Saturday, January 30, 2010

African Art Museum

Animals--each have symbolic meaning, each have positive aspect/personality emphasized

Chiwara masks--male and female masks meant to go together

yin and yang
female mask has young on back/top




Birds
spiral tails
feathers
bird flying = communication with spirit world
bird is a sort of threshold
(Yoruba people)
research bird calls


Sankofa bird--looks over shoulder, using past to move forward into future









Flamingoes sleep the same way.  Perhaps they have the best clarity into the meaning of the past while they are sleeping. Do they lucid dream?






Imagine using yourself as a pillow...how convenient.

Snakes = zigzag, coil
skin shedding = rebirth, creativity, infinity
waiting to catch prey = infinity
latent power in its patience = yin?

Chameleon = transformation, ability to eventually reach its destination
Walked when earth was new and ground was soft--superior balance
Daos ideally?
Tail curls (curl = life, time) up in art (opposite of nature)...what does this mean? Is the chameleon an optimist?

Mudfish
lives in and out of water = "magical rebirth", resurfacing of the hidden

Snail = coolness, control, serenity
idea of a storehouse for these things, a haven

Elephant = change, counterpart to kings, cycle of life and death
"One who follows the track of the elephant never gets wet from the dew on the bushes"
The museum interpreted this as if you stick with a powerful leader, he will protect you.  I interpret it to mean if you blaze your own trail you'll have more of an adventure.  But try to wear wool socks.

Scarab beetle = rising sun, rebirth

Butterfly = coming of rain
lots of kaleidoscopic patterns and psychedelic colors here!

Hippo = fertility, good fortune
blue!
can hold breath up to six minutes...is this how it became blue?

Turtle (and shell) = cross in circle/ordering of cosmos
cross = meeting of this world and spirit world
with triangle and spiral patterns = movements of moon, cycles of fertility and childbirth (creation on microcosmic scale?)

Masks with square shape and no teeth = non-threatening

Look into:
Guro people--Mami Wata figure = waterspirit
Senufo masked dancers
Creation story on turtle's back

Try:
Ink, paint, and chalk on plywood
Women emerging from gourd-shapes

National Gallery of Art

"Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal" T. S. Eliot

"The viewer is persuaded by his senses that he occupies the center of the world around him--a world he changes at will as he moves through it." Rudolph Arnheim

"The eye is the first circle, the horizon which it forms the second, and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end." Ralph Waldo Emerson

"It is gray we need...made of bright and black, able to shed the former or the latter, and be the latter or the former alone." S. Beckett
(Or grey could be neither, something completely separate from its component parts.  We are the grey of our parents, our surrounding culture, the world.)

Barnett Newman:
The split in his paintings is not a divide, rather reunites, making the works whole, stronger.
Like the self
or
aggregates, augmented matrix, recalcification of broken bone

Ideas from Jasper Johns exhibit:

Mediums to try/revisit:

Oil paintstick
Sharpie
Encaustic
Ink on plastic
Sand
Scrape-off technique (with gel medium too)
Draw with graphite then paint over with slightly translucent white, many layers?

Things to think about:


Watchman--outside viewer
Upside-down imagery
Circular art--no fixed beginning/end
Jumping Dali
Famous portrait => kaleidoscopify
BLUE BLUE BLUE anything blue a field of blue
Turi's "there, there, gone" print
Mountain with ski runs like the tip of an iceberg, pink rothko sky, roots = water
Umbrellas
Beanstalk--like living ladder to the ball of gold
Sleeping in a question mark
Pretzels

Calder-esque shadows--in and out of focus
Fingerpainting/fingerprintpainting
Wrinkles

Monday, January 18, 2010

A trip through the Southwest

Just read House of Rain, an incredible and beautifully written book about Craig Child's journey across the Colorado Plateau down to northern Mexico, following Anasazi ruins, in search of answers about the mysterious culture.  Really brings the southwestern landscape to life.  All I need now is to make the trek myself.

Some choice quotes:

"The cosmology of this desert is constantly revealed in different forms.  I looked up and saw rock art unfurling down a sunbaked cliff, and bits of fallen cliff dwellings hanging from shallow alcoves.  The movement of people is one of these thin veneers across the planet's surface.  Flowing over the geologic ripples of the Colorado Plateau, people once slipped into these convenient spaces, journeying between gaps and along ridges as the earth flinched and rolled around them...the hands of the world were touching them, leading them first one way and then another." 224
Here the desert is the base, the living organism, the mover and controller, the active element.  People are transient, guests--an interesting perspective on the place of humanity in the world

"...landscape and climate have always ruled the comings and goings of people, controlling, it seemed, my every step.  I called (the Southwest) a landscape of motion, saying that the science of archaeology has been hampered by an inability to comprehend even simple distances.  It is crucial that one walk across the land to earn a true sense of how people might once have traveled." 261
He studies the people through the lens of the landscape.
Interesting to think of "earning" knowledge, as opposed to just learning--a different type of absorption

A story relating types of pottery to migration:
When tribes reached the Little Colorado River, they were given a choice of either a dull or brightly colored egg.  The colorful egg contained a dark raven, signifying they were to stay on the Plateau.  The dull egg contained a rainbow-colored parrot, meaning that the tribes were to migrate south.  Colors of the birds match pottery types produced by the tribes.  269
Why did the colorful bird come from the dull egg and vice versa?  The pairing of opposites here is interesting--such as vibrance born from plainness--and relates to concepts of yin and yang, universal balance.

Changes in pottery patterns signal shifts in ideology:
"The hard geometry of an earlier era of black-on-white styles softened into spiraling imagery, still orderly and mathematical in its approach, but given over to more playful asymmetrical scrolls and serifs. ...(it) signaled the rise of the Flower World, what the Hopi call siitalpu, a belief in a beautiful and chromatic spiritual dimension that parallels this physical one." 308
Childs intimates that this new perspective arose as part of the shirt from "austere country of desert into the mountains, with their silver flashes of creeks and springs".  Landscape again shapes the people.

"Then I thought, maybe there are not a thousand paths.  Maybe there are only a few.  Maybe only one.  The earth contains inevitable confluences.  We come back again and again no matter who we are or when we come." 325
Like a river's tributaries converging, like Hindu belief of becoming one with Atman, of narrowing the focus down to one point that contains everything, or opening the focus to make everything into one great whole.  Perhaps there is no need to worry about which path to take, because the only forks in the road actually work the opposite way, and divergences only differ from confluences in perspective.

Idea of reflection:
Mountains in the Southwest are symbols for water--they are where water falls, where that life-force (qi?) of the land can be found
"There are metaphorical mountains underground that mirror the tangible ones aboveground, bodies of water within the earth fed by precipitation on peaks scattered across the southwest." 421
Contrast of over vs. under, up vs. down, open vs. hidden--paired opposites
Underground aquifers like yin
Like 7/8 of iceberg

"A religion is centered on the mechanics of water.  Even modern hydrologists cannot adequately explain the direct correlation between climate shifts and water table fluctuations.  ...Perhaps they cannot explain it because they have not had to live and die by it for thousands of years.  They are unaware that Tlaloc (the water deity) is breathing." 421
Hard science does not allow adequate room for all the possible perspectives, logic cannot explain the eccentricities of a living landscape

"Tlaloc is hydrology...The deity is a metaphor for the full hydrological cycle of moisture, ice, rain, snow, dew, and fog; pooling, draining, and evaporating.  It is the movement of water, the lifeblood of the Southwest, a meter that any civilization here must obey." 422
Rhythm, RTA here mesh with qi.  Think about pictures of moving water, water dripping, sounds created by water, crescendoing and fading with floods and years of drought, following an oscillating pattern.
A timepiece
"A form of motion stirred up from the land.  People merely fell into step" 423
Here a culture truly in touch with its surroundings.  To be at the height of awareness is to begin not to lose self-awareness, but to gain perception of dovetailing with everything else

Looking at a body in a very old grave:
"We have hardly changed in this short time.  Tools of stone have been replaced by plastic and metal, but our capacity for imagination, for sensation, has not altered." 428

Seeing potsherds:
"I reached out and touched the grainy, wind-hounded face, startled to see pieces of pottery sticking out of its surface like teeth. ...My eyes ran up the one-story wall, seeing little discs and dishes, as if the remains of this past civilization could not be kept in the ground.  They swept skyward, building a new culture." 439

"The rain will depart and the people will follow, walking a spiral that has no end." 445

Part of the Sky

Was watching Up (one of the most uplifting movies I've seen in a while...)


Some gorgeous hot air balloon photos:





They look like little dreams

...Must be in the top 50 destinations to lucid dream.  Maybe there's a dream inside each one, and lucid dreaming is like lighting the fire inside, giving it a kind of direction








Crazy sunrise









There must be some way to use fire to make a boat go faster too...





Looks like something from "Spirited Away"


Completely transforms the landscape




The balloon is reflected in the lake below








Every place should have a Totem Pole


Sculptures that not only have fascinating symbolism but also mesh with their surroundings.  Love the vertical element, idea of reaching up.


A forest of totem poles




The next ones are from Korea:



These are made by an art teacher in Hawaii--maybe my next job?:



And Clint Eastwood climbed this one in Monument Valley AZ:
















This goes with the question "If you were an animal, which would you be?" I usually want to be like Arthur in the Sword and the Stone and spend a week trying different ones, but perhaps it would make more sense logistically to choose a few favorites and make a pole out of them.