Dunes and Sea

"A person who seeks by contemplation and self-surrender to obtain unity with or absorption into the Deity or the absolute, or who believes in the spiritual apprehension of truths that are beyond the intellect."

That's actually the O.E.D. definition of the word "mystic", but is there anything mystical in my work? To start with I have chosen at random some watercolours...

     "Punta Paloma."

...They all happen to show aspects of a place called Tarifa where you stand on the edge of Europe which stretches behind you as far as the Arctic and yet just over there is... Africa! The area of the "Straits of Gibraltar" in general appeals as a territory which ignores the existing frontiers...a place for the inner- self to call home? Once upon a time such a territory did exist. It wa s known as "Vandalucia" and included parts of present day North Africa and Southern Spain...
 

                                                                        "Tarifa"

So where is there of the mystic here? I think it's there in the desire to slough off a super- imposed identity, the "me" which is made up of things like names and nationalities. This vast space between the two land masses is populated by whales, dolphins and migrating birds and just to be in such a place is to be closer to the divine...

    "Looking Across"

"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.