2011/06/27

Visible - Invisible III


The world is so complicated, tangled, and overloaded that to see into it
with any clarity you must prune and prune.


Italo Calvino (from: If on a Winter's Night A Traveller)



Luke Elwes, Refugia 2006 (oil on linen)


2011/06/20

Michael Schnabel - Cages


A Cage went in search for a bird.

Franz Kafka, Collected Aphorisms


Photographic series of empty zoo cages (2000-2002)
by german photographer Michael Schnabel



2011/06/16

Shiohi no tsuto - Gifts of the ebb tide



Shiohi no tsuto (Gifts of the ebb tide)
The shell book. (1789)
Painted by Kitagawa Utamaro (?-1806),
edited by Akera Kanko (1738-98)
A colored picture book of Kyoka (satirical poems) about shell collecting. 

Detail


2011/06/13

The mind is a strange machine ...

Events only become experiences through the interest we take in them

Bertrand Russell



“The mind is a strange machine which can combine the materials offered to it in the most astonishing ways, but without material from the external world it is powerless, and (...) must seize its material for itself, since events only become experiences through the interest we take in them; if they do not interest us, we are making nothing of them. The man, therefore, whose attention is turned within finds nothing worthy of his notice, whereas the man whose attention is turned outward can find within, in those rare moments when he examines his soul, the most varied and interesting assortment of ingredients being dissected and recombined into beautiful and instructive patterns."

from: Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness, 1930

watch the video below


2011/06/09

Circles - Mandalas - Radial Symmetry VII


The World is Bound With Secret Knots - Athanasius Kicher



Laura Splan, machine embroidered lace based on the influenza virus



Barbara Mungenast, Kreis #2, 2006



Sheila Gallagher, Sea Urchin Smoke Print, 2009


2011/06/07

Animals in Art - Roger Ballen


Many people say my work is quite disturbing. 

I am so pleased to hear that. What a great thing!



Animal Abstraction, 2002



Artist's statement:

I have been shooting black and white film for nearly fifty years now. I believe I am part of the last generation that will grow up with this media. Black and White is a very minimalist art form and unlike color photographs does not pretend to mimic the world in a manner similar to the way the human eye might perceive. Black and White is essentially an abstract way to interpret and transform what one might refer to as reality.

My purpose in taking photographs over the past forty years has ultimately been about defining myself. It has been fundamentally a psychological and existential journey.

If an artist is one who spends his life trying to define his being, I guess I would have to call myself an artist.

Roger Ballen

2011/06/04

Space Abstraction


Man is a microcosm, or a little world, because he is an extract from all the stars and planets of the whole firmament, from the earth and the elements; and so he is their quintessence.

Paracelsus

watch the video below


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