Blanc / Black
Tic / Tac
Plip / Plop
The sounds of contrast that I hear when the works of Victor Vasarely are ‘viewed’ by my ears are linked to the motions I feel when seeing the shadows cast by clouds onto undulating hills. As the shadows pass the grass and I try to capture their motion in some static moment with my linear experiments, what looked good at a distance I tear away from its land reef and deposit on canvas as I miss the natural scene of landscape slipping by each time I avert my eye.
By tomorrow, today will be gone, whilst I sit and draw, I think, ‘why would the function of energy be to record and store when our Natural instinct is to look and look more?’
My natural instinct is to use time to think and use art to spark re-think. For a few year, like any good Renaissance artist, I painted hundreds of scenes that recorded the historical and social. Each scene however, like Blake’s infinity in a grain of sand, created a drawing that, if I had allowed it, would have drawn me in like an adventure story without ending. I would still be painting my first canvas like some human fractal needing an ever thinner pencil point.
Pencil to pen:
N.B., pencil to pen is grey to black Noir / Black
At the point of ink, the thinking becomes thought, fixed as waterproof guidelines.
The drawing can be given life on display or can be put away.
It can be sold, grow old on a wall, and may seem to live its future unchanged, but the artist in Nature is at work trying to recycle its component parts. For me, that too is the art and in 2017 in the HoBB Gallery exhibition ‘Decay’s Not Rot’, water, fire, wind, fungus and sunlight were all used as art tools on a stage usually crowded with art conservators.
Space – the biggest gap between knowing and learning
Life – the hardest trap
Exchange – the first start
Rearrange – the way of being
Victor – today’s weather
Vasarely – halves together
Once you can communicate,
Speak your worth.
Once you can draw,
Add your values.
Once you understand,
Give.
Some of the tracks to Belle Isle
Appear like petal falls,
Their gathered pattern
In ever-flux
Disaligned.
Laws of wave and particle dance
Create a mind flow distraction
Whilst the Tick Tocks
The Plip Plops and
Life rocks
From each wake to sleep.
Never the parting heralded
Never the arrival stifled.
Heart / Soul
Contrasts.
Spirit
Immaterial.
A circle of dots appear as animated
but blink, fast enough, and all are still.
A life seems punctuated by events
but live long enough and life becomes nil.
Vasarely would suggest that all is a plastic in motion
that we animate, along with all other energized forms.
A heart beat away.
Co-ordinated impulses set to rhythms
We eat to feed.
What we know we cannot say.
We just grow
To fit some need.
Further reading on Vasarely
