on numbers, for colour can be measured by the number of vibrations. This is a completely new concept, one which opens infinite horizons for painting and may be used by everyone who can feel and understand it."
- Sonia Delaunay

In a time where I feel I am surrounded by art that is grandiose and powerful, large-scaled, minimalist and monochromatic and technical, it is a wonderful feeling when such small, old, basic illustrations of ideas can capture so much of my imagination. And with the hectic pace of the fashion world, and the types of prints fabric and textile designers are creating: digital, luridly coloured, computer generated, to look back on the prints of Delaunay is not such a bad idea.

And maybe this will be something I will continue with, interesting fabric patterns for and from everyday life. My first one (apart from the W netting) is a pattern of boots and noses.

an idea and something to accompany it


Leonor Antunes at Marc Foxx via Contemporary Art Daily.

"assembled, moved, re-arranged and scrapped continuously"

(excerpt from press release:)
In this exhibition, Antunes considers Brazilian modernist architect Lina Bo Bardi in “lina” 2012, a delicate brass and silver constructed curtain which is a reflection of the parquet floor design in the immanent modernist house she designed, known as the “Glass House” built Sao Paolo in 1951. Bo Bardiʼs influence can also be seen in the soft red leather floor work, “discrepancies with L.B.” which takes its form from the hard gridded window treatment of Bo Bardiʼs building “Sesc Pompeii”, also in Sao Paulo.

“lina” is installed upon “assembled, moved, re-arranged and scrapped continuously”, 2012, the exhibitionsʼ title and largest sculpture. The 9.5 x 9.5 foot walnut wooden pavilion is also the venue for “chão”, 2011, a 12 part hand- knotted and incrementally increasing, gridded series of delicate black nets. The canopy itself delineates the room, asserting an almost domestic feeling and providing an exhibited arrangement of grid upon grid within the show.

Hanging from the rafters and breaking her gridded constructions is the organic work “random intersections #7”, a sculpture made from handmade black leather straps, similar to horse bridals and referencing Carlo Mollinoʼs equestrian school in Turin “Società Ippica Torinese”, built in 1937 but destroyed in 1960. Antunes, like Mollino, has a great appreciation for the movement of material and this work brings her materiality back to a more corporeal connection.

The marriage of the fine black netting, the metallic glimmering curtain and the robust and darkly slick wooden structure upon which the works adorn, makes for an interesting and pleasing relationship. It reflects various thoughts I have myself had recently, revolving around an abandoned metal spring-bed base (which has since disappeared, and whose disappearance I may not fully get over for weeks or months) and a large pile of flaccid overstretched rubber bands.

I think it is only recently that tactility has taken on such importance in my work. The overwhelming feeling of wanting to touch something is luring me into the photographs of Antunes' work.

Knotting, linking, twisting; connecting ideas and materials is a common motif represented in my practice, building up textures and surfaces, images from small marks or gestures - stitches, knitting, creating patterns, repetition of shapes, reshaping the line - whether it is a length of embroidery thread or a pencil mark on paper.

(some notes from my journal)
"an interesting object (the bed base), black and silver and brown, stripped bare of any embellishments. skeletal. the bare bones. structural, architectural. the inner workings, masculine. Uncovered, exposed.
a single bed, only room for one.
standing upright, no room for anyone.
removed from it's original function/identity.

the coils and springs have a hypnotic quality, round & round.
rubber bands - the opposite of the coiled spring: soft, flaccid, stretchy.
mirroring the circular motif of the springs but out of shape, wobbly, chaotic, disorganised.

spring : springa sprang har sprungit (run, ran, have run)
spring is run in swedish.

a netting of rubber bands, covering the upright bed base. draped over the frame like a caress, an arm across the shoulders. a shroud/net encompassing it.
the bands are like thoughts, ideas, anxieties, unanswerable questions, dreams.
what fills the mind and what weighs one down.
tangled threads - made even worse with no beginning or end, circles connected to more circles, no straight lines here.
rubber bands with the ability to be stretched and reached through but can they ever be escaped from?"


just some thoughts to be thought about.
first item of business, sourcing another perfect spring single bed base, and ruing the missed opportunity of the one I thought was languishing casually waiting for me to get home from work to be rescued.


På Cinemateket


Mannen på Taket (The Man on the Roof) dir. BoWiderberg (1976) / Elvira Madigan dir. Bo Widerberg (1967) /  The Trial dir. Orson Welles (1962) / Kärlek 65 (Love 65) dir. Bo Widerberg (1965) / Tabu, a Story of the South Seas dir. F.W Murnau (1931) / Los Olvidados dir. Luis Buñuel (1950) / C'era una volta il West (Once Upon a Time in The West) dir. Sergio Leone (1968) / Death in Venice dir. Luchino Visconti (1971) /

Every Tuesday and Saturday at Spegeln cinema, runs the Malmö branch of Cinemateket - a sort of film society organized by the Swedish Film Institute, showcasing films from throughout the history of cinema - spotlighting the oeuvre of directors, actresses, or focusing on a specific theme. It has allowed me to not only watch examples of classic cinema on the large screen, but discover new favourite directors, such as Malmö's own Bo Widerberg; see films from Argentina to Scotland, from the early silent days to present offerings.
There should really be something like this in every city - it's regularity and variety means there is always something too look forward to, with the opportunity to see films you may never otherwise have had the chance to see.

Above are some posters of my favourite films seen at Cinemateket, many have become some of my all time favourites - I love leaving the cinema feeling 'so deeply moved'. I would recommend seeing any, and all of them.

Attention to detail

two works by Daan Van Golden at Wiels Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels, and two views of Martin Creed's installation at sketch, London.

Daan van Golden
His relatively small but diverse body of work is characterized by an acute attention to detail. References to important works from art history, as well as to less exalted images from commerce, pop-music and daily life are important components of his work. Van Golden has never been too concerned about prevailing artistic trends and has always carved a path of his own. His art does not consist of large brushstrokes, but of a much more modest gesture: his paintings are the result of a labour-intensive process, whereby a visual motive is explored in a very careful and precise manner.

Martin Creed at sketch:
Work No. 1347 consists of 96 different types of marble, in a formation of zigzagging lines across the floor, while Work No. 1343 is a new work specially made for the restaurant in which every single piece of cutlery, glassware, lamp, chair and table is different.

Attention to detail is an important thing. Something I seriously consider and take pride in with my work. While I appreciate the grand gesture, the found object, and the impersonal minimalism, there is something about labour intensive finely detailed craft which resonates with  me. Details are what give things credibility and authenticity apparently - at least this is what people praise and/or complain of in any televised period drama. The measure of something.

I like to think of details slowly building themselves up, accumulating numbers until their presence is inescapable. I strive to create a sort of push/pull effect - where the audience must step back from the work to take in the full picture, but afterwards are pulled close to see how the image is made.

It is in the details that one finds the clues in a murder mystery ("The Murder Mystery" could pretty much be a concept by which I question the meaning of life through my art practice). Red herrings too. It could just be the way a person phrases a sentence that gives the game away. I like to try and watch out for it, pick up the clues en route, and form an educated guess as to whom the perpetrator could be. It rarely, if ever happens like that however.

At this point it feels apt to admit that every single school report card given to me used the word 'diligent' in some capacity. It is a word that follows me around, and during my final year of art school, finally infiltrated my studio.

Before I used to sit on an idea, shape it like a bit of clay in my head, bolstering it with various concepts, cultural references and the like. My idea process changed while my work changed, and it took on a more insular, patient, labour-orientated facet, and all this time spent working, was also spent thinking, and both started to influence and build upon each other, and also from the music playing while this working and thinking process is going on. Hmm, sounds pretty wishy-washy. Bit new-age, 'organic'.

I guess what I am trying to with my writing these days is a similar method to working and thinking simultaneously. Trying to reach some level of clarity just by typing sentences around some of the thoughts in my head. Different ways of saying the same thing.  These days I just start writing things down/typing things out, seeing where they will lead me and how often I repeat myself.

And by-the-by, I am convinced that Van Golden's work of the young girl cartwheeling is out of sequence. Surely the 3rd and the 4th images should be switched around to give a complete cartwheel? But maybe, that is the whole point of it - that the details don't add up.

Lakes of Note


Have at long last been able to hang up my dear friend Claire Cooper's amazing work 'Notable Lakes part iv', a graphically compiled collation of lakes, both real and fictitious. The shapes of the Real Lakes are plotted on one side, and the Fictitious ones on the reverse (or vice versa).

I love the way the semi-transparent paper allows both sides to be visible - the overlapping of the dots creates an interesting variation in tone. After in initial quandary, I decided to hang it with those plastic poster holders, they rather exacerbate the feeling of looking at some kind of high school geography class OHP projection of how the world looked at some point in history.
It does make for an easy and painless transition from Notable 'real' Lakes to Notable 'fictitious' ones however.

Because it does look like a map. Occasionally I will look at it thinking how much lake xxv 'Taal Lake' could almost pass for Brazil. I asked Claire to send me one which she had folded, how she originally envisioned the work. The sharp creases keeps the work from being completely flat, and the poster holders do their job of helping it keep it's shape. The folds give a worn physicality to the work that the flatness and sheen of the paper would have overpowered. I think they give the work more character.

This is the second piece of art I have bought, along with my friend Ash's brilliant piece The Travelling Mime. I look forward to expanding my collection, especially with my works by my exceptionally talented friends.
I would also recommend Claire's various Internet endeavours, Olio Ataxia, as one half of Diamonds & Wood, and not to mention her War and Peace tumblr: dedicated to film stills from the 1968 mammoth adaption of Tolstoy's War and Peace and a personal fave.

EFFEMINACY - Kah Bee Chow






A few slightly blurred images from the opening of Kah Bee's masters show, Effeminacy. I was wandering through the show when a friend of mine came up to me, and as a way of saying hello queried "where's the cat?". Thinking she meant the video of internet sensation Maru, I told her about it. Only to be corrected "No, Kah Bee said there was going to be a real, live cat wandering through the show". I said I had seen no evidence of such an event, but considering Kah Bee, I wouldn't put it past her. When I found the artist, wearing a friend's baseball cap at a jaunty angle and with a long stemmed red rose between her teeth, I asked her to set the record straight on these cat rumours. KBC admitted at some point during the installation's run, a cat would feature. I really hope this was not just the opening night enthusiasm and alcohol intake talking.
With various cylindrical forms and structures covered in carpet it really is a cat-scratching haven. Or a Grecian-meets-Babylonian themed cat café, at the very least.

I noticed your walk changed as you went through the show. The layout, the scattering of objects across floors, strategically placed to dictate movement, forced the viewer to alter their gait to a delicate prowl. Almost like dance steps. One, step, two steps, pivot, crouch down to examine a video or an ikebana oasis, and up again. Repeat. You could almost feel rather cat-like yourself.

In her own words:

"When I was four years old, I came across a pack of crayons on the new lounge suite in the living room. I started testing out what the crayons could do and I learned I could leave markings on the textured upholstery of the sofa; a revelatory assignment. So I got to work that afternoon, I worked hard, attacking the surface with manic and more manic scribblings. I worked to colonize this expansive territory, smearing waxy residue over the entire set of furniture. I would use up one crayon, move onto another and another. It was exhilarating work. I had found my calling.

When my father returned home from work, I don’t recall what happened immediately after – but suffice to say, I didn’t anticipate the response that would come. At some point, I was placed outside the House. I clutched onto the grill of the gate outside our home, wailing like the banished offspring of an all-powerful God.
When I was finally allowed back into our house, I remember my father’s back turned towards me. He didn’t have a shirt on, he was on his knees, sweating profusely, scrubbing the sofa with his life."

and

"I channel the savages when I eat watermelons. Oranges also. They taste better when your teeth tear the flesh off the rind; puncturing the sacs so the juices run and collect into a pool inside your mouth. It doesn’t work with a mediocre orange. I once read: “We love beauty within the limits of political judgment, and we philosophize without the barbarian vice of effeminacy."


Barbarian vice of effeminacy: imagine this paradoxical compatibility.


Effeminacy pours from an excess of refinement not reined in by a soundness of thinking; it rings of aristocratic overkill, a persistent, eternal infantilism afforded by privilege. How does the barbarian; the cannibal fall for the effeminate? Where do they even meet? I could not draw a line around a territory, not because one belongs on the outside and the other within, but because they operate as a kind of corrupting impulse; their shared lack of restraint comes to surface but eludes arrest. They don’t meet up for coffee and they don’t scope out each other’s Facebook profiles; they are criminals on the run, they go chasing waterfalls."



Interiors (New Zealand)



Seeing where people live, how they display their possessions and what to them makes a livable and harmonious environment are a never-ceasing area of interest. I think my extended family have always had impeccable interiors, successfully reflecting their personalities and aesthetics.

Granny's flat, complete with many amazing artworks installed Salon-style. There was nearly no free wall space, every available square inch utilized for displaying her collection.  Staying here for one week while in NZ made me fully appreciate framing works/pictures, and I have been scouring second-hand shops in Malmö hunting down suitable frames with which to house my few prints and drawings, mainly done by myself.

Harriet and Chris' living room at their flat in Onehunga. A great mix of leather, lacquer and vinyl. Wooden floors, wooden walls, open brick fireplace. The best thing about houses in NZ is the abundance of wood, something sorely missing in our Swedish apartment. Swedish apartments have lots of things going for them - double glazed windows, central heating, ornately plastered ceilings - but linoleum floors and concrete walls are not the best sometimes.

Both these interiors made an impression on me, knowing as I did, that after my holiday in NZ we would be moving rooms to the largest on the in flat, complete with walk-in wardrobe and an opportunity to arrange and rearrange my still rather meagre but slowly growing collection of possessions presented itself.

A trick of the light

It's not often an idea or an artwork will stop me in my internet/google reader trawling, but whenever it does it is always instantly rewarding and I (metaphorically) give myself a withering look and disappointedly shake my head, wondering why I don't make more of an effort.
Via Junkculture I stumbled upon these remarkable photographs of Antarctic icescapes, by Belgian architect  Francois Delfosse, deftly created with simply a plastic bag and some clever lighting. The trick with the scale is beguiling - I originally saw these as a sort of large scale sculptural installation: as if the plastic had frozen and gallery goers were free to traverse it.
And as one commentator noted on Delfosse's flickr, it is reminiscent of the crevasse Tintin falls into in 'Tintin in Tibet' - the bowels of the icy abyss illustrated by Hergé in blues, greys, purples and blacks.

On his website a series of postcards are available, including the series of Antarctic 'scapes, and a particularly wonderful image of the Bermuda Islands, as a quavering mirage. I especially like the way the dark, faceted and enclosed plastic bag Antarctica series feel when juxtaposed against the flat, one-hued and sparse open water surrounding the scarcely visible islands. I also have no idea of its 'authenticity', and I think I prefer to keep it that way.

I am always interested in people who appear to share interests of my own, ongoing projects which have been on a bit of a back burner of late involve both icy landscapes and mirages, in however a non-photographic capacity. I also seem to have compiled a large amount of primarily blue postcards, in particular from New Zealand, which I am wanting to do something with, but may also have to add these three images to the growing pile.

A blue island in a red desert









































"Once there was a girl on an island. She was bored with grown ups, who scared her. She didn't like boys, all pretending to be grown ups. So, she was always alone. Among the cormorants, the seagulls, and wild rabbits. She had found a little isolated beach where the sea was transparent and the sand pink. She loved that spot. Nature's colours were so lovely and there was no sound. She left when the sun went down.
One morning, a boat appeared. Not one of the usual boats, a real sailing ship, one of those that braved the seas and the storms of this world. And, who knows... of other worlds. From afar, it looked splendid. As it approached, it became mysterious. She saw no one aboard. It stopped a while, then veered and sailed away. She was used to peoples' strange ways and was not surprised. But no sooner back on shore ... there! (sound of singing). All right for one mystery, but not two!
- who was singing?
The beach was deserted. But the voice was there, now near, now far. Then it seemed to come from the sea, an inlet among the rocks, many rocks that she had never realised looked like flesh. And the voice at that point was so sweet."
- who was singing?
"Everybody. Everything."

Story from Michelangelo Antonioni's sumptuous 1964 colour film 'Il Deserto Rosso'.
I wrote this passage down in my journal after watching Il Deserto Rosso last year, the use of the vignette in the narrative, it's contents, imagery and tone all reflected similar thoughts I had about a series I am working on at present. I enjoy taking the time to take down something in my own hand, to go back and reread.
Also, I think the people's handwriting will be completely illegible in twenty years.