Local image #59
2022, Acrylic on board, 30x30cm
R990.00
Endurance and decline, the tension of two things simultaneously at work. That is beautiful somehow. They look so different from their original referents, which no longer exist. Have they transformed into fairies, and are they living here now?
Ghostly ancestors, other mind, other voice? The speaking of myself, but also the other. The ancestor, the ghost, the spirit? The manifestation of a ghost or spirit, its appearance, in its sensuous disguise. My body.
It impresses upon me that the flowers in this painting are flying forwards, with the background passing by, seemingly, as vertical stripes. The flowers are inured in an atmosphere, travelling through the air, the wind, the storm, the inclement weather. What savage bloom, under your inclement weather, could prosper? And that is how I feel about us sometimes. We are all savage blooms, beautiful sublime savage blooms, crushed, awkwardly stretched, but not destroyed.
I have forgotten how I painted this exactly; was this the one where the turquoise pooled too much? No, its the next one; I made the centres too bold in this one; corrected that in the next one. Walking on a path determined by my aesthetic sensibilities, intuitive feeling of ‘this is beautiful’ and ‘this is not’, and striving for the beauty. When everything becomes all-beautiful, it collapses, and I am nauseated. Can I not handle all that beauty? Why does it not resonate? It seems too fake, and then it becomes kitsch, and no longer beautiful.
The viewing position of the viewer is voyeuristic, the protagonists are oblivious to viewer’s existence, the viewer is a spectator, looking in on the drama of two souls, a couple, enduring and declining, through life, being, existence; like seeing game in the park. Witnessing the existence of another existence, other, different, mysterious.
Redetermining the extreme boundaries, recalibrates inner boundaries.
The vertical pattern in the background, in this one, evokes the idea of ancestors, a stadium of passed soul's, looking on, witnessing, spectating. It implies the same role for the viewer. It identifies the viewer as an entity in the act of looking into another realm, another reality; and encountering, and experiencing the ecstasy of encountering, another realm. How would they move, how would they be?
I create, you sustain, and you want me to do this.