Hopefully a light-hearted, engaging digital BlahBlah on what I get up to creatively. Thoughts,feelings, smells and other things with pictures and words and quips and anecdotes and videos and things
And so, having (at 6:30 am) this morning finished the book I've been slowly reading, over this last month..
I thought it would be nice to review it with you all!
At the beginning of July this year (as her last few days were slipping away), I picked up 'Madame Bovary' by Gustav Flaubert at the cancer hospice my Grandmother was dying in.
(Before I go making the devil out of myself, I managed to leave my own book that I was reading at the time, there. So we can say karma has allowed a fair swap!)
I started Madame Bovary with her, reading it aloud as wasn't sure what to say. At the time she was 'semi-vegetative' and I wondered to my-self, 'what can I say to this woman who cant answer me if I talk to her. Who, I'm sure can't understand what I'm saying anyway!' It was a very odd experience.
Back to the book
If you give a shit about what happens in the book, it is summarised here.
Long story short, Madame Bovary ends up dead.
She kills herself.
I thought it drew a strange parallel - for me anyway.
So
Here I am thinking about death, in a kind of death and taxes way. Perhaps more than some, less than others, whatever.
I was having a bit of a hard time grasping the death of my grandmother, as she is the first person i've known who has died. Im not religious. I'm not sure if she was particularly.
I know that she saw the priest a lot before she died and expressed regret that she was not going to be living anymore.
My grandmother was old and didn't have a choice about the terminal cancer that killed her.
Young Ms Bovary killed herself.
OK Ms Bovary is fictional, but the concept is'nt.
What has happened to her soul? What is death?How do people die?
Why do people choose death?
Questions Questions
Answers?
This guy (Mr Shelly Keagan) is a lecturer from Yale, and has given me a bit of existential Hypothesising to help in the possible answering of some of these questions.
Its been a fairly mad week here in old Pecks.Mad times rioting. Houses on fire and kids acting BADMAN!
Fucking Shocking. I love Peckham, really I do. But Tuesday day was the most fucked up I've ever felt walking up the hight street. Usually a certain amount of paranoia accompanies one when down in Pecks, this was different. The Police were Everywhere, all shops shut by 3. Even the butchers! Wow, this is special.
Having myself lived in and around Peckham for the entirety of my earthly time. I know as well as any Peckhamite what it is to live on benefits, surrounded by council estates and in the midst of unemployment, low education levels and what seems to be a vacuum of love. There is a lack of love in all levels of British society. Here is a prime example;
The Prime Minister made an impassioned attack on the feckless parents, failed education policies of the past and welfare handouts which led to the ‘sick and irresponsible’ behaviour of young thugs. ‘There are pockets of our society that are not only broken, but frankly sick,’ he said.
- Daily Mail
Now, to be fair it isn't terrible to say that within our society (within us all ) there is something sick, something that potentially could drive us all in to a similar frenzy of opportunistic looting and thoughtless violence (given the right scenario). For sure there are videos all over of what appears to be whole families walking out of broken into shops, arms full of stolen goods.
But that is not what he meant right.
He meant that those people in Hackney,Lewisham, Tottenham, Eltham, Manchester, Liverpool, Bristol etc. who were involved in the looting were the 'sick' part of our society!
How is it that our own leaders can say that! Instead of condemning this part of society, we should be reassessing our actions. The last couple days have held a mirror to each of us. There are obviously problems in these areas that need to be seriously looked at. As this young black boy in Clapham Junction, South London said when talking to mayor Boris Johnson.
I personally have no qualms about politically motivated rioting or the looting of corporations, but these people are doing it for temporary gain, there is no articulate reasoning, they can't even see that once the dust settles the police will (murk) get them. And for all the fun of rioting an getting a 50" flat screen, its not worth the police record. Or even worse jail time. Its just not worth it
If we have any hope, it will of course be within the young. we need more educated, self confident youngsters like the guy in the video above. We all need to take responsibility. Compassion and education. This is how we stop this sort of thing from happening again!
In response to the brief for the biscuit factory show; I decided to make a piece that was based loosely on an abstracted image of a sugar molecule. I settled on the idea of a sugar molecule after wondering how I could incorporate a facet of the history of the biscuit factory in to my work.The structural and scientific nature of the drawing reminded me of the structure of the building it’s self. I wanted to play with the idea of structure and felt that it would be interesting to make a connection between the physical structure of the factory and the strong bonds holding the shape of the sugar together. By deconstructing the sugar I was commenting on the different use of biscuit factory, that presently it has been broken up in to different parts for new purposes. My work; I think mirrored the busyness and variety of activities going on in the biscuit factory today and is a portrait of it.
TIME MANAGEMENT
Compositionally speaking the piece was unable to work due to space restrictions and the dimensions of the room, mainly technical stuff to do with it sitting in the space. Initially when I saw it up at the factory I was very unhappy with the way it looked, not having been able to assemble it before then.
I have been working on Perspex since last term and have been experimenting endlessly with different methods of working with oil pain on this surface and other types of translucent and transparent materials. I have been interested in translucency and layering and experimenting with these (and having successful outcomes), but I have not really been concerned with display as much as I think I ought to have. I feel that the final piece that I made for the biscuit factory show was a big step in the right direction for me, Having been the first real show that I have had to install work in I have learned a lot about the importance of composition and the interaction my work has with space. So that is something I have learned.
Writing the unit 7 essay was rather difficult for me, I found it hard to focus on the aim of my essay and got distracted and sent off on tangents by each new text that I read. Although this did mean that I was looking and reading things that I would not normally look at. For example I got the idea for carving in to the Perspex from reading about Polynesian art. Also I have been informing myself about architecture, as in traditional stained glass making the architecture of the building it was installed in was a very important aspect of the work translating to the viewer.
In conclusion; I have a very Gung-ho attitude to making work and try to take inspiration from all avenues of media and for the next year I will continue on my track taking good heed of the things I have learned this year.
The sublime (from the Latinsublīmis "sloping up to the lintel, uplifted, high, lofty, elevated, exalted") is the quality of greatness or vast magnitude, whether physical, moral, intellectual, metaphysical, aesthetic, spiritual or artistic.
The term especially refers to a greatness with which nothing else can be compared and which is beyond all possibility of calculation, measurement or imitation.
And of course we all know what contemporary means right!!
Ahah so onwards
To start off with let’s have a looky see what types of sublime experiences you may encounter
Nature
Where you are faced with the edge of a cliff or the sun setting over the ocean
In Technology
Where in the advancements in technology lead us to experience things like dis
and create things like this
In the un-representable
I.E. things that cannot be explained through a language known to us
(I don’t have an image for that one for obvious reasons)
*feeling of something great*
Transcendence
You get the idea
Terror
Where you are bought to the crescendo of the unnameable fears in our consciousness
In the altered state
(Not gonna lie; I’m talking about drugs)
Or if you’re Hindu we’re talking about enlightenment.
Where you see the world differently and it is like a new birth
IN PERSPECTIVE
Nazis created images of human sublime where people were amassed at rallies to enhance feeling of being the greatest and part of a thing bigger than themselves
Nuremberg
Similar to this:
North Korea now
Fascism and Extreme leftism
-similar in the end?
------------
In the west the sublime is used to sell perfume and aftershave
LYNX
TOM FORD
NOT sublime but she is damn sexy
Guy who directed A single man
Which to be fair is just a long perfume advert
(fail)
And so the language of the sublime is commodified
Just like everything else in the world right
I digress
In religion
the sublime may mean reaching
GOD
Or
Finding your true self
In paintings that address the sublime
This usually happens
Emptiness
The sublime recognises thought and turmoil about the edge
And what is on the other side
(something I dug up about loonies who have 'spiritually awakened')
This is at complete odds with Beauty
Which is about pleasure and contentment
okay we can all say this is a beautiful painting
can you ever truly combine to two
to make a painting that addresses the transcendent reaching for the edge whilst portraying the balance and harmony in aesthetic beauty