"Reading, drawing and painting."

 The beloved "A Year In Marrakesh" by  Peter Mayne (above) provided some of the inspiration for my painting "Between Marrakesh and Tarifa", and my copy of the book also appears in the drawing shown below..

  In the chapter entitled  "Monsieur D____´s Pavilion" Mayne gives an account of a guest house or minzah situated within a walled garden. Without following closely the author´s description I felt the painting was somehow invested with its "spirit of place", while the surrounding landscape is probably more Al Andalus than Morocco...

   The author writes that on the day of his arrival in Marrakesh,

  "The road was blue with fallen jacaranda blossom, the air yellow with sunshine".

   Well that will be another painting...

Drawing Books 1.

Quite a few of my coloured pencil drawings feature a weathered paperback copy of Lawrence Durrell's "Avignon Quintet". This is not surprising as the book has often served me as a kind of parallel universe. In another drawing (left) it forms part of a totem-like structure. In this instance I liked the way that age and use/misuse had combined to form the curved edges.

"Art and Outrage".

   I have just re-read "Art and Outrage". First published in 1959, it is a correspondence about Henry Miller between Alfred Perlés  and Lawrence Durrell with an intermission by Henry Miller. This time around I was stuck by some comments about the roll of the artist. Durrell at one point cites "Art and Artist" by Otto Rank who thought that art was going into a new phase which would be characterized by what he called "personality-development" and that this would not be expressed in outward forms but by inward growth. I also love Durrell´s comment that.

                "Art reserves its greatest treasures for those who forget its existence".
 
    Later in the book the intention of the artist comes under scrutiny when Perlès cons
iders that,

        "Intention diminishes the artist. The sun does not "intend" to radiate heat, it radiates it".

This is a video made by Peder Strux at my 2011 exhbition in Munich.