visual artist
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Today I have been doing contact sheets and some sketched from the archive of images I am building up. It has been snowing overnight and everything looks white, or off-white, again. Like in the beginning. Somehow it feels both long ago and yesterday.
I bought myself a watercolor sketchbook. I am trying to draw without thinking, with mixed results.
And there are the chimneys, with their white smoke drifting upwards in slow motion. If the wind blows in the right direction the white column of smoke floats horizontally behind the small houses I can see from the studio. It is night and there is light in one of windows in the house at the edge of the hill. The image is blurry and the quality poor, but I know it is there, I can just make out the light changing. But even here and now, it feels that there is no time nor place. There is no language, no context. All is left is image. I look for synonyms and the words lead me back to the illusion. The house and the smoke are remote, forever unreachable there and then, as they were, as they are, even in the image. Something has been removed, stripped, separated and yet; in its reverberation it gains a new more ambiguous sense of meaning.
I am listening to Florence and the Machine, my favourites of their songs are without doubt Cosmic Love and Blinding, I love the drums…
Yesterday the light was very intense and bright, and the sun was warming. Walked up to the fortress where the view was beautiful. There is a small ice skating rink nearby where a single black figure was trying his best. I will definitely go back there with the tripod.
I got a bit of a cold today. Weather is lovely out there but I will stay in studio, keep warm and do a bit of writing. I took the exhibition down this morning. It is all gone now. It feels good but a bit sad too. I can’t believe February is already past. While I was at the gallery flicking through their lovely book shop, I was looking at a book on homecoming, and a piece of text in it was talking about first memories. It got me thinking about my first memory, or more specifically about my first image-memory. It got me thinking about distance and colors. My first school in Galicia, I think that is where my first memory that I can recall as truly mine comes from. Other memories feel constructed from language or photographs. But these couple of images I know they only come from my own lived moment. I want to write about it.
On a different note, some photos from my show at Babel are in on of the major contemporary art magazines of Norway. Nice. KUNSTforum
I saw a man walking a cat today. And this cat was cheerfully walking along. It was a grey tiger cat, they were gone before I had time to fish my camera out, and anyway I lost precious seconds just smiling and staring at the scene. The best image of the day. I will do a better drawing.
I have been doing a bit of drawing the last couple of days. It has been lovely to be back in the studio, and although I’m still very unsure about where the drawings might be going, it feels good if I manage to finish one without thinking its complete rubbish. Yesterday the sunset looked amazing from the studio window, full of reds and purples. I borrowed the two broken violins from Markus. They are very pretty objects, and even laying there, failed, still can somehow find a function in their silence. For me they are as valid as a fixed violin, I couldn’t make it play.
I feel I need a map to know how to get lost. But if you don’t want to arrive anywhere you wouldn’t look at a map. And if you follow a map, even one intended for getting lost, you wouldn’t be technically lost… I have started to hand-drawn empty polar coordinates graphs.
A superior mirage occurs when the air below the line of sight is colder than that above. This is called a temperature inversion, since it does not represent the normal equilibrium temperature gradient of the atmosphere. Since in this case the light rays are bent down, the image appears above the true object, hence the name superior. They are in general less common than inferior mirages, but when they do occur they tend to be more stable, as cold air has no tendency to move up or warm air to move down.
Superior mirages are most common in polar regions, especially over large sheets of ice with a uniform low temperature. This type of mirage is also called the Fata Morgana or, in Icelandic, halgerndingar. Source: Wikipedia
I have been revising the footage I took on the boat a few days ago. Most of it will probably be unusable, but I am happy with some clips. In a couple of shots there is a superior mirage effect. In most of the outside shots, I don’t really know if it was the wind, the engine or just the light again, but the image is not steady, it trembles as if it were only a reflection. I fear that is how I will remember it. I will forget about the cold wind in my face, the dripping nose and the pain in my fingers holding the camera. The experience will then be reduced to this collection of images. The steady image of the intense blue moving fast below will start to tremble slowly in my memory. And the new memory itself would become then just a mirage of the video, but then isn’t that what memory is anyway, a changing mirage of what it once was? so the video would be my memory. But now I am merely rambling.
Markus Lantto, an artist at LKV, has been kind enough to show me around his impressive collection of hand-made musical instruments. At the moment he is building a ten-string violin from scratch and rescued two broken violins to repair them. He has made also two guitars and my favorite without a doubt is a nyckelharpa. I have never seen one of these before (wikipedia link). The sounds is great and the instrument itself so beautiful. This was the first instrument he made, and each key is a different face carved in wood.
Here’s a little video of Markus playing the nyckelharpa. Although my camera mic probable doesn’t make much justice to the sound…
Click to Video (Quicktime)
