But sometimes restriction creates more freedom

This gave me goose pimples.

How Did Hokusai Create The Great Wave?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEubj3c2How

I had used the image in here: http://whilethereisstilltime.blogspot.com/2018/11/it-matters-that-you-care.html

It matters that you care

"The great Katsushika Hokusai was an artist, a Japanese one but ironically least like a typical Japanese artist.  Japan's best known woodblock print, his Great Wave, is also typically un-Japanese. "

Hokusai Says

Hokusai says look carefully.
He says pay attention, notice.
He says keep looking, stay curious.
He says there is no end to seeing

He says look forward to getting old.

He says keep changing,
you just get more who you really are.
He says get stuck, accept it, repeat
yourself as long as it is interesting.

He says keep doing what you love.
He says keep praying.

He says every one of us is a child,
every one of us is ancient
every one of us has a body.
He says every one of us is frightened.
He says every one of us has to find
a way to live with fear.

He says everything is alive --
shells, buildings, people, fish,
mountains, trees, wood is alive.
Water is alive.
Everything has its own life.
Everything lives inside us.

He says live with the world inside you.
He says it doesn't matter if you draw,
or write books. It doesn't matter
if you saw wood, or catch fish.

It doesn't matter if you sit at home
and stare at the ants on your veranda
or the shadows of the trees
and grasses in your garden.

It matters that you care.
It matters that you feel.
It matters that you notice.
It matters that life lives through you.

Contentment is life living through you.
Joy is life living through you.
Satisfaction and strength
is life living through you.

He says don't be afraid.
Don't be afraid.
Love, feel, let life take you by the hand.
Let life live through you.

Roger Keyes

Listen to this poem here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1joKzx7-M_k

Our every day life is what will save us

"Adams raises the questions, “Is art a sufficient consolation for life? Can Beauty make suffering tolerable?” His answer, while not an all-out endorsement for art, is real, and tangible. He says: “The fact is, I think that they are only partly sufficient. If we are not too burdened by disappointment or loneliness or pain, there are certainly times when art can help; there are moments when great pictures can heal. Views by Masaccio and Rembrandt and Cezanne and Stieglitz, among others, have all been important to me in this way.”

He goes on to say:

“Sometimes it has been enough to search out a cafe blessed with a jukebox, rattling dishes, and human voices. Family and friends are better though. What a relief there is in an anecdote, a jumping dog, or the brush of a hand. All of these things are disorderly, but no plan for survival stands a chance without them.”

Our every day life is what will save us, perhaps, in the end. The beauty of that, whether it's captured in a photograph, or in a poem, or paragraph."

Shawna Lemay

http://transactionswithbeauty.com/home/beautyinphotography

The Space Between Flowers

Beautiful video. The book sounds amazing too.

"Japanese photographer Masao Yamamoto (born 1957) trained as an oil painter before discovering that photography was the ideal medium for the theme that most interested him--the ability of the image to evoke memories. Small Things in Silence surveys the 20-year career of one of Japan's most important photographers. Yamamoto's portraits, landscapes and still lifes are made into small, delicate prints, which the photographer frequently overpaints, dyes or steeps in tea."

The Space Between Flowers [5 min 31 seconds]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yq9wf2wfnnw

Small Things in Silence

https://www.amazon.ca/Masao-Yamamoto-Small-Things-Silence/dp/841511883X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1476278589&sr=1-1

From here: http://transactionswithbeauty.com/home/http://transactionswithbeauty.com/2016/9/27/new-post-title-2

The Morning Like a Hiroshige Print

Sudden Shower over Shin-Ōhashi bridge and Atake

Raining, after the driest October
in twenty years, citizens hustle
across the street to take cover.

I join in, cross the street with my bags
from the market soaked by the rain, hurry
to beat the light turning red.
A maple leaf falls, another.

At the same time, she stokes
the fire with branches
as thin as her wrists, sets
the kettle on the stove—

waits to remove my clothes,
to sit me in front of the fire
with a blanket draped
over my shoulders, to pull the kitchen
knife from the drawer
to cut the gouda, to slice the Fujis
in half, to warm a loaf of bread.

Mark Heinlein

Photo from here.

Seeing

"Perhaps if people were encouraged to draw something everyday, they'd talk a lot less. They'd begin to appreciate the importance of silence, of observation, of not getting entangled in the outward appearance of things.

By watching a pencil slowly follow the contours of the subject, they would learn to edit out the superfluous and the unnecessary; they'd perhaps learn to not just see things but also comprehend them."

Anvita Lakhera

In Silence: http://sometimesiwritesometimesiam.blogspot.in/2013/02/in-silence.html

Divining

I love poems that go with paintings.

Not just on the wall—
the writing’s on the sky,
the river, the bridge, your hands.

Wouldn’t you love to believe
all those blue and red lines
make a map, and if only
you could read those lines,
you might know where to go
from here? Yes, we’re lost
and wrinkled and surely doomed,

but god, in this moment
between concerns, isn’t it beautiful,
this place where we wander,
this hour when gold gathers
just before the plum of night?

Rosemerry Trommer

Painting by Meghan Tutolo: http://www.rattle.com/poetry/divining-by-rosemerry-trommer/

Monet Refuses The Operation

Doctor, you say there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.

I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don’t see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.

Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.

What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolve
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?

I will not return to a universe
of objects that don’t know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent.  The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,

becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.

To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and change our bones, skin, clothes
to gases.  Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

Lisel Mueller

Freedom

"And the artist must never be a prisoner. Prisoner? An artist must never be a prisoner of [one’s] self, prisoner of a style, prisoner of a reputation, prisoner of a success, etc …

Didn’t the Goncourt brothers write that Japanese artists of the great period changed their names several times during their lives? I like that: they wanted to protect their freedoms.”

Henri Matisse

I felt I knew you

"I ride the NYC subway trains, usually in the evening when the seats are full. I focus on the shape of the space between the person sitting next to me and myself. I attempt to mentally and emotionally re-sculpt that space. In my mind, I reshape it- from the stiff and guarded space between strangers to the soft and yielding space between friends. I direct all my energy to this space between us. When the space palpably changes, and I completely feel like the stranger sitting next to me is my friend, I rest my head on that person's shoulder…"

I felt I knew you

http://www.georgeferrandi.com/108756/899221/all-projects/it-felt-like-i-knew-you-%282012-ongoing%29

Tenebrism

"Active from 1595 – 1610, Caravaggio was a major transitional figure in art moving from exaggerated Mannerism to a highly naturalistic style, illuminated with powerful light and shadow.  This dramatic use of light to intensify an image, also known as tenebrism, clearly influenced Spanish artists of the era."

http://daydreamtourist.com/2013/12/02/spanish-baroque/

How Paris Would Look With Outdoor Ads Replaced By Art

"The more difficult our lives, the more a graceful depiction of a flower might move us. The tears — if they come — are in response not to how sad the image is, but how pretty.

We should be able to enjoy an ideal image without regarding it as a false picture of how things usually are. A beautiful, though partial, vision can be all the more precious to us because we are so aware of how rarely life satisfies our desires."

Alain de Botton, 'Art as Therapy'

How Paris Would Look With Outdoor Ads Replaced By Art

http://www.fastcocreate.com/3026140/how-paris-would-look-with-outdoor-ads-replaced-by-art#1

Art, and Healing

"I wake and sleep language. It has always been so. I had been brought up to memorise very long Bible passages, and when I left home and was supporting myself so that I could continue my education, I fought off loneliness and fear by reciting. In the funeral parlour I whispered Donne to the embalming fluids and Marvell to the corpses. Later, I found that Tennyson's 'Lady of Shalott' had a soothing, because rythmic, effect on the mentally disturbed. Among the disturbed I numbered myself at that time.

The healing power of art is not a rhetorical fantasy. Fighting to keep language, language became my sanity and my strength. It still is, and I know of no pain that art cannot assuage. For some, music, for some, pictures, for me, primarily, poetry, whether found in poems or in prose, cuts through noise and hurt, opens the wound to clean it, and then gradually teaches it to heal itself. Wounds need to be taught to heal themselves.

The psyche and the spirit do not share the instinct of the damaged body. Healing is not automatically triggered nor is danger usually avoided. Since we put ourselves in the way of hurt it seems logical to put ourselves in the way of healing. Art has more work to do than ever before but it can do that work. In a self-destructive society like our own, is it unsurprising that art as a healing force is despised."

Page 156, 'Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery', Jeanette Winterson

Photo: Saleem's notebook, from his days in the Wayanad forests. 

Drawing, and Silence

"Perhaps if people were encouraged to draw something everyday, they'd talk a lot less. They'd begin to appreciate the importance of silence, of observation, of not getting entangled in the outward appearance of things. By watching a pencil slowly follow the contours of the subject, they would learn to edit out the superfluous and the unnecessary; they'd perhaps learn to not just see things but also comprehend them."

In Silence: http://sometimesiwritesometimesiam.blogspot.in/2013/02/in-silence.html

The Ego Boundary

"Suzuki rises from his chair and turns to the board. He picks up the chalk and draws a freehand oval, something like an eggshell in diagram. As though piercing one side of the eggshell with a straw, he draws two parallel lines that cut through from inside to outside.

...The eggshell is the boundary between us and everything else: the identity that constructs the viewpoint of "I-me-mine". The thin line that Suzuki draws on the board contains what we think of as "the world". Though it seems solid to us, the ego boundary is actually something like a mirror that reflects the way our own minds are constructed. Our consciousness imprints itself on everything we see, feel, think, and do, even before we notice. It's almost impossible to see what's "not us" due to the power of its biological force field. Perhaps it's a survival mechanism. Compared with the colossal and incomprehensible immensity that we float in, the egg-ego feels like a place apart - a comfortable little place where the separate existence of the chick can be nurtured.

Although the chick may feel alone within its shell, Suzuki is describing a bigger picture. He tells us that the chick's sense of separation is an illusion. I-me-mine has no reality beyond its purpose of keeping us alive. Instead, everything flows in and through the parallel lines.

...Suzuki's teaching on ego was ground zero in Cage's transformation. The emotions troubling him - where is their reality? They have no real basis. All they are doing is dividing Cage from himself. Walling him up in agonized thoughts. Making him lose sight of his own vast wisdom."

Page 171, 'Ego Noise', Section 2: 'Mountains are no longer Mountains', from ‘Where the Heart Beats - John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists’, by Kay Larson, 2012.

A Manner of Searching

“Drawing is anyway an exercise in orientation and as such may be compared with other processes of orientation which take place in nature.

When I’m drawing I feel  a little closer to the way birds navigate when flying, or to hares finding shelter when pursued, or to fish knowing where to spawn, or trees finding a way to the light, or bees constructing their cells.

I’m aware of a distant, silent company. Almost as distant as the stars. Company nevertheless. Not because we are in the same universe, but because we are involved – each according to his own mode – in a comparable manner of searching.

Drawing is a form of probing. And the first generic impulse to draw derives from the human need to search, to plot points, to place things and to place oneself."

Page 149, ‘Bento’s Sketchbook’, John Berger

To be Desired

"In the Louvre in Paris there is a Bathsheba painted by him (William Drost, Rembrandt's disciple) which echoes Rembrandt's painting of the same object painted in the same year.

She is not looking at the spectator. She is looking hard at a man she desired, imagining him as her lover. This man could only have been Drost. The only thing we know for certain about Drost is that he was desired precisely by this woman.

I was reminded of something of which one is not usually reminded in museums. To be so desired - if the desire is also reciprocal - renders the one who is desired fearless. No suit of armour from the galleries downstairs ever offered, when worn, a comparable sense of protection. To be desired is perhaps the closest anybody can reach in his life to feeling immortal."

Page 26, 'Bento's Sketchbook', John Berger

Sensitivity

"We value sensitive machines. We spend billions of pounds to make them more sensitive yet, so that they detect materials deep in the earth's crust, radioactivity thousands of miles away. We don't value sensitive human beings and we spend no money on their priority.

As machines become more delicate and human beings coarser, will antennae and fibre-optic claim for themselves what was uniquely human? Not rationality, not logic, but that strange network of fragile perception, that means I can imagine, that teaches me to love, a lodging of recognition and tenderness where I sometimes know the essential beat that rhythms life."

Page 112, 'Art Objects, Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery', Jeanette Winterson

Overflow

 You must not fear, hold back, count or be a miser with your thoughts and feelings. It is also true that creation comes from an overflow, so you have to learn to intake, to imbibe, to nourish yourself and not be afraid of fullness. The fullness is like a tidal wave which then carries you, sweeps you into experience and into writing. Permit yourself to flow and overflow, allow for the rise in temperature, all the expansions and intensifications.

Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.

Anaïs Nin in The Diary of Anais Nin, Vol. 4: 1944-1947

Beauty

From 'The People of the Deer', Farley Mowat:

"The Ihalmut do not fill canvasses with their paintings, or inscribe figures on rocks, or carve figurines in clay or in stone, because in the lives of the People there is no room for the creation of objects of no practical value. What purpose is there in creating beautiful things if they must be abandoned when the family treks out over the Barrens? But the artistic sense is present and strongly developed. It is strongly alive in their stories and songs, and in the string-figures, but they also use it in the construction of things which assist in their living and in these cases it is no less an art. The pleasure of abstract creation is largely denied to them by the nature of the land, but still they know how to make beauty.

They know how to make beauty, and they also know how to enjoy it - for it is no uncommon thing to see an Ihalmio man squatting silently on a hill crest and watching, for hours at a time, the swift interplay of colors that sweep the sky at sunset and dawn. It is not unusual to see an Ihalmio pause for long minutes to watch the sleek beauty of a weasel or to stare into the brilliant heart of some minuscule flower. And these things are done quite unconsciously, too. There is no word for "beauty" - as such - in their language, it needs no words in their hearts."

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